Friday, August 30, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Warning! Certain antibiotic drugs May Cause Perman...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Warning! Certain antibiotic drugs May Cause Perman...: Certain antibiotic drugs cause permanent nerve damage. Here is what you need to know about the risks and what you can due to help your bod...
Warning! Certain antibiotic drugs May Cause Permanent Nerve Damage!!!
Certain antibiotic drugs cause permanent nerve damage. Here is what you need to know about the risks and what you can due to help your body heal naturally
A certain class of antibiotics have been issued a new black
box warning because they cause serious nerve damage. Black box warnings
are the most serious and often deadly side effects of drugs that are
literally outlined in a black box on the package insert.
Fluoroquinolones, such as Cipro, Levaquin, and Floxin
were prescribed to over 23 million people in 2011 alone. They are
commonly prescribed for respiratory and urinary tract infection. These
are relatively simple conditions that have many natural and safe
treatment alternatives. However, antibiotics are one of the most
commonly prescribed drugs in America. Those hoping to find health from a
pill are in for a very serious and very dangerous surprise. These
drugs cause peripheral neuropathy within a few days of starting the medication. The nerve damage may last for months or it may be permanent
even when the drug is stopped. They do not cause this nerve damage in
every person who takes them; however, you are playing Russian Roulette
every time you take most prescription drugs. You may be the one who is
permanently affected. Is it worth the risk simply for a possibly quicker
recovery from an infection?
Peripheral Neuropathy Explained
Peripheral nerves are nerves that run from your spinal cord
to every muscle and organ in your body. They are the lines of
communication between your brain and the rest of your body. Neuropathy
is a general term referring to nerve damage; nerves that no longer work
properly.
While peripheral neuropathy is commonly diagnosed in the arms and
legs because those areas are easier visualized, it also occurs in the
nerves that control your organs. Pain and numbness are common early
signs of peripheral neuropathy in the arms or legs. It then progresses
as muscle problems such as weakness and loss of muscle control.Ever wonder how something as simple as an antibiotic can cause death? One of the many ways is their effect on the autonomic nervous system – nerves controlling the organs that keep you alive. Peripheral neuropathy nerve damage affects these nerves as well. This causes problems with digestion, heart problems, breathing problems, and kidney and liver dysfunction. Ultimately, this can lead to death due to organ failure.
Other Side Effects of These Antibiotics
This particular class of antibiotics also carries another
black box warning issued by the FDA in 2008. That warning was for sudden
rupture of tendons, the tissue that connects your muscles to your
bones. As if this two side effects are not enough, antibiotic drugs,
like Cipro, have pages and pages of additional side effects from
allergic skin reactions to deadly anaphylactic shock. Antibiotics also
cause deafness in infants, children, and adults alike. Cipro causes
sensitivity to sunlight that makes it difficult to be in direct
sunlight. Of course, this reduces your body’s production of Vitamin D,
further weakening your immune system, which allowed the infection to
develop in the first place! We could go on and on about the various,
dangerous effects of antibiotic drugs. However, I think that we have
already covered enough ways that they can kill you. See Drugs.com for more.
Healthy Alternatives to Antibiotics
If you have a bacterial infection, what can you do to heal
without the potentially deadly side effects of antibiotic drug
treatment?
1. Wait it out.
While most infections are not pleasant, they usually pass with few problems and no permanent damage.
- Side note: Your child’s pediatrician may have told you that certain infections may cause deafness in your infant child if not aggressively treated with antibiotics. The truth is that there is no research comparing the risks. There is, however, ample research documenting that aggressive antibiotic treatment does cause deafness in infants. The vast majority of cases of deafness associated with childhood illnesses are in those who were treated with high doses of antibiotics.
2. Get some sunshine.
Vitamin D is a strong immune system supporter. Adequate
vitamin D levels are essential for a healthy immune system. Your body’s
only natural source of vitamin D is sunshine. If you are in an
environment where this is not possible, it is easy and inexpensive to
supplement your diet with vitamin D3.
3. Eat more Antimicrobial foods.
Many foods are designed with the natural ability to kill
off dangerous bacteria. These include Coconut products like coconut oil,
coconut milk, and coconut butter; raw, unpasteurized honey; and
vegetables such as garlic, onions, and cabbage.
4. Eat fermented foods.
Raw, fermented foods, such as raw sauerkraut, raw pickles,
and cultured vegetables contain probiotics that strengthen your body’s
normal immune response.
5. Consume antimicrobial herbs and spices.
Many herbs and spices have antibacterial properties. A few
antibacterial heroes in this category are turmeric, ginger, and chili
peppers.
6. Exercise in short, quick bursts.
While an infection may cause you to feel tired and rundown,
exercise – especially in short bursts – actually increases your energy
levels and stimulates your immune system to speed natural healing.
7. See your chiropractor.
Stress on your nerves weakens your immune response
drastically and increases your risk of most infections from UTIs to the
flu. Receiving chiropractic adjustments regularly – especially when you
are sick – removes this nerve stress and dramatically increases your
rate of healing.
The best thing about these natural alternatives to antibiotics is
that none of them will kill you and they will actually make you
healthier! Including all of these as part of a wellness lifestyle creates a strong, disease-proof body that has no need for antibiotic drugs.For More Info and Access to Brand Name Health and Wellness Products and Services Visit our Partners at http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
Thursday, August 29, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Using Herbs as Your Home Remedy for Body Detox!
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Using Herbs as Your Home Remedy for Body Detox!: The accumulated toxins inside your body must be cleared in order for it to function well. Your body needs to be healed to regain energy. The...
Using Herbs as Your Home Remedy for Body Detox!
The accumulated toxins inside your body must be cleared in order for it to function well. Your body needs to be healed to regain energy. There is one effective way of clearing your body from these unwanted toxins and it is called body detox or body detoxification using natural herbs. However, it is not taken as a single step but a continued process so that the natural ability of your body is supported for the effective dispelling of toxins everyday.
Another process being incorporated in body detox together with using herbs is limiting the toxins which enter your body. Eliminating or restricting the use of the usual culprits such as refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, household chemicals, and petroleum or synthetic-based body paraphernalia is a very good way of starting.
You should start eating organic natural diet foods, getting regular exercise, and drinking adequate amounts of water to facilitate your detoxification. Your body can adjust easily in a gradual change that is much better compared to other practices.
The following herbs that have known to be effective for many years can be used as a home remedy. These are the natural way of body detoxification.
• Psyllium seeds and husks contain high fiber which can gently act as a natural laxative. You can utilize it by soaking the seeds in water. Psyllium is generally considered as adaptogenic which supports the healthy function of your bowel. It is also useful in treating diarrhea and other irritable bowel diseases. It is a very good choice for body detoxification since its gelatinous substance after soaking absorbs toxins.
• Hydrangea root and the Joe pye weed (gravel root) helps in preventing, dissolving, and expelling stones and crystals in the bladder and kidneys. It is good to keep your kidneys free from any obstructions to stay in good working condition essential in effective elimination of toxins.
• Cascara Sagrada is used also as natural laxatives. It could be safe even for longer duration of usage where it strengthens your colon’s muscles.
• Alder buckthorn’s barks are also used but it must first be dried and be stored for at least one year since its fresh barks are so strong which can be considered toxic.
• Juniper berries also promote the urinary system’s overall health. It detoxifies and strengthens your urinary tract, bladder, and kidneys. It is excellent for cleaning purposes but prolonged usage is not recommended because it can cause some overtaxing in your kidneys.
• Nettles also have detoxifying properties which can be extended not just in your urinary system. Nevertheless overusing it can display similar effects as the juniper berries.
• Burdock seeds and roots are similar to nettles. It has mild and cleansing diuretic action but has stronger effects. Heavy metals inside your body can be removed by using burdock.
• Basil, cypress, celery, grapefruit, lemon, fennel, rosemary, thyme, and patchouli contains essential oils effective for flushing out toxins underneath your skin and stimulating circulation of your lymph.
• Dandelion root and milk thistle help in cleansing and strengthening your liver. Milk thistle has silymarin which does not only protect your liver but helps in regenerating itself. Dandelion root helps in removing waste products from your gallbladder and kidneys.
You would never have any problems if your body needs detoxification at home. You can try using these wonderful herbs to obtain their natural remedies. Rejuvenate yourself and feel good about it. Also for More Great Articles and Brand Name Products and Services Visit our Partners at http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
Another process being incorporated in body detox together with using herbs is limiting the toxins which enter your body. Eliminating or restricting the use of the usual culprits such as refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, household chemicals, and petroleum or synthetic-based body paraphernalia is a very good way of starting.
You should start eating organic natural diet foods, getting regular exercise, and drinking adequate amounts of water to facilitate your detoxification. Your body can adjust easily in a gradual change that is much better compared to other practices.
The following herbs that have known to be effective for many years can be used as a home remedy. These are the natural way of body detoxification.
• Psyllium seeds and husks contain high fiber which can gently act as a natural laxative. You can utilize it by soaking the seeds in water. Psyllium is generally considered as adaptogenic which supports the healthy function of your bowel. It is also useful in treating diarrhea and other irritable bowel diseases. It is a very good choice for body detoxification since its gelatinous substance after soaking absorbs toxins.
• Hydrangea root and the Joe pye weed (gravel root) helps in preventing, dissolving, and expelling stones and crystals in the bladder and kidneys. It is good to keep your kidneys free from any obstructions to stay in good working condition essential in effective elimination of toxins.
• Cascara Sagrada is used also as natural laxatives. It could be safe even for longer duration of usage where it strengthens your colon’s muscles.
• Alder buckthorn’s barks are also used but it must first be dried and be stored for at least one year since its fresh barks are so strong which can be considered toxic.
• Juniper berries also promote the urinary system’s overall health. It detoxifies and strengthens your urinary tract, bladder, and kidneys. It is excellent for cleaning purposes but prolonged usage is not recommended because it can cause some overtaxing in your kidneys.
• Nettles also have detoxifying properties which can be extended not just in your urinary system. Nevertheless overusing it can display similar effects as the juniper berries.
• Burdock seeds and roots are similar to nettles. It has mild and cleansing diuretic action but has stronger effects. Heavy metals inside your body can be removed by using burdock.
• Basil, cypress, celery, grapefruit, lemon, fennel, rosemary, thyme, and patchouli contains essential oils effective for flushing out toxins underneath your skin and stimulating circulation of your lymph.
• Dandelion root and milk thistle help in cleansing and strengthening your liver. Milk thistle has silymarin which does not only protect your liver but helps in regenerating itself. Dandelion root helps in removing waste products from your gallbladder and kidneys.
You would never have any problems if your body needs detoxification at home. You can try using these wonderful herbs to obtain their natural remedies. Rejuvenate yourself and feel good about it. Also for More Great Articles and Brand Name Products and Services Visit our Partners at http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
Sunday, August 25, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Big Pharma invents yet another disease to sell dea...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Big Pharma invents yet another disease to sell dea...: Ever heard of "shift work disorder?" It's a new disease being played up by the pharmaceutical industry to sell drugs so dange...
Big Pharma invents yet another disease to sell deadly drugs: 'Shift Work Disorder' now used to push medication that may kill you!
Ever heard of "shift work disorder?" It's a new disease being played up
by the pharmaceutical industry to sell drugs so dangerous that even the
home page of the drug website admits the drug may kill you.
One such drug is called "Nuvigil," sold by Cephalon, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. The warning text on the Nuvigil website says:
NUVIGIL (armodafinil) Tablets [C-IV] may cause serious side effects including a serious rash or a serious allergic reaction that may affect parts of your body such as your liver or blood cells, and may result in hospitalization and be life-threatening. If you develop a skin rash, hives, sores in your mouth, blisters, swelling, peeling, or yellowing of the skin or eyes, trouble swallowing or breathing, dark urine, or fever, stop taking NUVIGIL and call your doctor right away or get emergency help.
Wow, mouth sores? Yellowing eyes? Trouble breathing? Dark urine? Hospitalization? Where do I sign up!
According to the Nuvigil website, the drug is, "a prescription medicine used to improve wakefulness in adults who experience excessive sleepiness due... shift work disorder (SWD)"
You're not simply tired because you're out of sync with the sun, the fictional narrative says: you're tired because you have a disorder! And unless you pop these pills -- which might kill you -- you'll never be normal again!
This is the incessant lie of all drug advertisements: these pills will make you normal and healthy, they claim. Yet people who take their pills aren't normal and healthy; they're chronically diseased and suffering kidney failure, liver failure, skin disorders, sleep disorders and often dying from FDA-approved medications.
An incredible 783,000 Americans die each year from conventional medicine. Roughly 100,000 of those are killed by FDA-approved prescription medications. Yet the industry's answer is to keep inventing more and more medications to add to the toxic burden patients are already experiencing from the half-dozen meds they're already popping on a daily basis.
That's the business model of Big Pharma, of course: invent a fake disease, promote the disease to push a new pill, then get as many people to take those pills as possible while government Medicaid and Medicare programs write the checks.
The patient, in essence, is just a proxy for profit. The patient's body is essentially a chemical dumping ground so that drug companies can collect profits while claiming to have offered some sort of "treatment" that never actually treats anything other than symptoms.
"NUVIGIL may help the sleepiness caused by these conditions, but it may not stop all of your sleepiness and does not take the place of sleep," says the Nuvigil website. In other words, you'd probably have similar results by slamming a couple of Monster energy drinks (not that I'm recommending energy drinks, of course).
Ah, and now we get to the real heart of the matter. Nuvigil is a highly addictive controlled substance.
"NUVIGIL is a federally controlled substance [C-IV] because it has the potential to be abused or lead to dependence," says the Nuvigil website. "Selling or giving away NUVIGIL may harm others and is against the law."
What they mean, of course, is that you selling Nuvigil to someone else is against the law, but it's not against the law for the drug industry to conspire with your doctor to sell you the drug. Keep this in mind when you hear about front groups like the Partnership For A Drug-Free America. Nearly all these front groups are funded by Big Pharma, and their goal is to get drugs off the streets so that people have to buy those very same drugs via prescription. It's a turf war, and Big Pharma wants to be your dealer.
By the way, the company that makes Nuvigil is running clinical trials now in an effort to get the pill approved for treating depression and "bi-polar disorder," yet another fictitious disease invented by the psychiatric industry to sell more high-profit pharmaceuticals that harm people. If they get their way, you'll soon be able to buy highly addictive, class IV controlled substances to treat your "bi-polarness."
So wait, let me get this straight: The pill people are supposed to take when they feel too sleepy and can't stay awake somehow causes insomnia? Say it isn't so...
Taking the pill, then, can cause you to be unable to attain normal, healthy sleep. This causes your next night shift to be worse than the previous one, making you feel so tired you start popping extra Nuvigil. Then the hallucinations from sleep deprivation start to kick in, probably, and you find yourself playing out the opening sequence of "Fight Club" starring Ed Norton.
Keep in mind that the people who are likely to be targeted for this drug are paramedics, EMTs, doctors, nurses and other night-shift workers who need to have their heads on straight. If I'm in a late-night car accident and end up in the emergency room, I don't want some pill-popping medical addict trying to patch me up.
Your endocrine system has its own light sensors that control the levels of hormones like melatonin. When your body senses light, it tells you to wake up and be alert. When it senses an absence of light, it tells your body to produce hormones that wind you down and help you go to sleep.
The simple solution for late-night work shifts is therefore twofold:
1) Avoid all light sources when sleeping (wear a blindfold or have window shades that can block out nearly 100% of outside light).
2) Supplement your light before or during night shifts. This may mean purchasing and using a high-intensity phototherapy device. Sunlight is quite intense, after all. Search for "light therapy device" or "Seasonal Affective Disorder" lamp to locate such products.
In addition, having a healthy endocrine system will further support your ability to work late-night shifts without compromising your overall health. This means avoiding all hormone mimickers such as BPA and drastically reducing your exposure to heavy metals.
In the end, however, there is no replacement for natural sunlight. Your body is engineered to work in harmony with Mother Nature, and that means waking and sleeping in rhythm with the orbit and rotation of planet Earth. Working late-night shifts will inevitably accelerate your aging, suppress your immune system, worsen your moods and disrupt your hormones. No drug will reverse this. Ultimately, the best solution is to work night shifts only temporarily and return to normal waking schedules as quickly as you can.
One such drug is called "Nuvigil," sold by Cephalon, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. The warning text on the Nuvigil website says:
NUVIGIL (armodafinil) Tablets [C-IV] may cause serious side effects including a serious rash or a serious allergic reaction that may affect parts of your body such as your liver or blood cells, and may result in hospitalization and be life-threatening. If you develop a skin rash, hives, sores in your mouth, blisters, swelling, peeling, or yellowing of the skin or eyes, trouble swallowing or breathing, dark urine, or fever, stop taking NUVIGIL and call your doctor right away or get emergency help.
Wow, mouth sores? Yellowing eyes? Trouble breathing? Dark urine? Hospitalization? Where do I sign up!
According to the Nuvigil website, the drug is, "a prescription medicine used to improve wakefulness in adults who experience excessive sleepiness due... shift work disorder (SWD)"
Yet another fictitious disease
SWD, of course, is a made-up "disease" now being propagandized for the sole purpose of selling drugs like Nuvigil. The pushing of fictitious disorders is generally known as "disease mongering" across the industry. The premise of so-called Shift Work Disorder is that the tiredness you feel when you stay up all night working a night shift is actually some sort of disease requiring chemical intervention.You're not simply tired because you're out of sync with the sun, the fictional narrative says: you're tired because you have a disorder! And unless you pop these pills -- which might kill you -- you'll never be normal again!
This is the incessant lie of all drug advertisements: these pills will make you normal and healthy, they claim. Yet people who take their pills aren't normal and healthy; they're chronically diseased and suffering kidney failure, liver failure, skin disorders, sleep disorders and often dying from FDA-approved medications.
An incredible 783,000 Americans die each year from conventional medicine. Roughly 100,000 of those are killed by FDA-approved prescription medications. Yet the industry's answer is to keep inventing more and more medications to add to the toxic burden patients are already experiencing from the half-dozen meds they're already popping on a daily basis.
That's the business model of Big Pharma, of course: invent a fake disease, promote the disease to push a new pill, then get as many people to take those pills as possible while government Medicaid and Medicare programs write the checks.
The patient, in essence, is just a proxy for profit. The patient's body is essentially a chemical dumping ground so that drug companies can collect profits while claiming to have offered some sort of "treatment" that never actually treats anything other than symptoms.
"NUVIGIL may help the sleepiness caused by these conditions, but it may not stop all of your sleepiness and does not take the place of sleep," says the Nuvigil website. In other words, you'd probably have similar results by slamming a couple of Monster energy drinks (not that I'm recommending energy drinks, of course).
Highly addictive controlled substance
But wait, there's more: "NUVIGIL is a federally controlled substance (C-IV), so use NUVIGIL only as directed and keep in a safe place to prevent misuse and abuse. It is against the law to sell or give NUVIGIL to another person."Ah, and now we get to the real heart of the matter. Nuvigil is a highly addictive controlled substance.
"NUVIGIL is a federally controlled substance [C-IV] because it has the potential to be abused or lead to dependence," says the Nuvigil website. "Selling or giving away NUVIGIL may harm others and is against the law."
What they mean, of course, is that you selling Nuvigil to someone else is against the law, but it's not against the law for the drug industry to conspire with your doctor to sell you the drug. Keep this in mind when you hear about front groups like the Partnership For A Drug-Free America. Nearly all these front groups are funded by Big Pharma, and their goal is to get drugs off the streets so that people have to buy those very same drugs via prescription. It's a turf war, and Big Pharma wants to be your dealer.
By the way, the company that makes Nuvigil is running clinical trials now in an effort to get the pill approved for treating depression and "bi-polar disorder," yet another fictitious disease invented by the psychiatric industry to sell more high-profit pharmaceuticals that harm people. If they get their way, you'll soon be able to buy highly addictive, class IV controlled substances to treat your "bi-polarness."
One of the most common side effects of Nuvigil is insomnia
"In placebo-controlled studies, the most commonly observed side effects were headache, nausea, dizziness, and insomnia," says Wikipedia, a website I don't always trust but nevertheless tends to have useful information about drug side effects.So wait, let me get this straight: The pill people are supposed to take when they feel too sleepy and can't stay awake somehow causes insomnia? Say it isn't so...
Taking the pill, then, can cause you to be unable to attain normal, healthy sleep. This causes your next night shift to be worse than the previous one, making you feel so tired you start popping extra Nuvigil. Then the hallucinations from sleep deprivation start to kick in, probably, and you find yourself playing out the opening sequence of "Fight Club" starring Ed Norton.
Keep in mind that the people who are likely to be targeted for this drug are paramedics, EMTs, doctors, nurses and other night-shift workers who need to have their heads on straight. If I'm in a late-night car accident and end up in the emergency room, I don't want some pill-popping medical addict trying to patch me up.
A safer alternative: phototherapy
So what can late-night workers do to stay alert on their night shifts? The answer is found in nature: phototherapy (light therapy).Your endocrine system has its own light sensors that control the levels of hormones like melatonin. When your body senses light, it tells you to wake up and be alert. When it senses an absence of light, it tells your body to produce hormones that wind you down and help you go to sleep.
The simple solution for late-night work shifts is therefore twofold:
1) Avoid all light sources when sleeping (wear a blindfold or have window shades that can block out nearly 100% of outside light).
2) Supplement your light before or during night shifts. This may mean purchasing and using a high-intensity phototherapy device. Sunlight is quite intense, after all. Search for "light therapy device" or "Seasonal Affective Disorder" lamp to locate such products.
In addition, having a healthy endocrine system will further support your ability to work late-night shifts without compromising your overall health. This means avoiding all hormone mimickers such as BPA and drastically reducing your exposure to heavy metals.
In the end, however, there is no replacement for natural sunlight. Your body is engineered to work in harmony with Mother Nature, and that means waking and sleeping in rhythm with the orbit and rotation of planet Earth. Working late-night shifts will inevitably accelerate your aging, suppress your immune system, worsen your moods and disrupt your hormones. No drug will reverse this. Ultimately, the best solution is to work night shifts only temporarily and return to normal waking schedules as quickly as you can.
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: McDonald's Chicken McNuggets found to contain myst...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: McDonald's Chicken McNuggets found to contain myst...: Today we announce the first investigation conducted at the Natural News Forensic Food Laboratory , the new science-based research branch of...
McDonald's Chicken McNuggets found to contain mysterious fibers, hair-like structures!
Today we announce the first investigation conducted at the Natural News Forensic Food Laboratory,
the new science-based research branch of Natural News where we put
foods under the microscope and find out what's really there.
Earlier today I purchased a 10-piece Chicken McNuggets from a McDonald's restaurant in Austin, Texas. Under carefully controlled conditions, I then examined the Chicken McNuggets under a high-powered digital microscope, expecting to see only processed chicken bits and a fried outer coating.
But what I found instead shocked even me. I've seen a lot of weird stuff in my decade of investigating foods and nutrition, but I never expected to find this...
We found dark black hair-like structures sticking out of the nugget mass, as well as light blue egg-shaped structures with attached tail-like hairs or fibers.
These are shown in extreme detail in the photos below, taken on August 15, 2013 at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab. The actual Chicken McNugget samples used in these photos have been frozen for storage of forensic evidence.
We also found odd red coloring splotches in several locations, as well as a spherical green object that resembles algae.
We are not claiming or implying that these objects in any way make McDonald's Chicken McNuggets unsafe to consume. We do, however, believe that this visual evidence may warrant an FDA investigation into the ingredient composition of Chicken McNuggets.
In particular, where are the hair-like structures coming from? This is especially important to answer, given that chickens do not have hair. Is there cross-species contamination in the processing of Chicken McNuggets? This question needs to be answered.
Share this story with everyone you know.
See my video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fuL-E2hPlc
Or if YouTube censors the video, watch it at our free-speech video site, TV.naturalnews.com:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=151BC31144DF47CE1D85FB664CCC2A65
Earlier today I purchased a 10-piece Chicken McNuggets from a McDonald's restaurant in Austin, Texas. Under carefully controlled conditions, I then examined the Chicken McNuggets under a high-powered digital microscope, expecting to see only processed chicken bits and a fried outer coating.
But what I found instead shocked even me. I've seen a lot of weird stuff in my decade of investigating foods and nutrition, but I never expected to find this...
Strange fibers found embedded inside Chicken McNuggets
As the following photos show, the Chicken McNuggets were found to contain strange fibers that some people might say even resemble so-called "Morgellon's."We found dark black hair-like structures sticking out of the nugget mass, as well as light blue egg-shaped structures with attached tail-like hairs or fibers.
These are shown in extreme detail in the photos below, taken on August 15, 2013 at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab. The actual Chicken McNugget samples used in these photos have been frozen for storage of forensic evidence.
We also found odd red coloring splotches in several locations, as well as a spherical green object that resembles algae.
We are not claiming or implying that these objects in any way make McDonald's Chicken McNuggets unsafe to consume. We do, however, believe that this visual evidence may warrant an FDA investigation into the ingredient composition of Chicken McNuggets.
In particular, where are the hair-like structures coming from? This is especially important to answer, given that chickens do not have hair. Is there cross-species contamination in the processing of Chicken McNuggets? This question needs to be answered.
Microscopic photos reveal an alien-like landscape with weird shapes and fibers
Here are the some of the photos from the Natural News Forensic Food Lab:Share this story with everyone you know.See my video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fuL-E2hPlc
Or if YouTube censors the video, watch it at our free-speech video site, TV.naturalnews.com:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=151BC31144DF47CE1D85FB664CCC2A65
Thursday, August 15, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Is Atkins right for you?
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Is Atkins right for you?: The Atkins diet is very popular, but is it right for you? Before you start down the low carb road, you should take some time to decide wheth...
Is Atkins right for you?
The Atkins diet is very popular, but is it right for you? Before you start down the low carb road, you should take some time to decide whether low carb is the right way for you to lose weight. Just because it has been effective for others doesn’t mean it will be right for you. No specific diet works for everyone, and you may even find that a type of low carb diet that works better for you than another. There are many things to consider before you start the Atkins diet.
First, evaluate your past dieting history. If you’ve been trying to lose weight for a long period of time, you’ve no doubt tried a wide variety of diets. Take note of the different diets you’ve tried over the years. Write down the basics of each diet, what worked and what didn’t. Also, write down why you didn’t stay on the particular diet. Evaluate your experience with high carbohydrate diets. These types of diets include most low-fat and calorie controlled diets. How did you feel while on these types of diets? Were you hungry, obsessed with food or experiencing negative reactions? Or did you feel full of energy and generally good?
If you’ve had experience with low carb diets, write that down as well. Past the negative effects of the first week, how did eating low carb make you feel? Why did you stop using the low carb diet?
The answers to these questions will help you decide whether Atkins is right for you or not. If you’ve had good experiences with low-fat diets and bad experiences with other low carb diets, then Atkins is probably not for you. If other low-carb diets have worked but not without difficulty, then you may have been on the wrong type of low-carb diet and Atkins might work better. If you’ve had bad experiences with both types of diets, then you may have better success with a modified Atkins diet.
Your food and eating behaviors can also give you a clue to whether or not Atkins is a good choice for your weight loss efforts. Carb sensitivities are indicated by a certain set of behaviors. You may be carb sensitive if you feel like eating right after you’ve finished a meal. You will also feel strong urges to eat throughout the day. You may feel dizzy, fuzzyheaded and fatigued without getting a boost from sugar or another carbohydrate. Carb sensitivity is also shown when you feel sluggish after eating. This occurs especially after you eat a meal rich in sugars and carbohydrates. If you experience these symptoms frequently, you may have carb sensitivities. Try paying close attention to how carbohydrates affect you and if you continue to experience these symptoms, try doing a low carb diet.
Your success on the Atkins diet can also be determined by your medical and family history. If you have any pre-diabetic symptoms, or diabetes itself, a reduced carb diet like Atkins may be right for you. Significant weight gain can also be helped by the Atkins diet. Normally, the more overweight you are, the more likely you are to have high blood pressure, high triglycerides and high blood glucose.
If any member of your family has diabetes or is significantly overweight, this can also put you at risk for these conditions. Your tendency toward these conditions on a genetic level can mark a necessity for a low carbohydrate diet like Atkins. The Atkins plan has been shown to improve weight and control blood sugar issues. If these are problems in your family history, then you may want to consider the Atkins diet.
There are a lot of good reasons to try the Atkins diet. Whether you have responded well to other low carb diets in the past or you have a medical history that warrants a controlled carbohydrate diet, the Atkins diet can meet your needs.
For More Great Brand Name Dieting Products and Services Visit Our Partners at - http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
First, evaluate your past dieting history. If you’ve been trying to lose weight for a long period of time, you’ve no doubt tried a wide variety of diets. Take note of the different diets you’ve tried over the years. Write down the basics of each diet, what worked and what didn’t. Also, write down why you didn’t stay on the particular diet. Evaluate your experience with high carbohydrate diets. These types of diets include most low-fat and calorie controlled diets. How did you feel while on these types of diets? Were you hungry, obsessed with food or experiencing negative reactions? Or did you feel full of energy and generally good?
If you’ve had experience with low carb diets, write that down as well. Past the negative effects of the first week, how did eating low carb make you feel? Why did you stop using the low carb diet?
The answers to these questions will help you decide whether Atkins is right for you or not. If you’ve had good experiences with low-fat diets and bad experiences with other low carb diets, then Atkins is probably not for you. If other low-carb diets have worked but not without difficulty, then you may have been on the wrong type of low-carb diet and Atkins might work better. If you’ve had bad experiences with both types of diets, then you may have better success with a modified Atkins diet.
Your food and eating behaviors can also give you a clue to whether or not Atkins is a good choice for your weight loss efforts. Carb sensitivities are indicated by a certain set of behaviors. You may be carb sensitive if you feel like eating right after you’ve finished a meal. You will also feel strong urges to eat throughout the day. You may feel dizzy, fuzzyheaded and fatigued without getting a boost from sugar or another carbohydrate. Carb sensitivity is also shown when you feel sluggish after eating. This occurs especially after you eat a meal rich in sugars and carbohydrates. If you experience these symptoms frequently, you may have carb sensitivities. Try paying close attention to how carbohydrates affect you and if you continue to experience these symptoms, try doing a low carb diet.
Your success on the Atkins diet can also be determined by your medical and family history. If you have any pre-diabetic symptoms, or diabetes itself, a reduced carb diet like Atkins may be right for you. Significant weight gain can also be helped by the Atkins diet. Normally, the more overweight you are, the more likely you are to have high blood pressure, high triglycerides and high blood glucose.
If any member of your family has diabetes or is significantly overweight, this can also put you at risk for these conditions. Your tendency toward these conditions on a genetic level can mark a necessity for a low carbohydrate diet like Atkins. The Atkins plan has been shown to improve weight and control blood sugar issues. If these are problems in your family history, then you may want to consider the Atkins diet.
There are a lot of good reasons to try the Atkins diet. Whether you have responded well to other low carb diets in the past or you have a medical history that warrants a controlled carbohydrate diet, the Atkins diet can meet your needs.
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Tuesday, August 13, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Ganjanomics: bringing Humboldt's shadow economy in...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Ganjanomics: bringing Humboldt's shadow economy in...: On e evening last October, I met with Anna Hamilt on in the Northern California town of Garberville. A singer-s on gwriter with a barbwire ...
Ganjanomics: bringing Humboldt's shadow economy into the light! Economic High's and Low's!
One evening last October, I met with Anna Hamilton in the Northern California town of Garberville. A singer-songwriter with a barbwire voice, Hamilton is known locally for her radio show, Rant and Rave, Lock and Load and Shoot Your Mouth Off -- which, it turns out, is a pretty good description of her approach to life.
"I'm a little gutterballer from the beach," she said. "And I get nervous around too much normalcy."
We sat by the front window in a bar called the Blue Room, shielding our eyes from the sun while a pair of hippies attempted to maneuver their minivan into a parking space. As a dreadlocked woman passenger gently upbraided him, the scrawny, bearded kid behind the wheel struggled to line up between the two white lines on the pavement. The entire operation seemed to unfold in slow-mo. Hamilton watched in disbelief.
"Don't let anybody tell you," she growled, "that pot makes you a better driver."
The hippies were among a wave of migrants that appear each fall to help with the harvest. And on those still-warm October days, Garberville and its neighbor, Redway, a couple miles down the road, felt like the forward operations base for a hard-core gardening cult. Citizens stormed local garden centers, loading up last-minute supplies and hauling them over a tangle of dirt roads into the surrounding hills.
Out in that wild country, concealed behind private gates in the draws and gulches that lace the rumpled landscape, lies the heart of what may be the biggest false-fronted economy in the United States. California produces nearly 40 percent of the country's marijuana; worth an estimated $13.8 billion, it is by far the state's biggest cash crop. The longtime hub of the business is here, in Humboldt and neighboring Mendocino and Trinity counties -- the legendary Emerald Triangle.
Despite the drug economy's pervasiveness, locals observe a kind of winking discretion that goes back four decades, when the hill culture first retreated from the reach of authority. As one grower put it, "We all are keeping each other's secrets, and there is kind of a community because of that."
But Hamilton has pushed for more candid talk about Humboldt County's economic reliance on marijuana. The formerly logging-dependent counties on the North Coast have struggled economically for years, and the money weed generates is real. Still, the marijuana business is an extremely complicated creature. In 1996, California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use. Yet the majority of the marijuana grown in the Emerald Triangle goes to recreational markets, and roughly 90 percent is sold outside the state -- where it has been very, very illegal.
That, however, is changing. A raft of other states have passed medical marijuana laws, and last fall, California voters took up the question of whether to legalize pot for recreational use as well. Despite seemingly broad support, Proposition 19 narrowly lost at the polls, receiving 46.2 percent of the vote. But in the aftermath of its failure, marijuana's slow roll towards legitimacy has continued, if somewhat more sluggishly.
Over the past year, trade organizations and the other institutions of commerce by which entrepreneurs of all stripes sustain themselves have spontaneously emerged. Marijuana growers have begun negotiating the complicated realities of regulation, launched lobbying campaigns, and even enlisted government support in fighting for market share. The county government is itself trying to delicately navigate its way into tapping an industry that is still mostly illegal.
That could soon pit the county against the federal government -- but it also may be the only practical thing to do. After all, Hamilton said, "it's stupid to not just flatly admit that marijuana is what's holding this county's underwear up."
The Emerald Triangle has long been isolated by distance and geography, holding itself consciously aloof from the rest of California. Until the 1920s, the main way to reach the North Coast was by ship, and the timber industry was king, sustained by redwoods that grew enormous in the coastal fog. By the late 1960s, however, when the area appeared on the psychic maps of disillusioned hippies desperate to escape from San Francisco and elsewhere, much of the land was logged over -- and cheap.
"They could come here and live off of welfare and peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches," says Charley Custer, a transplanted Chicagoan, "and just kind of scrounge along."
But the hippies were idealistic, too -- dreamers who hoped to leave mainstream America behind and create a different reality. Some began using their new land to grow pot on the side. They weren't the only ones. The timber industry, battered by environmental regulations and unfavorable economics, was wheezing a death rattle: In the two decades after the hippies arrived, logging in the county declined by 60 percent. Meanwhile, a single marijuana plant could fetch as much money as an entire redwood. Even the old-guard loggers who would rather cut a tree than hug it saw the practical benefits of the new crop.
"Now it's hard to tell who's who," says Eric Kirk, a Garberville attorney, "because when the mills all closed down, everybody got into marijuana."
Even as early as the '70s, it was clear that a new age had dawned. Itinerant hippies brought in specimens of Cannabis indica, a highland champion, from Afghanistan, and crossed it with Cannabis sativa, the Central American species that had long been the mainstay of U.S. growers. The plants that resulted were hardier and produced a more potent high. Then came the discovery that unpollinated female plants -- called sinsemilla -- are richer in THC, the active chemical in marijuana.
The new stuff practically sold itself, and Humboldt County became a slightly grubbier realization of the classic California dream. "I've heard stories about local kids who went away to college, and were living on Top Ramen diets. They came back, and their buddies who didn't go to college are driving around big rigs with expensive stereos," Kirk says. "And they're thinking, 'What the hell am I doing?' "
That kind of entrepreneurialism is hard to hide, and the government took notice. In 1983, the Reagan administration created the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP, a multi-agency SWAT team that bills itself as the nation's largest law enforcement task force. Practically everyone who lived in southern Humboldt in the late '80s and early '90s remembers frantically dialing neighbors to warn of impending busts, and women and children streaming out of the hills to safety.
CAMP estimates it has removed nearly 25 million marijuana plants from California since its creation. But there was a flip side. Many people jokingly refer to CAMP as a price-support program for marijuana. By the mid-1980s, with busts limiting supply, pot was going for prices that have not been matched since -- as much as $6,000 a pound, wholesale.
The high-risk, high-reward nature of the business only sharpened the local spirit of self-reliance, daring and innovation. Certain handymen began specializing in the construction of plywood platforms for marijuana in tree canopies, hidden from helicopter-borne drug agents. The community radio station, KMUD, doubled as an early-warning system, broadcasting the position of law-enforcement vehicles headed into the hills.
Then, things began to change. California's legalization of medical marijuana in 1996 raised the curtain on an elaborate pantomime that continues to this day. With a doctor's recommendation, a patient could either grow limited quantities for personal use, or purchase it from dispensaries. Some 2,100 dispensaries have sprung up throughout California, and the medical marijuana revolution has spread to every Western state except Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Two years ago, the federal government issued its own imprimatur of sorts, when Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden directed federal prosecutors to leave alone "individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."
With time, the Emerald Triangle's marijuana growers have begun acting more like real farmers. Today, many have contracts to supply medical dispensaries in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles. A few growers even receive IRS reportable-income forms from the dispensaries they sell to, and pay federal tax. An entire cloud of supporting businesses has also emerged, from attorneys who specialize in ensuring legal compliance to labs that analyze and certify the product's purity. A company called Statewide Insurance Services offers marijuana crop insurance, including a special "raid coverage" option. The availability of insurance has, in turn, raised the prospect that growers who supply dispensaries may someday be eligible for crop loans from banks, just like tomato farmers.
But the enthusiastic pursuit of what is still largely an unregulated industry has generated fallout, too, drawing unwelcome attention to the whole enterprise. Illegal diversions of water for marijuana gardens, together with indiscriminate use of fertilizer and pesticides, have choked important salmon streams. The widespread use of rat bait took a toll on birds of prey. And the CAMP assaults literally drove some growers underground: Buried shipping containers with high-intensity lights powered by diesel generators -- their fuel tanks holding as much as 2,000 gallons -- proliferated in the hills.
Hamilton and other like-minded residents took to the airwaves on KMUD and began proselytizing against the "diesel cowboys" who ran such operations. Diesel dope's carbon footprint would give Al Gore a case of the fantods: According to some calculations, it consumes about 75 gallons of fuel and releases more than two tons of carbon dioxide per pound of pot produced. Some growers dumped used crankcase oil from their generators straight into the ground. Poorly maintained generators caught fire in the middle of the woods. And they leaked -- sometimes a lot. In May 2008, 1,000 gallons of diesel-grow fuel poured straight into Hacker Creek, which provides habitat for salmon and drinking water for the watershed's residents.
But an even bigger problem has emerged recently. Criminal cartels, mostly with Mexican ties, have begun moving onto federal, state and private timberland and setting up monster grows with tens of thousands of plants. Last year, CAMP arrested 182 people in California, seized more than 5 million plants and shot at least seven people; the vast majority of the raids were aimed at cartel grows.
All this has helped shape an unusual social code in the Emerald Triangle. Practically everyone, including the police, distinguishes between "outlaws" -- the mom-and-pop, reformed-hippie operators who grow a little dope to make ends meet and put their kids through school -- and "criminals." And smart growers, while they may technically be breaking the law by growing for recreational markets, meticulously observe a certain set of rules that, at least theoretically, put them in compliance with the state's medical marijuana law. If a grower has fewer than 100 plants, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency generally leaves the decision to prosecute up to the local sheriff. And as long as the grower's not too flashy and doesn't go around brandishing guns, the sheriff will usually leave him be.
There are, after all, much bigger fish to fry. "Our priority now," says Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey, "is definitely the cartels."
Scrupulous observance of the law is, although officials hesitate to say so, tempered by a very practical concern. If local sheriffs were to crack down on the outlaws, they would destroy a significant chunk of the regional economy -- and their own budgets.
Just how important marijuana is to Humboldt County's economy may be as unknowable as the ineffable Tao. One Humboldt State University economist suggests that a quarter of the county's economy -- roughly a billion dollars -- is marijuana money. Conventional wisdom suggests that, particularly in southern Humboldt, the percentage is much higher.
Ernie Branscomb is a genial, fifth-generation Humboldter who owns Garberville's version of Sears. With his white mustache, bald head and easy banter, he would seem at ease behind a barber's chair. He's part of the unreconstructed Old Guard here, at least technically. "I've never grown marijuana," he said. "I've never even used marijuana. I'm afraid I'll like it."
Branscomb's store has given him a front-row view of the business, so I asked him how big a part of the local economy he thought marijuana is. He pondered for a moment. "In my opinion," he said, "it's about 80 percent."
I laughed and said that was impossible. Branscomb looked at me like I was an idiot.
"Look around you," he said.
A couple of days after I talked with Anna Hamilton, I met up with a grower alongside a frontage road in southern Humboldt. I'll call him Robert Grant. He wore logging boots, cargo pants and a T-shirt, and had the wiry build of someone who spends a lot of time on the move outside. We followed a labyrinthine route along dusty roads to a piece of land perched halfway up a pretty draw full of oaks, golden meadows and firs, with sweeping views of the surrounding hills.
Grant originally came from Southern California to chase the surf on the coast nearby. He slowly worked his way into the marijuana scene, careful not to disturb the local detente. It has served him well. At this particular spot, 60 plants were perched in the sun, standing in long raised beds and a handful of blue plastic kiddie pools. The leafy plants were as tall as apple trees; together, they were probably worth about half a million dollars, wholesale.
Among them were strains with names like Blueberry, Amazing Haze and Armageddon. But Grant was most excited about a new twist on one called Super Silver Haze.
"We've been working on it for nine years," he said, reaching to pull down a bud that glistened with silvery resin. I took a deep whiff, and my head filled with the plant's breathy, arresting allure.
Grant saw my eyes widen.
"Yeah," he laughed. "That's ... that just rocks."
Breeding marijuana is its own kind of magic. Grant talked about the elusive quest to balance a body high with a head high; to blend the perfect combination of looks, aroma, flavor and THC; and to encourage resistance to mold, an incessant problem with the coastal fog. Breeding and growing styles can border on the occult. One breeder meticulously tracks each plant's parentage in his quest to produce super-potent "stupid dope." Others drive nails through the plants' stalks, on the theory that torture will produce more THC. And one group of ritualists grows weed that's beyond hand-crafted, observing elaborate precautions to avoid touching the buds during harvest -- the better to preserve their sanctity.
Grant's pot patch reflected the evolving state of the Northern California marijuana business. His cannabis was contracted to a medical marijuana dispensary in Sacramento. In the middle of the garden, angled toward the sky, was a white board painted with a red cross. An attached bundle of paperwork noted his compliance with the state's medical marijuana law.
"That's for the helicopters," Grant said. He had little fear of a raid. The helicopters appeared once earlier in the summer and then stayed away. And now it seemed the entire industry was poised to come further out of the shadows.
In 2009, with the California budget going up in smoke, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- no dummy about his constituents' yen for dope -- began to consider legalizing recreational use of marijuana, and then taxing it, as a way to stem the state's looming fiscal crisis. The state tax office estimated that a $50-an-ounce levy on marijuana could, when coupled with increased sales-tax revenue, generate $1.4 billion for state coffers. The legalize-and-tax mantra was subsequently taken up by Oakland entrepreneur Richard Lee, who created Oaksterdam, a sort of vo-tech school for aspiring pot growers, and almost single-handedly turned the city into a medical-marijuana mecca.
When I met with Grant, Californians were within weeks of voting on Proposition 19. Many growers opposed legalization because it was sure to drop prices, although they hesitated to say so on the record. Others, like Grant, felt differently.
Despite the spreading legalization of medical marijuana, the profit margin has stayed fat: For a grower like Grant, it typically costs $400 to $500 to grow a pound of marijuana that will go for $2,000 wholesale. And with full legalization, he explained, "you're talking about a lot more consumption." Even if prices were to fall to $1,000 per pound, he said, "I'll take that. Absolutely."
From Grant's perspective, full legalization seemed, at some point, inevitable. Several fellow growers had recently formed the Humboldt Growers Association, in essence a lobbying group to help growers shape -- and get out in front of -- the regulations that legalization was sure to bring. The Growers Association had begun drafting its own proposed regulations to submit to the Humboldt County board of supervisors, which would govern the manner and extent to which marijuana was grown, and allow the county to collect taxes and fees.
"Everything's tracked. Everything has a permit number that tracks it right down to the farmer," Grant said. "It's just like lettuce, just like tomatoes, just like strawberries."
After years of keeping their heads down on the outlaw fringe -- where politics meant little more than supporting the local road-maintenance association -- growers were taking a big step into a new and complicated realm.
"There's a lot of uncertainty in the air," Grant said. "But a lot of entrepreneurs are really excited about the potential."
To a large extent, growers' worries these days aren't all that different from those of the folks at any local chamber of commerce. There is the issue of brand protection, for instance. Last September, a couple of hustlers moonlighting as monks showed up at the International Cannabis and Hemp Expo in San Francisco, hawking what they claimed were bona fide Humboldt seeds.
In response, local growers proposed an ordinance to protect the county's good name, which has acquired a special cachet over the decades. A fellow named The Man Who Walks in the Woods drew up a draft resolution freighted with 11 "whereas"es, one "be it resolved," and a "be it further resolved," and called for amending the county code to note: "The name 'Humboldt' as it expresses or implies or suggests Humboldt County, California is hereby reserved for the permanent and exclusive benefit of the legal residents of Humboldt County, California." Other enterprising souls began researching the feasibility of trademarking the Humboldt name, which sparked some nervous speculation that one or another local faction might lock up the appellation.
People also worried about the Emerald Triangle's distance from its main markets. There had been some recent discussion about using refrigerated semis to haul tons of weed down Highway 101 to the Bay Area. Somebody proposed repurposing an old armored car as a dope-delivery vehicle. ("I saw the thing, in Redway," Anna Hamilton told me, slightly incredulous. "It's an old dusty Brinks truck that's been sitting in somebody's yard for the last 10 years.")
Behind all this was a much more serious debate: how to bring Humboldt County's shadow economy into the bright light of government-regulated industry. For many growers, that's a pretty radical change. The black market is, in many ways, the ultimate free market. "The irony is that the most progressive community in the nation has been living Ronald Reagan's wet dream," Hamilton told me. "It's going to be a hard sell. A lot of people don't understand why a third of their income should go to taxes. They have never had to share their money with anyone. "
But big shifts are already happening in the business landscape. After four decades, the Humboldt growers, who had perfected the high art of lying low, are being edged out by an explosion of upstart, indoor growers in big cities like Oakland. "The rural counties that grow outdoor weed are getting left behind," Hamilton said.
That profusion of new supply has been pushing prices down, a trend that would be sure to continue with wider legalization. That would undercut Humboldt County's economic basis -- and that suggested a natural alliance between Humboldt marijuana growers and the county government. "The county," Hamilton said, "is a vested partner in the stability of the price."
Two camps emerged in the debate over how to shape the future. One grew out of Hamilton's crusading, and became the Humboldt Medical Marijuana Advisory Panel, or HUMMAP, a loose affiliation of locals including Hamilton and The Man Who Walks in the Woods. Some HUMMAP members were small growers who also belonged to the newly formed Tea House Collective, which is attempting to ride the wave of a new era of discriminating tokers -- namely, those Whole Foods devotees in the Bay Area with enough of a paycheck left over for boutique bud.
The other camp was the better-capitalized and more ambitious Humboldt Growers Association. While the HUMMAP types drove slightly dilapidated Toyotas and Volvos, the Growers preferred lifted Dodge pickups. Joey Burger, who owns a local business called Trim Scene Solutions -- best known for selling a power weed-trimming machine called the Twister, which looks like a gleaming jet engine on wheels -- was their main ambassador.
The Growers proved far more adept at politics than Hamilton's crew. Last year, members of the group contributed at least $14,750 to the re-election campaign of a county supervisor named Bonnie Neely, plus $13,000 to Paul Gallegos, the county's district attorney. But it wasn't until they held a press conference last October, to unveil their proposed regulations for how the county might regulate and tax marijuana, that it was clear just how successful the Growers had been in making the drug business a respectable issue for elected officials.
A day earlier in Eureka, 50 miles north of Garberville, HUMMAP had unceremoniously trotted out its proposed regulations in the time allotted for audience comment at the end of a county supervisors' meeting. The Growers, in contrast, rented a building with views of the Eureka waterfront, invited the press, and rolled out their proposal with a formidable show of support from the county's political bigwigs. Neely emceed the event; District Attorney Gallegos and another county supervisor named Mark Lovelace were also prominently in attendance.
Gallegos has never hidden his belief that the war against marijuana is, for the most part, a waste of time and money. "We don't see people smoking marijuana with a whole lot of initiative to go out and commit crimes," he told me a couple of days beforehand. "Generally, what we see on marijuana is people being stoned."
At the press conference, Gallegos led off the speakers, saying, "My feeling on this is we're a decade late."
Eventually, the microphone came round to the Growers' not-so-secret weapon: the magnificently pomaded Max Del Real, a glad-handing cannabis lobbyist from the state capital whose very name was spoken with awe -- or perhaps a kind of disbelief. Del Real promptly dialed up the grandiloquence to 11.
The Growers, he reminded the audience, "are your neighbors. These are the same people who sit on your PTAs, coach your soccer teams.
"These," he said, "are good Americans."
Del Real emphasized that, to qualify for a permit under the Growers' proposed regulations, any applicant would have to have been a Humboldt County resident for at least two years. "The key term here, people, is localism," he beamed.
The proposed regulations, like HUMMAP's, required growers to minimize their environmental impact, and obtain state water-rights permits for irrigation diversions from rivers or creeks. Both proposals would have excluded violent felons from the business. But the Growers were also lobbying for bigger grows than HUMMAP was. Whereas the HUMMAP proposal allowed grows up to 2,500 square feet, the Growers' proposal allowed ones up to 16 times bigger.
Each of those -- roughly an acre -- would bring the county $80,000 in permitting fees. Del Real pointed out that the Growers' proposal would, at a minimum, bring $10 million into Humboldt County's coffers. Then he hinted -- obliquely enough, but darkly nonetheless -- that three counties elsewhere in the state were already considering pot-friendly regulations designed to establish themselves as the next Humboldt County. "They're looking at jobs. They're looking at revenue. They're looking at bottom lines," he intoned. "Humboldt County needs to move quickly on this particular issue."
With that, Del Real roared to a Hollywood finish. "I don't think the road ahead is complicated, and I don't think it's long.
"Thank you," he said, "and God bless you, Humboldt County."
Despite a strong showing in pre-election opinion polling, Proposition 19 was defeated by 53.5 percent of the vote last November. Pundits are still dissecting the exact cause of the measure's demise. But Prop 19's very appearance on the ballot, Mark Lovelace told me when we first met last fall, "was a point that, to me, made this situation much easier to talk about."
This January, Lovelace, a former environmental activist who cut his teeth fighting to save old-growth redwoods here, became chairman of the county board of supervisors. He is soft-spoken and slightly buttoned-down. He hardly qualifies as a cannabis crusader, but he's frank about the realities in this part of the world.
Humboldt County faces one of the classic conundrums of rural areas throughout the West. Its government services are subsidized by people in urban centers elsewhere in the state. Only 16 percent of the county government's revenue comes from local taxes; nearly 70 percent comes from the state and federal governments. That has put the county in a tight spot as those budgets have imploded over the past two years.
Right now, marijuana money shows up on the county's books only in roundabout ways -- primarily as sales tax when a grower buys groceries, or fertilizer, or a new truck, or ducks into the gas station for a Mountain Dew. "I don't think we need to have a firm number to know that it's an important part of our economy," Lovelace said. "And we also don't need to know that number to know that there are issues we need to regulate."
As such, the county is continuing to develop regulations specifically for medical marijuana. Those will likely require growers to comply with everything from product labeling to workers' compensation, and set up a structure for taxes and fees. Lovelace is the first to admit that such far-reaching oversight isn't always welcome.
"Being illegal has been a wonderful barrier to regulation," he laughed. "There are going to be a lot of people who are going to be pining for the good old days, when the only thing they had to worry about was getting busted."
But growers would benefit from the bargain, too. Humboldt is home to a thriving microbrew industry, and Lovelace is fond of pointing out that the government had helped breweries in their efforts to market their products to an outside world thirsty for craft beer with a good story behind it. With pot, the county could essentially give a Good Housekeeping Seal to local growers who follow good farming practices. "The folks that want to be good growers? Those are the people we want to work with," Lovelace said. "We'll be doing what we can to try to support them as an export product that's compatible with our values."
Government "support" of good growers would also include diverting even more of the law-enforcement muscle away from locals and onto the large-scale Mexican grows. "If they do it right," one prominent grower explained to me, "we can cut the cartels out."
Lovelace said as much himself. If recreational marijuana use was legalized, he pointed out, the massive Mexican pot ranches carved out of remote public lands and out-of-the-way private timber holdings "will be every bit as illegal as they are today. And all of a sudden, you have a legal industry that is saying, 'We want you to go after those guys, because that's our unfair competition.' "
People in California's marijuana business delicately refer to what they call a "lack of alignment" between state and federal policy. Today, a medical marijuana garden that is legal under state law can, under federal law, still be prosecuted as a major felony. And the gap between the state and federal worldviews is widening again, causing a distinct sense of unease that the feds may see the defeat of Proposition 19 as a mandate to finally bring the state to heel.
Indeed, this year federal officials have taken a more aggressive stance. The city of Oakland, never a place to tiptoe around a social issue, has been preparing to issue licenses for several indoor medical-marijuana farms, each bigger than a football field. In February, Melinda Haag, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, wrote to Oakland's city attorney to remind him that the federal government still views marijuana as a Schedule I drug -- the bad kind. Haag warned that "we will enforce (the Controlled Substances Act) vigorously against individuals and organizations that participate in unlawful manufacturing and distribution activity involving marijuana, even" -- in a seeming reversal of the federal government's position -- "if such activities are permitted under state law."
The Department of Justice followed up that letter with a barrage of similar messages to Colorado, Montana, Arizona and Washington, and in March, federal agents raided several marijuana dispensaries in Montana. To make sure the point was clear, in June, Deputy Attorney General James Cole issued yet another memorandum, about the Justice Department's position nationwide, writing: "Persons who are in the business of cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana, and those who knowingly facilitate such activities, are in violation of the Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law."
The Treasury Department, meanwhile, has begun dismantling the basic business infrastructure that medical marijuana dispensaries rely on. This spring, banks holding accounts for dispensaries received a wave of letters threatening to revoke their FDIC insurance, and big banks such as Wells Fargo have since been closing such accounts.
As Humboldt County officials slowly move forward with their medical marijuana regulations -- an effort that will likely take at least another year -- some wonder whether they should see the Justice Department's recent statements as a warning to hold off. When I talked with Lovelace again in July, he sounded exasperated. "Frankly, the federal position isn't doing anything to actually help us with the issue," he said. "I just don't think they get it."
Anna Hamilton, for her part, has become disillusioned with the slowness of the process, and with HUMMAP, the group she helped to start. In fact, when I spoke with her this summer, she had practically become a cheerleader for the rival Growers Association. "They're putting thousands of dollars into political campaigns up here," she said. "And HUMMAP, meanwhile, can't raise 40 bucks at a meeting with 60 people."
Indeed, the Growers do seem to be building steam. After Bonnie Neely, the county supervisor, lost her re-election bid last fall, they hired her as a consultant. Paul Gallegos, the district attorney, won his re-election campaign, but ended up $47,000 in debt; this July, the Growers co-sponsored a fund-raising dinner for him in Sacramento.
The road ahead is undeniably longer and more complicated than Max Del Real predicted. But Humboldt's growers are used to biding their time. They've been doing it for 40 years.
Robert Grant is keeping a close eye on the Growers Association's progress. After Proposition 19 was defeated, the Growers scaled down their proposed regulations to apply only to medical marijuana. But, Grant points out, their proposal is carefully written so that if -- or when -- recreational use is finally legalized, it can easily apply to a much bigger market.
"It's so seamless," he says, "it's beautiful."
"I'm a little gutterballer from the beach," she said. "And I get nervous around too much normalcy."
We sat by the front window in a bar called the Blue Room, shielding our eyes from the sun while a pair of hippies attempted to maneuver their minivan into a parking space. As a dreadlocked woman passenger gently upbraided him, the scrawny, bearded kid behind the wheel struggled to line up between the two white lines on the pavement. The entire operation seemed to unfold in slow-mo. Hamilton watched in disbelief.
"Don't let anybody tell you," she growled, "that pot makes you a better driver."
The hippies were among a wave of migrants that appear each fall to help with the harvest. And on those still-warm October days, Garberville and its neighbor, Redway, a couple miles down the road, felt like the forward operations base for a hard-core gardening cult. Citizens stormed local garden centers, loading up last-minute supplies and hauling them over a tangle of dirt roads into the surrounding hills.
Out in that wild country, concealed behind private gates in the draws and gulches that lace the rumpled landscape, lies the heart of what may be the biggest false-fronted economy in the United States. California produces nearly 40 percent of the country's marijuana; worth an estimated $13.8 billion, it is by far the state's biggest cash crop. The longtime hub of the business is here, in Humboldt and neighboring Mendocino and Trinity counties -- the legendary Emerald Triangle.
Despite the drug economy's pervasiveness, locals observe a kind of winking discretion that goes back four decades, when the hill culture first retreated from the reach of authority. As one grower put it, "We all are keeping each other's secrets, and there is kind of a community because of that."
But Hamilton has pushed for more candid talk about Humboldt County's economic reliance on marijuana. The formerly logging-dependent counties on the North Coast have struggled economically for years, and the money weed generates is real. Still, the marijuana business is an extremely complicated creature. In 1996, California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use. Yet the majority of the marijuana grown in the Emerald Triangle goes to recreational markets, and roughly 90 percent is sold outside the state -- where it has been very, very illegal.
That, however, is changing. A raft of other states have passed medical marijuana laws, and last fall, California voters took up the question of whether to legalize pot for recreational use as well. Despite seemingly broad support, Proposition 19 narrowly lost at the polls, receiving 46.2 percent of the vote. But in the aftermath of its failure, marijuana's slow roll towards legitimacy has continued, if somewhat more sluggishly.
Over the past year, trade organizations and the other institutions of commerce by which entrepreneurs of all stripes sustain themselves have spontaneously emerged. Marijuana growers have begun negotiating the complicated realities of regulation, launched lobbying campaigns, and even enlisted government support in fighting for market share. The county government is itself trying to delicately navigate its way into tapping an industry that is still mostly illegal.
That could soon pit the county against the federal government -- but it also may be the only practical thing to do. After all, Hamilton said, "it's stupid to not just flatly admit that marijuana is what's holding this county's underwear up."
The Emerald Triangle has long been isolated by distance and geography, holding itself consciously aloof from the rest of California. Until the 1920s, the main way to reach the North Coast was by ship, and the timber industry was king, sustained by redwoods that grew enormous in the coastal fog. By the late 1960s, however, when the area appeared on the psychic maps of disillusioned hippies desperate to escape from San Francisco and elsewhere, much of the land was logged over -- and cheap.
"They could come here and live off of welfare and peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches," says Charley Custer, a transplanted Chicagoan, "and just kind of scrounge along."
But the hippies were idealistic, too -- dreamers who hoped to leave mainstream America behind and create a different reality. Some began using their new land to grow pot on the side. They weren't the only ones. The timber industry, battered by environmental regulations and unfavorable economics, was wheezing a death rattle: In the two decades after the hippies arrived, logging in the county declined by 60 percent. Meanwhile, a single marijuana plant could fetch as much money as an entire redwood. Even the old-guard loggers who would rather cut a tree than hug it saw the practical benefits of the new crop.
"Now it's hard to tell who's who," says Eric Kirk, a Garberville attorney, "because when the mills all closed down, everybody got into marijuana."
Even as early as the '70s, it was clear that a new age had dawned. Itinerant hippies brought in specimens of Cannabis indica, a highland champion, from Afghanistan, and crossed it with Cannabis sativa, the Central American species that had long been the mainstay of U.S. growers. The plants that resulted were hardier and produced a more potent high. Then came the discovery that unpollinated female plants -- called sinsemilla -- are richer in THC, the active chemical in marijuana.
The new stuff practically sold itself, and Humboldt County became a slightly grubbier realization of the classic California dream. "I've heard stories about local kids who went away to college, and were living on Top Ramen diets. They came back, and their buddies who didn't go to college are driving around big rigs with expensive stereos," Kirk says. "And they're thinking, 'What the hell am I doing?' "
That kind of entrepreneurialism is hard to hide, and the government took notice. In 1983, the Reagan administration created the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP, a multi-agency SWAT team that bills itself as the nation's largest law enforcement task force. Practically everyone who lived in southern Humboldt in the late '80s and early '90s remembers frantically dialing neighbors to warn of impending busts, and women and children streaming out of the hills to safety.
CAMP estimates it has removed nearly 25 million marijuana plants from California since its creation. But there was a flip side. Many people jokingly refer to CAMP as a price-support program for marijuana. By the mid-1980s, with busts limiting supply, pot was going for prices that have not been matched since -- as much as $6,000 a pound, wholesale.
The high-risk, high-reward nature of the business only sharpened the local spirit of self-reliance, daring and innovation. Certain handymen began specializing in the construction of plywood platforms for marijuana in tree canopies, hidden from helicopter-borne drug agents. The community radio station, KMUD, doubled as an early-warning system, broadcasting the position of law-enforcement vehicles headed into the hills.
Then, things began to change. California's legalization of medical marijuana in 1996 raised the curtain on an elaborate pantomime that continues to this day. With a doctor's recommendation, a patient could either grow limited quantities for personal use, or purchase it from dispensaries. Some 2,100 dispensaries have sprung up throughout California, and the medical marijuana revolution has spread to every Western state except Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Two years ago, the federal government issued its own imprimatur of sorts, when Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden directed federal prosecutors to leave alone "individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."
With time, the Emerald Triangle's marijuana growers have begun acting more like real farmers. Today, many have contracts to supply medical dispensaries in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles. A few growers even receive IRS reportable-income forms from the dispensaries they sell to, and pay federal tax. An entire cloud of supporting businesses has also emerged, from attorneys who specialize in ensuring legal compliance to labs that analyze and certify the product's purity. A company called Statewide Insurance Services offers marijuana crop insurance, including a special "raid coverage" option. The availability of insurance has, in turn, raised the prospect that growers who supply dispensaries may someday be eligible for crop loans from banks, just like tomato farmers.
But the enthusiastic pursuit of what is still largely an unregulated industry has generated fallout, too, drawing unwelcome attention to the whole enterprise. Illegal diversions of water for marijuana gardens, together with indiscriminate use of fertilizer and pesticides, have choked important salmon streams. The widespread use of rat bait took a toll on birds of prey. And the CAMP assaults literally drove some growers underground: Buried shipping containers with high-intensity lights powered by diesel generators -- their fuel tanks holding as much as 2,000 gallons -- proliferated in the hills.
Hamilton and other like-minded residents took to the airwaves on KMUD and began proselytizing against the "diesel cowboys" who ran such operations. Diesel dope's carbon footprint would give Al Gore a case of the fantods: According to some calculations, it consumes about 75 gallons of fuel and releases more than two tons of carbon dioxide per pound of pot produced. Some growers dumped used crankcase oil from their generators straight into the ground. Poorly maintained generators caught fire in the middle of the woods. And they leaked -- sometimes a lot. In May 2008, 1,000 gallons of diesel-grow fuel poured straight into Hacker Creek, which provides habitat for salmon and drinking water for the watershed's residents.
But an even bigger problem has emerged recently. Criminal cartels, mostly with Mexican ties, have begun moving onto federal, state and private timberland and setting up monster grows with tens of thousands of plants. Last year, CAMP arrested 182 people in California, seized more than 5 million plants and shot at least seven people; the vast majority of the raids were aimed at cartel grows.
All this has helped shape an unusual social code in the Emerald Triangle. Practically everyone, including the police, distinguishes between "outlaws" -- the mom-and-pop, reformed-hippie operators who grow a little dope to make ends meet and put their kids through school -- and "criminals." And smart growers, while they may technically be breaking the law by growing for recreational markets, meticulously observe a certain set of rules that, at least theoretically, put them in compliance with the state's medical marijuana law. If a grower has fewer than 100 plants, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency generally leaves the decision to prosecute up to the local sheriff. And as long as the grower's not too flashy and doesn't go around brandishing guns, the sheriff will usually leave him be.
There are, after all, much bigger fish to fry. "Our priority now," says Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey, "is definitely the cartels."
Scrupulous observance of the law is, although officials hesitate to say so, tempered by a very practical concern. If local sheriffs were to crack down on the outlaws, they would destroy a significant chunk of the regional economy -- and their own budgets.
Just how important marijuana is to Humboldt County's economy may be as unknowable as the ineffable Tao. One Humboldt State University economist suggests that a quarter of the county's economy -- roughly a billion dollars -- is marijuana money. Conventional wisdom suggests that, particularly in southern Humboldt, the percentage is much higher.
Ernie Branscomb is a genial, fifth-generation Humboldter who owns Garberville's version of Sears. With his white mustache, bald head and easy banter, he would seem at ease behind a barber's chair. He's part of the unreconstructed Old Guard here, at least technically. "I've never grown marijuana," he said. "I've never even used marijuana. I'm afraid I'll like it."
Branscomb's store has given him a front-row view of the business, so I asked him how big a part of the local economy he thought marijuana is. He pondered for a moment. "In my opinion," he said, "it's about 80 percent."
I laughed and said that was impossible. Branscomb looked at me like I was an idiot.
"Look around you," he said.
A couple of days after I talked with Anna Hamilton, I met up with a grower alongside a frontage road in southern Humboldt. I'll call him Robert Grant. He wore logging boots, cargo pants and a T-shirt, and had the wiry build of someone who spends a lot of time on the move outside. We followed a labyrinthine route along dusty roads to a piece of land perched halfway up a pretty draw full of oaks, golden meadows and firs, with sweeping views of the surrounding hills.
Grant originally came from Southern California to chase the surf on the coast nearby. He slowly worked his way into the marijuana scene, careful not to disturb the local detente. It has served him well. At this particular spot, 60 plants were perched in the sun, standing in long raised beds and a handful of blue plastic kiddie pools. The leafy plants were as tall as apple trees; together, they were probably worth about half a million dollars, wholesale.
Among them were strains with names like Blueberry, Amazing Haze and Armageddon. But Grant was most excited about a new twist on one called Super Silver Haze.
"We've been working on it for nine years," he said, reaching to pull down a bud that glistened with silvery resin. I took a deep whiff, and my head filled with the plant's breathy, arresting allure.
Grant saw my eyes widen.
"Yeah," he laughed. "That's ... that just rocks."
Breeding marijuana is its own kind of magic. Grant talked about the elusive quest to balance a body high with a head high; to blend the perfect combination of looks, aroma, flavor and THC; and to encourage resistance to mold, an incessant problem with the coastal fog. Breeding and growing styles can border on the occult. One breeder meticulously tracks each plant's parentage in his quest to produce super-potent "stupid dope." Others drive nails through the plants' stalks, on the theory that torture will produce more THC. And one group of ritualists grows weed that's beyond hand-crafted, observing elaborate precautions to avoid touching the buds during harvest -- the better to preserve their sanctity.
Grant's pot patch reflected the evolving state of the Northern California marijuana business. His cannabis was contracted to a medical marijuana dispensary in Sacramento. In the middle of the garden, angled toward the sky, was a white board painted with a red cross. An attached bundle of paperwork noted his compliance with the state's medical marijuana law.
"That's for the helicopters," Grant said. He had little fear of a raid. The helicopters appeared once earlier in the summer and then stayed away. And now it seemed the entire industry was poised to come further out of the shadows.
In 2009, with the California budget going up in smoke, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- no dummy about his constituents' yen for dope -- began to consider legalizing recreational use of marijuana, and then taxing it, as a way to stem the state's looming fiscal crisis. The state tax office estimated that a $50-an-ounce levy on marijuana could, when coupled with increased sales-tax revenue, generate $1.4 billion for state coffers. The legalize-and-tax mantra was subsequently taken up by Oakland entrepreneur Richard Lee, who created Oaksterdam, a sort of vo-tech school for aspiring pot growers, and almost single-handedly turned the city into a medical-marijuana mecca.
When I met with Grant, Californians were within weeks of voting on Proposition 19. Many growers opposed legalization because it was sure to drop prices, although they hesitated to say so on the record. Others, like Grant, felt differently.
Despite the spreading legalization of medical marijuana, the profit margin has stayed fat: For a grower like Grant, it typically costs $400 to $500 to grow a pound of marijuana that will go for $2,000 wholesale. And with full legalization, he explained, "you're talking about a lot more consumption." Even if prices were to fall to $1,000 per pound, he said, "I'll take that. Absolutely."
From Grant's perspective, full legalization seemed, at some point, inevitable. Several fellow growers had recently formed the Humboldt Growers Association, in essence a lobbying group to help growers shape -- and get out in front of -- the regulations that legalization was sure to bring. The Growers Association had begun drafting its own proposed regulations to submit to the Humboldt County board of supervisors, which would govern the manner and extent to which marijuana was grown, and allow the county to collect taxes and fees.
"Everything's tracked. Everything has a permit number that tracks it right down to the farmer," Grant said. "It's just like lettuce, just like tomatoes, just like strawberries."
After years of keeping their heads down on the outlaw fringe -- where politics meant little more than supporting the local road-maintenance association -- growers were taking a big step into a new and complicated realm.
"There's a lot of uncertainty in the air," Grant said. "But a lot of entrepreneurs are really excited about the potential."
To a large extent, growers' worries these days aren't all that different from those of the folks at any local chamber of commerce. There is the issue of brand protection, for instance. Last September, a couple of hustlers moonlighting as monks showed up at the International Cannabis and Hemp Expo in San Francisco, hawking what they claimed were bona fide Humboldt seeds.
In response, local growers proposed an ordinance to protect the county's good name, which has acquired a special cachet over the decades. A fellow named The Man Who Walks in the Woods drew up a draft resolution freighted with 11 "whereas"es, one "be it resolved," and a "be it further resolved," and called for amending the county code to note: "The name 'Humboldt' as it expresses or implies or suggests Humboldt County, California is hereby reserved for the permanent and exclusive benefit of the legal residents of Humboldt County, California." Other enterprising souls began researching the feasibility of trademarking the Humboldt name, which sparked some nervous speculation that one or another local faction might lock up the appellation.
People also worried about the Emerald Triangle's distance from its main markets. There had been some recent discussion about using refrigerated semis to haul tons of weed down Highway 101 to the Bay Area. Somebody proposed repurposing an old armored car as a dope-delivery vehicle. ("I saw the thing, in Redway," Anna Hamilton told me, slightly incredulous. "It's an old dusty Brinks truck that's been sitting in somebody's yard for the last 10 years.")
Behind all this was a much more serious debate: how to bring Humboldt County's shadow economy into the bright light of government-regulated industry. For many growers, that's a pretty radical change. The black market is, in many ways, the ultimate free market. "The irony is that the most progressive community in the nation has been living Ronald Reagan's wet dream," Hamilton told me. "It's going to be a hard sell. A lot of people don't understand why a third of their income should go to taxes. They have never had to share their money with anyone. "
But big shifts are already happening in the business landscape. After four decades, the Humboldt growers, who had perfected the high art of lying low, are being edged out by an explosion of upstart, indoor growers in big cities like Oakland. "The rural counties that grow outdoor weed are getting left behind," Hamilton said.
That profusion of new supply has been pushing prices down, a trend that would be sure to continue with wider legalization. That would undercut Humboldt County's economic basis -- and that suggested a natural alliance between Humboldt marijuana growers and the county government. "The county," Hamilton said, "is a vested partner in the stability of the price."
Two camps emerged in the debate over how to shape the future. One grew out of Hamilton's crusading, and became the Humboldt Medical Marijuana Advisory Panel, or HUMMAP, a loose affiliation of locals including Hamilton and The Man Who Walks in the Woods. Some HUMMAP members were small growers who also belonged to the newly formed Tea House Collective, which is attempting to ride the wave of a new era of discriminating tokers -- namely, those Whole Foods devotees in the Bay Area with enough of a paycheck left over for boutique bud.
The other camp was the better-capitalized and more ambitious Humboldt Growers Association. While the HUMMAP types drove slightly dilapidated Toyotas and Volvos, the Growers preferred lifted Dodge pickups. Joey Burger, who owns a local business called Trim Scene Solutions -- best known for selling a power weed-trimming machine called the Twister, which looks like a gleaming jet engine on wheels -- was their main ambassador.
The Growers proved far more adept at politics than Hamilton's crew. Last year, members of the group contributed at least $14,750 to the re-election campaign of a county supervisor named Bonnie Neely, plus $13,000 to Paul Gallegos, the county's district attorney. But it wasn't until they held a press conference last October, to unveil their proposed regulations for how the county might regulate and tax marijuana, that it was clear just how successful the Growers had been in making the drug business a respectable issue for elected officials.
A day earlier in Eureka, 50 miles north of Garberville, HUMMAP had unceremoniously trotted out its proposed regulations in the time allotted for audience comment at the end of a county supervisors' meeting. The Growers, in contrast, rented a building with views of the Eureka waterfront, invited the press, and rolled out their proposal with a formidable show of support from the county's political bigwigs. Neely emceed the event; District Attorney Gallegos and another county supervisor named Mark Lovelace were also prominently in attendance.
Gallegos has never hidden his belief that the war against marijuana is, for the most part, a waste of time and money. "We don't see people smoking marijuana with a whole lot of initiative to go out and commit crimes," he told me a couple of days beforehand. "Generally, what we see on marijuana is people being stoned."
At the press conference, Gallegos led off the speakers, saying, "My feeling on this is we're a decade late."
Eventually, the microphone came round to the Growers' not-so-secret weapon: the magnificently pomaded Max Del Real, a glad-handing cannabis lobbyist from the state capital whose very name was spoken with awe -- or perhaps a kind of disbelief. Del Real promptly dialed up the grandiloquence to 11.
The Growers, he reminded the audience, "are your neighbors. These are the same people who sit on your PTAs, coach your soccer teams.
"These," he said, "are good Americans."
Del Real emphasized that, to qualify for a permit under the Growers' proposed regulations, any applicant would have to have been a Humboldt County resident for at least two years. "The key term here, people, is localism," he beamed.
The proposed regulations, like HUMMAP's, required growers to minimize their environmental impact, and obtain state water-rights permits for irrigation diversions from rivers or creeks. Both proposals would have excluded violent felons from the business. But the Growers were also lobbying for bigger grows than HUMMAP was. Whereas the HUMMAP proposal allowed grows up to 2,500 square feet, the Growers' proposal allowed ones up to 16 times bigger.
Each of those -- roughly an acre -- would bring the county $80,000 in permitting fees. Del Real pointed out that the Growers' proposal would, at a minimum, bring $10 million into Humboldt County's coffers. Then he hinted -- obliquely enough, but darkly nonetheless -- that three counties elsewhere in the state were already considering pot-friendly regulations designed to establish themselves as the next Humboldt County. "They're looking at jobs. They're looking at revenue. They're looking at bottom lines," he intoned. "Humboldt County needs to move quickly on this particular issue."
With that, Del Real roared to a Hollywood finish. "I don't think the road ahead is complicated, and I don't think it's long.
"Thank you," he said, "and God bless you, Humboldt County."
Despite a strong showing in pre-election opinion polling, Proposition 19 was defeated by 53.5 percent of the vote last November. Pundits are still dissecting the exact cause of the measure's demise. But Prop 19's very appearance on the ballot, Mark Lovelace told me when we first met last fall, "was a point that, to me, made this situation much easier to talk about."
This January, Lovelace, a former environmental activist who cut his teeth fighting to save old-growth redwoods here, became chairman of the county board of supervisors. He is soft-spoken and slightly buttoned-down. He hardly qualifies as a cannabis crusader, but he's frank about the realities in this part of the world.
Humboldt County faces one of the classic conundrums of rural areas throughout the West. Its government services are subsidized by people in urban centers elsewhere in the state. Only 16 percent of the county government's revenue comes from local taxes; nearly 70 percent comes from the state and federal governments. That has put the county in a tight spot as those budgets have imploded over the past two years.
Right now, marijuana money shows up on the county's books only in roundabout ways -- primarily as sales tax when a grower buys groceries, or fertilizer, or a new truck, or ducks into the gas station for a Mountain Dew. "I don't think we need to have a firm number to know that it's an important part of our economy," Lovelace said. "And we also don't need to know that number to know that there are issues we need to regulate."
As such, the county is continuing to develop regulations specifically for medical marijuana. Those will likely require growers to comply with everything from product labeling to workers' compensation, and set up a structure for taxes and fees. Lovelace is the first to admit that such far-reaching oversight isn't always welcome.
"Being illegal has been a wonderful barrier to regulation," he laughed. "There are going to be a lot of people who are going to be pining for the good old days, when the only thing they had to worry about was getting busted."
But growers would benefit from the bargain, too. Humboldt is home to a thriving microbrew industry, and Lovelace is fond of pointing out that the government had helped breweries in their efforts to market their products to an outside world thirsty for craft beer with a good story behind it. With pot, the county could essentially give a Good Housekeeping Seal to local growers who follow good farming practices. "The folks that want to be good growers? Those are the people we want to work with," Lovelace said. "We'll be doing what we can to try to support them as an export product that's compatible with our values."
Government "support" of good growers would also include diverting even more of the law-enforcement muscle away from locals and onto the large-scale Mexican grows. "If they do it right," one prominent grower explained to me, "we can cut the cartels out."
Lovelace said as much himself. If recreational marijuana use was legalized, he pointed out, the massive Mexican pot ranches carved out of remote public lands and out-of-the-way private timber holdings "will be every bit as illegal as they are today. And all of a sudden, you have a legal industry that is saying, 'We want you to go after those guys, because that's our unfair competition.' "
People in California's marijuana business delicately refer to what they call a "lack of alignment" between state and federal policy. Today, a medical marijuana garden that is legal under state law can, under federal law, still be prosecuted as a major felony. And the gap between the state and federal worldviews is widening again, causing a distinct sense of unease that the feds may see the defeat of Proposition 19 as a mandate to finally bring the state to heel.
Indeed, this year federal officials have taken a more aggressive stance. The city of Oakland, never a place to tiptoe around a social issue, has been preparing to issue licenses for several indoor medical-marijuana farms, each bigger than a football field. In February, Melinda Haag, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, wrote to Oakland's city attorney to remind him that the federal government still views marijuana as a Schedule I drug -- the bad kind. Haag warned that "we will enforce (the Controlled Substances Act) vigorously against individuals and organizations that participate in unlawful manufacturing and distribution activity involving marijuana, even" -- in a seeming reversal of the federal government's position -- "if such activities are permitted under state law."
The Department of Justice followed up that letter with a barrage of similar messages to Colorado, Montana, Arizona and Washington, and in March, federal agents raided several marijuana dispensaries in Montana. To make sure the point was clear, in June, Deputy Attorney General James Cole issued yet another memorandum, about the Justice Department's position nationwide, writing: "Persons who are in the business of cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana, and those who knowingly facilitate such activities, are in violation of the Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law."
The Treasury Department, meanwhile, has begun dismantling the basic business infrastructure that medical marijuana dispensaries rely on. This spring, banks holding accounts for dispensaries received a wave of letters threatening to revoke their FDIC insurance, and big banks such as Wells Fargo have since been closing such accounts.
As Humboldt County officials slowly move forward with their medical marijuana regulations -- an effort that will likely take at least another year -- some wonder whether they should see the Justice Department's recent statements as a warning to hold off. When I talked with Lovelace again in July, he sounded exasperated. "Frankly, the federal position isn't doing anything to actually help us with the issue," he said. "I just don't think they get it."
Anna Hamilton, for her part, has become disillusioned with the slowness of the process, and with HUMMAP, the group she helped to start. In fact, when I spoke with her this summer, she had practically become a cheerleader for the rival Growers Association. "They're putting thousands of dollars into political campaigns up here," she said. "And HUMMAP, meanwhile, can't raise 40 bucks at a meeting with 60 people."
Indeed, the Growers do seem to be building steam. After Bonnie Neely, the county supervisor, lost her re-election bid last fall, they hired her as a consultant. Paul Gallegos, the district attorney, won his re-election campaign, but ended up $47,000 in debt; this July, the Growers co-sponsored a fund-raising dinner for him in Sacramento.
The road ahead is undeniably longer and more complicated than Max Del Real predicted. But Humboldt's growers are used to biding their time. They've been doing it for 40 years.
Robert Grant is keeping a close eye on the Growers Association's progress. After Proposition 19 was defeated, the Growers scaled down their proposed regulations to apply only to medical marijuana. But, Grant points out, their proposal is carefully written so that if -- or when -- recreational use is finally legalized, it can easily apply to a much bigger market.
"It's so seamless," he says, "it's beautiful."
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Tips For A Healthy Clear Complexion!
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Tips For A Healthy Clear Complexion!: For many women, visiting the skin care aisle at the drugstore can be as intimidating as ordering from all the complicated hot beverages on ...
Tips For A Healthy Clear Complexion!
For many women, visiting the skin care aisle at the drugstore can be as
intimidating as ordering from all the complicated hot beverages on offer
at the trendy local coffee shop. From blemish control to exfoliating to
deep cleansing, products today offer an often dizzying range of
ingredients and benefits claims. However, finding a targeted skin care
solution that’s right for you doesn’t have to be difficult-in fact, with
the right guidance, it can be a whole lot simpler than ordering a
venti, chai, decaf, vanilla skim latte with extra foam.
Celebrity makeup artist Tasha Reiko Brown shares knowledge on how to best tackle common skin care concerns, with some helpful tips on choosing the right products:
Problem: Do I need to exfoliate? It seems harsh.
Solution: One of the best ways to cleanse is by exfoliating. It stimulates the skin as you cleanse, giving your face a nice and radiant glow. Try cream-based cleansers with skin-smoothing microbeads that gently exfoliate to help reveal fresh, polished skin. For best results, make little circles with fingertips in a clockwise motion. Pay extra attention to the thicker, oily areas of your face to achieve an all-over glow.
Problem: I don’t have much time to tend for my skin.
Solution: For the woman who is looking for an effective and efficient skin care solution, deep cleansing can be as basic and satisfying as pouring a simple cup of joe. Try the Noxzema Original Cleansing Cream. A tried-and-true classic, it dissolves oil while conditioning skin, without overdrying, leaving skin feeling clean, soft and smooth in one easy step. Best of all, you can feel its signature eucalyptus-infused formula working as it deep cleans. And this invigorating beauty staple comes in Original and Plus Moisturizers.
Problem: I can never seem to beat blemishes.
Solution: The key to not only beating but also preventing blemishes is to use products that deep clean but are also gentle enough to use on a daily basis. Always look for products that contain salicylic acid, which is a proven ingredient to fight acne blemishes and breakouts. Salicylic acid can be found in toners, cleansers and cleansing pads, so you can pick and choose the best combination for your lifestyle.
Problem: Traveling interrupts my beauty regimen.
Solution: No matter how busy you are, never skimp out on facial cleansing in your daily beauty routine. Dirty skin looks dull and sallow, and it’s more prone to breakouts. Try products that are de- signed for the girl on the go, such as premoistened cleansing cloths that will quickly remove dirt, oil and makeup for an efficient deep clean.
Using these simple tips to demystify your most common skin care problems, your perfect skin solution should become clear.
Celebrity makeup artist Tasha Reiko Brown shares knowledge on how to best tackle common skin care concerns, with some helpful tips on choosing the right products:
Problem: Do I need to exfoliate? It seems harsh.
Solution: One of the best ways to cleanse is by exfoliating. It stimulates the skin as you cleanse, giving your face a nice and radiant glow. Try cream-based cleansers with skin-smoothing microbeads that gently exfoliate to help reveal fresh, polished skin. For best results, make little circles with fingertips in a clockwise motion. Pay extra attention to the thicker, oily areas of your face to achieve an all-over glow.
Problem: I don’t have much time to tend for my skin.
Solution: For the woman who is looking for an effective and efficient skin care solution, deep cleansing can be as basic and satisfying as pouring a simple cup of joe. Try the Noxzema Original Cleansing Cream. A tried-and-true classic, it dissolves oil while conditioning skin, without overdrying, leaving skin feeling clean, soft and smooth in one easy step. Best of all, you can feel its signature eucalyptus-infused formula working as it deep cleans. And this invigorating beauty staple comes in Original and Plus Moisturizers.
Problem: I can never seem to beat blemishes.
Solution: The key to not only beating but also preventing blemishes is to use products that deep clean but are also gentle enough to use on a daily basis. Always look for products that contain salicylic acid, which is a proven ingredient to fight acne blemishes and breakouts. Salicylic acid can be found in toners, cleansers and cleansing pads, so you can pick and choose the best combination for your lifestyle.
Problem: Traveling interrupts my beauty regimen.
Solution: No matter how busy you are, never skimp out on facial cleansing in your daily beauty routine. Dirty skin looks dull and sallow, and it’s more prone to breakouts. Try products that are de- signed for the girl on the go, such as premoistened cleansing cloths that will quickly remove dirt, oil and makeup for an efficient deep clean.
Using these simple tips to demystify your most common skin care problems, your perfect skin solution should become clear.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Natural Environmentally Friendly Household Cleaner...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Natural Environmentally Friendly Household Cleaner...: Many people use a vast array of chemical-laden household cleaners and products around the home on a daily basis. What they may not be aware...
Natural Environmentally Friendly Household Cleaners!
Many people use a vast array of chemical-laden household cleaners and products around the home on a daily basis.
What they may not be aware of is the fact that many of these chemicals can be damaging to their health when inhaled. Apart from the inhalation aspect, skin irritations often occur when coming into contact with many chemical cleaners.
Many disinfectants contain phenol ( aka carbolic acid ) or cresol. These can attack the central nervous system, liver, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas.
How can adding a load of chemicals to your home environment be good for your health and cleanliness. They may kill off the germs, sure, but human beings are gradually going to kill themselves off too, if they continue in this way. Many people aim to keep their homes a germ-free environment, but if our homes are kept so germ-free that our immune systems no longer have to work as hard, we run the risk of weakening our immune systems.
Another chemical-laden ( and one of the most dangerously toxic of all ) household product is oven cleaner. I have never personally used the stuff, as I remember the fumes when my mother used it when I was a child, and that alone was enough to put me off for life! How right I was. Many oven cleaners release fumes which may affect the respiratory system, and contain ammonia and lye, which eat the skin. I prefer to use baking soda and water, sprinkled inside the oven and left overnight. In the morning a good scrub finishes it off a treat. It does a wonderful job. Also you don’t get any chemical residue odour the next time you use the oven.
Many artificial air fresheners release nerve-deadening agents, which can interfere with your sense of smell. Natural aromatherapy oils would be a much safer bet.
In a time when respiratory illnesses such as asthma are at an all-time high, we should be looking to a more natural and gentle way of keeping our homes clean.
Using all-natural, non-toxic cleaning products around the home is the best defence against dirt and grime, while keeping our bodies healthy, being kind to the environment, and not tested on animals. Everyone’s a winner.
Many companies claim their products are ‘natural’ but it’s best to check the labels, as they may only contain a few natural ingredients while still being laden with chemicals.
Buying from a well-known ethical, cruelty-free company is the best way to go. Then, not only should their products be natural, safe and non-toxic, they should also be environmentally-friendly and not tested on animals.
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/73659/natural-environmentally-friendly-household-cleaners/
What they may not be aware of is the fact that many of these chemicals can be damaging to their health when inhaled. Apart from the inhalation aspect, skin irritations often occur when coming into contact with many chemical cleaners.
Many disinfectants contain phenol ( aka carbolic acid ) or cresol. These can attack the central nervous system, liver, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas.
How can adding a load of chemicals to your home environment be good for your health and cleanliness. They may kill off the germs, sure, but human beings are gradually going to kill themselves off too, if they continue in this way. Many people aim to keep their homes a germ-free environment, but if our homes are kept so germ-free that our immune systems no longer have to work as hard, we run the risk of weakening our immune systems.
Another chemical-laden ( and one of the most dangerously toxic of all ) household product is oven cleaner. I have never personally used the stuff, as I remember the fumes when my mother used it when I was a child, and that alone was enough to put me off for life! How right I was. Many oven cleaners release fumes which may affect the respiratory system, and contain ammonia and lye, which eat the skin. I prefer to use baking soda and water, sprinkled inside the oven and left overnight. In the morning a good scrub finishes it off a treat. It does a wonderful job. Also you don’t get any chemical residue odour the next time you use the oven.
Many artificial air fresheners release nerve-deadening agents, which can interfere with your sense of smell. Natural aromatherapy oils would be a much safer bet.
In a time when respiratory illnesses such as asthma are at an all-time high, we should be looking to a more natural and gentle way of keeping our homes clean.
Using all-natural, non-toxic cleaning products around the home is the best defence against dirt and grime, while keeping our bodies healthy, being kind to the environment, and not tested on animals. Everyone’s a winner.
Many companies claim their products are ‘natural’ but it’s best to check the labels, as they may only contain a few natural ingredients while still being laden with chemicals.
Buying from a well-known ethical, cruelty-free company is the best way to go. Then, not only should their products be natural, safe and non-toxic, they should also be environmentally-friendly and not tested on animals.
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/73659/natural-environmentally-friendly-household-cleaners/
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Swallow To Glow A Holistic Approach To Skin Health...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Swallow To Glow A Holistic Approach To Skin Health...: The skin is the largest organ in the body. It defends against disease and infection, regulates temperature and even aids in vitamin produc...
Swallow To Glow A Holistic Approach To Skin Health!
The skin is the largest organ in the body. It defends against disease
and infection, regulates temperature and even aids in vitamin
production. Keeping skin healthy is crucial for beauty and general
health, even if most of us are interested in knowing how to keep skin
looking healthy, rather than really keeping it healthy.
The best way to keep skin looking healthy – young, fair, radiant, supple, soft and wrinkle free – is to keep out of the sun.
Ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun bring about a healthy-looking tan, but do much damage to the skin in terms of pigmentation, sunburn and loss of elasticity. These can lead to premature aging in the form of wrinkles, fine lines, sagging, dark skin, uneven skin tone, loss of translucency, enlarged pores and dryness. Even the best of genetics, topical skin lightening treatments and oral skin supplements would be of little use if one tans mercilessly and regularly.
Keeping out of the sun helps, but if you cannot avoid it, you will have to ensure that you use a sunscreen. This is especially crucial if sun exposure is for an extended period of time.
Assuming that one is already sensible about sun exposure, how can we then further improve our skin condition? We know that certain oral supplements are effective for good skin health, but which are these supplements and how effective are they?
Supplement From Within
The first group would be vitamins and minerals, essential for proper functioning of every organ.
The vitamins and minerals that can affect skin health include the B-complex, especially B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin) and B12 (cyancobalamine). Overt deficiencies of vitamins B1 and B2 are known to cause special forms of dermatitis (a kind of skin inflammation). B12 deficiency is particularly detrimental to neurons and rapidly dividing cells, including skin cells.
Besides the B vitamins, deficiency of vitamin C, iron and copper also affect skin health. All three are important for the synthesis of collagen, a key structural protein in the skin, which fills the skin and gives it tone.
Vitamin A is critical for the normal life cycle of skin cells. Vitamin A deficiency causes skin to become dry, fragile and prone to wrinkles. On the other hand, excessive Vitamin A intake may cause serious toxicity and should be avoided.
Vitamins C and E, and beta-carotene have been touted as anti-oxidants that reduce free radicals. (Free radicals result in skin degeneration and aging.) However, while free radicals and the role of anti-oxidants are beyond doubt, clinical results have not conclusively proved if supplementary vitamins and other micronutrients improve the skin quality and defy the aging process.
Excessive doses can be just as harmful as deficiencies, so it is best to abide by the recommended daily allowance (RDA).
Topical Help
Oral supplements should go hand-in-hand with topical applications – sunscreen of at least SPF 30, creams (preferably with skin whitening agents) and moisturizer (preferably with skin lightening agents). Compared with topical applications, the effects of oral supplements are slower and more subtle. Consumers have to be realistic about their expectations because results certainly will not be seen in 7 days or 2 weeks.
We recommend a holistic approach to skin health, comprising:
* A healthy balanced diet comprising all food groups as well as vitamins, minerals and micronutrients.
* Keep a happy positive mood. It is well documented that some skin conditions – such as acne and eczema – are more prevalent among the stressed.
* If you smoke, quit smoking. Smoke causes free radicals, damages the microcirculation of skin and also causes staining of teeth and other discoloration.
* Minimize sun exposure and use a good sunscreen on a daily basis. For More Info and Great Brand Name Beauty Products Visit our Partners at http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/16286/swallow-to-glow-a-holistic-approach-to-skin-health/
The best way to keep skin looking healthy – young, fair, radiant, supple, soft and wrinkle free – is to keep out of the sun.
Ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun bring about a healthy-looking tan, but do much damage to the skin in terms of pigmentation, sunburn and loss of elasticity. These can lead to premature aging in the form of wrinkles, fine lines, sagging, dark skin, uneven skin tone, loss of translucency, enlarged pores and dryness. Even the best of genetics, topical skin lightening treatments and oral skin supplements would be of little use if one tans mercilessly and regularly.
Keeping out of the sun helps, but if you cannot avoid it, you will have to ensure that you use a sunscreen. This is especially crucial if sun exposure is for an extended period of time.
Assuming that one is already sensible about sun exposure, how can we then further improve our skin condition? We know that certain oral supplements are effective for good skin health, but which are these supplements and how effective are they?
Supplement From Within
The first group would be vitamins and minerals, essential for proper functioning of every organ.
The vitamins and minerals that can affect skin health include the B-complex, especially B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin) and B12 (cyancobalamine). Overt deficiencies of vitamins B1 and B2 are known to cause special forms of dermatitis (a kind of skin inflammation). B12 deficiency is particularly detrimental to neurons and rapidly dividing cells, including skin cells.
Besides the B vitamins, deficiency of vitamin C, iron and copper also affect skin health. All three are important for the synthesis of collagen, a key structural protein in the skin, which fills the skin and gives it tone.
Vitamin A is critical for the normal life cycle of skin cells. Vitamin A deficiency causes skin to become dry, fragile and prone to wrinkles. On the other hand, excessive Vitamin A intake may cause serious toxicity and should be avoided.
Vitamins C and E, and beta-carotene have been touted as anti-oxidants that reduce free radicals. (Free radicals result in skin degeneration and aging.) However, while free radicals and the role of anti-oxidants are beyond doubt, clinical results have not conclusively proved if supplementary vitamins and other micronutrients improve the skin quality and defy the aging process.
Excessive doses can be just as harmful as deficiencies, so it is best to abide by the recommended daily allowance (RDA).
Topical Help
Oral supplements should go hand-in-hand with topical applications – sunscreen of at least SPF 30, creams (preferably with skin whitening agents) and moisturizer (preferably with skin lightening agents). Compared with topical applications, the effects of oral supplements are slower and more subtle. Consumers have to be realistic about their expectations because results certainly will not be seen in 7 days or 2 weeks.
We recommend a holistic approach to skin health, comprising:
* A healthy balanced diet comprising all food groups as well as vitamins, minerals and micronutrients.
* Keep a happy positive mood. It is well documented that some skin conditions – such as acne and eczema – are more prevalent among the stressed.
* If you smoke, quit smoking. Smoke causes free radicals, damages the microcirculation of skin and also causes staining of teeth and other discoloration.
* Minimize sun exposure and use a good sunscreen on a daily basis. For More Info and Great Brand Name Beauty Products Visit our Partners at http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/16286/swallow-to-glow-a-holistic-approach-to-skin-health/
Saturday, August 10, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: How plastic bottled water is Harming You and the E...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: How plastic bottled water is Harming You and the E...: As soda sales leveled off in the U.S., multinational corporations like PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Nestle found a cash cow in marketing bottled...
How plastic bottled water is Harming You and the Environment! A GreenEarthMeds Alert!!!!
As soda sales leveled off in the U.S., multinational corporations like
PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Nestle found a cash cow in marketing bottled
water as the healthy alternative. Though blessed with an abundance of
clean water, the U.S. now consumes more bottled water than any other
country, piling up enough empty bottles to run the circumference of the
equator every 27 hours, and we do so at an unacceptable price to both
human health and the environment.
According to the Environmental Working Group, the annual manufacturing of plastic bottles for water alone in the U.S. market takes as much oil as required to fuel a million cars. At the consumer end, it is estimated that only one out of five bottles actually gets recycled, with much of the rest polluting our fragile environment. The throw-away bottled water economy has a significant burden on its resource as well, where it is estimated that two liters of water are needed to bottle every liter on the store shelf, resulting in approximately 72 billion gallons wasted annually worldwide.
A feigned image of health
The World Bank estimates the bottled water market at $800 billion, making the prospect of a fraction of this fortune enough for companies to salivate over. Marketing words like pristine, pure, and fresh, have been used to describe bottled water, while undermining the perceived quality of tap water. Yet, contamination issues have led to over 100 recalls on bottled water in recent years. Unlike tap water, which is tested hundreds of times a day and is under constant monitoring, bottled water producers are not required to provide water quality reports. Bottled water is not regulated, as the FDA has no jurisdiction on bottled water sourced and sold in the same state, which is often mined from local streams and lakes before being sold back to the public at a cost thousands of times more than what they can readily get from their own faucet.Hazards on the environment
The hazards of bottled water far outweigh its convenience. Small towns across the U.S. and around the world are being exploited for water resources to feed the manufactured demand of giant corporations selling public water and commodifying a necessity of life. Furthermore, poor neighborhoods, often in minority communities, are being poisoned by the toxic manufacturing of plastic bottles.According to the Environmental Working Group, the annual manufacturing of plastic bottles for water alone in the U.S. market takes as much oil as required to fuel a million cars. At the consumer end, it is estimated that only one out of five bottles actually gets recycled, with much of the rest polluting our fragile environment. The throw-away bottled water economy has a significant burden on its resource as well, where it is estimated that two liters of water are needed to bottle every liter on the store shelf, resulting in approximately 72 billion gallons wasted annually worldwide.
Harzards on health
Producers of bottled water are not required to offer water quality reports, leaving a consumer to wonder what kind of filtering is actually occurring. In third-party testing, bottled water showed traces of bacteria, chemicals, fluoride, endocrine disruptors such as BPA and PETE (or PET). In fact, whether the filtering process is pure or not does not exclude some of these chemicals since the process of storing the water in the PET plastic water bottles (especially after being exposed to heat during transportation and storage) infuses the water with leaching from the plastic. The fact is plain and simple: in the majority of counties across the U.S., local tap water is safer than the plastic-laced water bought for insanely inflated prices.A clearer path ahead
Given its ease and convenience, it takes commitment and planning to relinquish the costly addiction to bottled water. Nonetheless, it must be done for the sake of our own health, the health of others, and for the sake of our fragile, over-polluted environment. A healthier alternative would be to install a good quality filter in the home and use non-plastic, reusable water bottles. If a need arises, glass-bottled spring water is a better choice as it is bottled at the source and is naturally filtered underground.Friday, August 9, 2013
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: What If Low Carb ...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: What If Low Carb ...: GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: What If Low Carb Diets Can Cure Diabetes And Heart... : Low-carb diets can be advantageous in increased bod...
Should Reiki Really Be Considered A Massage Therapy?
I don’t know about you but when I go for a massage I expect the massage
therapist to use their hands, fingers and maybe even their elbows to
loosen my stress-laden muscles. There is nothing more delightful than an
experienced pair of hands that helps to expunge all of the bad stuff
from my body that causes me to become tense, anxious and, perhaps, a bit
unpleasant to be around sometimes.
I still vividly remember a visit with a physical therapist for a problem that I was having with a disk in my neck. The disk was pinching a nerve which was causing pain in my neck, back and arm. A particularly annoying area was near my shoulder above my shoulder blade. As I sat in a massage chair, the therapist used her elbow to dig right into the affected area with a force that caused some serious discomfort. But when I left that morning, the pain was almost gone. Now that was massage!
Recently, I was introduced to the concept of Reiki. I was reading up on the various forms of massage therapy and, quite frequently, Reiki was listed as a therapeutic option or as part of the curriculum at a massage school. Further reading about Reiki has caused me to question references to Reiki in the same context as massage. In fact, I began to wonder why Reiki was included in references to massage at all. And I’m not the only one.
Massage is generally defined as “the manipulation of the soft tissues of the body for therapeutic purposes, healing or relaxation.” I would think that “manipulation” is the operative word here. The practice of Reiki takes a quite different approach. Like Shiatsu massage, Reiki seeks to balance “ki” or “life force energy” within the body. The theory, according to ancient Oriental philosophy, is that if this energy is out of balance in the body, or is depleted, then an individual becomes susceptible to physical and emotional ailments. Practitioners of Reiki seek to channel energy into their clients in a manner that corrects imbalances and promotes healing.
However, based on the prescribed methods of practicing Reiki, there is no “manipulation” involved. In fact, in some cases, there is not even actual touch involved in Reiki treatments. That would certainly present a conflict between the generally accepted definition of massage and the practice of Reiki.
Reiki, as practiced today, was developed by Dr. Mikao Usui, a minister and head of a Christian school in Japan. His students had asked him how Jesus healed. Usui did not have the answer but became fixated on discovering how Jesus had cured the ill and infirmed. ( I guess “because he was the Son of God” does not qualify as an acceptable answer.)
Dr. Usui spent years studying in Christian schools, Buddhist monasteries and temples. He found no answer to the healing question until he embarked on a 21 day fast. At the end of the fast he apparently had a revelatory experience that showed him the methods he had sought to understand. He then set about on a healing ministry. Eventually, he shared his knowledge with Dr. Chujiro Hyashi who, in turn shared the knowledge with Mrs. Hawayo Takata who trained 22 Reiki Masters who then shared the knowledge with thousands of others.
Essentially, Reiki transfers energy from the Reiki practitioner to the patient. Actually, Reiki teaches that the patient draws this energy from the practitioner thus giving the patient an active role and ultimate responsibility for their own healing. The energy is then realigned and balanced and harmony is restored in the body.
Though it is not a religion there is a great deal of spirituality at work in Reiki. God or a Universal Life Force is acknowledged and recognized as the source of all life energy. Though there are specific principles involved in Reiki, the actual methods are quite similar to the “laying on of hands” practiced by faith healers of many religious denominations. But “laying on of hands” is not quite the same as “the manipulation of soft tissue” required to be defined as massage.
There are a couple of issues here. First, massage as a stand alone practice, has struggled to be recognized by the medical establishment as a legitimate form of therapy and healing. Under the auspices of physical therapy, massage is readily accepted and practiced to restore muscular function and to assist in the rehabilitative process. However, there is the view by many that massage therapy is somewhat of a “mongrel” healing application with touches of mainstream medicine, alternative medicine, holistic, health, New Age cultism, sexual indulgence and mystical fakery. The simple fact is the “the manipulation of soft tissue” has been proven and is accepted as a healing modality. It is the desire to include any healing avocation that involves touch, or even the close proximity of hand to body, under the heading of massage that creates confusion and causes suspicion.
Scientists and doctors have dismissed Reiki as a placebo that encourages patients to feel better because they are supposed to feel better. Other questions about the motivation of practitioners is the fact that Dr. Usui, the founder of Reiki, determined that there must be an “energy exchange” between Reiki healer and Reiki patient to invest the patient in the healing process. This investment is monetary in most cases and is a core principle of Reiki.
Another problem with Reiki being considered a form of massage is that some states require that practitioners of Reiki be licensed as massage therapists. Many Reiki practitioners dispute this categorization specifically because of the distinction between Reiki and massage as stated in the definitions presented earlier in this article.
So, Reiki has a bit of a schizophrenic personality. On the one hand, courses teaching Reiki are offered in many massage schools. On the other hand, many practitioners themselves don’t consider themselves massage therapists. So, far be it from me to try and settle this dispute in one article. Reiki may or may not be a truly effective form of healing. All I know is that I still have difficulty categorizing Reiki as massage. I think there may be some “manipulation” of the definition of massage required to justify the inclusion of Reiki.
I still vividly remember a visit with a physical therapist for a problem that I was having with a disk in my neck. The disk was pinching a nerve which was causing pain in my neck, back and arm. A particularly annoying area was near my shoulder above my shoulder blade. As I sat in a massage chair, the therapist used her elbow to dig right into the affected area with a force that caused some serious discomfort. But when I left that morning, the pain was almost gone. Now that was massage!
Recently, I was introduced to the concept of Reiki. I was reading up on the various forms of massage therapy and, quite frequently, Reiki was listed as a therapeutic option or as part of the curriculum at a massage school. Further reading about Reiki has caused me to question references to Reiki in the same context as massage. In fact, I began to wonder why Reiki was included in references to massage at all. And I’m not the only one.
Massage is generally defined as “the manipulation of the soft tissues of the body for therapeutic purposes, healing or relaxation.” I would think that “manipulation” is the operative word here. The practice of Reiki takes a quite different approach. Like Shiatsu massage, Reiki seeks to balance “ki” or “life force energy” within the body. The theory, according to ancient Oriental philosophy, is that if this energy is out of balance in the body, or is depleted, then an individual becomes susceptible to physical and emotional ailments. Practitioners of Reiki seek to channel energy into their clients in a manner that corrects imbalances and promotes healing.
However, based on the prescribed methods of practicing Reiki, there is no “manipulation” involved. In fact, in some cases, there is not even actual touch involved in Reiki treatments. That would certainly present a conflict between the generally accepted definition of massage and the practice of Reiki.
Reiki, as practiced today, was developed by Dr. Mikao Usui, a minister and head of a Christian school in Japan. His students had asked him how Jesus healed. Usui did not have the answer but became fixated on discovering how Jesus had cured the ill and infirmed. ( I guess “because he was the Son of God” does not qualify as an acceptable answer.)
Dr. Usui spent years studying in Christian schools, Buddhist monasteries and temples. He found no answer to the healing question until he embarked on a 21 day fast. At the end of the fast he apparently had a revelatory experience that showed him the methods he had sought to understand. He then set about on a healing ministry. Eventually, he shared his knowledge with Dr. Chujiro Hyashi who, in turn shared the knowledge with Mrs. Hawayo Takata who trained 22 Reiki Masters who then shared the knowledge with thousands of others.
Essentially, Reiki transfers energy from the Reiki practitioner to the patient. Actually, Reiki teaches that the patient draws this energy from the practitioner thus giving the patient an active role and ultimate responsibility for their own healing. The energy is then realigned and balanced and harmony is restored in the body.
Though it is not a religion there is a great deal of spirituality at work in Reiki. God or a Universal Life Force is acknowledged and recognized as the source of all life energy. Though there are specific principles involved in Reiki, the actual methods are quite similar to the “laying on of hands” practiced by faith healers of many religious denominations. But “laying on of hands” is not quite the same as “the manipulation of soft tissue” required to be defined as massage.
There are a couple of issues here. First, massage as a stand alone practice, has struggled to be recognized by the medical establishment as a legitimate form of therapy and healing. Under the auspices of physical therapy, massage is readily accepted and practiced to restore muscular function and to assist in the rehabilitative process. However, there is the view by many that massage therapy is somewhat of a “mongrel” healing application with touches of mainstream medicine, alternative medicine, holistic, health, New Age cultism, sexual indulgence and mystical fakery. The simple fact is the “the manipulation of soft tissue” has been proven and is accepted as a healing modality. It is the desire to include any healing avocation that involves touch, or even the close proximity of hand to body, under the heading of massage that creates confusion and causes suspicion.
Scientists and doctors have dismissed Reiki as a placebo that encourages patients to feel better because they are supposed to feel better. Other questions about the motivation of practitioners is the fact that Dr. Usui, the founder of Reiki, determined that there must be an “energy exchange” between Reiki healer and Reiki patient to invest the patient in the healing process. This investment is monetary in most cases and is a core principle of Reiki.
Another problem with Reiki being considered a form of massage is that some states require that practitioners of Reiki be licensed as massage therapists. Many Reiki practitioners dispute this categorization specifically because of the distinction between Reiki and massage as stated in the definitions presented earlier in this article.
So, Reiki has a bit of a schizophrenic personality. On the one hand, courses teaching Reiki are offered in many massage schools. On the other hand, many practitioners themselves don’t consider themselves massage therapists. So, far be it from me to try and settle this dispute in one article. Reiki may or may not be a truly effective form of healing. All I know is that I still have difficulty categorizing Reiki as massage. I think there may be some “manipulation” of the definition of massage required to justify the inclusion of Reiki.
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: What If Low Carb Diets Can Cure Diabetes And Heart...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: What If Low Carb Diets Can Cure Diabetes And Heart...: Low-carb diets can be advantageous in increased body weight , heart disease and treatment of diabetes according to new clinical studies . ...
What If Low Carb Diets Can Cure Diabetes And Heart Diseases!
Low-carb diets can be advantageous in increased body weight , heart
disease and treatment of diabetes according to new clinical studies .
Low carb diets still revolutionize the clinical practice of nutrition. Many scientists are now indicating low carb solutions for many disease states, according to Richard D. Feinman, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.
He also says “And practically speaking, some of the clinical results, particularly in diabetes, are quite remarkable.”
“I have seen many patients who were heading for disaster and who have turned their disease and their lives around simply by avoiding foods they cannot tolerate: carbohydrates.”
This simple, effective approach could reverse the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes,” says Mary Vernon, MD, FAAFP, CMD and President of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians, Known for her controlled carbohydrate challange with her patients for some time now.
“Thanks to the low-carb approach we’ve seen many patients reduce or completely eliminate drug therapy. Of course, it is up to a patient if they want to continue their medication, but they should at least be given a choice of a non-pharmacological approach.”
Low carb diets seem to have always had a metabolic foundation and although the news attention has concentrated mainly on the business side of the topic, science continues to dramatically move forward with it.
Some of the important findings about low-carb diets are:
+ A restrained carbohydrate way of life is an efficient way to control Type 2 diabetes blood sugar. Patients are consistently able to lower or do away with disease.
+A third of overweight Americans who are trying to lose weight, are doing so by eating less carbs.
+ More recent evidence to bear the weight of the benefits of a restrained carbohydrate way of life for heart risk factors such as low HDL and small LDL lipoprotein standard.
+ A restrained carbohydrate way of life may be the best treatment for metabolic syndrome, a forerunner condition to diabetes and heart disease.
+Over 60 percent of Americans are overweight; 38 percent are actually doing something about it.
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/99631/what-if-low-carb-diets-can-cure-diabetes-and-heart-diseases/
Low carb diets still revolutionize the clinical practice of nutrition. Many scientists are now indicating low carb solutions for many disease states, according to Richard D. Feinman, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.
He also says “And practically speaking, some of the clinical results, particularly in diabetes, are quite remarkable.”
“I have seen many patients who were heading for disaster and who have turned their disease and their lives around simply by avoiding foods they cannot tolerate: carbohydrates.”
This simple, effective approach could reverse the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes,” says Mary Vernon, MD, FAAFP, CMD and President of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians, Known for her controlled carbohydrate challange with her patients for some time now.
“Thanks to the low-carb approach we’ve seen many patients reduce or completely eliminate drug therapy. Of course, it is up to a patient if they want to continue their medication, but they should at least be given a choice of a non-pharmacological approach.”
Low carb diets seem to have always had a metabolic foundation and although the news attention has concentrated mainly on the business side of the topic, science continues to dramatically move forward with it.
Some of the important findings about low-carb diets are:
+ A restrained carbohydrate way of life is an efficient way to control Type 2 diabetes blood sugar. Patients are consistently able to lower or do away with disease.
+A third of overweight Americans who are trying to lose weight, are doing so by eating less carbs.
+ More recent evidence to bear the weight of the benefits of a restrained carbohydrate way of life for heart risk factors such as low HDL and small LDL lipoprotein standard.
+ A restrained carbohydrate way of life may be the best treatment for metabolic syndrome, a forerunner condition to diabetes and heart disease.
+Over 60 percent of Americans are overweight; 38 percent are actually doing something about it.
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/99631/what-if-low-carb-diets-can-cure-diabetes-and-heart-diseases/
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Rheumatoid Arthritis Treated With Alternative Medi...
GreenEarthMeds News and Reviews: Rheumatoid Arthritis Treated With Alternative Medi...: If you have rheumatoid arthritis you may have often thought about seeking an alternative health practitioner, but have not known how to ap...
Rheumatoid Arthritis Treated With Alternative Medicine!
If you have rheumatoid arthritis you may have often thought about
seeking an alternative health practitioner, but have not known how to
approach the matter. You may be considering alternative medicine now for
your arthritis, because you have been treated unsuccessfully for years
by conventional medicine.
Having been treated for rheumatoid arthritis over a lengthy period your condition may be rather advanced, that is not to say that alternative medicine would be unable to treat it, but rather the treatment would be slow and steady in order to avoid any aggravation of your arthritis.
Unfortunately patients often expect fast results from their chosen alternative practitioner, however, this will most certainly not be the case, for years of taking prescription drugs will have more than likely left you in a debiliated condition.Treatment of rheumatoid arthritis with prescription drugs fails to treat the cause of your disease, it only treats symptoms, this results in suppression, and you spend the rest of your life with intermittent flare-ups and exacerbations of your disease with no cure ever in sight.
Rheumatoid arthritis is considered to be an auto-immune disease, with an unknown cause. This diagnosis rather absolves you of all responsibility for your disease, having received your diagnosis you then proceed unquestioningly to commence a regime of potent drugs for your rheumatoid arthritis without doing any research on the disease yourself.
Have you ever asked why your immune system has decided to attack you, rather than protect you? If you gave this some serious thought you might decide to make some lifestyle changes in order to help your immune system regain it’s innate intelligence. You may ask what lifestyle changes you might have to make in order to regain your health. Basically there really is only one change, and that is your diet. The answer is simple, eat fresh organic fruits and vegetables, eliminate fast foods, highly processed foods, aspartame, MSG, saturated fats, refined carbohydrates, cigarettes, alcohol, diet sodas, and all other sodas.
If you would prefer to keep your rheumatoid arthritis, your junk diet and prescription drugs then that’s your choice and you will undoubtedly pay for your choice with lifelong sickness. However, if you make the effort to change your diet you will reap the benefits, and you will be richly rewarded with vibrant health. For Access To Brand Name Products and Services Visit our Partners at http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/99617/rheumatoid-arthritis-treated-with-alternative-medicine/
Having been treated for rheumatoid arthritis over a lengthy period your condition may be rather advanced, that is not to say that alternative medicine would be unable to treat it, but rather the treatment would be slow and steady in order to avoid any aggravation of your arthritis.
Unfortunately patients often expect fast results from their chosen alternative practitioner, however, this will most certainly not be the case, for years of taking prescription drugs will have more than likely left you in a debiliated condition.Treatment of rheumatoid arthritis with prescription drugs fails to treat the cause of your disease, it only treats symptoms, this results in suppression, and you spend the rest of your life with intermittent flare-ups and exacerbations of your disease with no cure ever in sight.
Rheumatoid arthritis is considered to be an auto-immune disease, with an unknown cause. This diagnosis rather absolves you of all responsibility for your disease, having received your diagnosis you then proceed unquestioningly to commence a regime of potent drugs for your rheumatoid arthritis without doing any research on the disease yourself.
Have you ever asked why your immune system has decided to attack you, rather than protect you? If you gave this some serious thought you might decide to make some lifestyle changes in order to help your immune system regain it’s innate intelligence. You may ask what lifestyle changes you might have to make in order to regain your health. Basically there really is only one change, and that is your diet. The answer is simple, eat fresh organic fruits and vegetables, eliminate fast foods, highly processed foods, aspartame, MSG, saturated fats, refined carbohydrates, cigarettes, alcohol, diet sodas, and all other sodas.
If you would prefer to keep your rheumatoid arthritis, your junk diet and prescription drugs then that’s your choice and you will undoubtedly pay for your choice with lifelong sickness. However, if you make the effort to change your diet you will reap the benefits, and you will be richly rewarded with vibrant health. For Access To Brand Name Products and Services Visit our Partners at http://adcitymarketing.webstarts.com
Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/99617/rheumatoid-arthritis-treated-with-alternative-medicine/
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