Omaha World-Herald. May 2, 2015.
Synthetic-pot law struggles to keep pace
Recent spikes in emergency room visits, doctor visits and calls to poison control centers tell the dangerous story of synthetic marijuana.
They show the continued growth of young people smoking or ingesting man-made pot that’s designed to skirt state and federal drug laws.
Of the illicit drugs that young Americans use, only real marijuana is used more often, the National Institutes of Health reports.
Last year, U.S. poison control centers logged 3,680 reports of synthetic pot use, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. That was up nearly 1,000 cases from 2013. And reports from the first four months this year are outpacing the 2014 tally by 661.
State and federal lawmakers, meanwhile, face a struggle to exert control over the compounds, which the so-called “spice” companies constantly re-engineer to stay one step ahead of statutes.
Legislatures in Nebraska and Iowa periodically update state laws to keep up with new ways synthetic pot is made, but it’s difficult. A Nebraska bill to do so again remains in committee, largely over questions about whether possession of synthetic pot should be made a felony. It’s an understandable concern given the Legislature’s work toward reducing prison crowding.
But the importance of approving at least Legislative Bill 326’s update to the legal definitions of synthetic pot is clear.
In Lincoln, authorities in recent weeks reported treating more than 100 people for medical emergencies tied to “spice.” One user suffered a heart attack. Last week, a Bellevue couple using something similar were found unresponsive in their apartment; their children had to be taken away.
The recent jump in Lincoln cases spurred Mayor Chris Beutler to ask local retailers to voluntarily stop selling K2, a popular brand.
“The seriousness (of the problem) is demonstrated by what we saw in the last two weeks,” Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson told The World-Herald. “The stuff is dealing with so many different dangerous chemicals, anyone who tries to use it really has no clue what they’re experimenting with. … It’s very dangerous.”
Because the composition of the compounds changes so often, Peterson says it’s difficult to predict the degree of harm that can be caused. That’s why he backs LB 326. “I think in some ways we have to start separating marijuana from ’spice.’ Because you don’t see these kinds of injuries and deaths with strictly marijuana,” he said.
Misunderstandings persist that synthetic marijuana is somehow natural and harmless. The medical community’s experience says otherwise.
User-reported symptoms include rapid heart rates, agitation, hallucinations, confusion, vomiting and, in extreme cases, heart attacks.
That doesn’t sound harmless or natural. It sounds like a fast-changing recipe that requires attention from lawmakers. It also sounds like a topic of conversation for parents and children.
Here’s the scoop: It’s not clear what’s in the bag. It’s not clear what synthetic marijuana will do to you. And it’s far from safe.
So if you’re using, stop. Better yet, don’t try it at all.
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Lincoln Journal Star. May 2, 2015.
Obama, Nebraska on same side
In an age when polarization has worn deep ruts in the political landscape, politicians often put their rhetoric on auto-pilot. Most of Nebraska’s congressional delegation is in the habit of routinely criticizing President Barack Obama, regardless of the circumstances.
So let’s hope that all five members of the delegation are awake to the opportunity and the need to actively support Obama as he attempts to negotiate trade deals that will benefit the state.
At stake are the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
The negotiations would be made easier if Congress would give the president Trade Promotion Authority, which would fast-track the agreements by giving Obama the ability to send trade agreements to Congress which could be voted up or down, but not filibustered or amended.
One can argue that the agreements will not benefit every interest in the country - labor unions are adamantly opposed - but there’s little doubt that it would give a boost to Nebraska.
No fewer than 22 agricultural organizations in the state, as well as Gov. Pete Ricketts and Agriculture Director Greg Ibach, have signed a letter urging Congress to give Obama fast track authority.
Michael Froman, the president’s chief adviser on international trade and investment, visited Nebraska with Rep. Brad Ashford recently to promote the deals, which Froman said will open markets for Nebraska to export more soybeans, corn, beef, pork and machinery.
“Right now over 80 percent of the products we are importing from TTP countries come in duty-free. There is zero tariff. And yet we face duties of anywhere from 35 to 70 and in some cases 400 percent on some of our products,” Froman said.
Nebraska ranks fifth among the states in the amount of agricultural goods that are exported. Last year the state exported $7.9 billion worth of goods, up from $7.3 billion in 2013, and up from $5.5 billion in 2004.
Obama is facing bitter opposition from his own party in negotiating the agreements. As he told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this week, “It’s never fun passing a trade bill in this town.”
Approval of fast track authority was advanced in both the Senate and the House last week. Lending support, after receiving assurance that the legislation would address the European Union’s restrictions on biotechnology, was Rep. Adrian Smith.
Continued support is needed to complete the trade agreements. If the delegation wants to see the negotiations achieve success, it’s going to take more than lip service.
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Scottsbluff Star-Herald. April 30, 2015.
Quakes: Geologists link seismic activity to use of wastewater injection wells
Last week, the U.S. Geological Survey, a division of the Department of Interior, issued a news release called “New Insight on Ground Shaking from Man-Made Earthquakes.”
“Earthquake activity has sharply increased since 2009 in the central and eastern United States,” it said. “The increase has been linked to industrial operations that dispose of wastewater by injecting it into deep wells.”
That refers to disposal wells used by the oil and gas industry, such as the one approved last week by the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The project will employ an abandoned oil well in Sioux County to dump chemical waste from Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado.
Federal geologists are working on predicting the hazards of those earthquakes, how often earthquakes are expected to occur and how hard the ground will likely shake as a result. While acknowledging the sensitive nature of the data, which could affect the oil and gas industry’s petroleum boom, it notes that USGS scientists have identified 17 areas in eight states, including Colorado, where increased earthquake activity has been recorded. The activity has been increasing since 2009 as injection wells become more common. The report includes maps of the affected areas.
“This new report describes for the first time how injection-induced earthquakes can be incorporated into U.S. seismic hazard maps,” said Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Modeling Project. “These earthquakes are occurring at a higher rate than ever before and pose a much greater risk to people living nearby. The USGS is developing methods that overcome the challenges in assessing seismic hazards in these regions in order to support decisions that help keep communities safe from ground shaking.”
The geologists warn that wastewater polluted by toxic chemicals needs to be disposed of in a manner that will prevent contamination of fresh water.
“Wastewater injection increases the underground pore pressure, which may lubricate nearby faults, thereby making earthquakes more likely to occur. Although the disposal process has the potential to trigger earthquakes, most wastewater disposal wells do not produce felt earthquakes,” it said.
To read the full news release or find the full report, go to https://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=4202#.VT5xfPCMKDp. Pay particular attention to the maps.
This report wasn’t produced by fanatics or socialists or activists. It’s a report by scientists - geologists - based on measurements and observations. As much as hacks and deniers would prefer that you believe otherwise, measurements and observations don’t have a political agenda. They are what they are.
How could injecting wastes into the ground cause earthquakes? To extract petroleum and gas trapped in underground rock formations, the industry injects water, sand and a mystery mix of chemicals, including lubricants, into those formations, under pressure, in a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. When oil or gas is pumped to the surface, those volatile fracking compounds come up with it. They call it saltwater, but lightning hit a disposal well recently in Greeley, Colorado, which was shaken by quakes last year, and it burned for two days. Instead of reusing or recycling the chemicals, the industry disposes of them and makes new fracking fluid from fresh water.
To dispose of the recovered fracking fluid, they again inject it underground, under pressure. It should be no cause for amazement that injecting fracking fluid into the ground sometimes causes underground rock formations to crack and move. That’s exactly what the stuff is designed to do.
Proponents of the well (mostly NOGCC “regulators”) tell us that it’ll be injected into a porous formation a mile down, well below the freshwater aquifer above it, separated from the valuable groundwater by impervious rock. They don’t have to listen to scientists (or, it seems, the public), and the Nebraska Legislature is remarkably unconcerned, probably because it’s hundreds of miles from Lincoln or Omaha. But you don’t have to be a scientist to figure out how it go wrong. At full capacity, the well will accept up to 5,000 barrels per day, forced under pressure for decades into a porous formation deep in the ground. If earthquakes cause the rock above that formation to collapse, it’ll put additional pressure on that fluid. It could move any direction, including up.
They tell us that the well pipe is encased in layers of impervious steel and concrete. That’s not true of the formation that will hold all that fluid. They might manage to put millions of barrels of that stuff into the ground without spilling any (a sketchy assumption, considering the petroleum industry’s abysmal record of frequent leaks, spill and explosions). But unless the principles of physics have been re-written, it could still reach the aquifer by being forced upward through fractures by seismic activity.
Years from today, if this stuff is poisoning groundwater, killing Nebraska crops and making people sick, don’t let them get away with saying, “We didn’t know.” That’s certainly the truth, but the stuff they’re ignorant about isn’t “theory” or “speculation.” It’s happening already, as close as Greeley, about 115 miles from Scottsbluff.
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McCook Daily Gazette. April 30, 2015.
Drive with care, at least until the robots take over
More and more of the driving skills we used to learn are becoming irrelevant, with front-wheel drive, traction control, antilock braking, collision avoidance, parallel parking and even navigation being taken over by our cars themselves.
It’s a scary thought, but we’ll all be leaving the driving to a silicon chip one of these days.
On the other hand, watch a few of the dash-cam traffic crash videos on YouTube and you’ll be glad to see an unemotional algorithm take control of our transportation. Dashcams are common in places like Russia, where they play an important part in crash settlements, and are likely to become common in this country as well.
Maybe you saw the videos (https://bit.ly/1I0KOKU) from Dallas this week, where authorities installed cameras on school buses to catch drivers who speed by buses with extended stop signs while children are loading or unloading.
Especially frightening was a video of an SUV speeding between the open doors of a school bus and a group of children trying to board.
Thankfully, those children weren’t injured, but a reward is being offered to find the driver of the SUV.
We’re sure local bus drivers have many tales of drivers ignoring the stop signs and flashing lights while small children try to make their way to or from school.
Just a reminder. Flashing lights and an extended stop sign mean traffic in both directions must stop until the children are safely out of danger.
School will be over soon, of course, but that doesn’t mean car and truck drivers can take a break from driving safely. Drivers are reminded to take special care to watch out for motorcyclists on these nice spring days, and even more for bicyclists, who are even easier to miss.
Bicyclists are a common sight on Southwest Nebraska highways, and the annual Bicycle Ride Across Nebraska, which starts in Wauneta this summer, makes it even more import for drivers to be aware.
Some 600 BRAN?riders plus about that many in families and support staff will be riding through our area starting Sunday, June 7, so let’s all be on our best behavior and make them feel welcome.
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