A study revealed these indicate more sexual partners and mental health issues. Tattoos may be considered attractive to certain people — body ink is practically a visual symbol of both “bad boys” and “bad girls” — but a new study has determined that people with tattoos not only have more sexual partners, they’re more likely to have mental health issues and sleep problems.
Researchers at the University of Miami studied 2,000 adults living in the U.S. and found a positive correlation, not just between tattoos and mental health and sleeping issues, but also smoking, incarceration, and number of sex partners.
Our results suggest that individuals with tattoos are more likely to engage in risky behaviors relative to their non‐tattooed counterparts, which may lead to health consequences. Dermatologists, healthcare providers, and public health advocates should recognize that having a tattoo(s) is a potential marker for mental health issues and risky behaviors.
“Previous research has established an association between having a tattoo and engaging in risky behaviors,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Karoline Mortensen.
“In an era of increasing popularity of tattoos, even among women and working professionals, we find these relationships persist but are not associated with lower health status.”
A Pew poll from 2010 found that 40 percent of people between ages 18 and 29 have at least one tattoo, with half of the group claiming between two and five. Eighteen percent had at least six.
Tattoos have been a part of human culture for thousands of years, serving as amulets, status symbols, declarations of love, signs of religious beliefs, adornments, and even forms of punishment. The earliest evidence of tattoo art dates to over 5,000 years ago. During the construction the great pyramids there become conclusive evidence of their use amongst people.
Ancient Greeks used tattoos to communicate among spies. But they fell out of favor and for health reasons almost vanished. In the 18th and 19th centuries tattoos were used as a unique way to identify a sailor’s body should he be lost at sea or impressed by the British navy.
In the 1930s, when Social Security numbers were introduced, people flocked to tattoo parlors to get their numbers inscribed on their arms, chests or backs as a memory aide.
In the mid-20th century, even as musicians like the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin helped make tattoos even cooler, the form suffered a setback in the city, as a 1961 hepatitis outbreak blamed on a Coney Island tattoo artist had prompted the New York City health department to ban tattooing. At a time when tattoos were seen as signs of promiscuity, Ruth Marten, a tattoo artist during the 1970s, says many of her clients were women getting a divorce, including one who told her that she “wanted to be able to change her body to something that her ex-husband had had no experience. The ban was lifted in 1997.
Medical cannabis shortfall concerns appeared even earlier. Some users worried producers were prioritizing more lucrative recreational products or overseas markets.
Cannabis producers greatly expanded their stockpiles prior to legalization last year. Between January and September, month-end inventories of “dry” cannabis (flowers and leaves) more than doubled from 40 to 102 tonnes.
Similarly, cannabis-infused oil supplies more than tripled, from 14 to 48 kilolitres. Inventory growth slowed in October as recreational sales began.
Producers’ month-end inventories of oil and dry cannabis. Prepared by author from Health Canada data. Michael Armstrong
So as officials have noted, there was lots of cannabis overall. That doesn’t mean there weren’t shortages.
Medical decline and rebound
Consider medical cannabis. Between April 2017 and September 2018, oil sales per registered client increased 18 per cent. Meanwhile, dry sales plunged 53 per cent, from 11.0 grams per client to just 5.1.
Medical quantities sold relative to total registered clients. October and November 2018 use September’s client count. Prepared by author from Health Canada data. Michael Armstrong
Dry sales’ steep decline might reflect a gradual medical shift to oils. But shortages also might have contributed.
The post-legalization sales increases support that theory. November’s oil sales were 18 per cent above September’s. But dry sales soared 103 per cent. Medical clients seemingly refilled their dry supplies after legalization made prescription transfers easier.
Differences between oil and dry cannabis also appear in the recreational cannabis data.
Oil flows, dry cannabis struggles
For cannabis oil, recreational sales hit 1.9 kilolitres in November, legalization’s first full month. But comparison to October’s stronger numbers suggests retailers lost sales of roughly 1.8 kilolitres due to shortages. That implies potential recreational demand was around 3.8 kilolitres monthly. Meanwhile, medical sales hit 5.9 kilolitres.
Distributor inventories ended November in good shape. They more than doubled to 7.6 kilolitres. That’s enough to satisfy more than two months of recreational demand.
Similarly, producers ended with 26.3 kilolitres of finished (ready-to-ship) oil. That’s nearly three months of combined recreational and medical demand. Plus, their production and outbound shipping rates both exceeded total end-user demand. That suggests shortages would ease over time.
Rectangles show month-end inventories of unfinished (dashed lines) and finished (solid lines) products. Arrows show the month’s flows of products from producers toward consumers. Green indicates dry cannabis, orange indicates oils. Numbers indicate tonnes of dry cannabis and kilolitres of oil. Estimated by author from Health Canada data. Michael Armstrong
By comparison, dry cannabis struggled in November. Sales were 5.1 tonnes, but lost sales were perhaps about 8.3 tonnes. That put monthly recreational demand around 13.4 tonnes. Medical sales hit 3.7 tonnes.
Distributors’ inventory climbed significantly to 10.5 tonnes. But that’s insufficient for even one month’s demand.
Producer’s finished goods inventory of 15.1 tonnes likewise represented less than a month of combined recreational-medical needs. Production and shipments also trailed demand. That implies shortages would continue worsening.
Explanations?
Several explanations are possible for dry cannabis shortfalls existing despite large total inventories.
One is that 86 per cent of producers’ dry inventory was unfinished and not yet available for sale. Much of that was recent crops being dried and cured. But the large contrast with finished goods suggests possible processing and packaging bottlenecks too.
Another reason is these data add-up inventories across all producers. By contrast, each recreational customer is served by just one provincial distributor.
Suppose one source has a surplus while another has a shortage. Their total inventory could look healthy. But half their users would see empty shelves.
As well, supply and demand are much harder to balance for individual products than for overall product categories. That’s a common retail problem.
For example, imagine visiting a clothing store. Request “a shirt”, and sales staff could show you hundreds. But specify “a long-sleeved, medium-tall, all-cotton, emerald-green shirt” and they might have none to offer, despite huge inventory overall.
Cannabis buyers and sellers likely experienced such mismatches. Medical clients treating conditions like epilepsy would be especially at risk. They’d want specific product formulations, not random substitutes.
One factor that doesn’t look important is cannabis exports. In 2018, those averaged only 2.5 per cent of monthly production. That’s probably too small to significantly affect domestic availability.
Another non-issue was cannabis growing itself. Producers’ unfinished dry stockpiles remained almost unchanged during November. That suggests crop harvesting rates kept up with processing.
Bigger market, bigger challenges
The industry faces larger challenges longer term. Estimates of Canada’s total demand vary widely. But Health Canada’s latest assessment, for dry cannabis and oil equivalents combined works out to about 77 tonnes monthly.
So the legal cannabis industry must not only provide better availability of the specific products users want. To eventually serve every recreational and medical user, it also needs to massively grow its capacity. And it must do that while competing with black markets despite federal restrictions on branding and promotion.
Cancer is the one disease that has, by now, affected nearly every family in the world. It kills somewhere around 8.2 million people each year. And while medical treatments for this vile affliction have been improving over the past few decades, science is still a long way off from developing a definitive cure. There are some who say that marijuana could be the solution, and, believe it or not, there is a small body of evidence to back that up this claim. In fact, a recent study shows that cannabidiol (CBD), the non-intoxicating compound of the cannabis plant, has the ability to improve cancer survival rates in mice when combined with a chemotherapy regimen.
We have known for years that marijuana can be beneficial in helping cancer patients deal with the nasty side effects of chemotherapy. Most recently, the CBD compound itself has been shown to help those undergoing chemo better deal with nausea. Yet, if the latest research coming out of the Queen Mary University of London holds any weight, whatsoever, CBD may also have cancer-fighting properties that could eventually help humans with certain forms of this disease live longer. But let’s not call it a cancer cure. CBD is only showing promise as a supplemental treatment option.
“Cannabidiol is already approved for use in clinics [in the UK], which means we can quickly go on to test this in human clinical trials,” said lead researcher Dr. Marco Falasca.
Unfortunately, scientists in the United States are met with much resistance when it comes to trying to study even non-intoxicating forms of marijuana. Since the herb remains a Schedule I drug on the Controlled Substances Act, it has “no known medical value,” and is considered as dangerous as heroin. For this reason, studies designed to explore the medical benefits of anything derived from the cannabis plant are few and far between.
There could, however, be some improvement with respect to the bureaucracies surrounding CBD research, as the FDA recently approved the first-ever cannabis-based drug – Epidiolex – for distribution in the United States. A recent report from Forbes shows that the DEA must now reschedule the CBD compound in order to GW Pharmaceuticals to bring this product to market. If this happens, researchers would likely have an easier time conducting studies dealing with this particular cannabinoid.
According to the American Cancer Society, pancreatic cancer is one of the most common and aggressive forms of this disease. Dr. Falasca’s study, which was paid for by the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund, found that mice treated with both chemotherapy and CBD lived an average of 56 days, compared to 20 days for those mice that didn’t receive treatment. Mice receiving chemotherapy alone only survived a little over 23 days.
“The life expectancy for pancreatic cancer patients has barely changed in the last 40 years because there are very few, and mostly only palliative care, treatments available,” Dr. Falasca said in a press statement.
“Given the five-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer is less than seven percent, the discovery of new treatments and therapeutic strategies is urgently needed.”
But without immediate access to additional research opportunities, it could be decades before we understand the true healing powers of this plant. There is hope that Canada, which is set to legalize marijuana for recreational use in October, will provide researchers with more opportunities to examine the reach of the cannabis plant.
Okay, so you’ll have to give up any plans for expanding your family, but not having to stress over an unplanned pregnancy is actually why researchers think vasectomies make sex better. Plus, fumbling around with condoms can be a mood killer in itself.
In the study, 294 couples were surveyed. Nearly half of men said their sex lives significantly improved after getting a vasectomy, 12.4 percent said they were having sex more frequently and 4.5 percent said they were having less sex.
According to Men’s Health, this recent study backs up data from a 2015 Stanford study of nearly 6,000 men that found guys with vasectomies “had sex 5.9 times per month, compared to 4.9 times for intact guys.” The study’s author, Dr. David Guo, told Men’s Health that he echoed the new research, saying couples would be more likely to get busy with the risk of getting knocked up off the table.
Sorry, ladies. The study concludes that women perceive no difference in sex after the procedure, only that “the satisfaction of the women was not reduced by the vasectomy.” So, that’s something.
While certainly dainty, maxing out at around 7 pounds, the Yorkie is a true terrier — feisty, brave, and full of attitude. Known for its regal floor length. almost human-like golden locks, it’s no wonder the Yorkshire Terrier became popularized as lapdogs for Victorian women. Today, with a big dog personality bursting inside its toy-sized body, the Yorkie is as popular as ever.
Here, we find a few of the most regal Yorkies of Instagram.
Meal prepping sounds like something only really organized people can accomplish. The act of preparing meals days in advance sounds risky and like you’d have to spend an entire day cooking, which is often true. When done correctly, meal prepping saves tons of time and allows you to eat balanced meals throughout the week, something rare when you’re busy with work and life.
The process of meal prepping varies depending on the person. On average, meals shouldn’t be stored in the fridge for more than four days, but you can freeze proteins if you made a large batch. If you’re picky with how fresh your food is, you can prepare your protein and carbs ahead of time, store them, and pack fresh veggies the day of.
No matter the lifestyle, everyone can benefit from scheduling their cooking, avoiding the pain of having to prepare a meal with whatever’s left on the fridge. Check out some items that will help you ease your transition into meal prepping:
Instead of sweating over four different pans on the stove, you can use a large pan with dividers that saves you some work. This pan is helpful for saving yourself some time while cooking, keeping foods separate from each-other, and narrowing your focus on one stove.
Instant Pots are amazing, allowing you to cook dishes over long periods of time. This device is programmable and can be left unattended while you sleep or are away from home. You only have to pack your food once you wake up, or eat once you get home.
Instead of wasting all of your savings on Ziploc bags, you can purchase reusable silicone bags, which are practical, easy to clean and good for the environment. Good quality storage bags will save you time and frustration, preventing meals from getting spoiled and preserving their taste.
If you’re planning on taking your food to work or to school, you need the appropriate container. You can buy disposable ones in bulk or buy a reusable one with dividers which you can reuse.
Valentine’s Day is a Christianized version of a pre-existing fertility festival called Lupercalia. It was a bloody, brutal marker of Spring in Roman times, shifting gears into a more playful party in later times. This was an easy fix for the church, eventually merging the observance of the martyr Saint Valentine with this Springtime baby making bacchanal.
Today’s Valentine’s Day is a pressure cooker of weird traditions and expectations, but it’s generally accepted that one is to give a gift to their significant other, so those sexual undertones are still going strong. If you are a cannabis lover or a new user, topical cannabis application is often a much more fun way to experiment with getting high. This makes it a dope gift, showing your loved one that you care without showing corporations that you care about them.
Making a candle is a little more complicated than a cookie recipe, but it’s a lot more romantic than a bottle of liquid or a tin of salve. Presentation can sometimes be everything!
Photos by Danielle Guercio
Weed Infused Massage Oil Candles
Danielle Guercio, 2017
Candle wicks
Double sided tape
Jars/tins/containers
Wooden skewers
Soy wax
Skin friendly oils
Cannabis Infused Coconut Oil*
Fragrance (optional)
Photos by Danielle Guercio
Your recipe should be determined by the size of the containers you use. Once you know their volume, calculate a 60% wax to 40% oil ratio. Depending on how strong you want the oil to be, make a percentage of that 40% an infused oil.
Photos by Danielle Guercio
Stick candle wicks to the bottom middle of your container. Twist the excess wick around a skewer, this will also keep the wick centered while you pour the melted wax.
Photos by Danielle Guercio
Prepare your workspace, when you’re dealing with hot stuff you don’t want to make a huge mess that isn’t contained. A paper lined baking pan works nicely here.
Photos by Danielle Guercio
Melt wax first in a heat safe measuring cup over a double boiler. Once the wax is melted, add oils, including weed oil. Last add fragrance, generally 20 total drops of essential oil per cup of liquid is a good measurement. You want to smell it, but not be overpowering to rub on the skin. A candle alone would be much stronger scented. I used Young Living Rose, Patchouli, and Sacred Frankincense, skin loving and sensual smelling.
Photos by Danielle Guercio
*Cannabis Coconut Oil
Decarboxylate 3.5g of finely ground cannabis at 225 degrees for 20 minutes in a tightly sealed, oven safe container. Put in lidded mason jar or vacuum sealed bag with cannabis 4 oz of coconut oil.
Heat in water bath just under boiling for at least 1 hour. Strain and chill to use in recipes.
Photos by Danielle Guercio
To use the candle, trim the wicks, light for a few minutes at a time to soften some of the wax into an oil. Use a wooden spoon or spatula to scoop out a small amount to use topically, and avoid sticking your fingers in the hot wax.
This Week’s Music is a weekly column that discusses the weeks’ best, worst, and most interesting songs. We try to select songs of different artists and genres to keep things interesting and to please a variety of music fans.
This week’s column highlights the return of two eagerly awaited performers (Vampire Weekend and Jenny Lewis) and the introduction of the offbeat girl band Unperfect. Check out their songs:
Pop
Vampire Weekend – Harmony Hall
Vampire Weekend’s return to music finds them in a different place, more grown up but just as quirky. “Harmony Hall” is the band’s first single in six years, following “Modern Vampires Of The City,” an album that awarded them a Grammy. When founding member Rostam Batmanglij left the band in 2016, different album names and contributions were teased, until finally the band confirmed that a new record would be released in 2019. “Harmony Hall” proves that despite all of the changes and time that’s passed, there are still aspects of Vampire Weekend that stand unchanged; their irreverent sound, elaborate piano bits and complex layers of instruments are all there. Still, you can tell that the album will show us a different side of the band, one that’s more evolved and hopefully just as creative.
Jenny Lewis has done a lot of interesting work throughout her career, playing vital roles in bands like Rilo Kiley and Jenny & Johnny. “Red Bull & Hennessy” is Lewis’ first single since her 2014 album, “The Voyager,” and it finds her continuing to explore country, pop and rock music in inventive ways. While Lewis’ work with Rilo Kiley was amazing and beloved by many fans, her solo work gives her the opportunity to be more indulgent with her music and vocals. “Red Bull & Hennessy” feels like a song pulled from a time machine, with a heavy Stevie Nicks influence and an awesome guitar solo. It’s a lead track that promises an amazing album.
Indie
Unperfect – Gots To Give The Girl
Despite the band’s preference for poorly spelled words, “Gots To Give The Girl” is an interesting song that stands out from the bulk — an achievement in today’s music industry. Despite the shoddy quality of the video and the strangely muted song, there’s something genuine about the band. Unperfect follows the formula of girl bands that sing empowering songs but they manage to feel more real and honest than their counterparts and predecessors. Hopefully, they can find the necessary impulse that’ll allow them to shape their voice accordingly.
Memes have permeated a large part of our digital and real lives. People use them to make jokes and communicate, so it makes sense then that they would appear in the fashion world. Although memes have appeared on clothing before, immortalized in Forever 21 outfits, Viktor & Rolf became the first Haute Couture brand to use memes to their advantage, dramatically introducing them during Paris Fashion Week.
The dresses are gigantic and dramatic, with phrases like “NO” and “Sorry I’m late I didn’t want to come” stamped right in the middle of them. The fonts are large and impossible to ignore, making the dresses look a little silly and outrageous, just like everything else on the runway.
People have speculated about the inspiration behind the dresses, claiming that the designers intended to mock Instagram posts and our society’s current obsession with quotes and influencers. While most users have loved the designs, claiming that they’re a “mood” and inventive, a small group of critics have said that Viktor & Rolf is trying too hard. Both groups make valid points, but the truth is that, no matter the intent of the designers, the dresses are funny and make great memes. Check out some of our favorites:
California was predicted to become the rockstar state in the realm of legal cannabis, but the recreational pot sales have not quite taken off in the way that many had hoped since the market launched in 2018.
Some believe this lackluster beginning is due to over-regulation, high taxes and the ability of municipalities to bow out of legal sales altogether.
All of this has a more significant percentage of cannabis customers frequenting the black market, which is the exact opposite of the promises made by cannabis advocates back when they were pushing this reform. The fact remains that fewer Californians are buying legal weed than ever, and it is now up to the bumbling powers that be to determine what needs to be done to get everything on track.
Early predictions showed that California would rake in around $1 billion in revenue during the first year of legal sales. Needless to say, the state has fallen short. California is now expected to generate around $471 million — $630 million less than what Governor Jerry Brown projected in his last budget.
This is mostly because the guts of Proposition 64 gave cities the right to ban pot sales in their neck of the woods. Many of them went for it. In fact, only around 20 percent of the cities in California allow marijuana sales in some form or fashion.
In Los Angeles County alone, 82 of its 88 towns still maintain a prohibition standard. Marijuana sales in those places are nonexistent. For example, pot sales are not legal in Compton or Beverly Hills.
Still, pot taxes in those jurisdictions allowing legal sales are compounding the problem by nickel and diming customers to death. There is a 15 percent excise tax, a 10 percent recreational marijuana tax, and a 9.5 percent city tax in Los Angeles. The black market doesn’t operate this way, and possession of the herb is no longer a crime, which makes it easy for citizens to use this illicit outlets without fear of legal repercussions.
Although legal marijuana sales really took off in states like Colorado and Washington after the market was launched, California’s market was already pretty much wide open before voters approved Proposition 64 back in 2016. There is so much marijuana being manufactured in the Golden State (15.5 million pounds) that the state now has far more surplus than it actually consumes (2.5 million pounds). Considering the state’s licensing problem – not even close to the 6,000 projected licensed cannabis shops — the black market is just stronger than the legal trade has been allowed to become.
Illegal operations have and are still taking full advantage of this situation, according to Tom Adams of cannabis market analysts BDS Analytics. “Regulators ignored that and thought they could go straight into an incredibly strict and high-tax environment,” he told the New York Times.
A lot of the weed being produced in California is being smuggled eastward to supply the black market in areas of prohibition. It’s been that way for years.
“It’s a very serious issue,” Governor Gavin Newsom said back in 2016 when he was serving as Brown’s lieutenant, “and it’s going to create a dynamic where the black market will likely persist in a very stubborn way.”
Although there is hope the market will eventually work itself out, cannabis advocates say it is not possible without a total revamp of the law.
“The cannabis industry is being choked by California’s penchant for over-regulation,” Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s impossible to solve all of the problems without a drastic rewrite of the law, which is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.”
