A Nissan test driver has become one of the first people in the North East to be banned from the roads following new drug regulations.

Ian Pearson, 26, was stopped by police officers in the early hours after finishing a night shift at the car maker’s Wearside plant on March 19.

The effects of driving under the influence of drugs can be devastating. Sarah Sillars, chief executive officer of the Advanced Institute of Motorists

New laws introduced in March this year mean drivers face prosecution if they exceed limits set for the presence of eight illegal drugs. Police can also issue roadside tests, using ‘drugalysers’.

The odds have been plainly against marijuana legalization for decades, but the tide appears to be turning to the point where the marijuana movement may soon be able to get over its previous barriers.

At a crossroads
Two decades ago public opinion was very much against the idea of legalizing marijuana for medical or recreational purposes. A survey from Gallup in the mid-1990s pegged the public's favorable opinion on the drug at just 25%.

Their proposed ban is an affront to our right to do whatever we want with our bodies

I lower the balloon from my lips and close my eyes. Sounds begin to slow down and seem further away. I feel like I'm moving at high speed, but through what, I'm not sure. My sense of time begins to slip away. I reach the deepest point of my journey. As quickly as I arrived, I return, blinking in the sunlight.

The whole experience has lasted less than a minute, and I'm left feeling energised and slightly disorientated. Within another few minutes, I feel totally back to normal.

After my blog on Wednesday on tensions between drugs advisors and the Home Office, more details have emerged of how the expert panel on legal highs was split down the middle on whether to go for a total ban.

While ministers claim their Psychoactive Substances Bill reflects the findings of the experts, I am told that the hand-picked committee was divided on whether low-harm substances like amyl nitrate (poppers) and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) should be included.

The final report was drafted by Home Office officials but some members of the panel, which included three people who also sit on the ACMD, insisted on writing in what became known as the "safety-valve" clause.

It looks like a head shop is taking inventory in a college science lab. On one side of the work surface are a few bags of white powder labeled with the very complicated names of chemical compounds; on the other is a range of foil packets sporting dodgy graphic designs and names like Gogaine, Ching, Exodus, and Herbal Haze.

Machines buzz and whirr in the background as chemists sit at computer screens, monitoring the compounds that pass through them. It's eerily quiet, and beyond the small selection of buildings in front of the window, there is no sign of civilization for miles.

Home Secretary Theresa May and her statutory advisers on drug policy look to be heading for a showdown over government plans to deal with so-called "legal highs".

Some members of The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) are understood to be furious that they were not consulted on proposed legislation for a blanket ban on psychoactive substances.

The relationship between the ACMD and ministers in various governments has long been strained. There have been sackings and mass resignations in the last few years, amid claims that expert scientists were being bullied and ignored because their advice didn't coincide with government policy.

Drinking lots coffee while smoking marijuana can cause people to become more addicted to the drug, according to a new study.

This may be because caffeine enhances the euphoria associated with smoking cannabis.

But scientists say it all depends on how much coffee you drink. 

The same research found that small amounts could actually help combat cannabis addiction, by putting you off the drug altogether.

‘The discovery does provide some fascinating insights into the workings of the brain, and why humans find coffee and marijuana so enjoyable,’ Dr Gary Wenk, who was not involved in the research, explains on the Oxford University Press' blog.

Their advice, when they’re actually asked for it, is consistently ignored in favour of doing the exact opposite, so why don’t we stop pretending to care about evidence and just scrap the ACMD altogether?

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was established in 1971, at the same time the Misuse of Drugs Act came into being, as a supposedly independent body which would advise the government on drug policy. To quote the Wiki entry on the Council, their job is supposedly to:

Peers debated the main principles of the government's Psychoactive Substances Bill in the House of Lords yesterday and seemed to be in agreement on one thing: its hopelessly vague.

The bill, designed to take aim at legal highs, defined a psychoactive substance as any substance that can affect a person's 'mental functioning or emotional state', with many critics pointing out that this effectively bans everything.

Lib Dem lord Brian Paddick told the House that the "dangers in the bill as drafted are to make the drug laws even more of a laughing stock than they are currently."

Medical researchers are beginning to study whether the hype surrounding a chemical in marijuana matches reality.

Proponents of cannabidiol largely believe that the chemical provides many of marijuana's therapeutic characteristics. And unlike tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, it doesn't get the user high.

But in the decades since its discovery cannabidiol remained difficult to study despite reports that it could improve a wide range of conditions, including epilepsy, schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.

As a Schedule 1 drug, scientists need approval from several federal regulators to conduct research. As a result, little has changed since the chemist who discovered THC reported that cannabidiol reduced seizures in seven of eight epilepsy patients in a 1980 study.