JACQUI Smith defied the Government’s own experts today by announcing that laws on cannabis will be toughened up.

The Home Secretary said the drug must be upgraded from Class C to Class B to avoid risking the future health of young people.

The move comes despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) concluding that the health dangers from cannabis did not justify its inclusion in the higher category.

A report from the group said scientific evidence pointed to a probable, but weak, causal link between psychotic illness, including schizophrenia, and cannabis use.

Those who take ibuprofen on a regular basis for five years may be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as they get older, according to a new study. And people who take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medicines in general may have a decreased risk. But the findings are not concrete enough to warrant advising patients to take a daily dose of ibuprofen, or any other type of NSAID, to ward off Alzheimer's, noted the researchers, led by Steven Vlad, a fellow in rheumatology at Boston University School of Medicine. Long-term use of NSAIDs carries a risk of gastrointestinal problems.

Still, "this trial is big enough and the results are good enough that it may reopen the debate--that we should do a prevention study with these medications," William Thies, vice president of medical and scientific relations for the Alzheimer's Association, told HealthDay.

Find out how to reduce your risk for dementia by shedding excess belly fat, and learn the difference between Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.

Autism and Schizophrenia May Be Related

A new study supports the idea in autism research that people diagnosed with either schizophrenia or autism often share the same rare genetic mutations, Nancy Shute reports. Julie Daniels, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, looked at the health records of the parents of 1,227 Swedish children with autism who were born between 1977 and 2003. Those parents were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia as parents of children who didn't have autism. Other studies of early childhood brain development have shown that in both autism and schizophrenia, the brain development process is accelerated from birth to age 3.

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Senate President Manuel Villar Jr. has voiced misgivings at the effectiveness of a newly passed law that promises to bring down the price of medicine, in the process apparently taking a swing at a possible rival in the 2010 presidential election.

Villar said he believed that the measure which came out of the House of Representatives, which provided for a drug price regulatory board and required doctors to prescribe only generics, would have been more effective instead of the version of the Senate, whose principal author is Sen. Manuel Roxas II.

The final version of the law followed Roxas’ bill, dropping the provision that required doctors to prescribe only the generic names of medicine and, doing away with a price regulatory board, authorizes the President to impose ceilings on drug prices.

“For me any version is acceptable. I believe both versions would help lower the price of medicine. Only maybe the decrease in prices would be bigger under the House version,” Villar said.

“But prices will also go down under the approved version. What’s important is that the law has been approved,” he quickly added.

Villar and Roxas have made plain their intentions to contest the 2010 presidential elections, both taking the helm of their respective political parties (Nacionalista Party for Villar and Liberal Party for Roxas).

Congress on Tuesday ratified the final version of the law, officially called “Universally Accessible Cheaper and Quality Medicines Act of 2008” and submitted it to Malacañang for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s signature.

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According to the new principles, all labels for all food products and drugs should present the following information to the customer: country of origin, the source of a medicine’s active ingredient and its place of manufacture and also, the producer should identify on its web site the place where each ingredient in a particular food product originates.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., and chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said consumers must be protected from possibly harmful products and deserve to know where their purchases come from.

"How are you going to know what is in there or whether it's safe if you don't know where it comes from?” Dingell asked. “For example, if it comes from Great Britain, you're going to assume it's pretty safe. If it comes from Canada, it's probably pretty safe. If it comes from China, you're going to say, 'Holy cats, we better watch out,'" Dingell concluded according to the Associated Press.

The new plan is thought out to aid the immense imports made by the Unites States, which at the moment rise above the $2 trillion bar. The products are shipped in from more than 150 countries and after a variety of food and drug safety problems, the decision to improve the system was reached.

The decision will also have a small downside. The Food and Drug Administration is going to solicit new fees from the industry. This will lead to higher food prices as the producers will pass the additional costs to the consumers.

Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives with Consumers Union, commented on the matter by saying that prices probably would not raise much and consumers are very likely to embrace the new policy knowing that their food is safer.

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Frequent back pain does not have to be a life-sentence. You can often decrease your pain. Sometimes (if the pain is due to injury) you can increase the speed of recovery. Unfortunate physical ailments are, nonetheless, unfortunate. No matter what you do (especially with chronic pain) the pain problem is not going to disappear. On the other hand, when there is a chance of reducing your pain and increasing your energy, most people rise to the option.

Pain medications (while it is true that they help you feel better) often keep you in a blur. This can happen to the point that an especially painful day can be such a clouded day that you feel like you are missing out on life – and you are. Pills can deafen you to the sounds of life, blind you to the enjoyment of life, and suck your energy and motivation to experience life as well. If you must take medication then you must. However, discuss it with your doctor and see if he or she recommends that you consider more physical and less chemical treatments.

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Two new studies published on Monday found that people who have a history of depression are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

How exactly depression influences the brain is not known, but the theory has been that depression shrinks specific areas leaving the brain vulnerable to the development of Alzheimer’s.

“We don’t know yet whether depression contributes to the development of Alzheimer’s disease or whether another unknown factor causes both depression and dementia. We’ll need to do more studies to understand the relationship between depression and dementia,” lead researcher of one of the studies, Dr. Monique M.B. Breteler, from the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam said in a statement, according to the Washington Post.

Dr. Breteler’s study followed 486 people, aged 60 to 90 who did not have dementia, of which 134 had had at least one episode of depression. After 6 years, 33 people developed Alzheimer’s disease.

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Half an hour before dawn, the semi-detached house, like the rest of the silent East Midlands town, is in darkness. Two investigators, search warrant at the ready, approach the front door, while a man with a battering ram takes up position. There has already been a 6am briefing session at the local police station, and the raid has a code name - Operation Mexico.

  But the investigators about to move into the house are not police officers. They belong to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) intelligence and enforcement unit, a small specialist group that seeks to keep Britain free of illegal and counterfeit medicines - a multi-billion-pound worldwide trade that is estimated to lead directly to the deaths of more than a half million people a year across the globe.

Today's target is the man behind a website, ostensibly based in Belize but in reality located in this nondescript house and an office in a small modern block a few minutes away. Malik (not his real name), the intelligence officer on the operation, has already made a purchase on the site, buying Kamagra, an Indian version of Viagra, illegal in the UK, using a bogus credit card and phoney mail address to hide his real identity.

'You never know what you are going to find behind closed doors,' Stan, the lead investigator, says. Other recent MHRA raids have uncovered everything from rudimentary machines for pressing baking powder and shoe polish into fake pills to so-called 'miracle cancer cures'.

Fake pharmaceutical drugs - whether sold directly over the internet or infiltrated into the neighbourhood pharmacy or local hospitals - have become a huge and fast-increasing threat. In 2005, 500,000 single doses of fake medicines were discovered across Europe. The following year that number had shot up to 2.5 million.

Worldwide, according to figures collected by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, customs seized more than three million counterfeit or suspected counterfeit tablets in more than 1,000 separate actions in the two years up to January.

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Cleaning out the medicine cabinet is like cleaning out the fridge, but with a lot less "ewwws!"

The expired medications and health stuff you find may be years past the best-before date, but at least it's not leftovers covered in fuzzy green mould or foul-smelling, stomach-turning black slime.

The worst thing Kory Sloan of St. Albert, Alta., encountered while cleaning out his grandfather's cupboards was a bottle of really old pain-relieving tablets that smelled like vinegar. The smell is a sign the medication has gone bad.

Not that you should stick your nose into an expired container before deciding to chuck it out.

"The first thing they teach you in pharmacy school is don't put your nose into anything," says Edmonton pharmacist Ali Damani.

"If it's toxic, you could pass out from it."

Damani's advice is to wave a hand over the opened container to get a sniff of the air wafting out of it. But generally, checking the expiry date and eyeballing the contents is enough to tell you whether or not something needs to be tossed, he says.

There is, however, a growing body of research that finds some medicines remain potent beyond their expiry date. The leading evidence comes from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration program that tests drugs for the U.S. military. The results through July 2006 found 88 per cent of tested medicines remained potent for at least a year past expiration, and some for up to 14 years.

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There are a lot of different substances we use to change the way our bodies work, not all of which we recognise as drugs.

A drug is a chemical substance that causes a change in the body. This includes both prescription and non-prescription medicines, herbal medicines, alcohol, nicotine and illegal drugs.