Month: June 2019

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  David Burnham, president of the Adirondack Motor Enthusiast Club, competes in a home-built yellow racer fitted with a vintage Maserati engine. [credit: Gregory Leporati ]

For most New Yorkers, a frozen Lake George signals the onset of winter and some of the year's most brutal weather. But for a handful of upstate gear heads, the ice represents something completely different: the perfect race track. "This is my favorite time of the year!" shouts Paul Dudley on a chilly February morning. He revs up his '99 Mazda Miata and peels out onto the frozen lake, running laps along a makeshift course marked by cones along the ice. His stripped-down Miata—"a Miata on an 800-pound diet," he jokes—is fitted with studded tires that dig into the ice, providing significant grip while kicking a thick mist into the air on every turn.

For Dudley, and more than 100 other drivers like him, these ice races are the ultimate adrenaline rush. They are also emblematic of what the country's grassroots racing scene has become: a unique but increasingly accessible way for hobbyists to fuel their need for speed.

"This is probably the most economical form of racing," says Michael Westhouse, the vice president of the Adirondack Motor Enthusiast Club (AMEC), the local organization that has hosted the races since 1965. "You don't need a racing license. All you need is a helmet and some snow tires and you're all set." AMEC hosts races for nine different classes, including home-built vehicles, modified cars with studded tires, and even street-legal cars, which cautiously navigate each twist and turn with virtually no traction.

Enlarge / Legal cannabis for sale in a tobacco shop in Italy. (credit: Stefano Guidi | Getty Images)

In the US, federal law has severely restricted our ability to study any potential medical properties of cannabis. But, given some limited studies and a lot of anecdotal stories, a number of states have gone ahead and legalized medical marijuana. This has allowed some population-level studies of what's going on in the states, but those have faced additional complications, like rules that differ from state to state and an ongoing legalization of recreational use confusing the picture.

Just how confusing all this can be was driven home this week by the release of a paper that suggests that one of medical marijuana's greatest successes was illusory. A couple of early studies indicated that states that had legalized medical marijuana use saw drops in opioid-related deaths. The new research replicates those results but finds that the trend has reversed in recent years, with those states now seeing increased deaths. While the new study's authors suggest the initial results were spurious, others suggest that the shifting legal landscape and changes in drug abuse may have driven the change.

What does everyone agree upon?

Back in 2014, researchers compared deaths due to opioid abuse in states with and without legalization of medical marijuana. For the decade prior to 2010, the trend was clear: states that allowed medical marijuana had lower rates of opioid-abuse-driven death.