From things I read, it was for the cold and snow of upstate New York.
Also politics; upstate New York is economically depressed.
]]>That's the other argument against there being much of a local industry - a field in bloom would be pretty obvious, and there aren't many places (except Salisbury plain) where one could be situated without being observed. Again, yes, it's POSSIBLE - but I doubt it's done.
]]>The bad news just keeps piling up: you do not want this virus!
(I've altered the spacing to highlight main ideas:)
https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2020/09/15/WNL.0000000000010851.abstract
'Stroke Risk, phenotypes, and death in COVID-19: Systematic review and newly reported cases
Abstract:
Results:
The proportion of COVID-19 patients with stroke (1.8%, 95%CI 0.9-3.7%) and in-hospital mortality (34.4%, 95%CI 27.2-42.4%) were exceedingly high.
Mortality was 67% lower in patients <50 years-old relative to those >70 years-old (OR 0.33, 95%CI 0.12-0.94, P=0.039).
Large vessel occlusion was twice as frequent (46.9%) as previously reported and was high across all age groups, even in the absence of risk factors or comorbidities.
A clinical phenotype characterized by older age, a higher burden of comorbidities, and severe COVID-19 respiratory symptoms, was associated with the highest in-hospital mortality (58.6%) and a 3x higher risk of death than the rest of the cohort (OR 3.52, 95%CI 1.53-8.09, P=0.003).
Conclusions:
Stroke is relatively frequent among COVID-19 patients and has devastating consequences across all ages. The interplay of older age, comorbidities, and severity of COVID-19 respiratory symptoms is associated with an extremely elevated mortality.'
Here's a good plain language discussion of these findings:
]]>As has been pointed out further up, English grown opium poppies are strong enough. When you have such a high profit margin on the eventual product that visitors to your plant have to agree to potential cavity searches on leaving, it doesn't much matter if your input is 10 tonnes of poppy heads rather than 1
Here's a link to a story in the Independent
]]>You're not wrong. Under orderly management there should be no problem importing arbitrarily large amounts of opiate feed stock, whether aided or hindered by America's adventures in Afghanistan and the subsequent expansion of the opium crops. (Condemning opium growing was one of only two things the Taliban ever did that I agreed with, and that still feels uncomfortable.) But these days?
I wouldn't bet on Boris Johnson being able to sweet-talk a trade agreement for pharmaceuticals - or for that matter to guarantee continued imports of Swiss chocolate and French macarons. And not even Donald Trump knows what Donald Trump is going to say or do tomorrow.
]]>As I say, it's a vague recollection, and may be flawed.
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