Building Better Baby Brains: Just Say No To FAS
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is our most preventable form of disability.
Despite a growing focus on the hazards of prescription painkillers for newborns, drinking during pregnancy remains the nation’s leading preventable cause of birth defects and developmental disorders in children. Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) encompass a wide variety of neurobehavioral and central nervous system disabilities related to alcohol use during pregnancy, including, but not limited to, developmental delays, growth retardation speech disabilities, and poor social skills. The classic physical characteristics of FASD, such as small ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - September 8, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
A Chemical Peek at Modern Marijuana
Researchers ponder whether ditch weed is better for you than sinsemilla.
Australia has one of the highest rates of marijuana use in the world, but until recently, nobody could say for certain what, exactly, Australians were smoking. Researchers at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales recently analyzed hundreds of cannabis samples seized by Australian police, and put together comprehensive data on street-level marijuana potency across the country. They sampled police seizures and plants from crop eradication operations. The mean THC content of the samples was 14.88%, while absolute levels varie...
Source: Addiction Inbox - September 3, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
“Spiceophrenia”
Synthetic cannabimimetics and psychosis.
Not long ago, public health officials were obsessing over the possibility that “skunk” marijuana—loosely defined as marijuana exhibiting THC concentrations above 12%, and little or no cannabidiol (CBD), the second crucial ingredient in marijuana—caused psychosis. In some cases, strong pot was blamed for the onset of schizophrenia.
The evidence was never very solid for that contention, but now the same questions have arisen with respect to synthetic cannabimimetics—drugs that have THC-like effects, but no THC. They are sold as spice, incense, K2, Aroma, Krypton, Bon...
Source: Addiction Inbox - August 22, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
LSD Mutates Into NBOMe
What’s on that blotter?
It is a darkly poetic indictment of the War on Drugs that LSD, the first synthetic psychedelic, demonized for decades and the target of extremely expensive law enforcement operations, looks to be far safer than its replacements.
—Earth and Fire Erowid, in Erowid Extracts
It is called 25I-NBOMe, or 2C-I-NBOMe, or SC-B-NBOMe, or 2C-I for short. It belongs to a group of drugs called the NBOMes, which are derived from phenethylamine-based drug families made infamous by Dr. Alexander Shulgin. The NBOMe part stands for N-Benzyl-Oxy-Methyl. After it was first synthesized in 2003, Purdue Universit...
Source: Addiction Inbox - August 18, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Will Power and Its Limits
How to strengthen your self-control.
Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,
Immediately inordinate desires,
And upstart passions, catch the government
From reason; and to servitude reduce
Man, till then free.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
What is will power? Is it the same as delayed gratification? Why is will power “far from bulletproof,” as researchers put it in a recent article for Neuron? Why is willpower “less successful during ‘hot’ emotional states”? And why do people “ration their access to ‘vices’ like cigarettes and junk foods by purchasing them in smaller quantities,” despite the fact th...
Source: Addiction Inbox - August 12, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Peyote and the White Man’s Gin
Aldous Huxley reflects on drugs in 1958.
In the Brave New World of my fable there was no whisky, no tobacco, no illicit heroin, no bootlegged cocaine. People neither smoked, nor drank, nor sniffed, nor gave themselves injections. Whenever anyone felt depressed or below par, he would swallow a tablet or two of a chemical compound called soma....
In small doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses it made you see visions and, if you took three tablets, you would sink in a few minutes into refreshing sleep. And all at no physiological or mental cost. The Brave New Worlders could take holidays from their black ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - August 8, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Methamphetamine: An Excerpt
There’s more than one kind of monster.
Type and I pass the pipe. The overhead light flickers and the wind picks up even more. It’s coming from the north because with each exhale, the smoke slips past my face, back toward the Twin Cities and my dead parents.
But for a brief moment, I’m not thinking about all that. I’m feeling the closest thing I can think of to God and he’s playing the samba inside of my body, his fingers gentle, as they press on the backs of my retinas, my spine, the tendons along my hip flexors. I’m thinking that I love drugs more than anything. That they are the one and only cons...
Source: Addiction Inbox - August 6, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
From “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”
By Honore de Balzac, translated by Robert Onopa.
Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale….
Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis; that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee's power changes over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just t...
Source: Addiction Inbox - July 31, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Crack Babies Are Turning Out Okay
Major study concludes that crack panic was overblown.
In an excellent story for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Susan FitzGerald traces the fortunes of Philadelphia children enrolled in a study that began in 1989, at the height of the crack “epidemic” in the U.S. Headed up by Hallam Hurt, then the chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center, a group began the in-vitro study of babies exposed to maternal crack cocaine use. One of the longest-running studies of its kind, the NIDA-funded research on 224 babies born between 1989 and 1992, half of them cocaine-exposed, the other half normal controls, was now coming t...
Source: Addiction Inbox - July 28, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Fruit Fly Larvae Go Cold Turkey and Forget the Car Keys
Not a pretty sight.
Let’s start with the fruit fly, your basic Drosophila. A fruit fly, like a human, can become addicted to alcohol even at a very young age. The larval age. In other words, even as a maggot. And, just like humans, alcohol degrades a fruit fly maggot’s ability to learn. But adaption is an amazing thing, and drunken larvae eventually learn as well as their teetotaling cousins. That is, until the alcohol is taken away, in which case, the maggots become impaired learners once again. The larval nervous system goes haywire, and hyperexcitablity sets in. They can’t concentrate on their work. But one ho...
Source: Addiction Inbox - July 21, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
MDPV Turns Lab Rats Into "Window Lickers"
Popular bath salt drug shown to be highly addictive.
Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, California, appear to have hammered the last nail into the coffin for the common “bath salt” drug known as MDPV. We can now say with a high degree of certainty that, based on animal models, we know that 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone is addictive—perhaps more strongly addictive than methamphetamine, although such comparisons are always perilous. However, principal investigator Michael A. Taffe, an associate professor at TSRI, said in a prepared release that the research group “observed that rats ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - July 14, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Popular Synthetics: The Class of 2013
Navigating the new alphabet of intoxication.
You don’t have to be a molecular chemist to know which of today’s recreational drugs are safe. Wait, I take that back. You DO have to be a molecular chemist to navigate today’s synthetic drug market with anything like a modest degree of safety.
It’s hard not to get nostalgic: Back in the day, you had your pot, you had your acid, your coke, your speed, and your heroin. And that, with the exception of a few freak outriders like PCP, was about that. Baby boomers of today, already losing touch with leading-edge music—Macklemore? Tame Impala?—can now consider themsel...
Source: Addiction Inbox - July 6, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Addiction Trajectories: Book Review
This study of faith-based healing in the addiction recovery community forms one chapter of a new volume, Addiction Trajectories, edited by Eugene Raikhel of the University of Chicago and William Garriott of James Madison University.
What anthropologists can do for addiction science is document these sociocultural attributes of addiction. In a chapter on buprenorphine and methadone users in New York City and the five boroughs, Helena Hansen, assistant professor of anthropology and psychiatry at New York University, finds that buprenorphine users live in predominantly white, high-income neighborhoods, tended to have college...
Source: Addiction Inbox - June 25, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Smoking and Surgery Don’t Mix
Even routine operations are riskier for smokers.
Smokers who are scheduling a medical operation might want to think seriously about quitting, once they hear the results of a new review of the impact of smoking on surgical outcomes.
A scheduled operation is the perfect incentive for smokers to quit smoking. The fact that smokers have poorer post-surgical outcomes, with longer healing times and more complications, is not a new finding. But the study by researchers from the University of California in San Francisco, and Yale University School of Medicine, published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, spells out the surgicial r...
Source: Addiction Inbox - June 22, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
A Weak Smoker’s Vaccine Might Be Worse Than None
New PET scans show wide responses to antibodies.
One of the brightest hopes of addiction science has been the idea of a vaccine—an antibody that would scavenge for drug molecules, bind to them, and make it impossible for them to cross the blood-brain barrier and go to work. But there are dozens of good reasons why this seemingly straightforward approach to medical treatment of addiction is devilishly difficult to perform in practice.
Last January, health care company Novartis threw in the towel on NicVax, a nicotine vaccine that failed to beat placebos in Phase III clinical trials for the FDA. And back in 2010, a re...
Source: Addiction Inbox - June 16, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
