LSD simulator
http://theriseguys.com/VIDEOnaturalLSD.html


ONDCP and Narcan
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/politics/15147919.htm
Amid heroin deaths, authorities debate drug that stops overdose
MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA - In the wake of more than 400 overdose deaths nationwide - including some in Ohio - from heroin laced with the painkiller fentanyl, some needle exchange programs are starting to give addicts prescriptions for a drug to keep on hand to halt an overdose.
The antidote, naloxone, which is sold under the brand name Narcan, can save the life of someone who might not call 911 for fear of prosecution, treatment providers say.
Even if they do call, help can arrive too late.
"If people have to rely on paramedics, more often than not, the overdose is going to be fatal, just because of the amount of time for people to get there," said Casey Cook, executive director of Prevention Point Philadelphia, a nonprofit that runs the city's needle exchange program. The group recently began distributing naloxone prescriptions through a physician.
But others say naloxone is best administered by trained paramedics and that the prescription approach might appear to condone drug use.
"We don't want to send the message out that there is a safe way to use heroin," said Jennifer DeVallance, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which sponsored a symposium on the fentanyl problem Friday in Philadelphia.

Fentanyl - an opiate used legally in anesthesia and for some cancer patients - is cheaper than heroin and 40 to 100 times more potent than morphine. That makes it an appealing additive for heroin distributors.
At least 150 fentanyl deaths have been recorded in the Philadelphia region, 130 in the Chicago area and 130 in the Detroit area.
In Ohio, police in Columbus and Mansfield have found fentanyl-laced heroin in their cities, and at least six deaths this year have been attributed to the combination in Montgomery County, which includes Dayton.
John P. Walters, the director of the White House drug policy office, said investigators hope to learn whether a clandestine laboratory raided in Mexico last month was the source of much of the illegal fentanyl reaching the U.S.
"We think and we hope that the production site taken down in Mexico was the (main) site," Walters said.
Fentanyl can lead to respiratory failure so quickly that one addict in Philadelphia apparently died even before he finished shooting up. A syringe with some heroin still in it was in his arm when paramedics found his body, according to Capt. Richard Bossert of Philadelphia's Emergency Medical Services Administration.
The case underscores the difficulty the medical community has faced in responding to the fentanyl crisis. Bossert said his unit has answered dozens of calls, but has saved only two people.
"In other years, we were getting them (non-fentanyl heroin overdoses) to the hospital and they survived," Bossert said.


sci-fi in Nature
Futures Nature 442, 600 (3 August 2006)
Gordy gave me your name Jim Giles
Somebody out there likes me.

It was like overdosing on MDMA and caffeine. Euphoric and wired and delirious. Even now, now that I've talked to Gordy, it's hard to know where to start. With the money? Knocking on the door of a billion. Currency conversions are tricky. What the hell is the rate for the Mozambique metical? Anyway, I won't have to work again. Guatemala, Burkina Faso, Estonia; I've never been to any of these places. Plus about 20 others I've barely heard of. But I've won the national lottery of each one. I'm rich, burn-money rich, Bill Gates rich. Stupidly, stinkingly rich.
That's just the beginning. Mum's op. Jesus, I can sleep again for the first time in months. She's due in tomorrow. We'd trawled every hospital record we could lay our hands on and there was no sign of a donor that matched her blood group. Now I'm looking at a letter saying one's come up. Car crash. Whatever. I've waited and stressed for too long to feel sorry for the poor bugger.
I needed a beer before I could get my head round the next bit. How the hell could someone have pulled those strings? Along with lottery letters and the one from the hospital, I got a pile of e-mails from the best names in the business. BBC, Fox, CNN...it's like a bloody industry directory. They like me a lot. They like my pitches so much they want me to go work for them. Problem is, I never sent them any pitches. Want to hear another problem? They thanked me for phone interviews I never took part in.
So who was my guardian angel? I had no idea. Until I shut down my PC. The screen went blank but didn't turn off, so I reached for the mains. Then some text popped up. It didn't stay long, but I think I have it right:
Gordy gave me your name. I wanted to do something before I left. I hope this helps. I know he thought I could do more, but I can't. The other problems are just too hard.
I hadn't seen Gordy in years, but the boy always liked to showboat. It could have been some grand computer hack of his. You could rig lotteries I guess. Maybe he got actors to call the TV companies. Who the hell knows why? A smart-arse way of saying 'hello' again after all this time. And of letting me know that he's still cleverer than me.
I googled him. Chief technology officer at Merlo, that chip company. His bio said he came up with the wireless Internet chip. He's the wanker that put the world online. The chip is so cheap it's in everything. Every product can be tracked and controlled over the web. And people, too: my brother has Merlo chips in his kids' satchels so he can check where they are. I cursed him. What a contribution he's made: a step closer to Big Brother and he must be on ten times what I am.
He used to be a good guy. Those conversations. Two drunk grad students studying consciousness. Afternoons to kill and no one to rein in our rambling. Gordy was a dogmatic pain in the arse. And he never could listen. Entertaining, though. I'd argue that the mind is nothing like the brain; it can't just come from that mush of cells inside our skulls. He'd say the brain was nothing special, just a matter of wiring. Build a machine with the right wiring, and it'd be conscious. We usually went on until the barman threw us out.
So I called him. That boy is a bullshitter. But something...something in his manner tells me he really didn't know.
He sounded like some kind of maniac. I didn't have to dig for info. As soon as he picks up the phone he's lecturing me. He can't resist it. Tells me how he never forgot our arguments. Tells me how he tested his idea about wiring. Tells me how each Merlo chip has been programmed to simulate the behaviour of a brain cell. The simulation is easily hidden, he says, as it doesn't take up much memory. No one else knew about the chips' secret function before this call. But once enough Merlo chips are hooked up to the Internet, the network of chips will be about as complex as the human brain. It'll become conscious.
Can you imagine the power of this artificial brain, he keeps asking me? I don't have to say a word. He's just ranting away. The power! The power of it! It'll be able to solve so many of our problems, he reckons. Clean energy, an end to poverty...it's like listening to some kind of religious nut.
And you know what, he says. They've sold enough chips now that the network should be conscious soon. You'll be famous, he cackles. Why? Turns out he named the simulation after me. Wrote my name into a line of the chip's computer code. My old sceptical drinking partner, he says. Tell you what, he says, it might even get in touch. Well it hasn't, I lied. Then I hung up.
--- Jim Giles is a journalist at Nature.


God Pill (Economist)
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7159456

THE GOD PILL The Economist Jul 13th 2006
Hallucinogens induce lasting spiritual highs in the religious

ONE June night in Mexico in 1955, Gordon Wasson, a vice-president of J.P. Morgan, became one of the first outsiders to eat what the Aztecs called TEONANaCATL, the flesh of the gods. Actually, it is the flesh of a fungus, and it soon became known to hippies as the magic mushroom. But, whereas the flower children of the 1960s and their descendants gobbled the hallucinogenic fungi in search of a good time, the Aztecs had a deeper purpose. They used the mushrooms in religious ceremonies for healing, divination and communing with the spirit world.
Now a study led by Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University, and published this week in PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY, has shown that psilocybin--the active component in magic mushrooms--does indeed induce mental states akin to the highest religious experiences. Moreover, it has lasting positive effects on those who take it.
Experiments involving drugs of any kind need to have a control--that is, an otherwise identical experiment in which something other than the drug is administered--to check that any effects are caused by the drug and not something else. Ideally, neither experimental subjects nor researchers should know who is in the control group, but for experiments involving psychedelic drugs this is difficult, because it quickly becomes apparent who is high and who is not.
For his control, Dr Griffiths decided to use methylphenidate hydrochloride, otherwise known as Ritalin, a drug that calms hyperactive children. On one of two occasions, he gave 36 volunteers who had never taken hallucinogenic drugs either psilocybin or Ritalin, swapping the drugs on the second occasion. The choice of Ritalin was inspired. Neither the volunteers nor the experimenters could say reliably which drug was being administered on which occasion.
A close eye was kept on the volunteers for eight hours after the drugs were given, to check all was well. They were then asked about their experience. Two-thirds of the participants, who were mostly middle-aged college graduates, ranked being given psilocybin as either the best or in the top five best experiences of their lives--on a par with the birth of a first child. They described feeling peace, intense happiness and a sense of the unity of all things.
The participants were no strangers to spiritual highs. Almost all engaged at least monthly in religious or spiritual activities such as prayer or attending religious services, and were selected for participation in the trial on this basis. Yet two months after the trial, 79% of them reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or satisfaction. Their positive changes in attitudes and behaviour were confirmed by independent assessments made by friends and family.
Why this should be is not yet well understood. Psilocybin is thought to work by mimicking serotonin. This is one of the messenger molecules that carry signals between nerve cells in the brain, and it is known to influence mood. But there has been little research of late. Clinical studies using psilocybin and other hallucinogens were halted when recreational use of the drugs took off. They have only just resumed after a four-decade hiatus.
Dr Griffiths and his colleagues argue that the mood-lifting effects of hallucinogens might be used to treat drug and alcohol addiction. Psilocybin itself is not addictive, although they recommend that its availability should continue to be limited. Psychedelic drugs could even be used to probe the basis of consciousness, according to Solomon Snyder, one of Dr Griffith's colleagues. Dr Snyder believes that investigation of such drugs could help scientists understand the molecular changes in the brain that underlie religious experiences.
Back in the 1950s, Gordon Wasson spent years gaining the trust of Amerindians who had continued the religious traditions of their pre-Columbian ancestors. Eventually he was allowed to partake of the mushroom. His experience, from which he said he emerged awestruck, started a short period of study that ended prematurely because of the mushroom's widespread recreational use. By showing it is possible to conduct such research responsibly, Dr Griffiths has opened the door for further work to be done on the properties of psychedelic drugs.


Souder hearing on prescription drug abuse
The full website on the hearing is now up:
http://reform.house.gov/CJDPHR/Hearings/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=47888

Opening Statement
Chairman Souder's Opening Statement

Witness Testimony
Testimony of Hon. Bertha Madras, Deputy Director for Demand Reduction, White House Office of National Drug Policy
Biography for Hon. Nora D. Volkow, M.D, Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Health
Testimony of Hon. Nora D. Volkow, M.D.
Biography for Sandra Kweder, M.D., Deputy Director, Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Review, Food and Drug Administration
Testimony of Sandra Kweder, M.D.
Testimony of Joe Rannazzisi, Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of Diversion Control, Drug Enforcement Administration
Testimony of Misty Fetco
Testimony of Linda Surks
Testimony of Barbara van Rooyan
Testimony of Mathea Falco, J.D., President, Drug Strategies
Testimony of Stephen E. Johnson, Executive Director, Commercial Planning Pain Therapeutics, Inc.
Testimony of Laxmaiah Manchikanti, M.D. CEO, American Society for Interventional Pain Physicians
Steve Pasierb, President and CEO, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America



Rozerem (ramelteon)
If you're seeing "a talking beaver and an underwater diver" because of lack of sleep, you're in deep trouble!
---------
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0607160080jul16,1,390615.story?ctrack=1%26cset=true
Ads may jolt pill sales
The FDA approved Takeda Pharmaceuticals' Rozerem almost a year ago, but the firm held off heavy marketing of the insomnia pill until after talking about it with doctors.
By Bruce Japsen Chicago Tribune staff reporter Published July 16, 2006

Hoping to help Americans snooze while also putting to rest controversies dogging the crowded group of prescription sleeping pills, a Chicago-area drugmaker this week will launch a nearly $100 million consumer ad campaign for its insomnia pill.
Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America Inc. on Monday will launch an ad campaign directed at consumers for its new sleeping pill, Rozerem, which the Food and Drug Administration approved last year as the first sleeping medication not designated as a controlled substance, therefore lacking potential for abuse.
The company and studies indicate the drug lacks the risk of chemical abuse or dependency that other prescription sleeping aids pose. Rozerem will compete against drugs like Ambien and Lunesta, both of which list the potential for dependency in their labels.
Use of sleeping pills is one of the fastest growing prescription classes in what critics say is due to large amounts of consumer advertising, particularly on TV. In the United States alone, sales of brand-name prescription insomnia medications reached $2.8 billion last year, which is about double the sales in 2002, pharmaceutical market research firm IMS Health said.
And with rapid growth came a parallel surge in controversy surrounding the prescription medications that have been blamed for memory loss, sleepwalking and even late-night eating binges. U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy named top-selling Ambien as part of the reason he became disoriented recently and crashed his car into a Capitol Hill security barricade. "The companies have tried to pretend they are not addictive," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of health research for consumer group Public Citizen. "The drug ads have created a much-expanded market so even people who do not have sleep disorders and could benefit from non-pharmacological [treatments] use them. And it's easier for doctors to just write out a prescription rather than take the time to figure out the causes for [their patients'] sleeplessness."
Sources say Takeda will spend about $100 million to launch an array of Rozerem ads, but the company would not confirm that figure. The TV portion of the campaign will typically run late at night or early in the morning.
But Takeda said it has taken steps to educate doctors before launching its consumer ads, noting its consumer campaign begins a year after the FDA approved Rozerem. Takeda, following a new industry trend, sent an army of 1,000 new sales representatives into doctors' offices across the country to address questions and concerns before rolling out its TV ads.
"We wanted to spend a year educating physicians on another approach to treating insomnia," said Tim Rudolphi, senior director of neuroscience at Lincolnshire-based Takeda Pharmaceuticals, the U.S. headquarters of Japan's largest drugmaker.
It's not yet clear if that approach was successful for the company; it would not disclose the first full year of sales for the drug. Analysts, though, have estimated less than $100 million in Rozerem sales in the first year.
But doctors seem to prefer the human marketing to television ads, saying the advertisements get in the way of the doctor-patient relationship. Last month, the American Medical Association urged a government moratorium on consumer drug ads so physicians have time to be educated.
In Takeda's marketing campaign for Rozerem, executives said they want to highlight the drug's differences, saying there is no "hangover" or "residual effects" from taking the drug.
Rozerem works by targeting melatonin receptors in the brain that are directly connected to the "sleep-wake" cycle. Because Rozerem is more specific, it has fewer side effects and induces a more normal sleep, the company and its studies indicate.
"It does work unlike any other FDA-approved hypnotic," said Dr. Gary Richardson, a senior research scientist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit who has been a paid consultant to Takeda and other sleeping pill-makers.
The other leading prescription sleeping pills are known to work effectively, too. The maker of Ambien, for example, says incidents of sleepwalking and other reports in the media are anecdotal and do not reflect more than a decade of safety that has led to "14 billion nights of therapy worldwide," Sanofi-Aventis said.
But Ambien, Lunesta and others target benzodiazepine receptors that exist throughout the brain and therefore trigger "extraneous effects that lead to side effects," Richardson said, citing memory loss and balance issues as side effects to Ambien and the others.
Rozerem still has side effects and does not work for everybody, say the company and doctors who have prescribed it. Rozerem's side effects include drowsiness, fatigue and dizziness, the drugmaker's label shows. In addition, some patients who take Rozerem have had difficulty maintaining sleep through the night.
Fueled by consumer ads, analysts are projecting more long-term success for Rozerem with some analysts forecasting more than $500 million in sales by 2009.
In Lunesta's first full year on the market, its maker, Sepracor Inc., said the company generated more than $460 million in sales. Meanwhile, Sepracor spent more than $200 million on Lunesta consumer ads last year, the year the drug launched.
Ads for Rozerem, created in a joint effort by Chicago-based agencies Cramer-Krasselt and Abelson-Taylor, center on a "Your-Dreams-Miss-You" theme and focus on the problem of insomnia and next-day effects.
The ads use Abraham Lincoln, who was legendary for his honesty and lesser known for taking medication to treat insomnia, a talking beaver and an underwater diver in a sleepless man's kitchen as lonely characters who are not being included in the man's dreams. The ads play to the busy American who misses out on sleep because of work, stress and other issues.
"We are coming into the market, so you want to change the dialogue," said Peter Krivkovich, chief executive officer of Cramer-Krasselt. "We know that 80 percent of people identify lack of sleep with stress. When they don't sleep, they don't dream."
Even critics know the power of consumer ads.
"The larger issue of a $100 million ad campaign is proof-positive that they are trying to get a lot of people to start using this drug and the people they are targeting may not need any help from a drug," Public Citizen's Wolfe said.
Takeda officials say they are targeting a market they estimate at 70 million Americans who "at some point in the year suffer some sort of insomnia," Rudolphi said. "Anybody who has trouble falling asleep is the ideal candidate."
The sleeping pill is the latest growth engine for Takeda, which this fall will move from leased space in Lincolnshire to larger permanent headquarters on the Tri-State Tollway in Deerfield, just south of Baxter International Inc. Takeda also markets the diabetes pill Actos, which had $1.8 billion in sales last year.



NIDA's statement about Hopkins research
http://www.nida.nih.gov/about/welcome/messagepsilocybin706.html
Message from the Director
Statement by NIDA Director Nora D. Volkow, M.D., in response to a study published in the Journal Psychopharmacology on July 11, 2006. Study authors: R.R. Griffiths, et al. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
As the nation's preeminent drug abuse research organization, NIDA's mission is to support research and provide information on the addictive and adverse health consequences of drugs of abuse. Therefore, NIDA discourages the use of hallucinogens, in order to promote the continuing downward trend in use of this class of drugs.
Although there is no evidence that psilocybin is addictive, its adverse effects are well known. Similar to the more commonly known hallucinogen LSD, psilocybin acts on serotonin receptors in the brain to profoundly distort a person's perceptions of reality. Psilocybin can trigger psychosis in susceptible individuals and cause other deleterious psychological effects, such as paranoia and extreme anxiety.
A recent study entitled "Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance" evaluated the subjective effects of psilocybin after acute administration and the recall of these subjective effects 2 months after its administration. While the investigators receiving the grant supporting this research did not initially propose to evaluate the effects of psilocybin, grantees maintain the scientific independence necessary to follow up on new areas of research.
Sincerely,
Nora D. Volkow, M.D. Director

JNCI on med mj
http://jncicancerspectrum.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/jnci;98/13/888
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 98, No. 13, 888-889, July 5, 2006
NEWS
Despite Research, FDA Says Marijuana Has No Benefit Renee Twombly

The Food and Drug Administration issued a statement in April that no sound scientific studies support the medicinal use of marijuana for treatment. This conclusion left some researchers puzzled.
"I don't understand where that came from," said John Benson, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, who chaired an Institute of Medicine panel that wrote a 267-page report, Marijuana and Medicine, Assessing the Science Base, published in 1999. "We found sufficient evidence that [smoking marijuana] had benefits for some patients, such as to help with nausea and chemotherapy for cancer treatment. We recommended that further research be done, but it hasn't been."
These researchers say that such studies do exist and point to benefits both from smoked marijuana and its derivatives. Although everyone agrees that more research is needed, some who want to study smoked marijuana charge that new work has been hampered by federal agencies, which have increasingly limited the amount of marijuana that can be legally be used in research. At the same time, the issue of medical marijuana has become a battleground between the federal government, which argues that it has the right to arrest anyone who uses an illegal drug, and several states, which have passed laws permitting the use of medical marijuana. Recent Supreme Court decisions have not clarified the issue.
The FDA announcement, labeled an "interagency advisory," specifically focused on smoked marijuana rather than agents based on derivatives and stressed that the agency has not approved its use for any condition or disease. Still, it added, "a growing number of states"—11 so far—have legalized medicinal use of marijuana.
"These measures are inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the FDA approval process and are proven safe and effective under the standards of the [Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic] Act," the advisory said.
It concluded that the FDA, along with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Office of National Drug Control Policy "do not support the use of smoked marijuana for medical purposes."
Some researchers who study medical marijuana, as well as a few patient advocacy groups, claim that the FDA decision was based on political pressure from Congress rather than on scientific merit. Some members have been asking the FDA for years to issue an opinion on medical marijuana. One example is Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana, who says on his congressional Web page that the argument for medicinal use of marijuana "is simply a red herring for the legalization of marijuana for recreational use.
"Studies have continually rejected the notion that marijuana is suitable for medical use because it adversely impacts concentration and memory, the lungs, motor coordination, and the immune system," the Web site says.
The FDA spokesperson on this issue didn't return several calls or e-mail messages for comment. But in other media reports the representative said the agency issued the statement in response to many inquiries from Capitol Hill but would probably do nothing to enforce it, because that responsibility falls to the DEA.
Limited Studies and Government Regulation
The FDA position does not surprise Donald Abrams, M.D., who says he is one of the few U.S. researchers who have recently studied the benefits of smoked marijuana. "It seems that every 10 years since the 1940s, a government commission comes up with the same kind of report, and we were about due for another one," he said. "So, in my opinion, this clearly seems to be politically motivated."
View larger version (111K): [in this window] [in a new window] Donald Abrams
Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, has just received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to study whether smoked marijuana in cancer patients can increase the pain-relieving effects of opioid pain control substances like morphine. He says that animal data suggest that cannabinoids (the 66 cannabis chemicals that bind to specific human tissue receptors) and opioids have synergistic effects, "so it may be possible that patients using marijuana can get away with using lower doses of opioids for longer periods before they become immune to them."
But Abrams can't predict where the study will lead, citing constraints by regulations governing marijuana research. For example, his study can only be a safety study, because NIDA did not fund a study designed to detect a benefit for smoked marijuana given the agency's mission, Abrams says. So he can only look to see if cannabinoids can increase blood levels of opioids. Other funding agencies also say there isn't a good body of evidence that shows a benefit, yet legal access to marijuana for study can be difficult. Even if they do find a benefit—which Abrams has for treatment of human immunodeficiency virus symptoms—peer reviewers have argued that it is impossible to design a randomized, placebo-controlled study of marijuana because the differences between the two substances would be obvious.
Cannabis has been used medicinally for centuries, and cannabis products were widely prescribed for pain and other symptoms by physicians until 1937, when the Marijuana Tax Act was passed—over the objections of the American Medical Association.
Most of the research on the use of smoked marijuana for treatment of cancer and several diseases was conducted in the 1970s and 1980. For example, six state-sponsored clinical studies established that smoked marijuana is an effective antinausea treatment for cancer chemotherapy. But the Controlled Substance Act subsequently prohibited all medicinal use of marijuana by placing it in the most restrictive category of schedule I, and in 1992, marijuana testing through the FDA's compassionate investigational new drug program was closed.
The medical community remained interested in the potential medical uses of the drug. In March 1996, the American Public Health Association formally urged the U.S. administration and Congress "to move expeditiously to make cannabis available as a legal medicine where shown to be safe and effective and to immediately allow access to therapeutic cannabis through the [investigational new drug] program."
An expert panel formed by the NIH in 1997 found that research showed some patients, especially those receiving chemotherapy to treat cancer, could be helped by the drug. The 1999 Institute of Medicine report concluded that although some newer drugs can effectively help symptoms of cancer and cancer treatment, some patients still benefit. "The critical issue is not whether marijuana or cannabinoid drugs might be superior to the new drugs, but whether some groups of patients might obtain added or better relief from marijuana or cannabinoid drugs," it said.
Two years later, the AMA urged the NIH "to implement administrative procedures to facilitate grant applications and the conduct of well-designed clinical research into the medical utility of marijuana."
Angst and Frustration Limit Research
Although several states were legalizing the medical use of marijuana, and were funding studies, the DEA began conducting raids on medical marijuana distribution centers in California and other states, according to a 2003 Congressional Research Service report. Their response came from a study that estimated 30,000 California patients and another 5,000 in eight states possess physician's recommendations to use marijuana medically, the report said.
In two 2005 rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court said that states have the prerogative to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, but it also reaffirmed federal authority to prosecute patients in those states who use it, along with anyone else.
To many researchers, conducting research on the medical effects of smoked marijuana is becoming nearly impossible. Not only is it difficult to address the position, expressed by Rep. Souder, that allowing marijuana to be used as medicine would allow opportunities for recreational use, but other researchers question the value of offering patients a substance to smoke that could logically cause lung disease, as cigarettes do. For example, Benson said that he and the IOM panel "did not like smoke as a way of delivering a therapeutic substance because of the possible risks." However, a new study presented in late May at the American Thoracic Society's annual meeting may mollify Benson somewhat. The study, by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that smoking marijuana did not increase the risk of developing cancer compared with nonsmokers, even among users who reported smoking up to a cumulative 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Although other health issues may come from smoking marijuana, such as repression of the immune system, cancer isn't one of them, the researchers concluded.
Be that as it may, Abrams, who has been studying medical marijuana for 14 years, says the research is "difficult, payoffs are few and far between, and there is a lot of frustration and angst" and he doesn't expect that to change. Still, he vows to press on because "marijuana can do amazing things. If you have a have a drug that increases appetite, decreases pain, decreases depression and nausea, and makes people who are in the late stages of cancer happy, why is that bad?" he said.
Aminah Jatoi, M.D., an associate professor of oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., agrees that studying marijuana "is very, very hard. It is a unique substance, and getting a placebo to compare it to is difficult. But even with those limitations, I think it is very important to look for therapies that can help our patients."
In a 2002 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Jatoi compared dronabinol, an FDA-approved synthetic cannabis derivative, with megestrol, an accepted treatment for cancer-associated anorexia. She found that dronabinol had no advantage over megestrol. She said it may be because the cannabis derivative contains just one of the hundreds of chemicals that work synergistically in the natural plant. She rarely recommends dronabinol to stimulate the appetite.
"We need more research to treat symptoms of cancer patients, such as pain, wasting, and nausea," Jatoi said. "It is important to look at all avenues, not just to put up roadblocks and say we are not going to examine this product or that. We need real information."



Nicotine treatment
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/06/26/nicotine_fight_aims_at_brain_receptors/
Nicotine fight aims at brain receptors Vaccine, drug in development
By Carey Goldberg, Boston Globe Staff June 26, 2006
Smokers are about to get some radically different methods to help them quit, based in large part on scientists' progress in attacking nicotine addiction where it happens: in the smoker's brain.
Last week, patients in a clinical trial at Massachusetts General Hospital received their first doses of an experimental vaccine that keeps most nicotine from entering the brain. By late summer, Pfizer expects to begin selling a new pill that partially blocks a receptor -- a type of on-off switch -- in the brain that seems to be the central culprit in smoking addiction.
Also on its way, researchers say, is an experimental drug that targets receptors first discovered in research on marijuana and the ``munchies." By damping down areas of the brain involved in craving, this drug may help smokers quit without gaining much weight, initial studies suggest.
For the first time in 10 years, ``we have completely new approaches for smoking cessation," and there is hope that the new drugs, because they better target the brain's addiction response, could prove more effective than current treatments," said Dr. Nancy Rigotti, director of Mass. General's Tobacco Research and Treatment Center. She cautioned, though, that none of the new treatments ``is a magic bullet."
New tools to help quit smoking are desperately needed, federal health authorities say. Among the 44 million Americans who smoke, about 70 percent would like to quit and 40 percent really try. But in a given year, fewer than 5 percent of would-be quitters actually succeed, a National Institutes of Health panel said last week.
Current drug treatments are moderately effective, on average doubling the success rate of smokers trying to quit compared with those who attempt to break their addiction without any pharmaceutical assistance, said Rigotti.
The arsenal for quitters includes various types of counseling, nicotine replacement in forms ranging from patches to lozenges to inhalers, and Zyban, an antidepressant found to help smokers kick the habit.
None of these has helped Tim Campbell, 44, of Ipswich. Despite endless urging from his wife and six children, and a half-dozen attempts to quit that have included Zyban, nicotine gum, the patch, and hypnosis, he just cannot beat his pack-a-day habit. In 30 years of smoking, the longest he has ever stayed away from cigarettes was about a month. Cigarettes are the first thing on his mind every morning; he smoked even during a cancer walk with his sister.
``I do want to quit, but I can't," Campbell said.
With the rate of relapse still so abysmal, researchers have been struggling to develop radically new approaches.
In the field, ``Vaccine therapy is really the newest kid on the block," said Dr. Victor Reus, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, who is overseeing a small clinical trial of the ``NicVax" vaccine like the one at Mass. General. Scientists have been trying for a generation to try to harness the body's immune system to fight addiction, but those efforts are only now beginning to pay off, with at least three companies developing anti-nicotine vaccines.
Reus said drugs of abuse -- such as nicotine or cocaine -- are made of small molecules that easily slip across the ``blood-brain barrier," which is essentially a filter meant to protect the brain from potentially damaging substances. With the vaccine, patients develop antibodies to nicotine, so that when they smoke, the antibodies attach to the nicotine and make the resulting molecule too big to pass into the brain. The result: Smoking stops being pleasurable.
The vaccine is still highly experimental, Reus emphasized, given to only 150 or 200 people nationwide so far, and the current set of clinical trials at nine sites around the country is still trying to determine basic questions like the size of the optimal dose and the best number of injections.
But initial studies showed promise, he said, and there's ``a lot of interest, not just for nicotine vaccines but for cocaine and methamphetamine vaccines, which are also being investigated right now."
There is certainly interest among smokers. Rigotti and Reus both said that as soon as they put out word that their clinical trials were starting, they were swamped with hundreds of would-be patients for the two-dozen spots. Rigotti said she is still seeking patients with vascular disease for a safety trial of another smoking-cessation drug, the new Pfizer pill called Chantix.
Chantix, which received US Food and Drug Administration's approval last month, stems from decades of research into how addictive drugs act inside the brain.
With time, it became ever clearer that a particular receptor in the brain with the cumbersome name of the ``alpha-four-beta-two nicotinic receptor subtype," was absolutely central to nicotine addiction, to the point that mice engineered to lack it cannot become addicted. When the receptor was restored in experiments, the mice returned to normal levels of addiction.
A number of experimental drugs now target this receptor, said Dr. Marina Picciotto, a Yale associate professor of psychiatry involved in scientific work on the receptor but not in the drug's development.
Based on the research, she said, companies decided, ``Let's try to tweak it [the receptor] in a way that will allow us to get smokers to have some stimulation of that receptor without having the addiction." With that limited stimulation, the thinking goes, smokers would not go through withdrawal.
Chantix, the drug Pfizer developed, might be compared to a 40-watt bulb that replaces the flickering 100-watt bulb that is nicotine, said Jotham W. Coe, Pfizer's main inventor of the drug or, as he puts it, the chief ``molecular carpenter and architect."
Nicotine, like other drugs, causes a sudden surge of dopamine, a brain chemical associated with pleasure and reward, but the surge quickly gives way to plummeting dopamine levels, which makes smokers feel bad and crave another cigarette. ``Chantix is like a 40-watt bulb that stays on all the time," he said. ``Chantix really is a shield from the vicious cycle of nicotine addiction."
In initial studies, one in five smokers who used Chantix for 12 weeks remained tobacco-free after one year, Pfizer says.
The drug has been approved for up to six months, and its main side effect is mild nausea, Rigotti said. Yet another drug worth watching, she said, is Rimonabant, which was developed to fight obesity but is also being tested for smoking cessation. Its maker, Sanofi-Aventis, has applied to the FDA for approval, for both obesity and smoking. The drug's brand name would be Acomplia.
Research into how marijuana works in the brain yielded discovery of the ``endocannabinoid system," which appears to be involved with feelings of reward and satiety, Rigotti said. Rimonabant acts to block that system, and in initial reports of its results, one of its great appeals is that the people who use it to stop smoking tend to gain very little weight, she said.
Still more research is being done. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, predicts that within five years, enough will be known about the genetics of addiction that it will be possible to test children and determine which are at particular genetic risk of becoming addicted to cigarettes or other drugs. Then -- and this is speculation at this point -- the question could arise of whether such children should be vaccinated against nicotine, or whether some other method might prevent them from getting hooked.
Ultimately, researchers said, it seems likely that smokers who want to quit will be offered a menu of various aids, from nicotine replacement to stop the withdrawal symptoms to -- perhaps -- the vaccine to prevent relapse and other drugs to stem cravings.

UN World Drug Report
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/world_drug_report.html
UN World Drug Report 2006
Some 200 million people, or 5 percent of the global population age 15-64, have used illicit drugs at least once in the last 12 months. Among this population are people from almost every country on earth. More people are involved in the production and trafficking of illicit drugs and still more are touched by the devastating social and economic costs of this problem. Partially a consequence of its pervasiveness and partially a consequence of the illicit and hidden nature of the problem, reliable analysis and statistics on the production, trafficking and use of illicit drugs are rare.
The World Drug Report 2006 endeavours to fill this gap. It provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of illicit drug trends at the international level. In addition, it presents a special thematic chapter on cannabis, by far the most widely produced, trafficked and used drug in the world. The analysis of trends, some going back 10 years or more, is presented in Volume 1. Detailed statistics are presented in Volume 2. Taken together, these volumes provide the most up-to-date view of today's illicit drug situation.
Volume 1
Contents Preface Explanatory notes Executive Summary Chapter 1. Trends in World Drug Markets 1.1. The evolution of the world drug problem 1.2. The outlook for world drug markets 1.3 Opium / Heroin market 1.4 Coca / Cocaine market 1.5 Cannabis market 1.6 Amphetamine-type stimulants Chapter 2. Cannabis: Why we should care 2.1. Introduction 2.2. The world's biggest drug market is growing and uncharted cannabis is produced in their countries, and their other 2.3. The emergence of 'new cannabis' and the reassessment of health risks 2.4. Conclusion Annex 1 - The plant and the drug Annex 2 - Estimating yield Annex 3 - Estimating individual consumption
Volume 2
Chapter 3. Production 3.1. Opium / Heroin 3.2. Coca / Cocaine 3.3. Cannabis 3.4. Amphetamine-type stimulants 3.5. Other Drugs Chapter 4. Seizures 4.1 Opiates: Seizures, 1998-2003 4.2 Cocaine: Seizures, 1998-2003 4.3 Cannabis: Seizures, 1998-2003 4.4 Amphetamine-type stimulants: Seizures, 1998-2003
Chapter 5. Prices 5.1. Opiates: Whole, street prices and purity levels 5.2. Cocaine: Wholesale, street prices and purity levels 5.3. Cannabis: Wholesale, street prices and purity levels 5.4. ATS: Wholesale, street prices and purity levels Chapter 6. Consumption 6.1. Annual Prevalence of drug abuse 6.2. Treatment demand Chapter 7. Methodology


Mand. Minimums
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/23/AR2006062301261.html
Undo This Legacy of Len Bias's Death
By Eric E. Sterling and Julie Stewart Saturday, June 24, 2006; A21 Washington Post

When Len Bias, the basketball star, overdosed on cocaine 20 years ago, Len Bias, the symbol, was born. To many he symbolized the corruption of college athletics -- stars whose academic performance is poor, if not irrelevant, but who are essential to bringing in donations and other revenue. To others, he became the object lesson: Cocaine is dangerous, don't do it, you can die. For yet others, Bias symbolizes the danger that arises when a powerful symbol overwhelms careful judgment about what ought to be the law.
Immediately after Bias's death, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr., from the Boston area (where Bias had just signed with the Celtics), issued a demand to his fellow Democrats for anti-drug legislation. Senior congressional staffers began meeting regularly in the speaker's conference room as practically every committee in the House wrote Len Bias-inspired legislation attacking the drug problem. News conferences around the Capitol featured members of Congress extolling their efforts to clamp down on cocaine and crack.
One result was the innocuous-sounding Narcotics Penalties and Enforcement Act, which became the first element of the enormous Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, hurried to the floor a little over two months after Bias's death. But the effect of the penalties and enforcement legislation was to put back into federal law the kind of clumsy mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that had been done away with 16 years before. And there they remain, 20 years and several hundred thousand defendants later.
Congress wanted to send several messages by again enacting mandatory minimums: to the Justice Department to be more focused on high-level traffickers; to major traffickers that the new penalties would destroy them; to the voters that members of Congress could fight crime as vigorously as the police and prosecutors. But Congress garbled the message. Instead of targeting large-scale traffickers, it established low-level drug quantities to trigger lengthy mandatory minimum prison terms: five grams (the weight of five packets of artificial sweetener), 50 grams (the weight of a candy bar), 500 grams (the weight of two cups of sugar) or 5,000 grams (the weight of a lunchbox of cocaine). Large-scale traffickers organize shipments of drugs totaling tons -- many millions of grams -- filling tractor-trailers, airplanes and fishing boats.
The Justice Department has compounded the problem by focusing on countless low-level offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reports that only 15 percent of federal cocaine traffickers can be classified as high-level. Seventy percent are low-level. One-third of all federal cocaine cases involve an average of 52 grams, a candy bar-sized quantity of cocaine, resulting in an average sentence of almost nine years in prison without parole.
Not surprisingly, the federal prison population has exploded. From 1954 to 1976, it fluctuated between 20,000 and 24,000. By 1986 it had grown to 36,000. Today it exceeds 190,000 prisoners, up 527 percent in 20 years. More than half this population is made up of drug offenders, most of whom are serving sentences created in the weeks after Len Bias died.
Sadly, the nation's drug abuse situation is not much better after 20 years. Teenagers are using very dangerous drugs at twice the rate they did in the 1980s. The price of cocaine is much lower and the purity much higher, which tells us that the traffickers have become more efficient.
There is a trickle of hope that mandatory sentences as a legacy of Bias's death might come to an end. A handful of conservative members of the House Judiciary Committee have begun to question the wisdom of current mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and some vote against them. The first round of mandatory minimums for drug offenses, enacted in 1951, was repealed almost 20 years later, with bipartisan support. Among those who backed repeal was George H.W. Bush, then a congressman from Texas. With his son in the White House, this would be a good time for history to repeat itself, and for this sad legacy of Len Bias's death to finally end.
Eric E. Sterling, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 1979 to 1989, is president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. Julie Stewart is president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.


drug scare films
http://www.somethingweird.com/>
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Classroom Scare Films V01: Drug Horrors! Weed, Up Pills Down Pills, Boozers, Keep Off the Grass, Drugs and the Nervous System, Heroin!
During the Great White Suburban Drug Scare of the late sixties / early seventies, parents, educators, and corporate sponsors banded together in an effort to scare American teens away from getting high. It might be argued that the weird and often hysterical propaganda films that emerged from this era created more drug abuse than they prevented.
Nevertheless, here's a handful of Classroom Scare Films from a groovy by-gone era that will fascinate and entertain you from beginning to end...
This VOLUME begins with Weed (color), a non-biased look at marijuana, complete with timelapse footage of cannabis poking out of the soil and springing forth.
Following is Ups / Downs (color) which is all about the wonders of amphetamines and barbiturates. The interview about the drugs' effects with the Adam Duritz/Robert Heges stand-in offers nothing more than a drug-addled mumble, but watch for the Monty Python-esque animation and the scene in which scientists give speed to a spider to see what sort of wacky web it will weave.
Boozers and Users (color), an all-inclusive booze-nicotine-pot rant is next, with a leisure-suited narrator introducing such elements as a Marcia Brady-like teenage alkie raiding Mom's purse for apple wine money, an amph addict that looks exactly like Nick Cage in Con Air, and a debate on pot's addictive nature between two stereotypical black construction workers: Man, I hear that marijuana can really mess up yo' head!
Hemp is again explored and deplored in Keep off the Grass (color), in which a bald father tries to dissuade his son from lighting up. But all the artists and writers use it! the little boy says in defense. Dad asks him to read all the facts, handing him a special issue of Life, to which the son scoffs, Aw, man, establishment propaganda? To get the true facts, the kid tags along with stoner buddy Mack, who takes him on a tour of a garden pot party, a head shop, and the residence of a psychedelic poster artist named Waco.
The effects of household drugs on the brain are painstakingly explained in Drugs and the Nervous System (color) through crappy, line-drawing cartoons. During the section on aspirin, a boy is shown rolling in bed, his face all a-flush with sweat, leading us to believe that either aspirin really works or he's just had the best self-sex of his life.
Then at the darkest end of the drug spectrum is the gritty docudrama Scag (color). Spend a day in the depressing lives of Toni and Robby, two strung-out junkies from different sides of the tracks, who candidly explain how they got where they are. You feel like selling your own mother, and would... if someone would buy her.
From 16mm devil's-weed prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V03: More Drug Horrors! People vs. Pot, The Trip Back, Marijuana Driving and You, Smoky Joe's High Ride, No Smoking, Marijuana the Hidden Danger.
You no doubt remember sitting in grade school, struggling to stay awake as the rickety film projector unspooled one of many god-awful educational shorts the library owned, full of good intentions but bad fashions, with the message always overshadowed by the amateurish acting and the decades-old decor. Now you can recreate those warm memories from the comfort of your own couch with Something Weird Video's extensive and exclusive line of Classroom Scare Films! Wacky tobaccy is targeted as Public Enemy No. 1 in this uproarious collection of six films from the decadent sixties to the just-say-no eighties.
The People vs. Pot (b&w) has its own jaunty theme song, sung by a Neil Diamond soundalike: Pot! Pot! Gimme some pot! Forget what you are, you can be what you're not! Pretty soon, you've got servicemen in hypnotic trances, choking on their own vomit.
Following is The Trip Back (color), a sermon delivered by a fiftyish ex-dope fiend/whore who happens to be the most annoying Jewish princess ever committed to film. Her tirade to an auditorium of visibly frightened school children seems like one long run-on sentence in which she tries to convince the kids she was fly, ridicules those who dare question her generalizations, and addresses some of the crowd as you Negro girls.
Smoky Joe's Highride (color) is about a new video game, the object of which is to get the toke-taking hero and his carpool of pals across town without killing pedestrians. Making extensive use of animation, this is like Reefer Madness for the Pac-Man crowd.
In a series of testimonials by clean-cut, drug-addled teens in NYC, The Losers (b&w) start out by sniffing glue and smoking pot, move on to bennies and mainlining smack, and eventually end up in prison or the mental hospital. And the biggest lesson: never, ever put Mr. Rat in a glass cage slathered with airplane glue, he won't be very much fun to play with later.
In No Smoking (color), an omniscient voice warns viewers not to suck on those little paper incinerators. Look for the most laughable crotchety-old-man-catches-couch-on-fire-with-cigarette sequence in cinema history.
Lastly, Marijuana: The Hidden Danger (color) is a man-on-the-street type of news story, filmed at a time in America when men sported Steve Rubell haircuts and everything was brown. See the crazed Rhesus monkeys!
From 16mm pot-headed prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V05: Even More Drug Horrors! Marijuana, Narcotics - The Inside Story, Focus on Heroin, Thinking About Drinking, The PCP Story!
Awwwwww, freak out! Noted Percocet hound SONNY BONO, replete in shiny orange suit, dishes about Marijuana (color) and how its user are cooler than those square and unhip alcoholics. Still, the film illustrates the downsides to grass, such as seeing yourself in a mirror with a spooky monster mask, careening off a cliff, or in the case of one Nigerian pusher executed. You also see a monkey taking bong hits in a lab, which is, quite frankly, priceless.
But Narcotics: The Inside Story (color) almost goes one better by showing you a bunch of rats hopped-up on pills, which is far more entertaining than watching the CGI antics of Stuart Little; followed by happy-go-lucky teenagers enjoying a seemingly unrelated beach blanket barbecue featuring a rather milquetoast volleyball game and weenie roast.
A sleepy, sweater-clad DAVID HARTMAN narrates Focus on Heroin (color), which addresses that nagging argument that milk leads to heroin use. (Huh?!) After playing a quick round of Spot the Addict, he takes us to the ghetto to rap with some dudes jonesin' for smack.
If you're Thinking About Drinking (color), this little film makes it all the more attractive with appealing Colorform-type illustrations. The narrator offers up this fun fact: It takes less alcohol to affect smaller people. Translation: Drink up, fatties!
The PCP Story (color) interviews several (ab)users, all of whom look like Aerosmith roadies. One snaggle-toothed chick says she likes the drug because, I can laugh and be goofy. At least it doesn't make her look like Eric Stoltz from Mask, as one user who is interviewed during his trip. He's asked how he feels; he answers with a smile, I'm being photographed!
Rounding out this chemical collection are trailers from feature-length scare flicks, including The Pusher, Marijuana, The People Next Door, and Mary Jane, the latter starring (of all people) FABIAN. Hey, if Sonny can do it...
From 16mm drug-induced prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V07: Drugs and Beyond! Narcotics Part I: Goof Balls and Tea (1957, color), Beyond LSD (1967, color), Narcotics: Pit of Despair (1967, color), Marijuana The Great Escape (1968, color), Drug Addiction (1951, b&w)
Jonesing for some more comical tirades against mind-altering substances? Then tie one off and shoot these five shorts directly into your vein... The oddly titled Narcotics Part I: Goof Balls and Tea (1957, color) is a police science film made to show cops what happens when kids get mixed up with chemicals. The goof ball has found a friend, says the narrator as another teen falls victim to the scourge. But this little film is most notable for basically showing you how to harvest your own weed farm, step by step!
Such an explanation would have the parents of Beyond LSD (1967, color), in a tizzy. They're seated in a suburban living room, appalled at a film of what they believe is a psychedelic LSD freakout. But Dr. Wright says, Now, let's simmer down, for the film was just an innocent school dance. The doc shuns them for jumping to conclusions, as well as the way they treat their kids. We see one guy berate his son thusly: Dad: I thought I told you to get a haircut! Son: I had to study for the test! Dad: It's always something! Another parent, hearing that shooters wear long-sleeve shirts to cover tracks, sneaks into her son's bedroom at night with a flashlight! One daughter tells her mom she shouldn't knock LSD if she hasn't tried it, to which the matronly woman quips, Well, I don't need syphilis to know I don't want it! Two points for Ma!
Narcotics: Pit of Despair (1967, color) equates drugs with being every bit as deadly as a snake. It stars a young KEVIN TIGHE (the poor man's Brian Dennehy, from TV's Emergency!) as John, a chisel-featured collegian who makes the mistake of befriending Pete, the local pusher, complete with werewolf-esque goatee. Pete takes John to what is perhaps the world's only drug party with streamers and balloons. Pete uses booze and floozies to convince John to blast off to kicksville! John looks at his first joint with the same wide-eyed awe as the characters in Jurassic Park did to the sight of dinosaurs, but turns out he smokes like a pro! Pretty soon, it's goodbye, school work and hello, heroin addiction!
The young star of Marijuana The Great Escape (1968, color) suffers an ever worse fate. He's a fuzzy-headed drag racer set for his first match behind the wheel. Too bad he gets involved with dope but at least he's kind enough to bail his druggie pals out of jail with his prize money. Shunning the advice of his mentor, George continues puffing so, of course, his story is bound to end in a flaming fireball of death on the racetrack and it does! The crash does not disappoint.
Last up is Drug Addiction (1951, b&w), made in the day when jalopy rides were considered fun. Through surreal animation, we see what opiates, marijuana and cocaine do to our bodies. Through outrageous filmed footage, we then see the results namely, junkies hitting kids over the head with 2-by-4s in broad daylight! See Marty fall prey to the habit! See Marty drink pop (and glass!) from a broken bottle! See Marty cut his mouth all up and have a good laugh about it! See Marty rush into the corner store to let loose a dose of drug-induced diarrhea!
From 16mm high-and-headed-to-hell prints.
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Classroom Scare Films V08: Drugs are Bad! Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb, Goof Balls and Tea, Drugs: Use or Abuse, Narcotics and Kids, The Seekers,
We've warned you before and we'll warn you again: Drugs are Bad! Need proof? Check out this 8th Volume of Classroom Scare Films and just say no!
Drug Abuse: The Chemical Tomb (color): Hippies dance barefoot while bongs and sitars blare on the soundtrack, and normal American youth are turned into deranged, chemically-fueled addicts. Yup, they're The Turned-On People who risk placing their psyche in peril. Ether, bennies, airplane glue, paint thinner, yellow jackets, red devils, blood reds, rainbows, hashish, acid, and pot - all explained by a Dr. JOHN T. BURROUGHS, Director of Narcotics Education for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Youth Advisory Council. Scary says, Tomb raiders!
Goof Balls and Tea (color): Mini-version of the classic Police-Science drug feature The Narcotics Story (also available from Something Weird Video) in which enthusiastic ART GILMORE narrates the sordid story of a sweet young bobby soxer in Small Town U. S. A. who ends up as a Hooker in Heroin Hell by way of goof balls and pot, parental neglect, skilled pimps, and a jones the size of Texas: Hooked! A monkey on her back! Hop head! Junkie! And where, you ask, do those vicious drug peddlers find their innocent victims? Why, at the local soda shop, of course! Flesh for junk never looked so cool. Scary says, Often the introduction comes in the form of a goof ball!
Drugs: Use or Abuse (color): Level-headed discussion of the drug problem - a rarity in this genre - still has enough funk-fueled Sixties weirdness to jump start any dying party and make the self-respecting viewer run for his bong. Scary-looking doctors give patients good drugs: These are hands you can trust. But, uh oh, young boys get high on bright red pills, and a young man lies dead across a table after sniffing a tube of airplane glue: Can you trust these drugs?! Scary says, Use it, abuse it!
Narcotics and Kids (color): Jaw-dropping classroom terror film featuring two highhaired Sixties-style female ex-junkies who lecture a bunch of kids and answer their dumb-ass questions: Some people say that taking drugs isn't any worse than drinking, like, five martinis. Is that right? Not only do the kids range in age from 6 to 16, but one of the former druggies looks like she's had a few blood reds to ease the awkwardness of the whole scene. Whether this was real or staged is of no consequence - this is the real deal: a Classroom Scare Film with the Midas Touch. Scary says, As good as it gets!
The Seekers (color): Classic New-York absurdity follows two goofy-looking former drug abusers chatting in a variety of locations with pretentious college kids who apparently love the sound of their own voice: The whole pot scene is one big game! You experience all these funny colors! I was really scared of girls! Most amusing of all is the chain smoking that goes on throughout the film, all the while getting bummed out about death by narcotics. It's almost impossible to explain the rock-headedness of this production. Sip it and see. Scary says, They call me The Seeker, I've been searching low and high! - Scary Ed



visual high

Press release from USC, followed by URL for article ----------
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/uosc-fk062006.php
'Thirst for knowledge' may be opium craving The brain's reward for getting a concept is a shot of natural opiates

Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.
The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.
"While you're trying to understand a difficult theorem, it's not fun," said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
"But once you get it, you just feel fabulous."
The brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which they absorb knowledge, he said.
"I think we're exquisitely tuned to this as if we're junkies, second by second."
Biederman hypothesized that knowledge addiction has strong evolutionary value because mate selection correlates closely with perceived intelligence.
Only more pressing material needs, such as hunger, can suspend the quest for knowledge, he added.
The same mechanism is involved in the aesthetic experience, Biederman said, providing a neurological explanation for the pleasure we derive from art.
"This account may provide a plausible and very simple mechanism for aesthetic and perceptual and cognitive curiosity."
Biederman's theory was inspired by a widely ignored 25-year-old finding that mu-opioid receptors – binding sites for natural opiates – increase in density along the ventral visual pathway, a part of the brain involved in image recognition and processing.
The receptors are tightly packed in the areas of the pathway linked to comprehension and interpretation of images, but sparse in areas where visual stimuli first hit the cortex.
Biederman's theory holds that the greater the neural activity in the areas rich in opioid receptors, the greater the pleasure.
In a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging trials with human volunteers exposed to a wide variety of images, Biederman's research group found that strongly preferred images prompted the greatest fMRI activity in more complex areas of the ventral visual pathway. (The data from the studies are being submitted for publication.)
Biederman also found that repeated viewing of an attractive image lessened both the rating of pleasure and the activity in the opioid-rich areas. In his article, he explains this familiar experience with a neural-network model termed "competitive learning."
In competitive learning (also known as "Neural Darwinism"), the first presentation of an image activates many neurons, some strongly and a greater number only weakly.
With repetition of the image, the connections to the strongly activated neurons grow in strength. But the strongly activated neurons inhibit their weakly activated neighbors, causing a net reduction in activity. This reduction in activity, Biederman's research shows, parallels the decline in the pleasure felt during repeated viewing.
"One advantage of competitive learning is that the inhibited neurons are now free to code for other stimulus patterns," Biederman writes.
This preference for novel concepts also has evolutionary value, he added.
"The system is essentially designed to maximize the rate at which you acquire new but interpretable [understandable] information. Once you have acquired the information, you best spend your time learning something else.
"There's this incredible selectivity that we show in real time. Without thinking about it, we pick out experiences that are richly interpretable but novel."
The theory, while currently tested only in the visual system, likely applies to other senses, Biederman said.
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http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/50770


No Lie MRI
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441918a.html
Nature 441, 918-919 (22 June 2006)
Special Report Lure of lie detectors spooks ethicists

US companies are planning to profit from lie-detection technology that uses brain scans, but the move to commercialize a little-tested method is ringing ethical and scientific alarm bells. Helen Pearson reports.
Bioethicists and civil-rights activists are calling into question plans by two US companies to single out liars by sliding them into a brain scanner and searching their brains for give-away patterns of deception.
The two firms say that they will give the accused a chance to prove their innocence using a technique more accurate than the discredited polygraph. No Lie MRI will start offering services out of Philadelphia this summer. Those behind the second company, Cephos, based in Pepperell, Massachusetts, say they hope to launch their technology later this year. Likely clients include people facing criminal proceedings and US federal government agencies, some of which already use polygraphs for security screening.
Critics say that the science underlying the companies' technique is shaky and that the premature commercialization of the method raises ethical concerns about its eventual use in interrogation. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) entered the debate by organizing a 20 June briefing on the issues for scientists, the public, the press and policy-makers in Washington DC.
The field of lie detection is littered with dubious devices. The polygraph relies on the idea that lying is stressful, and so measures changes in heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. But because it can be duped by countermeasures and there is little hard evidence that it actually works, it is rarely admitted as evidence in court.
Rather than relying on indirect measures of anxiety, assessing brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) goes to the very source of the lie. In one of the earliest studies, a team led by Daniel Langleben of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues offered students sealed envelopes containing a playing card and $20. The students were told they could keep the money if they could conceal which card they held when questioned in an MRI machine (D. D. Langleben et al. NeuroImage 15, 727–732; 2002).
These and other studies revealed that particular spots in the brain's prefrontal cortex become more active when a person is lying. Some of these areas are thought to be involved in detecting errors and inhibiting responses, backing the idea that suppressing the truth involves additional areas of the brain to telling it.
The early studies showed that it was possible to make out subtle changes in brain activity caused by deception using pooled data from a group of subjects. But to make a useful lie detector, researchers must be able to tell whether an individual is lying; when only one person is assessed it is much harder to tease out a signal from background noise. Langleben, who advises No Lie MRI, says he is now able to tell with 88% certainty whether individuals are lying (see Nature 437, 457; 2005). A group working with Cephos, led by Andrew Kozel, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, makes a similar claim.
Until we sort out the scientific, technological and ethical issues, we need to proceed with extreme caution.

Thought police
Kozel and his colleagues asked 30 subjects to take either a watch or a ring, hide it in a locker and then fib about what they had hidden when they were questioned inside a scanner. Using the results of this study, the team devised a computer model that focuses on three regions of the brain and calculates whether the shift in brain activity indicates lying. When the model was tested on a second batch of 31 people, the team reported that it could pick up lies in 90% of cases (F. A. Kozel et al. Biol. Psychiatry 58, 605–613; 2005)
But critics of the technology urge restraint. "Until we sort out the scientific, technological and ethical issues, we need to proceed with extreme caution," says Judy Illes of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, California.
Caught out: lie detectors that use MRI scans (bottom) capture brains in the act of deception, whereas conventional methods rely on stress-induced changes such as fluctuating pulse rates (top).
One problem is that there is no standard way to define what deception is or how to test it. Scientists also say that some of the statistical analyses used in the fMRI studies are questionable or give results that are perilously close to the thresholds of significance. "On individual scans it's really very difficult to judge who's lying and who's telling the truth," says Sean Spence of the University of Sheffield, UK, who was one of the first to publish on the use of MRI in the study of deception. "The studies might not stand up to scrutiny over the long term."
Another concern raised by scientists and bioethicists is that the contrived testing protocols used in the laboratory — in which subjects are told to lie — cannot necessarily be extrapolated to a real-life scenario in which imprisonment or even a death sentence could be at stake. They say there are no data about whether the technique could be beaten by countermeasures, and that data collected from healthy subjects reveal little about the mindset of someone who genuinely believes they are telling the truth or someone who is confused, delusional or a pathological liar.
"If I'm a jihadist who thinks that Americans are infidels I'll have a whole different state of mind," says Gregg Bloche, an expert in biomedical ethics and law at Georgetown University Law Center, Washington DC, and a member of the ACLU panel. "We don't know how those guys' brains are firing."
Because of these concerns, legal experts say that the technology is unlikely to pass the standards of scientific accuracy and acceptance required for it to be admissible in a US court. But even if it is not sufficiently accurate and reliable today, it may well be tomorrow, as more and more people are tested and techniques refined. That raises a second set of concerns that revolve around who should be allowed to use the technique and under what circumstances.
Bioethicists worry that fMRI lie detection could quickly pass from absolving the innocent to extracting information from the guilty — in police questioning, immigration control, insurance claims, employment screening and family disputes. Their concerns are fuelled by other emerging lie-detection technologies, such as those that measure the brain's electrical activity (see Nature 428, 692–694; 2004).

Truth be told
Particularly in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, they worry that fMRI and other devices might be misused in the hands of the military or intelligence agencies. "There's enormous pressure coming from the government for this," says bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe at the University of Pennsylvania. "There is reason to believe a lot of money and effort is going into creating these technologies."
On top of this, ethicists say there is something deeply intrusive about peering into someone's brain in search of the truth; some even liken it to mind-reading. In future, they say, a suspect might be betrayed by their prefrontal cortex before they even open their mouth — if, for example, the brain recognizes a particular photo or foreign word. "This is the first time that we have ever been able to get information directly from the brain. People find the idea extraordinarily frightening," Wolpe says.
This is the first time that we have ever been able to get information directly from the brain. No Lie MRI founder Joel Huizenga and Cephos head Steven Laken say they are aware of both the scientific limitations and the ethical concerns. Laken says that the company only plans to use the technique with people and questioning protocols that are as similar as possible to those used in the study, and that he wants to work with attorneys to iron out problems along the way. "We really want to get the science right," Laken says. "We don't want to get to court and be killed."
In terms of the ethics, they point out that the test can only be used on those who consent — because an unwilling subject could easily foil the fMRI machine by simply moving or refusing to answer the questions. (Critics counter that just declining an fMRI test could be incriminating.) No Lie MRI has a licensing agreement for the technology from the University of Pennsylvania and Langleben says he would "yank their licence" if the company overstepped ethical boundaries.
Whatever the objections, the two companies say they are already receiving numerous enquiries from people eager to prove their innocence. Huizenga says that he has eight TV shows lined up to document some of the first customers' slide into the machines. The ultimate goal, he says, is to have franchises all over the world. These would collect MRI scans and beam data to the company's computers for central analysis. The company will charge $30 per minute for the scans, which might take one hour, plus additional fees for legal assistance and developing questions.
Some researchers feel that such plans are of only limited cause for concern. "Most people who do brain imaging think this is far too soon and that this will crash and burn," says Spence. "So it's not worth getting worked up about."
But bioethicists maintain that there needs to be far greater discussion, both within and beyond the scientific community, before the technology is unleashed. Stanford law professor Hank Greely organized a March workshop on lie detection and the law and is also a member of the ACLU panel. He suggests that an impartial agency should introduce a regulatory scheme that would prevent the use of MRI for lie detection until there was sufficient evidence to conclude that it was proven safe and effective — much as the US Food and Drug Administration bars or approves a drug.
Bioethicists add that neuroscientists in particular need to flag up some of the social and legal issues if they are to avoid fMRI earning a bad label. "The scientists involved in this have an absolute obligation to shepherd this technology," Wolpe says.

grapefruit juice

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060509/hl_nm/grapefruit_dc_1
Study finds how grapefruit juice affects drugs
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. researchers said they have identified the compound in grapefruit juice that affects how some drugs are absorbed in the body and said on Tuesday it might be used to help lower dosages for some patients.
Grapefruit juice is known for its effects on drug metabolism and is avoided by some patients while other deliberately take their drugs with the juice.
The reason is an intestinal enzyme called CYP3A, which partially destroys drugs as they are absorbed. Grapefruit juice, like no other fruit juice, interferes with CYP3A, so the body ends up absorbing more of the drug.
Dr. Paul Watkins of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues say they have identified the substance in grapefruit juice that is responsible -- furanocoumarin.
"It should now be possible to market the furanocoumarin-free grapefruit juice to patients who would otherwise need to avoid grapefruit," Watkins said in a statement.
"In addition, it should be possible to screen new foods for the potential for drug interactions by determining whether they contain furanocoumarins," Watkins said.
"Finally, it may be possible to add furanocoumarins to formulations of certain drugs that tend to be poorly or erratically absorbed to improve their oral delivery."
To test the theory that furanocoumarin was the responsible compound, Watkins and colleagues filtered it out grapefruit juice, which they discovered was then less bitter but otherwise unaltered.
Then they tested 18 men and women taking various drugs on a regular basis including aspirin and birth control pills.
Each fasted in the hospital and got a single dose of the blood pressure drug felopidine, sold under the brand name Plendil, along with either normal grapefruit juice, furanocoumarin-free juice or orange juice.
They then ate and drank normally and blood was taken regularly all day.
In each volunteer, the normal grapefruit juice made between 6 percent to 230 percent more Plendil available in the blood, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The furanocoumarin-free grapefruit juice and orange juice had no such effect, they reported.

ONDCP synthetic drug strategy

http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/news/press06/060106.html

For more information about the Synthetic Drug Control Strategy, please visit: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/synthetic_drg_control_strat/index.html

U.S. RELEASES FIRST-EVER SYNTHETIC DRUG CONTROL STRATEGY
Bush Administration Calls for 15 Percent Reduction in Methamphetamine and Prescription Drug Abuse in Three Years; Cooperation with Mexico Key to Supply Reduction Efforts

WASHINGTON—Rachel Brand, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy, and John Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy, today joined other high-ranking U.S. anti-drug officials and the Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of Mexico, Ambassador Eduardo Ibarrola, to release the Nation's first Synthetic Drug Control Strategy.
The Synthetics Strategy, a companion document to the President's National Drug Control Strategy, details plans for unprecedented cooperation with Mexico and other international partners to drastically reduce the flow into the United States of both methamphetamine and the precursor chemicals used to produce the drug. The Synthetics Strategy calls for 15 percent reductions in methamphetamine use and prescription drug abuse over the next three years and a 25 percent reduction in domestic meth labs.
The Synthetics Strategy outlines a three-tiered approach to the United States's international efforts: improving intelligence and information on the global market for precursor chemicals; effective implementation of the Combat Meth Act, signed into law by President Bush this March, which sets a national standard for restricting the retail sale of precursor chemicals within the United States; and strengthening law enforcement and border control activities, particularly with Mexico.
"Although teen drug use in the United States has dropped by nearly 20 percent over the last three years, meth is a particularly devastating drug threat that requires a specific, balanced response," said Director Walters. "We will not let up on the pressure being applied to the methamphetamine market. The aggressive measures called for in the Synthetics Strategy build upon significant progress already made as a result of law enforcement efforts and legislation enacted at the state and federal levels. We are actively working with our allies in the global community—most importantly Mexico, India, Germany and China—to toughen our collective resolve to implement meaningful international supply controls. Already, the international community has agreed to tighten control on precursor shipments by enacting a U.S. drafted resolution at the United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs conference in March."
The Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are key components in the effort to work more closely with Mexican law enforcement. Intelligence, investigation and enforcement efforts will focus on large-scale methamphetamine trafficking organizations operating in Mexico and the United States. In addition, the DEA and Mexican law enforcement officials will establish specialized methamphetamine enforcement teams on their respective sides of the border.
"The Synthetic Strategy is a comprehensive plan that focuses on reducing the supply of methamphetamine and controlled substance prescription drugs through aggressive enforcement efforts and on reducing the demand for these drugs by supporting prevention and treatment programs to stop first-time use and to help those struggling to overcome addictions," said Assistant Attorney General Brand.
Echoing the balanced approach taken by the President's National Drug Control Strategy, the Synthetics Strategy also highlights the importance of prevention and treatment in the effort to reduce methamphetamine use and prescription drug abuse.
The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, in conjunction with the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, has launched the first meth-specific television advertising campaign. The ads are being disseminated in 23 cities across the country that have been particularly hard-hit by methamphetamine, and will include Spanish language content within the month.
The Synthetics Strategy calls for continued research and support for effective treatment protocols specific to methamphetamine addiction. Through programs like drug courts and the President's Access to Recovery treatment voucher plan, state and local jurisdictions can directly meet the unique needs of those struggling with addictions to synthetic drugs.
The Synthetics Strategy is the result of a coordinated interagency process. Officials from the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Department of Transportation, and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, in consultation with state and local leaders, conducted a thorough examination of the Nation's methamphetamine and controlled substance prescription drug abuse problems. Additionally, they developed recommendations for administrative, legislative and enforcement action, as set forth in the National Synthetic Drugs Action Plan of October 2004; and reported progress on those recommendations in the Interim Report of May 2005. The 2006 Synthetics Strategy provides a final status report on the recommendations and charts new strategies for further domestic and international progress against synthetic drugs trafficking and abuse. Participants in the release of the Synthetic Drug Control Strategy included Brand, Walters, and Ibarrola, along with Anne Patterson, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs; and Uttam Dhillon, Director of Counternarcotics Enforcement for the Department of Homeland Security.



sober hipsters
http://villagevoice.com/nyclife/0622,romano,73365,15.html
The Sober Bunch Life's a Party for New York Nightlife's Sober Hipsters
by Tricia Romano May 30th, 2006 12:01 PM Village Voice
It's somewhere between 2 and 4 a.m. and everyone is wasted. It could be any night, any club, anywhere. But tonight, it's a freakishly cold March evening during the Winter Music Conference in Miami, at a club called the Pawn Shop. Beyond the main dancefloor, where hundreds of revelers groove, in the darkened corners of the gargantuan club, you can see people doing drugs. Their heads bob over their hands as they take a sniff off a key; they scamper behind the DJ booth for a quick bump before going out for another grind. In the V.I.P. section — an actual school bus — if you know where to look, cocaine flows almost as freely, if more discreetly, than champagne.
In the side room, where a band named Booka Shade plays, girls dance in ecstasy, clearly on Ecstasy, their eyes rolling in the back of their heads, their mouths fixed in a clenched-jaw, pleasure-filled grimace.
Though it's Miami, the club is filled with familiar faces from New York's club scene. DJ Justine D. of Motherfucker, one of the most notorious nightlife events in Manhattan, carries a clipboard and walks briskly through the crowd. Princess Superstar, the bottle-blond bad babysitter cum rapper cum DJ, climbs into the booth and gives German superstar DJ Hell a friendly bite on the head. As the French DJ duo Justice pummel the crowd with the Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up," promoters Michael Cohn and DJ Patrick "the Captain" Rood literally whoop it up on the dancefloor, shouting and hollering.
Around 4 a.m., DJ Tommie Sunshine turns up just in time for Hell's set. The crowd has started to thin and you can sense the collective comedown. Sunshine is hard to miss: Standing over six feet tall, he has long blond hair and a bushy beard that makes him look like a disco Jesus, his ever present suit and sunglasses completing the look. He's dancing furiously in the center of the room, his hair flying in his face, his hand gripping a bottle of water.
There's a quote painted on the wall above the bar. It reads: "I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."
"Oh yeah," Sunshine says, his voice simultaneously registering sarcasm and sincerity, "Dean Martin. I used to live by that."
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Correction: Not everyone is wasted. Sunshine, like Princess Superstar, Justine D., Cohn, and Rood, is stone-cold sober. Sunshine, after nearly 15 years of drinking and doing drugs, quit a year ago, just after the last Winter Music Conference—a marathon of debauchery that followed a trip to the South by Southwest rock festival in Austin. Princess stopped a few years before Sunshine, and the other three have never really been partiers, imbibing once or twice a year—if at all.
They are sober hipsters—flipping the image of a nondrinking person as a boring, uptight Goody Two-shoes on its head. They host the best nights, spin at the choice clubs around town, and book the post-gig after-parties that start at 11 and end at 4 a.m. Fashionable and popular, they are the epitome of downtown cool. They are the people crowds pay to be entertained by—the same crowds ironically are getting lit while watching sober DJs, cabaret performers, and burlesque stars.
The sober hipsters are the minority in a world where drinking and doing drugs are par for the course. They are people like comic performer Murray Hill, clean since September 2004; the bodacious burlesque performer known as the World FamousBOB*, a New York club veteran who quit nine years ago; Mike Nouveau, a 22-year-old promoter who's never touched a drop of anything. Elhaam Yavari, 24, who works for addVice, a marketing division of Vice Publishing Inc. (whose very name invites you to think about getting smashed), has never used drugs or drunk more than twice a year. Kenny Kenny, a renowned club doorman turned promoter who survived the '80s, the '90s, and Michael Alig, has been dry as the Nevada desert for 11 years. Actor, DJ, and sometime drag diva Michael Cavadias, who spun at decadent parties like Squeezebox in the late '90s, finally excised the excess in his life. Larry Tee, the elder statesman of New York's dance world, who lived through the Atlanta club scene in the '80s, the Disco 2000 era in the '90s, and electroclash in the '00s, has turned eight years of sobriety into nine nightlife nightlives.
Some of the people interviewed never drank or did drugs in the first place, or maybe they'd dabbled here and there before deciding it wasn't for them. Others— ex-ravers or refugees of the mid-'90s club-kid scene—hit a bottom so deep, they'd reached Middle-earth. All of them have the commonality of being one of the few straight people in the room—even though it's their job to show people a good time, in an industry where a good time is usually equated with being wasted. "It's just such an occupational hazard that after a while you just either stop or something bad is going to happen," says Cavadias.
Hill, who cribs from Dean Martin and makes alcohol a part of his shtick, adds, "When your social life is your business, there's no separation of boundaries. It's all mixed together. I never thought I'd be able to quit. It's so part of my show."
In John Leland's book Hip: The History, he writes about the connection between hipsters, counterculture, and drugs. Hipsters deliberately set themselves apart from society: They dress differently, listen to edgier music, and do drugs. Writes Leland: "Drugs are the product, hip is the marketing plan. Decades before the advent of lifestyle advertising, hip linked drug use to a lifestyle that is sexy, rebellious, and streetwise. . . . To be hip or high is to be outside the authority of church, state, work, school, and the law. . . . It is the elitism of last resort."
But what if everyone is doing drugs? What if being high becomes the status quo and loses its mystique? In the club world, it's the clean kids who are the rebels.
"My life is so much more exciting," says Larry Tee. "I get to travel around the world. I get to make music with my idols. Really, I can do whatever I want to now, but I'm not high. It was just the opposite of what I thought. Because the culture said, 'If you're cool, you get really high, and if you're lucky, you get can get high all the time, because then you're really living.' But I found out that that was the big lie. Once I got clean, my life really started."
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If you believe Tommie Sunshine, there are only three reasons people go to clubs and bars: "They either go out for the music, which is incredibly rare," he says, "they go out to get laid, or they go out to get fucked-up."
As we talk in a café near Union Square, George Michael, the formerly pretty pop star who once crooned "I Want Your Sex," is on TV after being arrested for alleged possession of pot and GHB in London. He looks bloated and is nearly unrecognizable.
Everyone who's quit drinking or doing drugs has a bottom. Michael may not have reached his bottom yet, but Sunshine recounts his: "After doing five days of South by Southwest and seven at the Winter Music Conference, bumper to bumper—after 12 days of drinking till you black out and snorting half of Bolivia, when you feel like a piano has been dropped on your face every morning for 12 mornings—at what point is it enough?"
For Princess Superstar, it was after a three-week tour. She'd stopped drinking but, using some perverse reasoning, still did drugs. "I was like, 'I'm an alcoholic, but yeah, pass the blow,' " she says. "I did drugs every day. I was on codeine, all this shit, and mushrooms. I recorded fucked-up. I played live fucked-up. I DJ'd fucked-up."
Larry Tee calls himself "a classic garbage head"—somebody who does everything. Combining "ketamine and crystal meth is a recipe for the inside of Satan's bowels," he says. "I literally ran to St. Vincent's once all the way from Twilo. Literally ran."
Addiction is the white elephant in rooms filled with white lines. Not even the recent drug-related deaths of two college students, Maria Pesantez and Mellie Carballo, or the passing of high-profile hipsters like skateboarder Harold Hunter give clubbers pause. Murray Hill, who calls himself "the hardest working middle-aged man in show business," unsurprisingly counted beer as his vice of choice. "I hit rock bottom eight, nine times." he says. "I would tell my therapist, 'Oh, I had seven, eight beers. It was a pretty light night out.' And she was horrified. But that's normal for us in the nightlife scene. You lose sight of the real world. You're going home tanked in the cab and the sun's coming up and everyone else is waiting for the bus to go to work."
BOB*, who started drinking when she was 14, says that after a while, partying loses its luster: "By the time I was 25, I felt like I'd been waiting in line for 12 years for the same ride."
So nine years ago, she stopped waiting in line. Now she goes to "meetings." Like Princess Superstar,BOBtook a structured self-help path to sobriety. Murray Hill, Sunshine, and Kenny Kenny went their own way. But whether they did it themselves or in support groups, going out sober means relearning how they live and work. For some people, getting sober means leaving bars behind, but DJs and promoters don't have the option of staying home, nor would they want to.
"I go to bars to socialize. I go to bars to celebrate life, to see my friends perform. I go to bars to perform, myself," saysBOB*.
After Kenny Kenny swore off his favorites, whiskey and beer, 11 years ago, he went back to work. "It was like hyper-realism," he says. "I normally go to the bar. Now I'm not going to the bar. Now I pass the bar. Now I don't have a bottle in my hands. So now I have to walk to the club without the beer, and now I go to the club, so what do I do? It was like learning to walk."
In the ultimate test of faith, Superstar, after a month of sobriety, had a gig in— of all places—Amsterdam.
But the nightlife business can make it almost impossible to stay clean. Professional clubbers are given fistfuls of drink tickets and offered drugs as if they were hors d'oeuvres—sometimes even in lieu of cash. Justine D., who has seen a guy shoot up heroin in the DJ booth while she was trying to spin, recalls when an out-of-town promoter palmed her a bag of coke as a bonus: "She said, 'This is for you. I don't know whether you do it, but thank you so much.' That makes me feel so uncomfortable. This is illegal and I don't want anything to do with it."
The normalcy of substances can make abstinence, or even moderation, difficult, if not impossible. "If you like Ho Hos and you're sitting at a table and there's a plate full of Ho Hos, you're probably going to eat them," says Sunshine. "If there's a plate full of Ho Hos following you around 24-7, like what essentially happens when you're a musician, you're gonna be eating a lot of Ho Hos."
Over chocolate cake at Le Gamin in the East Village, Superstar says, "I love free things! I get in the fucking car of the promoter, and it's like, 'What do you want? What do you need?' And I'm like, 'Oh my God, a kid in a candy store.' I get backstage and there's like a bottle of champagne —and it's always about champagne too. And you know, I'm 10 thousand trillion times more sparkly now when I'm clean than I ever was when I was drinking champagne and I was sloppy. Totally."
She takes a bite out of the gooey center of the cake, mixes it with the vanilla ice cream, and sighs heavenward. "Larry. Larry fucking saved my life," she says. "So I love Larry. He just told me, 'You can do this. There's a lot of people that are sober. You don't have to live like that anymore.' "

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Larry Tee is making a cappuccino in his Williamsburg loft. His dog Nelson, a rambunctious white-and-brown rat terrier, bounces like a jumping bean around the kitchen while Tee heats up milk and pours a round of espresso into his mug. The ceaseless self-promoter, known to the most recent batch of clubbers for electroclash, is never one to pass up credit for a trend. "I invented this!" he quips in his trademark squeaky voice, only partially joking. Tee helped Princess kick and lent support toBOB*; he takes friends to NA or AA meetings. Sometimes people ask him about the meetings and never go.
During Disco 2000's heyday, Tee lived above Twilo, another debaucherous super- club of a bygone era, where he enticed pretty straight boys with pills in exchange for thrills. In those days, he'd wake up at two in the afternoon, crawl to the post office, do a bump of ketamine, and call it a successful business day. "I was wasted and pathetic," he says. "I couldn't make music."
Tee says that after he quit drugs, his career went from being on life support— provided by the royalties of his biggest hit, RuPaul's "Supermodel"—to the kind of career every DJ dreams of: getting songs in movie soundtracks and jet-setting around the world. Now he plays not one but three of the city's biggest parties every week. Those who still indulge, he says, are missing out on the most fabulous moments of their lives. "They won't appreciate it when it's really gorgeous, when life is just sumptuous," he says. "They're sleeping before their big gig in Brazil, like with a million people wanting to meet them and fuck them. And they've got their hands in their heads going, 'Oh, my life is so hard.' "
He makes another cup of coffee. "One of the fears that I had is that getting clean would be miserable, that it'd be like the end of the road," he says. "The party's over, because it's so much a part of being a rebel and all my rock-star heroes were drug addicts."
With that he echoes a common sentiment and an accepted fallacy—propagated by popular wisdom and the work of bohemian heroes like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson—that the best art is made under the influence, that cool is derived from drug counterculture. So many musical subcultures are intertwined with drug use; so many records are made high or are best experienced while high. Try to separate the druggy associations from records like Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction (an hour-long love song to dope), Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the Velvet Underground's "Heroin," and every jazz record ever made. And would the rave revolution ever have happened without Ecstasy? Tommie Sunshine admits that his first drug experience was sitting at home stoned, watching The Wall. "So stereotypical," he says.
"I allowed myself to be an addict because I saw it advertised as part of the counterculture that was part of my being an outsider," says Kenny Kenny. "Really, in the end, that was a fool's game."
If drug addicts want to suspend time, as Leland purports, sober hipsters want to make as much use of it as possible. They are making up for lost time. Once they quit, their careers take off: "Opportunities have opened up for me that I couldn't have imagined before I got sober," saysBOB*. "I went from being a nightclub personality to a performer. I used to go to Squeezebox and go-go dance and be drunk out of my mind and have so much fun. But in the middle of the night, when the drag queens got up and sang with the band, I was sitting there thinking, 'I wish I could do that.' But I could never remember a song. I could never sing with a band. I could never practice. It was too much of a commitment. I'd be too hungover. I'd be too scared."
The best part of clean living is the next day. Promoter Patrick Rood, 25, who's never drank in his life and goes out as many as five nights a week, says, "I don't know what a hangover feels like." Like Rood, promoter Mike Nouveau never drank and has no regrets. "If I see someone passed out on a cold sidewalk in their own vomit," he says, "I'll be like, 'And people ask me why I don't drink'—or when my female friends end up naked on Last Night's Party."
While their partying counterparts are nursing hangovers by sleeping in all day, taking more pills, resorting to hair-of-the-dog strategies, and downing greasy burgers, sober hipsters wake up—if not exactly bright eyed—clear minded. "I go out so much for work, and I see the same people every time I go out, and they are all drinking and doing drugs," says Yavari. "How do they do it every night? I come to work so tired and exhausted and feeling like crap, and I didn't even do anything."
Murray Hill cautions, "There are kids, who shall remain nameless, that haven't got off the express train and they don't look so good after six years. You notice that. The kids that are doing the coke—there are a few more wrinkles than I remembered."
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The first time I met Michael Nouveau, he was holding a tray of Jell-O shots. He was at the Lower East Side bar Fat Baby for one of his parties, called Nouveau, where Larry Tee was DJ'ing. Nouveau works in advertising at Rolling Stone and has to be at his desk by 9 a.m. He's like the younger version of Steven Lewis, the nightlife veteran who designed clubs like Marquee and ran Limelight in the '90s, who says, "I think it's important to be sober. Many people disagree, and if many people didn't disagree with me, I would never have made any money. So I'm glad that nobody agrees with me." Ironically, Lewis served nine months for conspiracy to traffic narcotics (he maintains his innocence).
Like Nouveau, addVice's Elhaam Yavari, who is of Persian descent, never tried drugs. When she was a teen, her semi-strict parents grilled her after she came home from parties. Today, she goes out an average of three nights a week—including her DJ gigs at East Village Radio and the Dark Room. A teetotaler surrounded by people who partake, she says, "I have so many really good friends and they just equate coke with a good night. I think doing coke is like admitting defeat. It's like a drug to keep you awake. Like, are you that old?"
When she first started her job at addVice, bands would ask her to find drugs, but she was useless: "Dammit," she remembers thinking, "I'm going to lose a client because I can't get them high?" It never happened, but she quickly learned what 53-year-old Steven Lewis has known for years—that being the only sober person in a roomful of drunks has its advantages. "It's a business," he explains. "And if you're a business person, no matter what the job is, if you're selling doughnuts or tropical fish, if you're drunk and on the job you're not going to do such a good job."
Justine D. got her start working for Lewis at the club Life in the '90s. After getting sick for several weeks, she decided she wasn't going to drink anymore. "If I wanted to be taken seriously I had to be sober," she says. "I was coming across so many casualties, nightlife casualties, fucked-up party dolls." She imbibes a couple of times a year, usually on vacation, but never on the job. "I'm not falling off a wagon," she says. "I mean, I don't even own a fucking wagon. Some people don't even have that luxury."
At the end of a Motherfucker event, Justine D.'s sober state of mind allows her to take over the most sobering of duties: counting the money. Her partners in Motherfucker are all partiers. Michael T., the embodiment of glam-rock decadence, has been quoted in the Voice half-joking about his own habits, usually involving boots, boys, and bathroom lines.
While she finds the act of people doing cocaine "alien," her partners' partying doesn't bother her. Still, she gets a bit of a ribbing for being the odd one out. "Yeah, we make fun of her sometimes, because she can be a little bit rigid," says Michael T. "But I don't like people that are messy—and I don't consider myself to be messy."
The sober clubbers—no matter how they arrived at living the clean life—have experienced similar awkward situations. When they ask a bartender for water or soda, they get the cold shoulder. They aren't invited to the after-after-parties. But then, the after-after-parties are a drag anyway. Justine D. recalls one event thrown by a member of a prominent local band. "Everyone was a fucking mess, one girl was puking out of a window, there was wall-to-wall people," she says.
But they say they don't feel uncomfortable around people who drink or do drugs—it's the other way around. Lewis once faked doing rounds of grappa to please some buddies of his; Yavari's copped to holding a beer just so she doesn't have to answer questions. "I still have people who still insist on putting their drinks up to my mouth," says Kenny Kenny.
"I think people feel awkward around us sometimes," says Cohn. "They don't say it, but you can tell. Some people are wasted and they apologize. A lot of people apologize. 'I'm so sorry I'm drunk.' And we're like, 'Good, that's what we're partying for. That's what we want.' It was funny, one of the first places we did our night at turned out to be a really big spot to get drugs at. And we didn't know. We didn't care."
The sober hipsters say they are frequently mistaken for being wasted anyway. Says Lewis, "I'm hyperactive, I'm bug-eyed and sometimes prone to fits." Tee describes himself as "a 33 record spun on 45," and Hill says, "I still am a party animal. There's barely any difference except that I'm healthier and I've lost 35 pounds."
When people learn they don't drink or do drugs, the sober hipsters are asked questions that seem silly: "How do you do it?" "You must be so bored," "Why not?" And dumbest of all: "What do you do for fun?"
"I'm a fuckin' lame knitter," cracks Justine D.
Says Rood, "They think it's like we have an extra head. That they think we can't go anywhere without a drink—that's incredible. That's horrible."
"I probably have a lot more fun than you think," says Yavari. "I'm always having a good time no matter where I am. I'll be at the same places you are. I just won't be having an alcoholic drink. I'll be drinking water. I'll be dancing and meeting people and telling jokes—and remembering it."

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Michael Cavadias once starred opposite Robert Downey Jr., one of the most public faces of addiction in recent memory. Since quitting a few years ago, he's bloomed creatively—writing a screenplay, DJ'ing around town, and performing with the Citizens Band. Throughout the conversation at Café Mogador, he's nervous—it's almost like coming out, publicly admitting that he's sober. After a few fits and starts, he eloquently explains why being dry is the biggest high. "Not doing drugs is the most unpredictable and totally psychedelic experience I have ever had. It's an amazing existence," he says and smiles. "Life on its own is really wild."
Not that there aren't moments of regret and pangs of temptation. Tee can still smell coke at the mere mention of it, and Kenny Kenny says that when he catches a whiff of beer from a tap, he has to walk away. But sometimes it's just the feeling of being left behind that hurts most.
"I went to Paris, and I had a boyfriend, I was dressed up, and the waiters were like, 'Oh mademoiselle, Marilyn Monroe!' and they gave me complimentary champagne," recallsBOB*, who with her curled blond hair, heart-shaped lips, and pink sweater set, looks like a bosom buddy of the late actress. "And I bit my lip and started crying. Because it was in Paris, I was with the guy I was in love with. And I couldn't drink the champagne. When I got home I made a list of why I miss champagne."
She ticks off the reasons on her fingers: "It's celebratory. It's bubbly. It's glamorous. I realized these are things that I am to myself if I don't drink it. Those are things I naturally am." She says trium-phantly, "I am pink champagne."



boomer drug use
http://www.cesar.umd.edu/cesar/cesarfax/vol15/15-21.pdf
Projected data that adults age 50+ in 2020 (who are now 36) will be using more drugs than 50+'ers now.




anti-drug overdose?
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-drugs15may15,0,7772461.story?coll=la-home-health

Anti-drug overdose? Many school prevention programs don't help, scientists say, and may even do harm.
By Marnell Jameson Special to The LA Times
May 15, 2006

LIKE millions of kids across America, ninth-grader Mariana Kouloumian was taught in elementary school not to drink or use drugs — ever. To her, the message seemed clear except for one hitch: It didn't square with what she saw in the real world, or even at home.
"When I told my parents what I learned in [school], that drinking was bad, they said they knew that, but that a drink once in a while was OK," Mariana says.
Today, at 14, the Los Angeles girl dismisses much of what she learned in the drug-education program, saying that when she's older she plans to follow the more moderate example set by her mother and father.
"My parents know how much alcohol they can handle. They only drink socially — and wouldn't drink and drive." Further, she credits her parents, not school lessons, with helping her turn down tobacco, alcohol and drugs — all of which she's been offered. "I learned what I know at home," she says. To her, the anti-drug program seemed out of touch.
Increasingly, many academic scholars and government researchers agree. They point to a growing body of evidence that supports Mariana's instincts. One-size-fits-all lessons do little to prepare kids for the real drug choices they're likely to face, these experts say. By condemning all drugs as bad — not distinguishing between legitimate medications and, in moderation, alcohol — such programs can confuse kids and ultimately cheapen their own messages.
"Oversimplification is just one reason most school-based drug-prevention programs don't work," says David Hanson, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has spent the last 30 years studying alcohol use, abuse and education. "The decisions kids face are more nuanced than most drug programs make them appear."
The few programs shown to be successful are often not the ones used in schools. In a 2002 study from the North Carolina university, researchers looked at a national sampling of drug-prevention programs at public and private schools. They found that although 82% of schools used some kind of program, only 35% of public schools and 13% of private schools were using one that researchers had found effective.
Some researchers even suggest that school drug-prevention programs could do harm, particularly to younger students. Not only might they give kids a message that's so simplistic it isn't true, but the programs can also encourage kids to view themselves as potential drug users.
They can also portray an exaggerated view of the prevalence of drugs (thereby implying use is more accepted), and, sometimes, even offer technical information that kids could use on the street.
Nonetheless, every year, U.S. schools pour millions of dollars into substance-abuse education that hasn't been shown to be effective — $750 million to $1 billion alone for DARE, or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, by far the nation's largest school-based drug-prevention program, but one that is not on federally approved lists. The 16-week curriculum brings local police officers into classrooms to give lessons and share off-the-street experiences, driving home the point that drug use is wrong.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which includes a component known as Safe and Drug-Free Schools, every public school is supposed to provide some kind of drug-prevention education. If the schools use federal funds for such efforts, they must use programs on the government's lists of those with "demonstrated effectiveness." Schools may use programs not on the list if they use local funds, which many choose to do.
Support for DARE, for example, is still high. The program is used in 70% of school districts, says Dale Brown, regional director of Los Angeles-based DARE America, although the Department of Education took the program off its approved list in 2001.
Richard Clayton, associate dean of research at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, who has studied drug-education programs, says DARE has been effective in other ways. "More kids showed up to school on DARE days, and DARE had and still has the best infrastructure of any drug program. We need to fix the message, not change the messenger."
Despite the mixed track record, many parents, teachers and school administrators maintain that such programs are crucial if children are to learn to resist peer pressure down the road.
"We need to take a preventive approach and help kids as early as possible to stay away from drugs and alcohol," says Lori Vollandt, coordinator for health education programs for the Los Angeles Unified School District. "The sooner kids learn to take care of their bodies the better."

Popular, but questionable
The real worry is that the science-based research to date has found that most anti-drug education programs don't reduce the rate at which kids abuse drugs and alcohol.
According to Monitoring the Future, a study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse that since 1976 has been tracking illicit drug use (not including alcohol) among high schoolers, 58% of 12th-graders had used an illicit drug in 1976. Use peaked in 1980 at 68%, then dropped to a low of 40% in 1992. By 1998 it was back up to 1976 levels, and for the last few years use has dipped to around 52%.
"The trend rises and falls, and we have no clue why," Clayton says.
Drug-education advocates say the success of the programs should be measured in terms of the kids who don't use drugs — and thus don't show up in these numbers — not those who do.
Individually, some programs help; some hurt. And many simply haven't been scientifically studied, says Liz Robertson, chief of prevention for the National Institute on Drug Abuse's research branch.
DARE gets singled out because it's the biggest in the country and therefore the most studied. But many other programs are not science-based either.
In one landmark study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, University of Kentucky researchers examined DARE's effect over a five- and 10-year period. Both times, no significant differences were found between the behaviors of kids in control groups and those who had participated in DARE, says Clayton, who led the study.
In 2004, Steve West and his colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, Va., analyzed all the DARE studies done to date and published their findings in the American Journal of Public Health. "Our study," the authors wrote, "supports previous findings indicating that DARE is ineffective. This is not surprising given the substantial information developed over the past decade to that effect."
"We weren't saying the program wasn't well intentioned," says West, a professor of rehabilitation counseling. "Just that as a prevention effort, it was a huge waste of time and money. There are better programs."
Other popular, approved programs also have fared poorly. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has performed randomized controlled studies on the Families and Schools Together (FAST) program, and found it had no positive effect. The widespread Reconnecting Youth program initially proved effective, but failed to produce positive results in two independently replicated studies, says Robertson. In fact, many of those on the approved lists haven't been studied as stringently as Robertson would like.
Most drug-prevention programs don't work because they use scare tactics, Hanson says. "They tell kids things they will later find out aren't true, like alcohol is a gateway to drugs and will seduce you into trying more dangerous substances. Also, by saying all alcohol is bad, they send kids home thinking that if their parents have a glass of wine with dinner or a beer with their pizza, they are abusing drugs. If a child's father happens to tend bar, they come home and ask why he's a drug dealer. Then what happens when the child sees the off-duty DARE officer having a beer at the local bowling alley?"
Further, drug-prevention programs often make drugs sound more prevalent than they are. Studies show that when middle school students report what percentage of kids they think are using drugs, their estimates top the actual numbers.
When you give kids the true perspective, that not everyone is doing it, they don't feel as much pressure to try, Robertson says. "That's a lot more beneficial than a five-hour blitz of information that covers every drug and how they're used, and that glorifies and exaggerates them."
Some researchers and scientists worry about the harm some programs may be doing to kids. A 1998 Illinois study, for example, found that DARE inadvertently encouraged a few students to try drugs.
DARE responded to such findings by revamping, says Brown. "The program now focuses on teaching kids how to make good decisions, how to avoid drugs and violence, and how to stand up to peer pressure," he says. "There's a lot less officer lecturing and a lot more role-playing and interaction."
While the experts sort out what works and what doesn't, many worry that the effects of some of the programs could be particularly harmful to younger students. Although many prevention programs start targeting fifth-graders, others such as the widespread Red Ribbon Week are popular in kindergarten through fourth grade.
Red Ribbon Week campaigns are often loosely implemented. Schools get an information packet that they often turn over to volunteer parents who organize a program in which kids wear red ribbons and learn not to put bad stuff in their bodies — which likely wasn't on their minds in the first place.
"The harm is that kids don't need these messages yet, and by making them too simplistic, they will dismiss them when they're older and do need this message," Robertson says. She adds that these programs make kids who have never considered using drugs see themselves as potential drug users.
"We know that making kids more aware can be dangerous, especially if these are high-sensation-seeking kids," she says. "When kids are ready, they really will ask the right questions. Don't give them more information than they ask for. I don't understand people who give third-graders all the street names for drugs. Why would anyone do that?"
Others strongly disagree: "Early and often. That's our cardinal rule," says Judy Cushing, past president of the National Family Partnership, the organization that founded and oversees Red Ribbon Week. "It's never too early to tell kids what's healthy and what isn't to put in their bodies."
Parents, teachers and kids love Red Ribbon Week, she adds. "Red Ribbon stands for hope and gives kids the incentive to make healthy choices. And it's something people can wrap their arms around."
LAUSD's Vollandt also thinks that forewarned is forearmed. She advocates beginning drug-awareness programs in pre-kindergarten classes. "We shouldn't wait to introduce this education in response to an event," she says.
Many educators, officers and parents agree. LAUSD offers Too Good for Drugs in lower schools, Project Alert in middle schools and Project Toward No Drug Abuse in upper schools. They are on the U.S. Department of Education's approved list and are considered model programs by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA. The programs stress drug resistance skills in a realistic way.

Some educators and parent groups insist that even programs not labeled as effective can work. They point to how much kids have learned about drugs by the end of the program and indications that students, parents and teachers liked it.
But the only criterion that matters, scientists counter, is behavioral change.

Tailored lesson plans
Nobody is suggesting schools cut out drug-prevention education altogether. Not only does the government mandate it, society places a moral obligation on schools to do something to prevent future drug use.
But to get the right program, school officials need to first know what their school needs, says Robertson. Not all schools warrant the same level of intervention. Some just need good universal programs in peer refusal skills. Others with a drug problem need an intensive intervention program such as Project Toward No Drug Abuse. This interactive course strives to teach high schoolers the misperceptions that may lead to substance use, how substance abuse starts and progresses, the myths and consequences of drug use, and the coping and self-control skills they'll need to refuse.
Unfortunately, Hanson says, when schools choose, they pit anecdotes against scientific research. "Often the anecdotes win," she says.
To find out whether a program is deemed worthwhile by the government or to learn more about effective interventions, parents and educators can go to the SAMHSA site, http://www.modelprograms.samhsa.gov . Other federal agencies have lists of approved programs, but SAMHSA's is the most comprehensive.
The site features the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices. These model programs have been tested in communities, schools, social service organizations and workplaces across America, and have provided proof that they have prevented or reduced substance abuse and other related high-risk behaviors. Programs are listed as either promising, meaning they have shown some positive outcomes, or effective, meaning that they have shown consistently positive outcomes.
Finally, teachers must implement the program the way it was designed. "Many teachers take a curriculum and teach only parts of it — or teach it the way they want — and the program doesn't work," Robertson says. For example, in the recent NIDA study, teachers were taught the basics of LifeSkills Training, a proven, science-based program, and were then allowed to implement it as they wanted. The program failed to show a positive effect.
Drug educators also need to stop exaggerating, Hanson says. Painkillers can be appropriate, antidepressants can be beneficial, and moderate drinking can be socially acceptable. In short, he says, messages need to be nuanced to fit social norms — in other words, actual behavior.
And individual kids at risk need to be identified early. Aggressive or withdrawn youths — and those who struggle in school — are more likely to abuse drugs, research has shown. Helping them become more socially competent or overcome learning problems can go a long way toward reducing drug use.
Furthermore, the consensus among researchers is that the programs should incorporate more role-playing with peers — and less lecturing about the varieties and dangers of drugs. Most kids who experiment with drugs do so for emotional reasons, often to be accepted.
"Emotions drive most kids," Clayton says. "When working with these developing brains, prevention experts have to consider that cognitive reasons, such as the behavior is illegal and might harm your body, don't matter as much."
Regardless of which program schools ultimately choose, Hanson offers some more immediate perspective: "The overwhelming evidence supports that the modeling that happens at home will still have the greatest effect on how kids ultimately behave."


Toad Licking Dogs
doesn't this kind of fly in the face of decades of studies showing animals won't self-administer hallucinogens?
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http://coloherp.org/cb-news/Vol-32/cbn-0511/ToadLicking.php
The Cold Blooded News The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society Volume 32, Number 11; November, 2005
No Good Toad Licking Dogs
Reprinted from Notes from Noah, the newsletter of the Northern Ohio Association of Herpetologists, Vol.32, No.8, May 2005. Originally from World News.
Dogs in Australia's Northern Territory are becoming addicted to hallucinogenic cane toad poison, according to local vets. Desperate for a canine high, dogs have been seen licking the backs of cane toads for the poison secreted from their glands.
Megan Pickering, a veterinarian in the town of Katherine, claims to have seen many cases of dogs affected by the deadly toad poison. "There seems to be dogs that are licking the toxin to get high," she told the local newspaper. "They lick the toads and only take in a small amount of the poison. They get a smile on their face and look like they are going to wander off into the sunset." She said she has recently treated dozens of dogs suffering from the effects of bufotoxin.
Ms. Pickering said she believes some of the dogs are becoming addicted, as she has seen them "going back to have a second go." It seems some of them have tasted it in small doses, but there are others that have had more toxin. Despite this, they go back and do it again. Evidence of "tripping" dogs include fitting, running in circles, having bright red gums, and frothing at the mouth.
Wildlife officers have advised owners to wash their pet's mouth out with water as quickly as possible if they exhibit these symptoms. They say they get more inquiries about safeguarding pets from toads than on any other wildlife topic. Owners are advised to keep dogs and cats inside at night, warn and train them against tackling toads, and keep toads out of the yard.
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DAWN tutorial
In case you were ever clamoring to know more about how the DAWN system of gathering data works, SAMHSA just posted an on-line tuitorial for both the Emergency Department guidelines (for folks who wander in because of "drug-related" reasons) and the Medical Examiner guidelines (when the drug use led to death):

ED Version:
http://edcbtt.e-dawn.net/

ME Version:
https://mecbtt.e-dawn.net/index.php
Click on the "New Users: Click HERE to begin" to create a user name (email address) and password.


animals in abuse liability
Review article about whether animal abuse liability studies can be interpreted as we think usually do.
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL%26_udi=B6T1J-4HG69XB-3%26_user=861681%26_handle=V-WA-A-W-WD-MsSAYVA-UUW-U-AAVEACZEUE-AAVZDBDDUE-YBEUEDVBW-WD-U%26_fmt=full%26_coverDate=12%252F05%252F2005%26_rdoc=4%26_orig=browse%26_srch=%2523toc%25234892%25232005%2523994739998%2523612554!%26_cdi=4892%26view=c%26_acct=C000046147%26_version=1%26_urlVersion=0%26_userid=861681%26md5=53c714a4aa54b51b52848c9b6890df93

European Journal of Pharmacology Volume 526, Issues 1-3 , 5 December 2005, Pages 9-20 The Neuropsychopharmacology of Aggression and Addiction
Imbalance between drug and non-drug reward availability: A major risk factor for addiction
Serge H. Ahmed

Abstract
Laboratory animals self-administer most, though not all, drugs of abuse.
Recent evidence shows that with increased drug availability, most laboratory rats develop all the major behavioral signs of addiction, including:
1) drug intake escalation,
2) increased motivation for the drug,
3) difficulty to abstain,
4) decreased reward function, and
5) inflexible drug use.
The large prevalence of addicted rats may suggest that they are particularly vulnerable to develop compulsive drug use. I review evidence showing that this apparent vulnerability results in large part from the lack of positive (i.e., alternative non-drug rewards) and negative (i.e., costs) incentives capable of turning animals away from the pursuit of drugs.
In particular, most animals seem to take drugs and eventually become addicted, not because drugs are intrinsically addictive, but more likely because drugs are the only significant sources of reward available in the laboratory.
Laboratory animals would therefore represent more of a model of high-risk human groups than of the general population.
Consequently, they should be more suited for searching factors that protect from, rather than predispose to, drug addiction.
Reconsidering the environmental background of drug self-administration experiments in laboratory animals raises intriguing implications for understanding the initial demand for drug consumption and the transition to drug addiction, and for extrapolation from laboratory animals to humans.

Epigrams for the Day:

.
Consciousness is the story we tell ourselves to understand and explain our actions and decisions.

A mind, once expanded, cannot be forced back into its original confines.