http://uk.news.yahoo.com/wenn/20080706/ten...-c60bd6d_1.html
‘Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has vowed to stop smoking marijuana - because it makes him too paranoid.
MacFarlane signed a GBP50 million deal with 20th Century Fox in May, in a move which will make him the highest-paid writer-producer in television - and he’s determined to increase his productivity by swearing off illegal drugs.
He says, “I don’t smoke much pot anymore. One of the last times I was stoned, I was convinced that I would die unless I kept moving my body.
“So I sat there, baked, waving my arms around like a crazy person.”‘
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?i...C35C&sc=rss
'In the insect world, bright reds, oranges and yellows can be a warning: “Eat me at your own risk, pal.” Because colorful bugs can be toxic, they often get their chemical protection from nibbling poisonous plants. But these poisons can have a flip side for us—some fight cancer or tropical parasites that cause diseases like malaria.
The idea that colorful bugs can tip us off to disease-fighting plants isn’t new. But researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute just backed it up with science, in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
They chose ten plant species that kill parasites and cancer in lab tests, and ten species that look similar but do nothing. Then they headed into the Panamanian jungle to survey hundreds of these plants for beetles and caterpillars. Turns out, they found colorful bugs on almost all the toxic plants but less than half of the harmless plants. And black, brown and gray bugs didn’t have a preference—they ate indiscriminately. So modern-day shamans scouring the jungle for cancer-fighting drugs might just cut down on search time by keeping an eye out—for brightly colored bugs.'
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fear-f...mine&sc=rss
'A brain chemical linked to pleasure and depression may also trigger fear, according to a new study. Researchers say this may explain why the neurotransmitter dopamine, known to cause addictive behavior, may also play a role in anxiety disorders.
"Showing that dopamine can enhance both approach and avoidance behaviors is an important finding," says Howard Fields, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Approach behavior describes what someone attracted to an object does to obtain it. Fields says the finding reveals a new potential target for treating puzzling neurological disorders such as schizophrenia.
Scientists have long suspected that dopamine was linked to dread as well as delight. To confirm their suspicions, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor researchers studied what happens to rats when the neurotransmitter is blocked from reaching the rear portion of the nucleus accumbens, a brain region where dopamine is produced and reward-seeking activities (such as eating and other urges) as well as emotions including fear are processed.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Neurology: the animals remained calm even when scientists also removed a fear-controlling brain chemical (glutamate), which ordinarily would have sent them into a tizzy. This suggests that too much dopamine in the rear of the nucleus accumbens (linked to dread) may at least be partly responsible for the paranoia that many schizophrenia patients experience, study co-author Kent Berridge says.
"Some researchers have thought that dopamine may drive paranoia in schizophrenics," he adds. "The results are consistent with that idea."'
http://blog.aclu.org/2008/07/12/strip-sear...constitutional/
‘If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil – or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches – you can take relief in yesterday’s ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.
“A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” the federal appellate court wrote in today’s opinion. “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”
“It does not take a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old girl is an invasion of constitutional rights. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity,” the court continued.’
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/...80707161437.htm
'A combination drug taken within an hour after the start of a migraine is effective in relieving symptoms, according to research published in the July 8, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The drug combines sumatriptan, a migraine-specific drug that affects the constriction of blood vessels, with naproxen sodium, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that works on the inflammatory aspect of migraine and relieves non-traditional migraine symptoms such as sinus pain and pressure and neck pain.
"Unfortunately, many migraine sufferers put off treatment," said study author Stephen Silberstein, MD, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. "This study provides more evidence that treating a migraine at the first sign of pain increases the likelihood of relief."'
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnough...oddlyEnoughNews
'Police have detained two custodians who were about to harvest their first crop of cannabis, a source of drugs like hashish and marijuana, from a cemetery in Vietnam's capital, a state-run newspaper reported on Monday.
Police took in Nguyen Manh Hung, 44, who heads the caretaker team at the cemetery in Hanoi's outer district of Hoang Mai, and Ho A Lau, 46, after the authorities found cannabis plants grown on a 25 square meter (82 square feet) patch, the Vietnam Labour Confederation-run Lao Dong newspaper said.
Lau, a tribal man from the northern mountainous province of Son La bordering Laos, testified he obtained the seeds in Son La for cultivation from early 2008 and that the harvest would soon start.
Vietnam has strict drug trafficking laws, including in some cases the death penalty, but it has long been used as a transit point for trade in heroin, hashish, opium, amphetamine pills and other illegal drugs.'
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/...80703145849.htm
'Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the "mind's eye"—directly impacts our visual perception.
"We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception," says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. "This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on."
"These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself," Pearson and his co-authors write.
It is well known that a powerful perceptual experience can change the way a person sees things later. Just think of what can happen if you discover an unwanted pest in your kitchen, such as a mouse. Suddenly you see mice in every dust ball and dark corner—or think you do. Is it possible that imagining something, just once, might also change how you perceive things?' [...]
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=long-t...ooms&sc=rss
'People who took magic mushrooms were still feeling the love more than a year later, and one might say they were on cloud nine about it, scientists report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."
Griffiths gave 36 specially screened volunteers psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. The compound is believed to affect perception and cognition by acting on the same receptors in the brain that respond to serotonin, a neurotransmitting chemical tied to mood.
Afterward, about two thirds of the group reported having a "full mystical experience," characterized by a feeling of "oneness" with the universe. When Griffiths asked them how they were doing 14 months later, the same proportion gave the experience high marks for transcendental satisfaction, and credited it with increasing their well-being since then.
But some scientists noted that this psilocybin study was just the first trip on a long journey of understanding. "We don't know how far we can generalize these results," cautions neuroscientist Charles Schuster of Loyola University Chicago and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "To attribute all of this to the drug, I think, is a mistake and to expect the same effects from simply taking the drug without this careful preparation in these kinds of people would be a mistake."
Herbert Kleber, who directs the division of substance abuse at Columbia University also notes that it is difficult to assess the mushroom's impact without detailed information on how individual lives were changed. For example, it remains unclear from the study whether volunteers really were more altruistic or simply claimed to be.
But the findings do seem to support reports of recreational users and what LSD guru and 1960s counterculture icon Timothy Leary made famous in his psychedelic lab at Harvard University.' [...]
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnough...oddlyEnoughNews
'Drug traffickers in China's far west are smuggling heroin into the country woven into carpets imported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, state media said on Tuesday.
Customs officials in Xinjiang, which borders both countries, have seized more than 30 carpets containing some 50 kg (110 lb) of heroin in the last several months, the official China Daily said.
"The traffickers have become more sophisticated and are using new techniques," it paraphrased Wang Zhi, deputy director the General Administration of Customs' anti-smuggling bureau, as saying.
"Wang said traffickers first inject heroin into plastic tubes of 1-2 mm diameter and wrap them with colorful natural or synthetic fibers to make them look like yarn. They then weave them into the carpet along with normal yarn," the report said.
The new smuggling method was making detection harder as equipment normally used by customs' officers was not up to the task, the newspaper added.'
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnough...oddlyEnoughNews
'A sharp increase in drugs and cellphones found inside a Brazilian prison mystified officials -- until guards spotted some distressed pigeons struggling to stay airborne.
Inmates at the prison in Marilia, Sao Paulo state had been training carrier pigeons to smuggle in goods using cell phone sized pouches on their backs, a low-tech but ingenious way of skipping the high-tech security that visitors faced.
"We have sophisticated equipment to search people when they go in, but they avoided this by finding another way to bring in cellphones and drugs," prison director Luciano Gamateli told Globo TV.
Officials said the pigeons, bred and trained inside the prison, lived on the jail's roof, where prisoners would take their deliveries before smuggling the birds out again through friends and family.' [...]
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=genera...leep&sc=rss
'Researchers studying the effects of general anesthesia recently made a startling discovery: the drugs used to knock out patients during surgery may lead to increased pain when they wake up.
Doctors have known for decades that most general anesthetics may cause a temporary burning sensation when administered or swelling around the injection site. Similarly, inhaled agents can cause momentary coughing bouts, according to Gerard Ahern, a pharmacologist at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Now Ahern has discovered that some drugs used to put patients to sleep may also increase postoperative pain from the procedure itself by boosting the activity of a protein called TRPA1 on the surface of pain-sensing nerve cells.
Ahern and his colleagues write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that anesthesiologists may be able to limit post-op pain by sticking to meds that do not have this effect. "By understanding the mechanisms for these noxious effects," says Hugh Hemmings, a professor of anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, "it gives you a way to screen for new drugs that don't have these effects, but do produce anesthesia."'
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_B...-07/06-144.html
‘Morphine, as little as a single dose, blocks the brain’s ability to strengthen connections at inhibitory synapses, according to new Brown University research published in Nature.
The findings, uncovered in the laboratory of Brown scientist Julie Kauer, may help explain the origins of addiction in the brain. The research also supports a provocative new theory of addiction as a disease of learning and memory.
“We’ve added a new piece to the puzzle of how addictive drugs affect the brain,” Kauer said. “We’ve shown here that morphine makes lasting changes in the brain by blocking a mechanism that’s believed to be the key to memory making. So these findings reinforce the notion that addiction is a form of pathological learning.”‘
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/200...mp;topic=latest
‘Australian researchers have found that long-term heavy use of marijuana may cause parts of the brain to shrink.
Published in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry, the study found that the hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in men who were heavy marijuana users compared to non-users.
The study looked at 15 men heavy marijuana users, who had smoked at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for on average of 20 years.
Brain scans showed that on average their hippocampus volume was 12% less and amygdala volume was 7% less than in the 16 men who were not marijuana users.
The hippocampus regulates memory and emotion, while the amygdala plays a critical role in fear and aggression.’
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/...80531091527.htm
'A University of Adelaide study has revealed that effects of the drug ecstasy are compounded when taken in warm environments.
Preclinical research undertaken by Pharmacology PhD student Emily Jaehne shows that ecstasy deaths, which are invariably related to elevated body temperature, may be related to drug users’ failure to recognise their body is abnormally hot.
“The fact that these drugs are often taken in warm nightclubs and at rave parties increases the risk of long- term changes in brain function, or even death,” Emily says.
The 25-year-old student has spent the past three years investigating how ecstasy can increase body temperature, and to understand how drug users respond when this happens.
“Our bodies usually maintain a constant temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, but in some cases ecstasy can elevate this by up to five degrees, leading to severe brain damage.”'
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2871407.html
‘Two Australian burglars broke into a house - only to find it full of police officers staging a drugs raid.
The pair jemmied open a window to get into the house in a midnight raid in Melbourne, reports the Herald Sun.
But they had been beaten to it by police officers who had just burst through the door to search for drugs.
The property was allegedly being used for growing hydroponic cannabis, and the detectives were on a raid to arrest the resident, a man in his 20s.
The startled burglars fled, but were caught a couple of days later, said Det Sen-Sgt Paul Cassidy, of Melton detectives.
"It is unusual," he said, but declined to comment on whether the burglars had been after money or drugs.
The three arrested men, all in their 20s, have been remanded to appear in court.’
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnough...oddlyEnoughNews
'Canadians should avoid unlicensed drugs that claim to improve sexual performance because they could cause problems such as loss of consciousness, prolonged erections and chest pain, the health ministry said on Friday.
Health Canada issued the warning in a release about a product called Desire, which was found to contain the prescription drug phentolamine -- something not indicated on the label.
"Health Canada advises consumers not to use Desire or any other unauthorized products promoted to increase sexual performance that are advertised as 'all natural', as such products may contain undeclared prescription drugs that may pose serious risks to health," it said in a statement.'
http://www.13wham.com/entertainment/weirdn...4b-a488924bd823
‘Police in Russia are investigating after pupils stripped off their clothes, climbed walls or lay on the floor laughing after their school dinners were spiked with drugs.
The teenaged students were given ecstasy in their soup and drinks at their school in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in eastern Russia.
Doctors who were called in said the students showed signs of intoxication and prosecutors later found traces of ecstasy.’
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-hg...-dam&sc=rss
'Abuse of opiates such as heroin, methadone and morphine destroy brain cells, reducing attention span and memory. But new research shows there may be a way to regain some lost patience and recall.
Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that brain cells targeted for early death by continued opiate use may be salvaged by injections of synthetic human growth hormone (HGH). HGH is a chemical naturally secreted by the pituitary gland at the base of the brain that stimulates cell growth and reproduction. The scientists say their findings open the door to new ways to treat and prevent damage from abuse of opiates in addicts as well as patients undergoing chronic pain management.
Previous studies show that chronic opiate use can disrupt new cell growth (neurogenesis) in the hippocampus, a midbrain region implicated in short-term and so-called episodic memory (places, people and emotions linked to events). Growth hormones seem to keep neurogenesis moving smoothly until old age when levels drop, leading to less cell production and general memory decline. Elderly patients treated with synthetic growth hormones have experienced improved memory, says study co-author Fred Nyberg, a professor of pharmaceutical biosciences at Uppsala.'
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnough...oddlyEnoughNews
'Authorities in Texas have filed corpse-abuse charges against two men who allegedly removed a skull from a grave and used it as a bong.
The Harris County District Attorney's Office confirmed on Thursday that misdemeanor abuse of corpse charges have been filed in the case.
One of the men allegedly told police they dug up a grave in an abandoned cemetery in the woods, removed a head from a body and smoked marijuana using the skull as a bong.
Police found the cemetery and a grave that had been disturbed but are still investigating the rest of the story, officials said.'
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-...line-news_rss20
'The Milanese are partial to a line or two of cocaine. The same goes for many drug users in London, although they dabble in heroin more than their Italian counterparts. Both cities like ecstasy at the weekends and cannabis pretty much every day. Welcome to the results from a new branch of public health: sewage epidemiology.
The Italian scientists behind the idea first attracted attention in 2005, when they detected the residues of several illegal drugs in the water of the Po, which flows through Milan.
Now they've shown that the idea is more than just a gimmick. According to their latest paper, sewage sampling can provide a quick, cheap and reliable way to monitor a city's stimulants of choice.
The team, headed by Ettore Zuccato and based at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, looked at samples collected from sewage works in London, Lugano and their hometown. They showed that the results are reproducible – samples taken on the same day in different weeks give similar results – and roughly in line with other estimates of drug use.
But unlike surveys of drug use, the sewage samples can be taken at short notice and analysed a day or two after being taken.'
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/05/01/2233186.htm
'Instead, they say, the drink's reputation is down to nothing more exotic than its high alcohol content.
German researcher Dr Dirk Lachenmeier of the Chemisches und Veterinaruntersuchungsamt Karlsruhe and colleagues publish their study online in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Absinthe has been dubbed 'the green fairy' or 'the green muse' and was once widely used by 19th century Parisian bohemians, many of whom believed it could expand consciousness.
Australian drug expert Dr Rodney Irvine of the University of Adelaide, who was not involved in the research, says there have always been many rituals surrounding its use.
For example, the drink is sometimes poured through a sugar cube, goes cloudy, and some people set it on fire.
But in its heyday many drinkers developed 'absinthe madness' or 'absinthism', a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial contractions, numbness and dementia.
Absinthe soon gained a reputation as a dangerous psychedelic drink and was banned after growing reports of illness and violence.
Some say artist Vincent van Gogh chopped off his ear and later shot himself in the chest after drinking it.'
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1381...allucinate.html
'Hospital intensive care is a traumatic experience, especially for a child. It can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults, but nothing has been known about it in children.
"No-one asks the children," says Gillian Colville, at St George's Hospital in London.
Now Colville and colleagues have asked the children, and they have found that any long-term stress in children may result more from the drugs the children were given than their memories of actual illness and treatment.
PTSD can follow life-threatening situations – the sufferer experiences flashbacks or unstoppable memories of the stressful event, shuts it out and can become hyper-irritable. The disorder can also cause further illness.'
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=invent...trip&sc=rss
'Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD, died yesterday at the age of 102, just 10 days after the 55th anniversary of his notorious bicycle trip while tripping on "acid". Hofmann, who suffered a heart attack at home in Basel, Switzerland, was the first person to synthesize lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, and the first human known to experience its mind-bending effects.
The drug was the 25th he created from the basic chemical ingredients of ergot, a fungus that forms on rye, in his search for treatments for circulation and respiratory problems. He reports in his 1979 autobiography LSD, My Problem Child, that he became restless and dizzy when he accidentally ingested the compound while making it—and "perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors" for about two hours.
The very next day (April 19, 1943), he swallowed 0.25 milligram of the acid to confirm that it had caused his odd symptoms. Overcome by dizziness and anxiety, he asked an assistant to bicycle him home; once there, he writes that he was overcome by feelings that he might die (prompting a later call to his physician), along with delusions that included perceiving a kindly neighbor transformed into a malevolent witch.'
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health...line-news_rss20
'BILLIONS of people the world over drink alcohol to overcome shyness and animate their social lives - as people have done for millennia. For most drinkers, alcohol is associated above all with relaxation and conviviality, and people forget about its darker side. Yet doctors, governments and healthcare agencies are becoming so concerned about the effects of alcohol abuse that in January the executive board of the World Health Organization agreed a plan to develop a global strategy to combat the damage alcohol can do.
The harm drinkers are doing to themselves, such as liver and brain damage, is only part of the problem. The plan has been given extra momentum by a growing recognition of the number of people who, while not themselves drunk, suffer as a result of the reckless or aggressive behaviour of those who are. '
http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-en...Habit/580000713
'If you use cocaine and need a reason to quit—or one to avoid starting in the first place—think conservation. The national parks of Guatemala and other countries have become the preferred haven of drug traffickers who usurp protected areas and burn the forest to serve their own purposes and the demands of their customers, according to Roan McNab, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) country director for Guatemala.
"They systematically destroy and sabotage forests so they can put in landing fields," McNab said at the WCS State of the Wild conference on April 15. The landing fields enable them to move drugs—particularly cocaine—north by plane to feed American habits.
Similar misuse of parklands has plagued Colombia since at least the 1990s, and the Sierra de la Macarena National Park there is home to some 13,000 hectares (32,100 acres) of coca plantations, according to field data compiled by the illegal-drug monitoring U.N. body the Sistema Integrado de Monitoreo de Cultivos Ilicitos. As a result, officials have targeted the park for herbicide spraying from airplanes. Of course, this indiscriminately kills both coca and forest vegetation as well as poses a risk to the area's frogs and other amphibians.'
