http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/31/1992736.htm
‘Researchers at the University of Sydney have found that adolescent rats are more vulnerable to adverse effects of cannabis than adult rats.
Professor Ian McGregor says rats’ brains basically respond to drugs the same way as humans but they are easier to work with because they are not polydrug users.
He says his team gave the rats cannabis then took them off the drug for two weeks before testing their long-term memory.
“We found that the adolescents that had been given cannabis had impaired memory, relative to adolescent rats that hadn’t had cannabis exposure,” he said.
“Then when we compared them to adults we found there was very little memory deficits in the adults rats that had been given cannabis.”‘
http://www.newsdaily.com/Science/UPI-1-200...othepatitis.xml
'Using marijuana daily may raise the risk of liver fibrosis nearly seven-fold in those with chronic hepatitis C, or HCV, infection, U.S. researchers said.
The study, published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, also found combining marijuana use with alcohol use in HCV patients significantly raised the risk of liver fibrosis.
The recommendation to avoid marijuana is of particular importance for HCV patients who are also infected with HIV -- because the progression to fibrosis is already greater in these patients.'
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=what-i...on-drug-lawsuit
'In the spring of 2000, a professional guitarist named Diana Levine, then in her 50s, sought treatment for a migraine headache at a clinic in Vermont. She usually received the drug Demerol for pain relief, along with an injection of Wyeth’s anti-nausea drug Phenergan in the muscles of her butt to relieve the nausea that usually accompanies migraines. But this time the physician’s assistant used an alternative method for administering Phenergan approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In the method, called intravenous push, the drug is injected directly into a vein in the arm.
The physician’s assistant, however, missed Levine’s vein and accidentally injected Phenergan into her artery. Over the next few weeks, Levine experienced excruciating pain. Her hand and forearm turned black with infection, and both had to be amputated later.
Levine sued Wyeth for failing to warn her about the gangrene risk associated with IV push, and a Vermont jury ordered the drugmaker pay $6.7 million in damages. But Wyeth had, in fact, disclosed the risk of intra-arterial injection on their FDA-approved label, so they appealed. The Vermont Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling in 2006. This week, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the case.
Suddenly, everyone within earshot of a trial lawyer is talking about "pre-emption," which is the legal issue at stake in the case. It's already generated a lot of coverage and buzz, and is being watched closely by lawyers and advocates who say it could dramatically change the drug lawsuit landscape. Similar cases are working their ways through other courts, including one in New Jersey involving Merck and Vioxx. You'll recall that people who took Vioxx -- a painkiller now off the market -- are suing Merck because studies later showed that it doubled the risk of heart attacks. Some are even speculating about what a new president and Congress will be able to do about the eventual ruling.' [...]
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/08..._drug-evolution
'Why do people abuse drugs? It’s not only a question worried parents ask their wayward, substance-dabbling teenagers. It’s also a deeper question asked by biologists.
In general, nature has designed all creatures as exquisite machines for their own protection and propagation. Yet we’re easily and often drawn into self-destruction by nothing more than lifeless chemical lures. This weakness seems such a jarring exception, such a dismal Achilles’ heel, that it seems to demand explanation.
Scientists typically offer the following one. Drugs are chemicals that inappropriately trigger activity in brain circuits designed for very different purposes: to provide a sense of reward for having satisfied ordinary needs, healthfully.
The brain has few defenses against this chemical deception, the standard account goes, because drugs were unknown in the natural environment that shaped human evolution.
This traditional view, though, is coming under attack. A new study proposes the brain evolved to account for and even exploit drugs. Although their abuse is still unhealthy, the authors suggest it’s wrong to think they cheat the brain in the sense traditionally theorized.
“Evidence strongly indicates that humans and other animals have been exposed to drugs throughout their evolution,” wrote the scientists in the study. The research, by anthropologist Roger Sullivan of California State University and two colleagues, appeared March 19 online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.'
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://uk.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUKN0756745220071107
‘Got some leftover drugs — the kind that someone else might want to use, such as painkillers or stimulants? Wrap them up in used kitty litter or other pet droppings, the government advises.
A pilot program at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is looking at ways people can safely dispose of unused prescription drugs that are liable to be abused. [..]
Of course some people do not drink coffee. But maybe they have a pet ferret.
“Ferret waste, like nearly any other form of pet waste, can be effectively used to help prevent the abuse of unused prescription drugs,” SAMHSA spokesman Mark Weber said.
This news delighted the American Ferret Association.’
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.lateralscience.co.uk/edison/index.html
'"At Menlo Park one cold winter night there came into the laboratory a strange man in a most pitiful condition. He was nearly frozen, and he asked if he might sit by the stove. In a few moments he asked for the head man, and I was brought forward. He had a head of abnormal size, with highly intellectual features and a very small and emaciated body. He said he was suffering very much, and asked if I had any morphine. As I had about everything in chemistry that could be bought, I told him I had. He requested that I give him some, so I got the morphine sulphate. He poured out enough to kill two men, when I told him that we didn't keep a hotel for suicides, and he had better cut the quantity down. He then bared his legs and arms, and they were literally pitted with scars, due to the use of hypodermic syringes. He said he had taken it for years, and it required a big dose to have any effect. I let him go ahead. In a short while he seemed like another man and began to tell stories, and there were about fifty of us who sat around listening until morning. He was a man of great intelligence and education. He said he was a Jew, but there was no distinctive feature to verify this assertion. He continued to stay around until he finished every combination of morphine with an acid that I had, probably ten ounces all told. Then he asked if he could have strychnine. I had an ounce of the sulphate. He took enough to kill a horse, and asserted it had as good an effect as morphine. When this was gone, the only thing I had left was a chunk of crude opium, perhaps two or three pounds. He chewed this up and disappeared. I was greatly disappointed, because I would have laid in another stock of morphine to keep him at the laboratory. About a week afterward he was found dead in a barn at Perth Amboy."'
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=new-di...le-of-the-bulge
'Want to lose weight but lack the willpower to just say no to fatty foods and sweets? Help may be on the way. The first clinical trials of an experimental weight-loss drug show that it helps curb appetite—and burn more fat—even at low doses.
Researchers report in the journal Cell Metabolism that taranabant, developed by drug giant Merck, is the second drug found to be successful in fighting flab by blocking cannabinoid receptors (responsible for the psychological effects of marijuana a.k.a. Cannabis sativa) in the brain's reward circuitry.
"The effects of marijuana on appetite have been known for millennia from its medicinal and recreational use," said study author Steven Heymsfield of Merck Research Laboratories. "The ingredient responsible stimulates cannabinoid receptors. When you block the cannabinoid system with an antagonist like taranabant, you suppress appetite."
The first indication that the cannabinoid-1 (CB1) receptor might be a prime weight-loss target came during studies of an earlier drug called rimonabant (manufactured by sanofi-aventis), which is now available as a diet aid in several European countries but has yet to receive the Food and Drug Administration's nod for use in the U.S.'
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.newscientist.com/channel/health...line-news_rss20
'Smoking cannabis regularly can lead to gum disease in people in their early thirties – much younger than generally expected. Lifestyle factors associated with the condition are also linked to chronic diseases later in life, and some argue that gum disease itself may contribute to cardiovascular disease directly.
A quarter of people who had smoked cannabis regularly from 18 to 32 years old had established gum disease, found the study led by Murray Thomson at the Dunedin School of Dentistry in New Zealand.
In 2007, the same team showed that smoking tobacco also significantly raises the risk of gum disease in young people (Journal of Clinical Periodontology, vol 34, page 828)'
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22148...from=public_rss
‘Two men have been charged with attempting to smuggle 16kg of the illicit drug ice into Australia hidden in two marble tables. [..]
Customs officers at Sydney Air Cargo discovered the drugs on July 10 after selecting for examination two packages which had arrived from Vancouver, Canada.
An X-ray of the packages aroused suspicion of a possible concealment and prompted Customs officers to drill a hole in the marble slab.
They found white powder inside.’
http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-scienc...effe-2009-01-28
'The glut of antidepressant drugs on the market and the ads for them may have you – not to mention doctors -- wondering how to tell one from the other. But a new study sheds light on which ones may be most effective in battling the blues.
Topping the list of a dozen prescription antidepressants reviewed: Zoloft and Lexapro. Patients taking those drugs in trials were also the least likely to drop out. But because Zoloft, made by New York-based Pfizer, is now off patent and available in relatively cheap, generic form, it may be the better choice for patients starting antidepressant therapy, write authors of the study published today in The Lancet, who are from Italy, Greece, England and Japan.
The scientists reviewed 117 randomized, trials – testing "new generation" meds called serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that enhance the effect of that brain chemical conducted between 1991 and 2007. The trials involved nearly 26,000 people, two-thirds of them women. Their findings: eight to 69 percent of patients in the trials responded to Zoloft and 51 percent to 69 percent of them responded to Lexapro, which is made by Forest Pharmaceuticals in New York. (The study of Zoloft with an 8 percent response rate was small and unusual; most studies showed more than a 50 percent response.)
Reboxetine, a Pfizer antidepressant not approved for use in the U.S., was the least effective, with 49 percent to 56 percent responding to it, according to the analysis.' [...]
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=narcotics-recovery-farm
'From 1935 to 1975, just about everyone busted for drugs in the U.S. was sent to the United States Narcotic Farm outside Lexington, Ky. Equal parts federal prison, treatment center, research laboratory and farm, this controversial institution was designed not only to rehabilitate addicts, but to discover a cure for drug addiction.
Now a new documentary, The Narcotic Farm, reveals the lost world of this institution, based on rare film footage, numerous documents, dozens of interviews of former staff, inmates and volunteer patients, and more than 2,000 photographs unearthed from archives across the country. Premiering October 26 on public television in Philadelphia and Salisbury, Md., the film will appear on public television stations across the country throughout November. A book accompanying the documentary includes rare and previously unpublished pictures of "Narco," as the institution was called locally, a selection of which can be seen in this slide show.' [...]
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=...line-news_rss20
'Ricin, cholera toxin and shiga toxin, produced by deadly strains of E. coli, are the stuff of every poisoner's handbook - because there is no antidote. Now Jose Saenz and colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, may have found one.
These toxins travel backwards through a cell's protein-making pathway, passing through the Golgi network and endoplasmic reticulum before interrupting protein synthesis. Saenz's team screened 14,400 small molecules for compounds that could halt this journey without disrupting normal cell function. They found two such molecules which, if safe, could lead to treatments for these poisons.'
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnough...oddlyEnoughNews
'Two convicts on day-release from a German prison were caught tending their illegal cannabis crop in an empty warehouse nearby, German authorities said on Monday.
German customs agents discovered the 1,200 cannabis plants in the warehouse in the western town of Moers and detained the two convicts, immediately ending the furlough and sending them back to jail.
The customs agents said the men, who were on day-release to find jobs, were planning to export their harvest to the Netherlands.'
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.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.surfline.com/surf-news/over-36-...rug-mule_20294/
'A surfboard that had been hollowed out, packed with bricks of marijuana then glued back together was found by Border Patrol agents Wednesday while patrolling a beach in close proximity to the international border fence in Imperial Beach, California.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that the discarded board -- really just a fiberglass shell -- was filled with more than 36 pounds of marijuana and would have bore a street value of just under $30,000.
No one was taken into custody and the seized drugs were surrendered to the appropriate authorities.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb...medicalresearch
‘Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.
The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.
When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.’
