Addiction Inbox

Addiction Science and the Problem of Perception

2009-07-15T11:08:00.005-05:00

Why don’t mental health professionals get it?

Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, identified by the BBC News as a “mental health expert,” gave the world the benefit of her view on the use of drugs for mental disorders in a July 15 article titled “The Myth of the Chemical Cure.”

Joanna Moncreiff’s version goes like this:

“If you've seen a doctor about emotional problems some time over the past 20 years, you may have been told that you had a chemical imbalance, and that you needed tablets to correct it. “

True.

“Magazines, newspapers, patients' organisations and internet sites have all publicised the idea that conditions like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be treated by drugs that help to rectify an underlying brain problem.”

True.

“People with schizophrenia and other conditions are frequently told that they need to take psychiatric medication for the rest of their lives to stabilise their brain chemicals, just like a diabetic needs to take insulin. The trouble is there is little justification for this view of psychiatric drugs.”

Deeply, undeniably false.

“First, although ideas like the serotonin theory of depression have been widely publicised, scientific research has not detected any reliable abnormalities of the serotonin system in people who are depressed.”

False—but a new and increasingly popular line of attack. None of the major findings about the relationship between serotonin metabolism and clinical unipolar depression has been overturned. The Serotonin hypothesis of unipolar depression is still a fundamentally sound and useful model, as evidence by the stunning success of serotonin-boosting antidepressants.

But wait! The success of SSRIs is proof that serotonin has nothing to do with it! Moncrieff writes: “It is frequently overlooked that drugs used in psychiatry are psychoactive drugs, like alcohol and cannabis. Psychoactive drugs make people feel different; they put people into an altered mental and physical state. They affect everyone, regardless of whether they have a mental disorder or not.”

False—all three statements. A trifecta of untruths. Psychoactive drugs for mental illness are not necessarily chemically akin to alcohol and cannabis, many of the drugs do not “make people feel different” or vault them into an altered mental state, and the drugs do not effect most “normal” people who do not have one of the underlying mental disorders the drugs are designed to treat.

“In my view it remains more plausible that they ‘work’ by producing drug-induced states which suppress or mask emotional problems.’

False—and happily, her view on the matter is not shared by many reputable neurologists. The quotation marks around the word “work” would seem to tell us all we need to know about Ms. Moncrieff’s relationship to modern medicine.

“At the moment people are being encouraged to believe that taking a pill will make them feel better by reversing some defective brain process.”

True--and we should thank our lucky stars that we have progressed out of the dark ages when it comes to the treatment of mental illness.

“If, on the other hand, we gave people a clearer picture, drug treatment might not always be so appealing.”

True—but on another hand, uncounted numbers of addicted people might find the prospect very appealing, if only they could afford it, or were under the care of a health professional who understood what the medication could do for her patients.

Graphics Credit: 1800blogger

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Stimulating Facts About Caffeine

2009-07-12T16:54:00.008-05:00

Coffee highs and lows.

[Excerpted from “Caffeine: Pharmacology and Effects of the World’s Most Popular Drug,” by Kyle M. Clayton and Paula Lundberg-Love, in The Praeger International Collection on Addictions Volume 2]:

-- Caffeine dependence is not presently recognized as a clinical disorder in the American Psychological Association’s DSM-IV-TR. Caffeine intoxication, however, is listed as a distinct clinical syndrome. Most of the symptoms of caffeine intoxication resemble symptoms of cocaine or amphetamine overdose: anxiety, insomnia, restlessness, tremor, irritability, rambling speech patterns, and irregular heartbeat. “In adult cases of highly elevated doses,” the authors write, “symptoms such as fever, hallucinations, delusions and loss of consciousness have occurred.”

--In high enough doses, caffeine is extremely toxic and can lead to death. The good news: This almost never happens, since the potentially lethal dose is on the order of 50 to 100 cups of coffee, quickly consumed. There is, however, the theoretical risk that an overdose of caffeine tablets could be fatal.

--Caffeine tolerance develops in a hurry. Tolerance to the sleep-disrupting effects of coffee in high doses can occur after only seven days of consuming 400 mg of caffeine three times a day—using 120 mg per cup as a rough average, that amounts to about ten cups of strong coffee per day. The researchers report that “complete tolerance to subjective effects such as nervousness, tension, jitters and elevated energy were observed to develop after consuming 300 mg three times per day for 18 days, and it is possible that such tolerance can occur within a shorter period of time.”

--Caffeine can interfere with the effectiveness of benzodiazepines and other medications that act on the neurotransmitter GABA. “Caffeine can inhibit the binding of benzodiazepines to their specific receptors on the GABA-A receptor sites, therefore neutralizing the effects of such medications and inhibiting their sedative hypnotic effects. Such interactions should be considered when evaluating the effectiveness of medications used to treat insomnia.”

--Conversely, caffeine can enhance the effectiveness of pain relievers. In particular, caffeine allows for faster absorption of headache medications, producing faster relieve at lower doses. Nicotine increases the rate at which the body metabolizes caffeine. Abstinent cigarette smokers often discover that their usual intake of coffee causes jitters and a bad stomach once they quit smoking. Some researchers have speculated that a high level of caffeine intake during smoking cessation might cause an increase in nicotine withdrawal symptoms.

Photo Credit: www.healingwithnutrion.com

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Harm Reduction Scorecard

2009-07-09T13:38:00.003-05:00

A look at drug strategies worldwide.

A fascinating study released earlier this year by the International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA) provides a snapshot of the staggering country-by-country variations in drug law and policy across the globe.

While Western Europe and North America have in place a solid base of operational heroin substitution therapies, such as methadone, these same Western countries have fallen behind in prison addiction programs, including all-important needle exchanges.

Countries lacking widespread access to heroin substitution programs include Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cambodia, and most of Latin America with the exception of Mexico. These are also, coincidentally or not, all regions of substantial opium cultivation.

As it turns out, every major nation except South Africa—where the ravages of HIV are all too evident--has put in place needle and syringe exchange programs of one scope or another, in at least one location in the country.

Interestingly, the IHRA report, titled “Harm Reduction Policy and Practice Wordwide,” finds that some of the countries with the most active needle exchange programs in prisons include Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Romania—and Iran, which also offers heroin substitution therapy in prisons. Notable countries lacking widespread needle exchange programs in prisons include the United States, Latin America, and portions of Western Europe.

Finally, regarding the most radical category in the harm reduction arsenal—drug consumption rooms, also known as safe injection facilities—the world has been significantly slower to adopt this approach to the public consumption of injectable drugs. The document lists the existence of drug consumption rooms in Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

The report, prepared by Catherine Cook, a Research Analyst with IHRA, notes that the listings do not indicated “the scope, quality or coverage of services.” And while almost all countries have national policy documents that make reference to harm reduction policies for health or drug-related policy, strategies vary widely.

“Of particular interest here is the US,” the report notes, “which includes harm reduction in its national HIV and hepatitis C strategy documents, but not in those relating to drug policy.”

Graphic Credit: Bristol Drugs Project

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What’s a Neurotransmitter, Anyway?

2009-07-07T09:30:00.006-05:00

A brief guide for the perplexed.

A neurotransmitter is a chemical substance that carries impulses from one nerve cell to another. Neurotransmitters are manufactured by the body and are released from storage sacs in the nerve cells. A tiny junction, called the synaptic gap, lies between brain cells. (Think of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, with the finger of Adam and the finger of God not quite touching, yet conveying energy and information.)

Neurotransmitters squirt across the synaptic gap, and this shower of chemical messengers lands on a field of tiny bumps attached to the surface of the nerve cell on the other side of the synaptic gap. These bumps are receptors, and they have distinctive shapes. Picture these receptors, brain researcher Candace Pert has suggested, as a field of lily pads floating on the outer oily surface of the cell.

Neurotransmitter molecules bind themselves tightly to these receptors. The fact that certain drugs of abuse also lock tightly into existing receptors, and send messages to nerve cells in the brain, is the key to the mystery of addiction.

The fact that certain drugs essentially “fool” receptors into receiving them is one of the most important and far-reaching discoveries in the history of modern science. It is the reason why even minute amounts of certain drugs can have such powerful effects on the human nervous system. The lock-and-key arrangement of neurotransmitters and their receptors is the fundamental architecture of action in the brain. Glandular cells are studded with receptors, and many of the hormones have their own receptors as well. If the drug fits the receptor and elicits a response, it is called an agonist. If it simply blocks the receptor site without stimulating a response, it is an antagonist. Still other neurotransmitters have only a secondary effect, causing the target cell to release other kinds of neurotransmitters and hormones.

Two of the most important neurotransmitters are serotonin and dopamine. The unfolding story of addiction science, at bottom, is the story of what has been learned about the nature and function of such chemicals, and the many and varied ways they effect the pleasure and reward centers in our brains.

In 1948, three researchers—Maurice Rapport, Arda Green, and Irvine Page—were looking for a better blood pressure medication. Instead, they managed to isolate a naturally occurring compound in beef blood called serotonin (pronounced sarah-tóne-in), and known chemically as 5-hydroxytryptamine, or simply 5-HT. The researchers determined that serotonin was involved in vasoconstriction, or narrowing of the blood vessels, and in that respect resembled another important chemical messenger in the brain—epinephrine, better known as adrenaline.

Even though there is at most 10 milligrams of the substance in our bodies, serotonin turned out to be one of nature’s signature chemicals—a chemical of thought, movement and behavior, as well as digestion, ejaculation, and evacuation. The body’s all-purpose neurotransmitter, involved in sleep, mood, appetite, among dozens of other functions. The cortex, the limbic system, the brain stem, the gut, the genitals, the bowels: serotonin is a key chemical messenger in all of it.

Another key neurotransmitter—dopamine—is considered to be one of the brain’s primary “pleasure chemicals,” and is found in areas of the brain linked to experiences of joy and reward.

Dopamine pathways play a role in carrying signals related to attention, movement, problem solving, pleasure, and the anticipation of rewarding experiences. Dopamine is one of the reasons why, after you have a pleasurable experience with food, drink, sex, or certain drugs, you are likely to feel a desire to repeat the experience. Dopamine is implicated in not just the drug high, but in the craving that accompanies withdrawal as well.

Feelings of pleasure, or joy, are natural drug highs. The fact that they are produced by chemical alterations in brain state does not make the fear or the pleasure feel any less real.

Excerpted from The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction by Dirk Hanson © 2008

Photo Credit: NIDA

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Common Medicines That Can Kill You [Guest Post]

2009-07-05T13:27:00.005-05:00

Legal but lethal.

[Today’s post was written by Kat Sanders, who regularly blogs on the topic of pharmacy technician certification. She welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: katsanders25@gmail.com.]

Medicines are supposed to save lives, but as with all things that are not used responsibly, they end up killing people more often than not when they are abused. It’s not just illegal drugs that kill; even the ones that are prescribed have the potential to become dangerous when they are not used as they are supposed to be. While we know that heroin, crack and other illegal substances cause death in the event of an overdose, we are not aware of many others that are relatively unknown, but just as dangerous. The below list is not exhaustive but details just a few of the drugs that could lead to death if abused.

NPF: Non-Pharmaceutical Fentanyl has been responsible for more than 1000 deaths (those that have been reported--there are definitely going to be many more that went unnoticed or unreported) between 2005 and 2007, according to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). NPF is a painkiller, one that is also illegally produced and sold because of its narcotic effects. Since it is much cheaper than heroin, sales are high, as are the deaths that it is responsible for. What people do not realize is that when this drug is produced illegally, it is 30 to 50 times more potent and risky than heroin.

Codeine: We would hardly think that the cough syrups we obtain over the counter could end up killing us, but the codeine they contain is a narcotic that causes hallucinations if taken in large amounts. And when cough syrups are abused, they could end up being potentially dangerous, like the case of Chad Butler, the rapper more popularly known as Pimp C. The singer already suffered from sleep apnea, and large amounts of codeine combined with sleep apnea is apparently enough to cause respiratory problems and cause death.

Acetaminophen (Paracetamol): While paracetamol alone cannot cause death, if you are a habitual drinker, your liver is already weak and damaged. And when you take large doses of paracetamol under such conditions, you may start feeling the symptoms in a day or two; you may experience a stomach ache, vomit, and feel pretty ill. Death, if it occurs, happens after four or five days after the overdose, if you do not take any treatment at all in the interim.

Opioid painkillers and Anti-depressants: This combination was responsible for killing up and coming actor Heath Ledger. The star, who was said to be increasingly despondent and depressed, was on anti-anxiety drugs and painkillers as part of his prescription. An overdose (a combination of six different drugs that included sedatives and painkillers) found him dead, just before the release of the blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, the latest in the Batman series and the one that saw him winning a posthumous Oscar for his devilish portrayal of the Joker.
The CDC reports that accidental drug overdoses are responsible for the death of more than 22,000 Americans every year. In fact, it is the second leading cause of preventable deaths, next to automobile accidents. And this is why we need to be extra careful and exercise caution when handling drugs and medicines.

Photo Credit: Canwest News Service

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Friday File

2009-07-03T11:35:00.005-05:00

Book and Blog Recommendations

Books

A decade ago, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher at Harvard Medical School and a national spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Bank, suffered a massive stroke at the age of 37. Unable to walk, talk, read, or write, Dr. Taylor underwent an 8-year recovery and narrates the story of her recovery in her book , My Stroke of Insight.

The book’s jacket copy explains: “As the damaged left side of her brain—the rational, grounded, detail-and-time oriented side—swung in and out of function, Taylor alternated between two distinct and opposite realities: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized Jill was having a stroke and enabled her to seek help before she was lost completely. “

As reporter Robert Koehler writes: “This book is about the wonder of being human and as such is a plea and a prayer that we strive to be equal to how big we really are. What a piece of work is man — 50 trillion cells functioning in purposeful harmony.”

Stroke patients, victims of brain injuries, medical practitioners, and the general reading public will find invaluable insights and recommendations in this book.

Blogs

The mission of Corpus Callosum, a science blog maintained by an anonymous psychiatrist who works at a community hospital, is “to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.” The blog intelligently covers a broad range of general-interest topics, including social commentary, neuroscience, politics, and science news.

Corpus Callosum also regularly features excellent graphics and photographs, and is written in a reasoned, straightforward and easy-to-digest style. As a bonus, the site features a deep and high-quality blogroll.

They Inhaled

2009-06-29T12:59:00.029-05:00

The "Nice People Take Drugs" campaign.

From the UK charity Release comes the project called Nice People Take Drugs. The publicity campaign has caused significant controversy in Britain, as reported by the UK Guardian. Release says on its web site that its charter is to "campaign for changes to UK drug policy to bring about a fairer and more compassionate legal framework to manage drug use in our society."

An earlier, similar campaign, using the same slogan and photos of well-known people on bus advertisements, ended when the bus company removed the ads, fearing a public backlash.

1 in 25 Global Deaths Linked to Alcohol

2009-06-28T17:33:00.005-05:00

Vodka kills more Russians than war, Lancet reports.

A team of researchers at the University of Toronto reported in Lancet that 3.8 % of global deaths could be attributed to alcohol. In Europe, the report stated, the rate of premature death from alcohol was 1 in 10 during 2004, the year studied. And in a related study, more than half of all premature deaths among adult males in Russia were attributable to booze.

The world health care burden, as spelled out by Dr. Jurgen Rehm and others at the University of Toronto, is staggering: “The costs associated with alcohol amount to more than 1% of the gross national product in high-income and middle-income countries, with the costs of social harm constituting a major proportion in addition to health costs.”

In a BBC News report,the study authors warned that the worldwide effect of alcohol-related disease was similar to that of smoking in prior decades. The report takes note of prior research indicating a health benefit from moderate drinking, stressing that any purported benefit is “far outweighed by the detrimental effects of alcohol on disease and injury.”

The Lancet study concludes that the overall mortality figures are “not surprising since global consumption is increasing, especially in the most populous countries of India and China.”

Professor Ian Gilmore of the Royal College of Physicians, quoted by the BBC, called the report “a global wake-up call,” and urged the adoption of “evidence-based measures” for reducing alcohol-related harm, such as price increases and advertising bans. “Many countries are investigating new ways to cut deaths and disease and reduce the burden on health services by using the price of alcohol to lower consumption,” Gilmore said. Pricing strategies have been used effectively in the past to lower cigarette consumption, researchers have noted.

In one of the Russian studies, Professor Richard Peto of the University of Oxford led a statistical analyses, concluding: “If current Russian death rates continue, then about 5% of all young women and 25% of all young men will die before age 55 years from the direct or indirect effects of drinking.” The Russian figures are also affected by the high rate of associated smoking in the former Soviet Union.

Peto added: “When Russian alcohol sales decreased by about a quarter, overall mortality of people of working age immediately decreased by nearly a quarter. This shows that when people who are at high risk of death from alcohol do change their habits, they immediately avoid most of the risk.”

Photo Credit: www.adaweb.net

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Friday File

2009-06-26T13:41:00.009-05:00

Book and blog recommendations for the weekend.

Books

I just finished reading a splendid book, Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. Oakley, a systems engineer at Oakland University in Michigan, has done a great service for interested non-scientists by picking apart the intricate genetics of psychopathy and antisocial behavior.

Primarily a history of borderline personality disorder and the “great men” who suffered from it, Oakley takes the “nature-nurture” debate to the next level, asserting that bad behavior is a genetic propensity triggered by environmental influences—precisely the argument I make about addiction in my book, The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction.

Oakley deftly beats back the usual panoply of objections to genomic research—that it is a slippery slope leading to eugenics, or that it is an excuse for bad behavior. Even worse, for many people, Evil Genes suggests that individual ethics are largely biochemically determined. The “successfully sinister,” as she calls them, have a baffling ability to charm their way to the top, and the author suggests some evolutionary reasons why this might be so.

Overall, Oakley makes a strong, eye-opening case for the importance of modern neuroscience in the quest to understand human behavior. This book should come as a serious shock to a generation of lawyers, judges and forensic psychologists who have spent a lifetime adhering to the “blank slate” view of human nature, when the “bad seed” analogy appears to be closer to the truth.

Blogs

Check out Brain Blogger for a look at “Topics from Multidimensional BioPsychoSocial Perspectives,” as the site is subtitled. Recent posts include articles about antibiotic overuse, gender reassignment, autism, torture, proprioception, neural plasticity, and my own article on marijuana withdrawal, which has drawn a panoply of heated responses.

A fascinating site with a multidisciplinary perspective.

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Should I Tell My Boss?

2009-06-24T19:53:00.003-05:00

Health help in the workplace.

It’s no secret: Times are tough. The situation at work is uncertain at best, downright Machiavellian at worst. According to a recent survey by the American Psychological Association (APA), the primary source of stress for 80 % of Americans is—you guessed it—money.

Health Matters at Work, a program developed by Community Health Charities, is offering a four-part video podcast series on addiction, depression, and stress in the workplace. The goal of the Health Matters at Work program is to enhance the ability of “employers, employees, and their loved ones to connect to credible information and resources to improve their health and their lives.”

The podcast series focuses on work-related resources available through Mental Health America, the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, and the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

“The message we hope people hear,” said Robert Lindsey of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, “is that together we offer a broad network of support to people in communities across America, and we are all here for people that need our help.”

David Shern of Mental Health America said: “Mental Health is fundamental to health in every way. Increased levels of stress, depression, and anxiety all raise the risk of cardiovascular disease.”

Community Health Charities of America, located in Arlington, Virginia, is a consortium dedicated to assisting “people affected by a disability or chronic disease by uniting caring donors in the workplace with health issues and causes important to them and their families.”

A list of the group’s member charities can be found here.

Corporate partners include AARP, McDonalds, Exxon, HP, Siemens, and USA Today.

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Obama Comes Clean

2009-06-23T16:24:00.003-05:00

Signs nicotine control act, admits he still lights up.

The new anti-smoking legislation, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, prevents the advertising of tobacco to children and puts tobacco under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration for the first time.

In signing the bill, Obama was compelled by reporters to admit to his nicotine addiction during a press conference. "Look, I've said before that as a former smoker I constantly struggle with it. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes," Obama said in an article about the news conference by Sheldon Alberts of Canwest News Service.

Typically, for a smoker who can’t quite quit, Obama defended himself by saying, "I don't do it in front of my kids. I don't do it in front of my family."

Obama was said to have convinced his wife to support his bid for the presidency by agreeing to give up cigarettes—a campaign pledge he has not been able to keep, by his own admission.

During the Tuesday press conference Obama compared his addiction to nicotine to an alcoholic's need for a drink. "I don't know what to tell you, other than the fact that, you know, like folks who go to (Alcoholics Anonymous) you know, once you've gone down this path, then, you know, it's something you continually struggle with, which is precisely why the legislation we signed was so important, because what we don't want is kids going down that path in the first place."

During the press conference, an exasperated Obama sought to turn the questions away from his own lingering addiction. "First of all, the new law that was put in place is not about me. It's about the next generation of kids coming up," he said. "So I think it's fair . . . to just say that you just think it's neat to ask me about my smoking, as opposed to it being relevant to my new law. But that's fine. I understand. It's an interesting human interest story."

Graphics Credit: obamasmoking.com

addiction drugs smoking nicotine

The Dapsone Analogy

2009-06-21T12:41:00.003-05:00

Another way of looking at addiction.

Medical science tells us that there are diseases called “pharmacogenetic disorders.” A common one is known as glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency. This disorder is a human enzyme deficiency that reduces the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen, resulting in severe anemia. Its origin is genetic, and it is found predominantly in Jews and African-Americans. People who have this disease don’t necessarily know it. They don’t get into trouble until they are exposed to a very particular kind of environmental insult: an oxidative agent. Like eating fava beans, for example. If a person suffering this disorder eats fava beans, as one addiction expert told me, sparing the technical details, “their red blood cells go to hell.”

Okay. But how can something be a disease if the people who supposedly have it are perfectly normal until they start messing with fava beans—or alcohol or heroin? To some people, that just does not sound like a disease. And there are, in addition, obvious environmental influences on the course of addiction. However, there are also strong environmental causes and impacts related to diabetes, hypertension, and a host of other common diseases.

As it happened, African Americans who served in Viet Nam who suffered from glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency found out about it fast, whenever they took an anti-malarial medication called Dapsone, a drug now used to treat certain skin diseases similar to leprosy.

Blacks with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency would take Dapsone, which pulled the environmental trigger on their disease, and they would suffer acute hemolysis—the complete breakdown of their red blood cells. If they didn’t take Dapsone, or eat fava beans, they were fine—you couldn’t tell them from anyone else. (The same thing happened in Korea when service personnel suffering this deficiency encountered a different environmental trigger—the antimalarial drug primaquine.)

Now try this: What if eating fava beans for the very first time didn’t make certain people sick—it made them feel incredibly good; better than they had ever felt in their life? Better than they ever thought possible. What if that first experience felt like a life truly worth living; a surcease from years of sadness, a miracle drug, the healing hand of God? What if certain people, for reasons of abnormal biochemistry, had never experienced the typical feelings of happiness and contentment most people take for granted—until they ate fava beans. And then, for the first time in their lives, they felt better than okay.

If fava beans were a rewarding stimuli instead of aversive, the disease would still be a pharmacogenetic disorder, hidden from view in the absence of the environmental trigger. Once having tasted the bean, however, a stubborn minority of people would be drawn to eat it repeatedly. And the more they ate the beans, the more their bodies would become dependent upon the artificial reward the beans provided—until they reached a point where they simply could not function unless they had their beans.

Photo Credit: Astragen LLC

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Addiction Touches Almost Everyone

2009-06-17T12:47:00.006-05:00

75% of Americans know someone who is addicted.

A new survey by Lake Research Partners, sponsored by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and presented at the June 16 Conference of Mayors meeting in Providence, R.I., reveals that three of every four people surveyed said that they personally knew someone who has been addicted to alcohol or drugs.

More ominously, half of Americans “say they could not afford treatment if they or a family member needed it. They are also concerned that people addicted to alcohol or drugs may not be able to get treatment because of cost or lack of insurance coverage – a concern likely heightened by the current economic recession.” Moreover, financial concerns about treatment are highest among Americans with incomes less than $50,000. 67% of that income group said they would not be able to afford addiction treatment.

Among the survey’s other findings:

--Three‐quarters (75%) of Americans are concerned that people who are addicted to alcohol or drugs may not be able to get treatment because they lack insurance coverage or cannot afford it. Concerns about the affordability of and access to addiction treatment emerge throughout the survey results. Four in ten (41%) are very concerned.

--Nearly three‐quarters (73%) support including alcohol and drug addiction treatment as part of national health care reform to make it more accessible and affordable. This support cuts across all demographic groups. Lake Research Partners notes that this figure is quite high, “given the current economic climate and public concerns about government spending." One‐quarter (26%) oppose increased funding.

--Two‐thirds of Americans (68%) also support increasing federal and state funding for alcohol and drug prevention, treatment, and recovery services.

--Finally, more than nine in ten (96%) support providing specialized prevention, treatment, and recovery support to veterans and military returning from active duty (78% strongly support this effort).

The poll was sponsored by Closing the Addiction Treatment Gap , a program of the Open Society Institute. This program seeks to raise awareness around alcohol and drug addiction and its effects on family and communities. The telephone survey was conducted May 29-June 1, 2009 among a nationally‐representative sample of N = 1,001 adults 18 and older. The margin of sampling error is + 3.1 percentage points.

Graphics Credit: http://naturalpatriot.org/category/education/

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Smoke Alarm

2009-06-16T10:59:00.006-05:00

The Cannabis and Tobacco Education Initiative.

My British friend James Langton, author of No Need For Weed, who maintains the excellent web site Clearhead for people with marijuana abuse problems, has launched a new site called Smoke Alarm.

The new venture is a non-profit company dedicated to the proposition of “offering credible information to the estimated 3 million people who regularly smoke tobacco joints here in the UK. We do this by directly educating through schools and colleges as well as indirectly through tobacco cessation professionals, drug agencies, and youth services.”

James Langton is in a unique position to help smokers in Europe, where the preferred drug delivery method for nicotine and marijuana is a joint of marijuana and tobacco rolled together—a smoking method that has never really caught on in the U.S. This preference for combining the two smokes into a “tobacco joint” creates “a powerfully addictive carcinogenic cocktail,” Langton writes on the new site. “Cannabis and tobacco are intimately connected and although the science of nicotine addiction is well understood, much less is known about how to help cannabis smokers with the psychological and physiological aspects of their dependency, and how the two substances interrelate to compound the difficulties in quitting either or both, together or separately.”

Langton’s book, No Need For Weed: Understanding and Breaking Cannabis Dependency, published by Hindsight Press, chronicles the author’s 30 years of experience as an addicted marijuana smoker, and explores the thoughts and difficulties of others who have suffered various degrees of marijuana dependency (See my support site on Marijuana Withdrawal).

“Cannabis continues to be an extremely popular drug with young people in the United Kingdom, and the fact that 44% of fifteen and sixteen year olds admitted to using the drug at some point in their lives when questioned for the 2008 United Nations International Narcotics Control Board report should not come as a surprise,” Langton writes. “Many young cannabis smokers do not consider themselves to be nicotine addicted simply because they mix their cannabis with tobacco. However, it's when the supply of cannabis is curtailed or they make an attempt to quit the drug that the nicotine pull gains dominance. This dynamic can set up a life-time nicotine cannabis relationship that remains one of the hardest for adult drug users to break.”

addiction drugs smoking nicotine

Allergies and Addiction

2009-06-13T18:00:00.003-05:00

Is there a connection?

Most medical scientists agree that the primary cause of allergies is the unregulated release of histamine from mast cells, mostly likely caused by genetic malfunctions in the immune system.

What connection could that mechanism have to addiction? For starters, real toxins like drugs, and mistaken toxins like dust and ragweed, are both dealt with by the immune system, which attempts to cleanse the system of the “poisons.”

On a more mundane level, Alcoholics Anonymous has from the beginning referred to alcoholism as an “allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.” More and more frequently, references are made to “allergy-induced addictions,” which supposedly include cravings for high-carbohydrate foods, sodas, and sugar foods in general, in addition to alcohol.

Joan Mathews-Larson and Mark Mathews, in “The Role of Allergies in Addictions and Mental Illness,” from the 2009 Praeger International Collection on Addictions, concentrate on food allergies, and argue that abstaining alcoholics turn instinctively to “allergy-provoking foods” like grains, sugars, and yeast—not coincidentally the basic ingredients of alcoholic beverages. This same basic class of foods—wheat, milk, barley and corn (from which we derive corn syrup) are capable of forming peptides that can bind to endorphin receptors.

Combining these trigger foods with alcohol can be a bad idea, the authors claim. “The starting point of most diseases is in the gut. Allergy foods factor heavily in the etiology of diseases because they damage the GI tract, and impair digestion.... Furthermore, combining allergy foods with alcohol heaps more stress on the immune system by doing more damage to the gut.” Thus, allergic alcoholics risks compounding the digestive damage unless they work to clear their diet of allergens.

The authors further allege that “If the allergic addictive person is deprived of the offending allergen long enough, he or she will go into withdrawal,” concluding that addiction and allergies “are the same problem based on similar molecules, following the same etiology.” Needless to say, this is a controversial theory. As one commentator on a health site described it, “This is counter intuitive on so many levels.”

While the research is controversial, and represents an unusual view of the etiology of addiction, there are plenty of addicts and alcoholics who suffer from allergies, and the extent to which this represents a double whammy to the immune is a question that remains largely unanswered.

Photo Credit: Allergy Asthma Zone

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