Eric H. Doss's Posterous Site

How a caffeine drink put a woman in hospital with liver failure | Mail Online

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:25:00 -0700

Well, I always thought these would cause diabetes before hepatitis, but either way.

Rat Park: Addiction is a situation, not a disease | Science That Matters

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:49:00 -0700

Rat Park: Addiction is a situation, not a disease

Filed under Drugs by aaronsw on February 1 | 22 comments

Thousands of studies have been done claiming that addiction is a disease, mostly by putting rats in a cage with some drugs and noting that they’ll repeatedly take the drugs, even if it means starving to death.

Bruce Alexander was skeptical about these results. He noticed that the rats in the experiments were stuffed alone in a boring cage with little else to do. “If I was strapped down alone in a cage,” he thought, “I’d probably want to get high too.”

So he built a rat park — a large, intricate, brightly-painted and heavily-padded structure to make the rats actually happy. He put half the rats in the normal cages and half in the park and gave both equal access to drugs.

The rats in the cage got addicted, while the rats in the park stayed away.

Then, even more strikingly, he took rats who’d had 57 days to get addicted to the drugs and took half of them out of the cages and put them in the park. The rats, even though they’d been addicted in the cage, suddenly stayed away from the drugs. They even voluntarily detoxed — trembling and shaking, but still staying off the drugs.

The top-shelf journals like Science and Nature rejected the study. It did end up getting published in a peer reviewed journal (Pharamacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, impact factor 1.5), but received little public attention. His university pulled the funding for the project.

The paper [PDF]

Detailed Wikipedia article

Related paper by the study’s author

via sciencethatmatters.com

And this, folks, is why raising your kids in Manhattan is safer than a small town in SC...

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Run Over Twice, Still Not A Crime In Mississippi « Urban Velo

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:42:00 -0700

via urbanvelo.org

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What did you do this weekend?

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 15:40:10 -0700

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Ready for the apocalypse... That's 17 pints of green tomato-hot pepper mix, 8 quarts of marinara sauce, 4 pints of corn relish, and 6 pints of salsa. Total of 50 pounds or so of tomatoes. That doesn't include the three salsas in my fridge or the creamed corn from earlier this week. Man, I love summer produce.

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