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NaturalNews - A report by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission has concluded that prescription drugs have outstripped illegal drugs as a cause of death.

An analysis of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that three times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines put together. According to state law enforcement officials, this is a sign of a burgeoning prescription drug abuse problem.

"The abuse has reached epidemic proportions," said Lisa McElhaney, a sergeant in the pharmaceutical drug diversion unit of the Broward County Sheriff's Office. "It's just explosive."

In 2007, cocaine was responsible for 843 deaths, heroin for 121, methamphetamines for 25 and marijuana for zero, for a total of 989 deaths. In contrast, 2,328 people were killed by opioid painkillers, including Vicodin and Oxycontin, and 743 were killed by drugs containing benzodiazepine, including the depressants Valium and Xanax.

Alcohol directly caused 466 deaths, but was found in the bodies of 4,179 cadavers in all.

While the number of dead bodies containing heroin jumped 14 percent from the prior year, to a total of 110, the number of deaths influenced by the painkiller oxycodone increased by 36 percent, to a total of 1,253.

Across the country, prescription drugs have become an increasingly popular alternative to the more difficult to acquire illegal drugs. Even as illegal drug use among teenagers have fallen, prescription drug abuse has increased. For example, while 4 percent of U.S. 12th graders were using Oxycontin in 2002, by 2005 that number had increased to 5.5 percent.

THAT illegal drugs are not always pure is no surprise, but is cannabis being laced with a Viagra-like compound?

Dries de Kaste and colleagues at the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, analysed a liquid that police found being sold on the streets of Utrecht as a "marijuana adulterant".

They found compounds called homosildenafil (HS) and thiohomosildenafil (THS) in it, which belong to the same class of compounds as sildenafil, sold as Viagra. All three inhibit the breakdown of an enzyme that dilates blood vessels in the penis, increasing blood flow.

De Kaste does not know why HS and THS are being added to cannabis, but speculates that it could be to enhance the uptake of its psychoactive constituents, or to exploit a perception that marijuana use affects libido.

HS and THS were not destroyed when they were "smoked" using a laboratory simulator (Forensic Science International, DOI: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2008.09.002). The health effects of inhaling such "erectogenics" - and the compounds they produce when burned - are unknown.

Amy Winehouse's persistent drug use has left the troubled star's nose so "weak" she is concerned that it's about to fall off, according to a new report.
"Amy knows that her nose is next to fall apart — she admitted to me that it feels weak at the bone," a source tells Fox News columnist Neil Sean.
Amy herself has addressed the nose issue. "Yeah, it's a problem, but it's my problem so leave it," Sean quotes her as saying.
Meanwhile, Amy's friends are said to be so worried about the Grammy Award winner they are keeping watch over her 24/7.
According to a report from earlier in the week, the Rehab hitmaker's pals have been forced to give up their prior commitments and stay with Amy at her Camden, North London home to ensure she doesn't do anything she might regret.

A source told The Sun, "No one wants to leave Amy on her own – she's in a very fragile state at the moment. "Her most loyal friends are terrified she is going to do something which she can't overcome. "She's been to hell and back already but some fear she’s going to get worse before she gets better." The singer, 25, is also facing arrest after allegedly punching dancer Sherene Flash last week.

Amy Winehouse may have brain damage as a result of two overdoses in the past year where she binged on crystal meth, heroin, and cocaine, reports the Sun. In addition, the "Rehab" singer convulsed “like a scene from The Exorcist" and displayed “multiple personality traits” after consuming an “inhuman” amount of hash in July, a friend says.

"The future is bleak, bleak, bleak," said the friend. “She had smoked an inhuman amount of hash which resulted in acute cannabis poisoning. It’s thought she had been smoking it for 36 hours. She is in need of years of psychiatry and medical treatment if she has a hope."

Source Sun (UK)

Any dreadlocked white guys finding this article after Googling "Drugs Rule" should know that we've given this list about drugs a rule. To make the cut, an accomplishment has to be considered great by people who could pass a field sobriety test. So no Grateful Dead music. We're sure someone somewhere has enjoyed the Dead perfectly sober, just as there are probably non-Christians who listen to Christian Rock. But we're just as sure that in the grand scheme of things, those people don't count.

In fact, because we're masochists, we gave ourselves a strict no music policy, leaving us with ... well, not a whole lot actually. Turns out most great things were accomplished by people who just said no, at least immediately prior to accomplishing them. Except for these five:

1. Francis Crick Discovers DNA Thanks to LSD
2. Freud and Cocaine Invent Psychoanalysis
3. A Coke Addict Makes a Coke-Flavored Cola and Calls it Coke
4. Dock Ellis Trips His Way to a No-Hitter
5. Moses Takes 'Shrooms, Shits Out Ten Commandments

Read the original article (by Jack O'Brien) on Cracked.com for further details...

A ground-breaking study of 4117 marijuana smokers in California reveals that the 'Gateway Theory' probably had it backwards. Instead of enticing young people to use other drugs, this study suggests that marijuana may have the opposite effect.

This first-ever clinical examination of a large number of medical marijuana applicants depicts a population that is remarkably normal. The percentages earning bachelors' degrees and doctorates are nearly identical to the national numbers. They are, in the main, productive citizens with jobs, homes and families who smoke marijuana weekly or daily – and have in some cases for decades.

For the vast majority of these applicants, their use of cannabis ultimately led to a decrease in the use of tobacco, alcohol, and hard drugs. Asked to compare their current alcohol consumption with their lifetime peak, over 10% claimed to be abstinent and nearly 90% claimed to have cut their drinking in half.

They also report using cannabis as self medication for stress and anxiety – with fewer side effects than the legal pharmaceutical alternatives.

As children, a significant percentage of the male applicants had been treated for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Today their routine morning use of minimal amounts of cannabis strongly suggests that it enhances their ability to concentrate by allowing them to focus on one problem at a time.

As one construction company estimator said, "After two hits and my morning coffee, I'm the best estimator in the company."

After years of prescription antidepressants that offered no relief from anxiety disorder, Patsy K. Eagan experiments with her drug of choice— marijuana, which for some may be the medicine to send SSRIs up in smoke

A thimbleful is all it takes. After a day’s work, I pinch off a small amount of marijuana and put it in a steel-tooth grinder. The flowers, covered in tiny white diamonds of THC, release a piney scent when crushed. I turn on the TV, and instead of taking a glass of wine with my evening news, I take out my vaporizer and set it on the coffee table.

Outside the walls of my bungalow in Oakland, California, I can hear the rush-hour traffic, but I’ve already changed into my Big Lebowski–style robe and slippers. I tap the ground flakes into a canister that I attach to another piece, this one with a bag on the end, and set both on the vaporizer. I flip the switch, and the bag slowly inflates with plumes of white smoke. Once it’s fully clouded, I attach a mouthpiece to the canister, put this to my lips, and press. On the inhale, the cannabinoids taste like sunned grass. My prescription for anxiety disorder didn’t always begin and end with an herb. But I’ve run through enough pharmaceutical drugs to know that pot dulls my panic better than any pill.

Marijuana Anxiety Disorders - ELLE

Correction to This Article (Washington Post): The April 30 obituary for Albert Hofmann incorrectly reported fatal overdoses from the hallucinogen LSD. There are no known deaths directly attributable to overdoses of LSD, although its mind-altering effects have led some users to misjudge dangers and harm themselves.

Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered in 1938 as his "problem child", died April 29 at his home in Burg, a village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack.

His death was confirmed by Rick Doblin, the Boston-based founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company developing LSD and other psychedelics for prescription medicines.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, thousands of times stronger than mescaline, can give its user an experience often described as psychedelic -- a kaleidoscopic twirling of the mind pulsating with color and movement.

After its discovery, LSD was viewed as a wonder drug with the potential to treat problems including schizophrenia and alcoholism. For the latter, some held the theory that chronic drinkers quit only after experiencing the hallucinations of delirium tremens.

LSD attracted many prominent advocates. They included Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World," and psychologist Timothy Leary, who saw the drug as a potent way for people to live up to his 1960s counterculture motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

The CIA was also widely reported to have used LSD in experiments on unwitting subjects. This, and greater recreational use that caused some fatal overdoses, led to the widespread condemnation of the drug and, by the early 1970s, its criminalization. As a result, research permission and funding from state and federal agencies was terminated.

In Dr. Hofmann's opinion, outlawing LSD made its use even more attractive to young people and diminished any safeguards. He spoke of many hippies stopping by his home on the way to their spiritual quest, hoping to score from his "secret stash."

Dr. Hofmann came across LSD while working on medicinal uses of a fungus to act as a circulatory heart-lung stimulant. His first LSD "trip" occurred in 1943, a troubling experience that led him to write in his journal, "A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul." Above all, he wrote, about his second "trip": "I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane."

Dr. Hofmann headed the research department for natural medicines at Sandoz (this firm manufactured LSD under the trade name Delysid by the late 1940s) before retiring in 1971. At the company in the 1950s and 1960s, he discovered and named many of the active hallucinogenic ingredients in Mexican "magic mushrooms," including psilocybin and psilocin. He was credited with important developments in medications for geriatric and gynecological uses as well as drugs to control blood pressure.

He was a member of the Nobel Prize Committee and a fellow of the World Academy of Sciences. He was a prolific writer of scientific articles and the author of several books, many of which tried to bind the scientific with the spiritual. In particular, he denounced the demonization of LSD after hippies and societal dropouts seemed to have monopolized the media's focus.

In his 1989 book "Insight Outlook," he wrote that LSD taken by "mentally stable persons in the right set and setting" was suited to the Western world, which he saw rife with "materialism, estrangement from nature, . . . [and] the missing of a sense-making philosophical fundamentalness of life." Read also this conversation.

His 100th birthday was celebrated in Basel as a referendum on his greatest discovery. He attended the conference, "LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug," and told one reporter that it was his daily diet of a raw egg that kept him spry, not, as many LSD enthusiasts suspected, his long-ago experiments.

His wife of more than 70 years, Anita Hofmann, died in December. One son died years earlier.
Survivors include three children.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse recently offered adolescents the first ever "Drug Facts Chat Day." Students from high schools and middle schools across the country submitted anonymous questions online—about alcohol, the brain, addiction, and everything in between—to NIDA scientists, including some of the nation's top experts in substance abuse. The scientists then responded with personalized, nonjudgmental answers. Below is a sample of the inquiries that relate specifically to prescription drugs and other substances around the house. All the questions and answers below are unedited.

1) Consume in small, frequent amounts.

Between 20-200mg per hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function.

Caffeine crosses the blood-brain barrier quickly (owing to its lipid solubility) although it can take up to 45 minutes for full ingestion through the gastro-intestinal tract. Under normal conditions, this remains stable for around 1 hour before gradually clearing in the following 3-4 hours (depending on a variety of factors).

A landmark 2004 study showed that small hourly doses of caffeine (.3mg per kg of body weight [approx 20 mg per hour; thanks digg!]) can support extended wakefulness, potentially by counteracting the homeostatic sleep pressure, which builds slowly across the day and acts preferentially on the prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain thought responsible for executive and "higher" cognitive functions).

At doses of 600mg, caffeine's effects on cognitive performance are often comparable to those of modafinil, a best-of-class nootropic.

2) Play to your cognitive strengths while wired.

Caffeine may increase the speed with which you work, may decrease attentional lapses, and may even benefit recall - but is less likely to benefit more complex cognitive functions, and may even hurt others. Plan accordingly (and preferably prior to consuming caffeine!)

Caffeine has long been known to improve vigilance, but work focusing on its more more cognitive effects - through interactions with the "frontal task network" - show less clear effects.

In tests of lateral prefrontal function, caffeine only remediates some fatigue-related symptoms. For example, in a random number generation task (a commonly-used measure of prefrontal function), caffeine increased the quantity of numbers generated to pre-fatigue levels, but did not significantly affect more demanding aspects of performance: caffeine didn't affect the likelihood of subjects generating numbers outside the acceptable range, or their tendency to perseverate on particular numbers.

Another study indicates the same is true of caffeine's effect on the medial prefrontal cortex. In that study, sleep deprivation-related decrements on the Iowa Gambling Task were not mitigated by caffeine.

The Stroop task, which a wealth of neuroimaging shows is related to functioning of the anterior cingulate, may also benefit from caffeine, but this effect may also be due to general speed improvements rather than those of cognitive control specifically.

(Interestingly, it appears that none of these studies follow guideline #1 - and there are hints in the second one that subject's performance might have shown significant improvements if another dose of caffeine had been provided about half-way through the task).

Recall from memory may be improved by caffeine (here and here), possibly due to enhancements in memory encoding rather than retrieval per se. Another study shows caffeine can actually impair estimates of "memory scanning" speed (in the Sternberg paradigm), so the failure of many studies to find recall-related effects of caffeine may reflect a speed-accuracy tradeoff at the time of retrieval.

3) Play to caffeine's strengths.

Caffeine's effects can be maximized or minimized depending on what else is in your system at the time.

The beneficial effects of caffeine may be most pronounced in conjunction with sugar. For example, one factor analytic study has shown caffeine-glucose cocktails provide benefits to cognition not seen with either alone.

Some flavonoids (such as soy) may act in the same way as caffeine - i.e., through adenosine receptor antagonism - in particular galangin, genistein, and hispidol. Evidence showing that markers of caffeine metabolism are slowed by flavonoids might suggest that ingestion of flavonoids would enhance the effects of caffeine - some studies show grapefruit juice might keep caffeine levels in the bloodstream high for longer, though others have found no such effect (thanks to commenter Matt McIntosh for this latter reference).

Caffeine's effects might be masked by green tea extract, Kava Kava or St. John's Wort - all of which contain theanine and are associated with subjective feelings of relaxation - but other preliminary evidence indicates the opposite effect: theanine might actually potentiate the benefits of caffeine on some tasks (reported in longer format here).

Similarly, nicotine may speed the metabolism of caffeine.

Because caffeine is a competitive antagonist for adenosine 1 & 2a primarily at striatal sites, it may also selectively increase the efficacy of D2 receptors, given evidence that D2 depleted mice show reduced effects of caffeination. According to theoretical computational models of D2 receptor activity in the striatum, this should increase cortico-thalamic excitability. It will be important for future work to examine caffeine's effect on tasks thought to require NoGo pathway activity.

A variety of other chemicals may work on the A2 receptor in similar (SCH 58261, ZM 241385, CSC, KF17837) or opposing ways (CGS 21680, APEC, 2HE-NECA).

4) Know when to stop - and when to start again.

Although you may not grow strongly tolerant to caffeine, you can become dependent on it and suffer withdrawal symptoms. Balance these concerns with the cognitive and health benefits associated with caffeine consumption - and appropriately timed resumption.

Long-term ingestion of large quantities of caffeine (by way of coffee) is associated with a variety of health benefits - not only cognitive enhancements but also reduction in risk for type 2 diabetes (c.f.), Alzheimer's and Parkinson's . These beneficial effects may be related to the neuroprotective role of adenosine.

However, there are some suggestions that caffeine also has adverse effects (mostly cardiovascular, which might be balanced by flavonoids - see guideline #3). And some people just don't like the thought of cultivating an addiction - or the spectre of withdrawal symptoms.

Some evidence indicates high heritability for caffeine addition (note: this is based on interviews of twins) and others are advocating the recognition of caffeine addiction as a bona fide mental disorder. Withdrawal symptoms can onset within 12 to 24 hours of caffeine consumption and last between 2 and 9 days.

There are more cognitive concerns here as well. For one, caffeine probably follows the Yerkes-Dodson law, in which a moderate dose is superior to too little or too much. In addition, there are well-established cognitive effects where recall is best when it matches the context of encoding - so if you're caffeinated when you study for the test, you better be caffeinated when you take it.

5) Finding good sources of caffeine

Despite the huge variety of sources of caffeine - including caffeinated soap, candy, and of course chocolate - the optimal use of caffeine is likely to involve small, hourly doses along with some cardioprotective agent. Given the high solubility of caffeine, absorption time should not be an issue (but if for some reason it is, try gum).

Otherwise, why not enjoy a cup of green tea (coffee-flavored, if you must), as the Chinese have for nearly 5000 years? It's hard to come by a better longitudinal study than that.

"Legalisering wietteelt en gereguleerd verstrekken harddrugs enige oplossing." Dat zegt scheidend voorzitter Hans van Duijn van de grote politiebond NPB in een vandaag gepubliceerd interview met de GPD-bladen. De aanpak van drugscriminaliteit heeft de afgelopen jaren volgens hem weinig opgeleverd, maar trekt wel een zware wissel op de politie. Door de vele uren die agenten steken in drugsbestrijding, komt de aanpak van andere vormen van criminaliteit in gevaar, aldus Van Duijn.

Eerder al bepleitten burgemeesters van grote steden als Job Cohen en Gerd Leers voor een versoepeling van het softdrugsbeleid. De Raad van Hoofdcommissarissen is echter onvermurwbaar. De politietop heeft zelfs een speciale taskforce in het leven geroepen om wietcriminaliteit te bestrijden. De regering is ook niet van plan om de wietteelt te legaliseren. Dat ligt in verband met Europese regelgeving overigens ook gecompliceerd.

De 60-jarige Van Duijn vertrekt eind mei als NPB-voorzitter.

Een proef aan de universiteit van Wake Forest heeft aangetoond dat onderdanige mannetjesapen onder stress een voorkeur hebben voor cocaïne. De cynomolgusapen hebben een samenlevingsvorm waarbij dominantie belangrijk is. De onderzoekers stelden dan ook vier dominante en vier onderdanige cynomolgusapen bloot aan een stressvolle situatie. Na veertig minuten kregen ze de keuze tussen een portie eten en cocaïne. De onderdanige apen kozen voor de drug. (vsv)