Showing posts with label addiction blog posts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label addiction blog posts. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Twelve Months of Addiction Box


(Inspired by Twelve Months of Drug Monkey)

Drug Monkey writes:

The rules for this blog meme are quite simple.
-Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.
I originally did this meme, after seeing similar posted by Janet Stemwedel and John Lynch.

Okay, here we go:

January:

Say what you will about glutamate-gated chloride channels in the parasitic nematode Haemonchus contortus—but the one thing you probably wouldn’t say about the cellular channels in parasitic worms is that a drug capable of activating them may prove useful in the treatment of alcoholism and other addictions.

February:

Here’s a book I’m delighted to promote unabashedly.

March:

Mo Costandi at the UK Guardian expanded on his Nature article about the mechanisms that result in memory impairment when people smoke marijuana.

April:

Our latest participant in the “Five Question Interview” series is Dr. Keith Laws, professor of cognitive neuropsychology and head of research in the School of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

May:

I'm not a huge fan of infographics, mostly because they tend to overpromise and are often marred by factual errors.

June:

Reporting the results of published studies concerned with genetic risk factors has always been a tricky proposition.

July:

Dr. Tom McLellan, chief executive officer of the Treatment Research Institute, who served on President Obama’s healthcare reform task force, called the recent U. S. Supreme Court Decision on the Affordable Care Act “the beginning of a new era in prevention, early intervention, and office based care for patients who are not addicted—but whose drinking, smoking, and use of other substances is harming their health and compromising the effectiveness of the care they are receiving for other illnesses and conditions.

August:

Medical marijuana advocates will finally have their day in federal court, after the United States Court of Appeals for D.C. ended ten years of rebuffs by agreeing to hear oral arguments on the government’s classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug.

September:

Voters in The Netherlands may have lost their final chance to block the nationwide imposition of the wietpas, or so-called "weed pass," as the law of the land in The Netherlands next year.

October:

People who say they are addicted to marijuana tend to exhibit a characteristic withdrawal profile.

November:

Children with heavy alcohol exposure show decreased brain plasticity, according to recent research on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FAS) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

December:

When a stroke happens to anyone under the age of 55, a major suspect is drugs, specifically the stimulants—methamphetamine and cocaine.


Photo Credit: lotteryuniverse.com

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

A 12 Days of Christmas Blog Meme


Wrapping it up.

From DrugMonkey’s blog: “The rules for this blog meme are quite simple. Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.” (Credit to Janet Stemwedel and John Lynch for the idea.)

Here are the 12 first lines from 2011 here at Addiction Inbox. Click month for full story:

January: Films popular in Europe feature more drinking episodes per movie than their equally popular American counterparts, according to a report by the European Centre for Monitoring Alcohol Marketing (EUCAM).

February: The Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy issued a warning about the new synthetic stimulants now being clandestinely marketed as bath salts or insecticide.

March: The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) exercised its emergency scheduling authority yesterday to outlaw the use of “fake pot” products.

April: In the first published examination of thirdhand smoke pollution and exposure, researchers at San Diego State University discovered that non-smokers who move into homes purchased from smokers encounter significantly elevated nicotine levels in the air and dust of their new homes two months or more after moving in.

May: What would it be like to have written a drug memoir and an autobiography before you turned 30? Would it seem like the end or the beginning? Are there any worlds left to conquer?

June: The song is not about cigarette addiction, but it could be.

July: Readers may remember the dark day of January 1, 2008, when the U.S. set an all-time record: One out of every 100 adults was behind bars. That’s more than 2.3 million people

August: The cost of addiction treatment is a legitimate medical expense, as long as you are talking about drug and alcohol addiction, which the IRS recognizes as a genuine medical disease.

September: The DSM-V, when it debuts it 2012, is set to replace the category of “Substance-Related Disorders” with a new category entitled "Addiction and Related Disorders." 

October: It’s official: The Obama administration has thrown off the gloves, repudiating Attorney General Eric Holder’s vow of two years ago that the federal government was not interested in prosecuting “state-legal” cannabis activity.

November: They first turned up in Europe and the U.K.; those neon-colored foil packets labeled “Spice,” sold in small stores and novelty shops, next to the 2 oz. power drinks and the caffeine pills.

December: After years of tightening regulation and dramatic declines in the number of adult smokers, Big Tobacco is targeting teenagers like never before.

Photo Credit: http://simplemom.net

Sunday, May 22, 2011

An Assortment of Drug-Related Articles


Misc. Stuff Etc.

In this post, I offer up an assortment of links to articles, mostly by me, and other related material, so that I can put checkmarks after a few items on the official Addiction Inbox to-do list, here on the official Addiction Inbox plexiglass clipboard. So let’s see….

* Here’s an article I wrote awhile ago for Brain Blogger, called "Why Do Schizophrenics Smoke Cigarettes?" The comments alone are worth a look. Spoiler: Schizophrenics smoke cigarettes because nicotine helps quell both audio and visual hallucinations.

* One of the very early posts here at Addiction Inbox, called "Marijuana Withdrawal," transformed itself into a self-help support board over time, with lengthy and enlightening comments appended to a short original post about the symptoms of marijuana dependency. The post has accumulated more than 1,000 comments at this writing, and is still going strong. Have a look here.

* The title of the Dutch study, published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism, is unambiguous: “Alcohol Portrayal on Television Affects Actual Drinking Behaviour.” But the dirt, as always, is in the details. My article at Adi Jaffe’s All About Addiction site.

* This feature of mine about synthetic marijuana products like “Spice” ran last month at The Fix, where I am now serving as senior contributing editor. 

* I contributed a comment or two to this follow-up piece on synthetic cannabis that ran in the New York Daily News.

* Also at The Fix, that irritating fraud James Frey gets his ass totally kicked by Time Healthland’s Maia Szalavitz, who demands that he apologize to addicts for all the harm he has done their cause in this article. Great stuff. 

* Here’s a hard-hitting excerpt from James Brown’s phenomenal addiction memoir, This River, which redeems the entire genre from the likes of James Frey. Read the harrowing “Instructions on the Use of Heroin.”

* Science of Blogging is a great site that regularly features interviews with, you guessed it, science bloggers. Travis Saunders was kind enough to do a Question and Answer session with me recently.

And here are a dozen recent blog posts by yours truly over at the The Fix:

2C-E, a research hallucinogenic best left to the professionals, may have killed two people in Oklahoma.

Almost 30 states now intend to test welfare recipients for drug use.

From the Hold Steady to the Rolling Stones to Nine Inch Nails: best all-time recovery songs.

Lawmakers argue over how to do the right thing for people who do the wrong thing.

As bodies pile up in Mexico's drug war, murdered children account for over 1,000 deaths.

The internet giant may pony up some serious dough for promoting prescription-pill abuse.

Provocative Penn psychologist wonders what would happen if our health care system treated diabetics like it treats most addicts. Nothing good.

Cigarette trafficking is now so lucrative that organized drug and gun smuggling operations want in on the action.

How does alcohol affect memory? New research suggests that students perform much better on tests when their "memory states" match.

For over 30 years, a charismatic Vietnam vet and mercenary named Gordon Baltimore helped hardcore addicts recover with a controversial regimen at a Thai monastery. A former heroin addict, he died last week at the age of 60

An American "charity" is paying thousands of U.S. drug addicts not to have children. Buoyed by its success, the group has moved on to Britain. Now Denmark may be taking up the trend.

An officially-sanctioned injection site for heroin and cocaine addicts in Vancouver prompts a dramatic fall in death rates. So why is the Canadian government so dead-set against it?

Thank you and good night.

Photo Credit: http://www.thinkstockphotos.com/

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