Eideard

Imagine a vaccine against smoking: People trying to quit would light up a cigarette and feel nothing. Or a vaccine against cocaine, one that would prevent addicts from enjoying the drug’s high.

Though neither is imminent, both are on the drawing board, as are vaccines to combat other addictions. While scientists have historically focused their vaccination efforts on diseases like polio, smallpox and diphtheria — with great success — they are now at work on shots that could one day release people from the grip of substance abuse…

Unlike preventive vaccines — like the familiar ones for mumps, measles and so on — this type of injection would be administered after someone had already succumbed to an addictive drug. For instance, cocaine addicts who had been vaccinated with one of Dr. Kim Janda’s formulations before they snorted cocaine reported feeling like they’d used “dirty coke,” he said. “They felt like they were wasting their money.”

The scientific principle behind Dr. Janda’s vaccines is, as he put it, “simplistically stupid.” Much like vaccines against disease, they introduce a small amount of the foreign substance into the blood, causing the immune system to create antibodies that will attack that substance the next time it appears…

The contrast, he said, is to anti-opiates like Suboxone or methadone that are currently used to treat heroin addiction. Rather than blocking the drug’s effects, they seek to replace the heroin high…

He is quick to caution that taking away someone’s ability to get high off of one drug hardly cures them of their addiction problems. There’s nothing to stop a vaccinated cocaine addict, for example, from turning to methamphetamines.

Like any anti-addiction treatment, his vaccines are simply meant as “a crutch for people wanting to go into abstinence,” Dr. Janda said. “The whole thing with addicts is you have to want to get off the drug, or it’s not going to happen.”

RTFA. Dr. Janda is at least as interesting as his work. He has a sound scientific outlook about his work, about the patients his work could be treating.

I’d say he has a sound analysis about the unlikelihood of his work ever being funded by pharmaceutical companies that want more frequent product usage to keep their pockets full enough to motivate support. His treatment once every six months probably wouldn’t be profitable enough to satisfy corporate medicine.

According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription drug overdose deaths in Florida are up a staggering 265% since 2003. But it’s not just the deaths that have Florida officials worried; it’s the births.

“We saw the number of crack babies that died, and this is just another version of that,” Broward County Sheriff Al Lamberti said. “We all need to be concerned.”

According to state health records, 635 Florida babies were born addicted to prescription drugs in the first half of 2010 alone. South Florida doctors and intensive care nurses report an dramatic uptick in babies born hooked on pills that their mothers abused while pregnant.

“They go through withdrawal symptoms,” said Mary Osuch, the head nurse at Broward General Medical Center’s neonatal intensive care unit. “They’re crampy, miserable. They sweat. They can have rapid breathing. Sometimes, they can even have seizures…”

Marsha Currant, who runs the Susan B. Anthony Recovery Center near Fort Lauderdale, says prescription drug addiction overtook crack in 2009 as the main problem afflicting the pregnant women who are treated there…

Currant says new mothers who are hooked on prescription drugs are often reluctant to seek help for fear the authorities will take their babies from them.

“We wanted to have a place where women didn’t have to chose between getting treatment and having their children go into foster care,” she said.

Compounding the problem, women who are addicted to prescription drugs and find themselves pregnant cannot safely go off the drugs without medical supervision. They need to be weaned off slowly, or the baby will go into withdrawal in the womb.

Yes, Florida has a Tea Party governor who made his billions dispensing drugs. He’s so “serious” about the problem that he actually says stuff about it. And had to be dragged kicking and screaming into signing a bill requiring a statewide database tracking pill prescriptions. He calls it an invasion of privacy.

Meanwhile, Florida is the pill center of America. A situation which reflects a lax medical community as a whole – and a governor whose walk-in clinics established the record for the largest fine ever paid for Medicare fraud.

In the global war against smoking, Europe remains a difficult battlefront. Despite ad campaigns featuring grisly images of rotting lungs and crumbling teeth, “the beautiful continent” continues to have the highest smoking rate in the world.

So forgive Iceland for considering something truly radical — prescription-only cigarettes. Under proposed legislation, only those with valid medical certificates would be permitted to buy cigarettes from pharmacies.

“I think Iceland can be a test tube to try out progressive things because we are a small country and we don’t have a massive lobby for tobacco,” said Thorarinn Gudnason, a cardiologist at Landspitali University Hospital in Rejkyavik. ”We are taking care of people who are dying of this disease in their 40s and we’re fed up with it.”

Iceland’s smoking rate is already one of the lowest in Europe. Just 15 per cent of the population lights up compared to an average of 31 per cent across the continent. However, the story among young Icelanders is more worrisome: 20 per cent of children and teenagers smoke. Dr. Gudnason hopes the new plan will dramatically reduce that figure and cut overall smoking rates to less than 10 per cent…

Tobacco and nicotine would be classified as addictive drugs and second-hand smoke would be treated and controlled like other carcinogenic substances. Lighting up in public places such as parks and in cars with children would be outlawed.

Eventually, smokers who are unable to kick the habit through treatment and various addiction programs — or those smokers who simply refuse to quit — may get a prescription for tobacco from their doctors. Once cigarettes become available only through physicians, the price will go down again — as it would be unfair to tax those unable to quit supporters of the plan say.

“Tobacco is very addictive and we would recognize them as addicts,” said Ms. Fridleifsdottir.

Bravo! Once again the political side of Iceland is willing to experiment with a daring approach to a disgusting problem. It would force a lot of people with lazy personal ethics to confront a personal problem. They can still maintain their addiction if they wish.

Saving their lives is a side effect.

Florida’s Governor Scott – investor in walk-in clinics

The Kentucky number plate on Chad’s pick-up truck, parked round the back of a doctor’s clinic in Palm Beach, Florida, reveals that he has just driven a thousand miles, 16 hours overnight, to be here – and he’s not come for the surfing.

“It’s my back,” he says, rubbing his lower vertebrae. “I’m a builder. I fell off the roof and hurt my back.”

That’s odd, as we have just watched him run out of the clinic and over to his truck without so much as a limp. He’s clutching a prescription for 180 30mg doses of the painkiller oxycodone.

Chad is one of thousands of “pillbillies” who descend on Florida every year from across the south and east coasts of America. Some come in trucks bearing telltale number plates from Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, even far-away Ohio. Others come by the busload on the apocryphally named Oxycodone Express.

It’s a lucrative trade. Chad tells us he has just paid $275 to the doctor inside the clinic, or pill mill, as it is pejoratively called. The doctor, who can see up to 100 people in a sitting, can make more than $25,000 in a day, cash in hand.

For Chad the profits are handsome too. He will spend $720 at a pharmacy on his 180 pills, giving him a total outlay of about $1,000. Back in Kentucky he can sell each pill for $30, giving them a street value of $5,400 and Chad a clear profit of more than $4,000. If he goes to 10 pill mills in Palm Beach on this one trip he could multiply that windfall tenfold. But then there’s the other cost of the oxycodone trade, a cost that is less often talked about, certainly not by Chad or his accommodating doctor.

Every day in Florida seven people die having overdosed on prescription drugs – 2,531 died in 2009 alone. That statistic is replicated across the US, where almost 30,000 people died last year from abusing pharmaceutical pills.

It’s an American catastrophe that has been dubbed pharmageddon, though it rarely pierces the public consciousness. Occasionally a celebrity overdose will attract attention – Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson – but they are specks in a growing mountain of human mortality.

RTFA. If you’re someone who reads and thinks, who cares about their community and family – this is probably something you already are aware of.

Still – a little more ammunition to fire at your Congress-critter is always helpful. Who knows? As we approach the next election cycle a note from you – and hundreds more – may add up to something more meaningful than some smiling lobbyist with a hundred dollar haircut and a check.

Britain and the US have contributed to instability in the Middle East by supporting autocratic regimes that suppress human rights, David Cameron has said. The Prime Minister said that popular uprisings now flaring across the Middle East showed the West had been wrong to support dictators and oppressive regimes.

Speaking to the Kuwaiti Parliament, Mr Cameron said Britain would back democracy campaigners seeking greater rights across the Middle East. “History is sweeping through your neighbourhood,” he said. “Not as a result of force and violence, but by people seeking their rights, and in the vast majority of cases doing so peacefully and bravely.”

Britain and other Western countries supported Hosni Mubarak, ousted by protests in Egypt. They have also backed authoritarian regimes in the Gulf region, making few efforts to push allies towards democratic reform.

That approach was wrong and counter-productive, Mr Cameron said…

He said that Britain’s economic and security interests would ultimately be advanced by a more democratic Middle East. “Our interests lie in upholding our values – in insisting on the right to peaceful protest, in freedom of speech and the internet, in freedom of assembly and the rule of law.”

Mr Cameron’s call for reform could be seen as heralding a new approach to countries like Saudi Arabia, where the Western-backed royal family firmly opposes democratic reform…

Anyone expect a new approach to the Saudi royal family from Congress or the White House?

“There is no single formula for success, and there are many ways to ensure greater, popular participation in Government,” he said. “We respect your right to take your own decisions, while offering our goodwill and support.”

“But we cannot remain silent in our belief that freedom and the rule of law are what best guarantee human progress and economic success, and that each country should find its own path to achieving peaceful change.”

This is the voice of an English conservative. Can you imagine, say, a Republican candidate for president saying this? How about Barack Obama? Sarah Whatshername?

It’s been about a century since American conservatives spoke out against imperialism. Western complicity in profit-taking has always overruled the essential benefits of commerce and communications.

New research…takes a look at birth outcomes and maternal smoking, building urgency for more states and cities to join the nationwide smoke-free trend that has accelerated in recent years. According to the new data, strong smoke-free policies can improve fetal outcomes by significantly reducing the prevalence of maternal smoking.

The study…compared maternal smoking prevalence in one Colorado city where a smoking ban has already been implemented to that of a neighboring city where there is no ordinance.

Researchers from the University of Colorado School of Pharmacy collected data from mothers residing in Pueblo, Colo., before and after a citywide smoking ban took effect. Results show a 23 percent decrease in the odds of preterm births and a 37 percent decrease in the odds of maternal smoking in Pueblo following the ban. Birth outcomes in El Paso County, Colo., however, showed no such drop during the same time period. Findings in this first-ever study in United States reflect similar findings as national data from Dublin, Ireland.

The study suggests that smoking bans have a significant and immediate positive impact on the health of infants and mothers. Pre-term babies stand a greater likelihood of experiencing cardiovascular issues later in life.

“This research proves that smoking is an irrefutable risk factor for expectant mothers who are acutely more affected,” said Associate Professor Robert Page, PharmD, MSPH, at the University of Colorado Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, and lead researcher on the study, who presented the findings. “The good news is that implementing strong tobacco control policy can protect even the most vulnerable from the deadly consequences of smoking.”

There are sufficient self-detructive so-called adults who consider this a libertarian issue. The silly part is they uniformly deny one’s right to legal suicide. But, it’s OK to kill yourself, your family, children and co-workers because of your addiction. One with no redeeming social value whatsoever.

Kudzu and its extracts and flowers have been used in traditional Chinese folk medicine to treat alcoholism for about 1,000 years. Kudzu contains daidzin, an anti-drinking substance…

“I think the over-arching issue here is medical treatment,” said Ivan Diamond…corresponding author for the study.

“Alcoholism is a medical disorder, not just a problem of will power,” he said. “Physicians treat medical disorders in order to prevent harm, while not necessarily curing the disease being treated – for example, drug treatment of hypertension, statins for high cholesterol, insulin for diabetes – and the same will become true for treating alcoholism…”

“Extracts of various parts of the kudzu vine have been used in many Chinese herbal medicine formulas and are said to be helpful in treating a variety of maladies, including alcoholism and intoxication,” said Ting-Kai Li, a professor in the department of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, and former director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “Recent research has found that several compounds of the isoflavone family – puerarin, daidzin, daidzein – in the kudzu extract decrease alcohol intake in experimental animals…”

“We had several key findings,” said Diamond. “We found that, one, CVT-10216 is a highly selective reversible inhibitor of ALDH2 without apparent toxicity. This means that it does not cause serious damage to other proteins and functions. Two, treatment with our ALDH-2 inhibitor increases acetaldehyde in the test tube and in living animals.” Acetaldehyde’s aversive effects can include a flushing reaction and feeling ill, which tend to reduce drinking. “And three, we found that our ALDH-2 inhibitor suppresses drinking in a variety of rodent drinking models.”

But that’s not the whole story, Diamond added. “Most importantly, we also found that CVT-10216 prevents the usual increase in drinking (binge drinking) that occurs after five days of abstinence, and also prevents relapse to drink, even when alcohol is not present. This means that something else besides acetaldehyde helps to suppress craving for, and prevent relapse to, drinking alcohol. We believe that ‘something else’ is dopamine.” He said that current concepts suggest that increased dopamine in the nucleus accumbens drives craving and relapse into drinking.

Bravo! Every little bit helps. And we get to use up Kudzu at the same time.

Hon Lik used to light up first thing in the morning. He smoked between lectures at the university where he studied Oriental medicine, between bites at lunch, in the lab where he researched ginseng health products. He’d usually burn through two packs by dusk and smoke a third over dinner and drinks with colleagues.

One of the strangest gizmos to come out of China in recent years, Hon’s invention, the electronic cigarette, turns the adage “where there’s smoke there’s fire” on its head.

It doesn’t burn at all. Instead, it uses a small lithium battery that atomizes a liquid solution of nicotine. What you inhale looks like smoke, but it’s a vapor similar to stage fog. (Take that, smoke-free bars!) It even has a red light at the tip that lights up with each drag.

“It’s a much cleaner, safer way to inhale nicotine,” said Hon, blowing curlicues of e-smoke as he showed off the cigarette in his Beijing office. (He says he doesn’t smoke anymore, except for such demonstrations.)

Hon got his first patent on the e-cigarette in 2003 and introduced it to the Chinese market the next year….

This year, it’s planning a big push in the United States. A disposable e-cigarette called the Jazz ($24.95 for the equivalent of five packs) is due to hit 7-Elevens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area shortly. Many rival versions, all made in China, are making their way to the U.S., sold mostly over the Internet by small marketing firms….

Buyer beware.

On the other hand, I am somewhat bemused by countries barring these products until they are demonstrated to be safe… like traditional cigarettes, one supposes.

They call Montana “Big Sky Country” or “The Last Best Place” – and it is easy to see why with its wide open spaces, majestic mountains and meandering rivers. But there is a far less wholesome side to this wilderness, a problem more associated with grim urban despair – drugs.

And one drug in particular – Methamphetamine.

That said, Montana’s wide open spaces have provided the perfect cover for makeshift meth labs, which are used to make the deadly cocktail. Until recently, the north-western state was ranked among the top five in the US with the worst meth problem.

Fifty percent of the children in foster care in Montana were there because of meth, while 50% of the prison population was there because of meth-related crime.
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