George Will recently wrote a column on drug policy:

The Economist magazine says this means that more than 200 million people — almost 5 percent of the world’s adult population — take illegal drugs, the same proportion as a decade ago. The annual U.S. bill for attempting to diminish the supply of drugs is $40 billion. Of the 1.5 million Americans arrested each year on drug offenses, half a million are incarcerated. “[T]ougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars,” the Economist said in March.

“There is no correlation between…

The Washington Post looks toward the end of the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity with some ambivalence. It appears that they failed to consider whether prison sentences are an effective tool for addressing the harm associated with crack use.

IN THE 1980s, entire communities were devastated by the addiction and violence that accompanied crack, a smokable form of cocaine. Congress reacted by passing extraordinarily tough laws, including one that mandated a minimum prison sentence of five years for those in possession of as little as five grams of crack. Those arrested with 50 grams were automatically slapped with a 10-year sentence.

This supposed solution,…

Not sure what to make of this:

Junk food elicits addictive behavior in rats similar to the behaviors of rats addicted to heroin, a new study finds. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food. The results, presented October 20 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, may help explain the changes in the brain that lead people to overeat.

“This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul…

Anchorage, AK is taking some very aggressive steps to address public drunkenness in their community:

The new mayor, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, has created a staff position and a task force devoted to addressing homelessness. The police recently gained the authority to dismantle homeless encampments with just 12 hours’ notice. Citizen groups are patrolling parks where homeless camps have been the site of rapes and other violence. But in perhaps the biggest and most controversial break from how the city has handled the problem in the past, a Salvation Army detoxification and alcohol abuse treatment center has begun accepting chronic inebriates who…

• A brief history of scholastic inebriation (Too bad they missed Robert Smith whose U of M fraternity brothers called his father to fetch him because his drinking was out of hand.)
• Claims injection site dropped Downtown Eastside crime ‘very much exaggerated,’ say cops
• Battling Addiction With Those Who Know It Best
• New UK study suggests minimal relationship between cannabis and schizophrenia or psychosis
• Cocaine exposure during pregnancy leads to impulsivity in male, not female, monkeys

The Big Picture sets its lens on drug use across the globe.

Chuck Lane writes a two post take down on medical marijuana.

As turned off as I am by anything that includes the word “druggie”, he more or less states my position. Personal drug possession should be among the lowest enforcement priorities and should not result in incarceration. If there is or was a legitimate medical marijuana movement it’s been co-opted by people whose goal is decriminalization of recreational use–a defensible position but a dishonest approach to achieving it. Finally, this just isn’t the way we do medicine.

An emerging market.

I wonder what this means for addiction recovery and treatment messaging:

A study that will appear in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health tracked the ways in which party affiliation related to people’s responses to identical information on diabetes.

Participants in the study read a mock news article on the American Diabetes Association lobbying Congress for greater attention to Type 2 diabetes, the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. Some people read a straight news report, with minimal mention of what causes diabetes. Others read one of three versions of the story: one that pegged the…

The LA Times paints a pretty sympathetic picture of Project Prevention, a program that pays addicted women to get themselves sterilized or use long term birth control. It closes with the following:

Project Prevention makes sense to me. Although a few thousand IUDs might not make a dent in the problem, the bluntness of the gesture turns up the volume.

And it brings drug-using moms in on the dialogue. Thank you for helping me do the first responsible thing I’ve ever done with my addiction, one mother wrote in a letter to Harris, who solicits a life story from every client.

“They’re not bad…

• Cocaine Vaccine for the Treatment of Cocaine Dependence in Methadone-Maintained Patients
• Cocaine use doubles in Mexico in six years
• The genetics of addiction

Not surprising:

The 2009 Annual Report of the Office of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (OSATS), formerly the Division of Addiction and Recovery Services, includes return-to-custody data on offenders who paroled in Fiscal Year 2005-06 for a one-year and a two-year period. The return to custody rate after one year for offenders completing both in-prison and community-based treatment in FY 2005-06 was 21.9 percent compared to 39.9 percent for all offenders. The return to custody rate after two years for offenders completing both in-prison and community-based treatment in FY 2005-06 was 35.3 percent compared to 54.2 percent for all offenders.

For male…

The Lighthouse Institute has compiled all the publications based on GAIN data (Dawn Farm uses the GAIN in adolescent services). They have full text articles for many of them.

Very cool. Thanks Lighthouse!

Thanks Ivana. It’s been needed for years.

For many students, moving to Ann Arbor to begin their careers at the University of Michigan is a time of excitement, curiosity and maybe a little bit of fear. But for School of Social Work graduate student Ivana Grahovac, the emotions were different.

As Grahovac prepared to start her time at the University, she was also recovering from a five-year addiction to heroin. Though she had been clean and sober for four-and-a-half years in her hometown of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., she wasn’t sure she could recreate that security in Ann Arbor.

Grahovac said coming to Ann…

From the Honorary President of the International Harm Reduction Association (page 8):

I am completely in favour of helping people who use drugs to stop, if that is what they want. I assume that is what is meant by ‘recovery’. Working with anyone who has problems with drugs must start where the individual is and could involve a range of strategies. Harm reduction should permeate the services available to drug users, which should be used on the basis of evidence of effectiveness, including cost-effectiveness, and on the basis of allocating scarce resources in the most effective way on a population base.

I wonder…

Mark Kleiman being interviewed about his new book.

This segment focuses on drug policy.

Powerful language from wired in to recovery:

Many people would argue that the UK treatment system, in main, is simply managing symptoms and accepting long-term disability or discomfort of people with serious substance use problems.

These same people would not argue against the value of treatment per se, rather it needs to be provided in a different way.

The recovery movement is first and foremost a civil rights movement. It is about helping disadvantaged people, people with problems, improve their well-being.

It is about helping people with substance use problems (and often many other problems) reclaiming or claiming their right to a safe,…

The finding from a study of the relationship between alcohol advertising and adolescent alcohol use:

Based on the consistency of findings across the studies, the co-founders controlled for, the dose response relationships, as well as the theoretical plausibility and experimental findings regarding the impact of media exposure and commercial communications, it can be concluded from the studies reviewed that alcohol marketing increases the likelihood that adolescents will start to use alcohol, and to drink more if they are already using alcohol.

Bill White interviews a medication assisted recovery advocate:

The problem with the methadone community is we have too many people who think methadone is a magic bullet for that disease—that recovery involves nothing more than taking methadone.

This view is reinforced by people who, with the best of intentions, proclaim, “Methadone is recovery.” Methadone is not recovery. Recovery is recovery. Methadone is a pathway, a road, a tool. Recovery is a life and a particular way of living your life. Saying that methadone is recovery let’s people think that, “Hey, you go up to the counter there, and you drink a cup of…

• Should Burden of Disease Estimates Include Cannabis Use as a Risk Factor for Psychosis?
• Mental Health Indicator Interaction in Predicting Substance Abuse Treatment Outcomes in Nevada
• Addiction recovery as TV drama: A&E’s “The Cleaner”
• Military Families Targeted by New Prevention Campaign

From the Washington Post:

In 16 states and counting, drugs now kill more people than auto accidents do, the government said Wednesday. 

Experts said the startling shift reflects two opposite trends: Driving is becoming safer, and the legal and illegal use of powerful prescription painkillers is on the rise. 

Read the rest here.

Phillip-Morris played a role in killing health care reform in 1994:

McCaughey’s lies were later debunked in a 1995 post-mortem in The Atlantic, and The New Republic recanted the piece in 2006. But what has not been reported until now is that McCaughey’s writing was influenced by Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle Clinton’s health care reform. (The measure would have been funded by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks,…

More evidence for the argument that lowering drinking ages would lead to more alcohol and drug problems later in life. The point about age of first use vs. regular use is interesting and offers some interesting questions about goals and strategies for prevention programming.

Background: Many studies have found that earlier drinking initiation predicts higher risk of later alcohol and substance use problems, but the causal relationship between age of initiation and later risk of substance use disorder remains unknown.

Method: We use a “natural experiment” study design to compare the 12-month prevalence of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition, alcohol and substance use…

I’m not much of a Mitch Albom fan, but good for him. Whether one agrees with him or not, it’s something we all take for granted and it deserves discussion.

The video featured two attractive women.

It was shot by an onlooker.

It hit YouTube by storm.

You’re no doubt thinking “sex,” but let me assure you the women kept their clothes on. Unfortunately, that was the only ladylike thing about them.

On the video, they appeared intoxicated, swore like sailors, got in fights, then screamed, shoved and cursed until security finally took them away, one in handcuffs.

This was not a women’s penitentiary. It was…

Presentations (hopefully video too) will be up next week. I’ll post a link when they’re up.

Sarah Zemore gave a great presentation on the evidence for the effectiveness of 12 step groups. It was powerful and well organized. I found a link to an identical presentation here.

She very effectively rebutted the Cochrane Review from a few years ago by making the following points. (These are based on notes I took and are incomplete. Hopefully they post video so that you can see her complete rebuttal for yourself.)

• It was limited only to randomized trials and ignored the overwhelming observational evidence.
• It included…

The University of Michigan will host a conference tomorrow on How AA/NA Work and will stream it live here. The presenters include some very big names. Here’s the agenda:

Friday, September 25, 2009
9:00 am - 4:00 pm

Two interesting findings about underage drinking. The first on the relationship between early alcohol use and chronic alcohol problems later in life. The second looks at the relationship between early alcohol use and poor judgment later in life.

We’ve known for some time that there is a relationship between early drinking and alcohol problems later in life. What’s been unclear is the nature of that relationship. Does early exposure to alcohol cause changes in the adolescent brain that lead to problems later in life? Does early exposure facilitate the expression of genes that are related to alcoholism? These two theories would…

From the International Harm Reduction Association:

‘Harm Reduction’ refers to policies, programmes and practices that aim primarily to reduce the adverse health, social and economic consequences of the use of legal and illegal psychoactive drugs without necessarily reducing drug consumption. Harm reduction benefits people who use drugs, their families and the community.

Not bad for a definition developed by a committee.

[via drugscope]

An interesting take on the growing chorus of calls to end the war on drugs.

The first problem I have with the op-ed is that she conflates ending the drug war with legalization, offering an fallacious binary choice. The piece is a hard sales pitch for her position.

She offers 2 reasons for these calls:

Two significant developments are contributing to the sudden surge in calls for reconsidering prohibition. The first is that drugs are now damaging long-term Western security interests, especially in Afghanistan and Mexico. The second is that production is migrating away from its traditional homes like Colombia and the Golden Triangle…

As someone who lives in Michigan, I’ve been very interested in the welfare of the auto industry and I’ve been pretty hopeful about Ford. That is, until I read this. What the heck? (I’m trying to keep this blog PG.)

You can read more about Hythiam here.