Posts Tagged ‘Drugs’
“When I was a kid, I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”*…
Kids these days, not so much. Bruce Gil reports…
Marijuana consumption among teens has seen a significant drop over the past decade, according to a new study published this month in the scientific journal Pediatric Reports. The news comes after teen vaping hit a 10-year low this year.
Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine also found that teen girls now surpass boys in reporting marijuana use. In 2021, girls reported a higher rate of current marijuana consumption (17.8%) than boys (13.6%), according to data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. This is a big shift from 2011 when boys were more likely to use marijuana (25.9%) compared to girls (20.1%)…
…The study also showed that the percentage of teens that reported trying cannabis for the first time before age 13 dropped to 4.9% in 2021, compared with 8% in 2021…
Earlier this year, results from the National Youth Tobacco Survey found that teen tobacco use is also on the decline with teen vaping hitting a 10-year low.
About 1.63 million or 6% percent of middle and high school students said they are currently using e-cigarettes, down nearly 2% from 2.13 million last year.
This is the lowest level in a decade, and far below a peak of 20% in 2019…
Via the ever-enlightening Walter Hickey, who observes…
There are all sorts of possible theories behind this — pandemic-era cannabis supply chain problems reverberating across a generation of teens, a shift in the cyclical straightedge-rebel trend cycle, the fact that pot is now annoyingly strong which means there’s no solid entry point for new smokers — but at the end of the day, the reality is that anything that’s legal and popular among adults is inherently uncool for teenagers, so this was all just a matter of time…
“More teen girls smoke marijuana than boys now, study says,” from @brucgl in @qz.
For some (broad) historical context: “Drugs and Trade,” an excerpt from The World That Trade Created by Kenneth Pomeranz (via the always-illuminating DelanceyPlace)
* Barack Obama
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As we wonder about weed, we might recall that it was on this date in 1951 that President Harry S. Truman signed the Boggs Act into law. An amendment to the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act, it established mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes for the first time in the United States.
Named after Democratic congressman (and future House Majority Leader) Thomas Hale Boggs Sr. of Louisiana who sponsored it, the law was originally intended to apply only to narcotics. But thanks to the testimony of Federal Narcotics Bureau Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, marijuana was added to the list of harder drugs included in the bill—arguing that though marijuana itself wasn’t deadly, it was a “stepping stone” to the other harder drugs in the bill. Sound familiar? That’s because Anslinger’s argument would later come to be known as the “gateway drug” theory pushed by Drug War proponents during the 1970s and ’80s.
The Boggs Act imposed harsh new penalties for both possession and trafficking: under this law, a first offense for marijuana possession carried a sentence of 2-5 years in prison and a $2,000 fine (the equivalent of $20,000 today); a second offense would get you 5-10 years, and for a third offense you were looking at 10-20 years behind bars. One representative from New York reportedly even proposed a 100-year sentence for dealers, but fortunately, that provision was not adopted. Sadly though, mandatory minimums would be reinstituted and expanded in later years: in the Narcotic Control Act of 1956, and again with The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.
– source
“Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that’s put to use more gold begets.”*…
The scientific literature is vast. No individual human can fully know all the published research findings, even within a single field of science. As Ulkar Aghayeva explains, regardless of how much time a scientist spends reading the literature, there’ll always be what the information scientist Don Swanson called ‘undiscovered public knowledge’: knowledge that exists and is published somewhere, but still remains largely unknown.
Some scientific papers receive very little attention after their publication – some, indeed, receive no attention whatsoever. Others, though, can languish with few citations for years or decades, but are eventually rediscovered and become highly cited. These are the so-called ‘sleeping beauties’ of science.
The reasons for their hibernation vary. Sometimes it is because contemporaneous scientists lack the tools or practical technology to test the idea. Other times, the scientific community does not understand or appreciate what has been discovered, perhaps because of a lack of theory. Yet other times it’s a more sublunary reason: the paper is simply published somewhere obscure and it never makes its way to the right readers.
What can sleeping beauties tell us about how science works? How do we rediscover information the scientific body of knowledge already contains but that is not widely known? Is it possible that, if we could understand sleeping beauties in a more systematic way, we might be able to accelerate scientific progress?
Sleeping beauties are more common than you might expect.
The term sleeping beauties was coined by Anthony van Raan, a researcher in quantitative studies of science, in 2004. In his study, he identified sleeping beauties between 1980 and 2000 based on three criteria: first, the length of their ‘sleep’ during which they received few if any citations. Second, the depth of that sleep – the average number of citations during the sleeping period. And third, the intensity of their awakening – the number of citations that came in the four years after the sleeping period ended. Equipped with (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) thresholds for these criteria, van Raan identified sleeping beauties at a rate of about 0.01 percent of all published papers in a given year.
Later studies hinted that sleeping beauties are even more common than that. A systematic study in 2015, using data from 384,649 papers published in American Physical Society journals, along with 22,379,244 papers from the search engine Web of Science, found a wide, continuous range of delayed recognition of papers in all scientific fields. This increases the estimate of the percentage of sleeping beauties at least 100-fold compared to van Raan’s.
Many of those papers became highly influential many decades after their publication – far longer than the typical time windows for measuring citation impact. For example, Herbert Freundlich’s paper ‘Concerning Adsorption in Solutions’ (though its original title is in German) was published in 1907, but began being regularly cited in the early 2000s due to its relevance to new water purification technologies. William Hummers and Richard Offeman’s ‘Preparation of Graphitic Oxide’, published in 1958, also didn’t ‘awaken’ until the 2000s: in this case because it was very relevant to the creation of the soon-to-be Nobel Prize–winning material graphene…
Indeed, one of the most famous physics papers, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR)’s ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ (1935) is a classic example of a sleeping beauty…
More examples, and explanation of why they slumber, and thoughts on how to awaken them sooner: “Waking up science’s sleeping beauties,” from @ulkar_aghayeva in @WorksInProgMag.
[Image above: source]
* Shakespeare, “Venus and Adonis”
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As we dwell on discovery, we might send healing birthday greetings to a woman whose scientific work thankfully rarely napped, Gertrude Elion; she was born on this date in 1918. A pharmacologist, she shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design (focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error) in the development of new drugs. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well-known and widely deployed creations also include the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection, and a number of drugs used in cancer treatment.
“By temporarily disrupting the order of the brain, a new order forms. And that order may have incredible value at either the level of mental health and psychology or the level of creativity.”*…
But, Zoe Cormier warns, if the means of that constructive disruption are industrialized and turned into aggressively-marketed products, we could be in for trouble…
Welcome to the strange new world of “psychedelic capitalism,” where dozens of start-ups have already raised millions (and in some cases billions) of dollars to commercialize psilocybin (the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms), DMT (found in the Amazonian brew ayahuasca), mescaline (peyote’s active component), and LSD—despite the fact that all of these “classic psychedelics” are still ranked as Schedule I drugs under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Manufacturing any of these drugs without a license can still land you a long prison sentence. But marketing one, even though they all remain illegal and none have passed all the clinical trials required for approval? That can make you a millionaire…
The days when mind-bending psychedelics were seen as appealing only to drug dealers, nut jobs, and hippies are over. Today, serious-minded people interested in randomized controlled trials and stock valuations are leading the charge.
The “psychedelic renaissance” we’ve awaited for half a century—the promised era when acid, shrooms, and peyote would be brought back into legitimate research and legal access—is finally here. But will it turn out to be worth the wait? Or the hype?
Because it’s not like we ever stopped enjoying them: In the West, hippies, scientists, “healers,” and others have used psychedelics continuously for seven decades. And before we got our hands on them, Indigenous cultures used psychedelics for thousands of years as ritual sacraments. Now dozens of start-ups want to standardize, commercialize, alter, patent, and market these ancient compounds—and they stand to make a fortune doing so.
Will old-school profit-centered tactics bring down decades of dogged work by activists, scientists, and reformers to have these drugs reassessed for their virtues? Will we experience another nasty, research-smothering backlash?…
The profiteers have arrived; get ready for Psychedelics Inc.: “The Brave New World of Legalized Psychedelics Is Already Here,” from @zoecormier @thenation.
* Michael Pollan, in conversation with Tim Ferriss on Ferriss’ blog
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As we tune in, we might spare a thought for Ellen Swallow Richards; she died on this date in 1911. The first female student admitted to MIT, she became its first female faculty member. A chemist, she did pioneering work in sanitary engineering, but is best remembered for her experimental research in domestic science, which laid the foundation for the new science of home economics, of which she is considered founder. She was one of the first ecofeminists, believing that women’s work within the home was not just vital to the economy, but also a critical aspect of our relationship to the earth.
“You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund”*…
Who benefits from the commercial biomedical research and development (R&D)? Patients-consumers and investors-shareholders have traditionally been viewed as two distinct groups with conflicting interests: shareholders seek maximum profits, patients – maximum clinical benefit. However, what happens when patients are the shareholders?…
Adding investments by governmentally-mandated retirement schemes, central and promotional banks, and sovereign wealth funds to tax-derived governmental financing shows that the majority of biomedical R&D funding is public in origin. Despite this, even in the high-income countries patients can be denied access to effective treatments due to their high cost. Since these costs are set by the drug development firms that are owned in substantial part by the retirement accounts of said patients, the complex financial architecture of biomedical R&D may be inconsistent with the objectives of the ultimate beneficiaries…
It has been estimated that of the total $265 billion spent annually on biomedical research worldwide, over a third – $103 billion comes from public sources. Nevertheless, as public input capital is allocated predominantly into early stage research, nearly all output – medicines – is ultimately brought to the market by private firms. Importantly, these firms are not independent agents. They have owners-shareholders to report to. Until the end of the previous century the major type of owners-shareholders were individual households. At the turn of the millennium, however, they have been displaced by institutional investors, the largest of which are public retirements schemes or quasi-public funds, such as occupational pensions.
First, government money underwrites the basic R&D that goes into drug discovery and development, then public pension monies fund the private companies that bring those drugs to market. As the private companies are solving for highest profits, as opposed to optimal public health, those drugs are often priced out of the reach of the very people whose pension contributions funded their development. Drugs “priced out of reach” is certainly not a new phenomenon; AIDS drugs (to take one example) were priced by Western pharma companies at prices that rendered them inaccessible to most citizens of low-income countries in Africa and Asia. The pensioners in wealthy nations were, effectively, living off of the misery of those in poorer companies.
But the dynamic has continued, deepened– and come home to roost. Now patients in high-income countries are denied access to effective treatments due to their high cost, while these costs are being set by the drug development firms, owned in substantial part by the retirement accounts of those same patients, and benefiting from direct and indirect governmental support.
Investing in one’s own misery– the painful irony of pharma funding: “Pension and state funds dominating biomedical R&D investment: fiduciary duty and public health.”
[Image above: source]
* Ben Elton, Meltdown
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As we untangle unintended consequences, we might send healthy birthday greetings to Charles Value Chapin; he was born on this date in 1856. A physician and epidemiologist, he was a pioneer in American public health. He co-founded in first bacteriological laboratory in the U.S. (in 1888) in Providence, were he was Superintendent of Health– a position he held for 48 years. In 1910, he established Providence City Hospital where infectious disease carriers could be isolated under aseptic nursing conditions; his success inspired similar health control measures throughout the U.S. A professor (at Brown) and prolific writer, his impact on health policy and practice was so broad that he was hailed as “the Dean of City Public Health Officials.”
“Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life”*…
Alcohol consumption in the U.S has been trending down for several years; in 2018, alcohol consumption in the United States dropped for the third-straight year. Nevertheless…
America is in the middle of an alcohol epidemic.
That’s one takeaway from a new study published this month in Alcoholism, which found the number of alcohol-related deaths more than doubled between 1999 and 2017 from nearly 36,000 to nearly 73,000, and the rate of alcohol-related deaths rose by more than 50 percent from 16.9 per 100,000 people to 25.5.
To put that in perspective, there were roughly 70,000 drug overdose deaths in the US in 2017. Based on the Alcoholism study, alcohol was linked to more deaths than all overdoses — even at the height of America’s opioid epidemic. Alcohol accounted for 2.6 percent of all deaths among people 16 and older in 2017, up from 1.5 percent in 1999…
The study speaks to a problem in American public health and drug policy: While crises like the opioid epidemic (deservedly) get a lot of attention, even deadlier drug crises are often neglected by the public, policymakers, and media…
Alcohol isn’t even the deadliest drug. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously estimated that tobacco smoking is linked to 480,000 deaths each year, or roughly 1 in 5 deaths. In other words, preventing just 30 percent of smoking deaths would prevent more deaths than preventing all drug overdose deaths and alcohol-related deaths combined.
Yet alcohol and tobacco haven’t filled a big part of public discussions about drugs in the past few years, especially compared to the opioid epidemic…
More at “The number of US alcohol deaths per year has doubled since 1999.”
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we contemplate cocktails, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912, during the First International Opium Conference at The Hague, that the first international drug control treaty, the International Opium Convention, was signed.
Opium article from The Daily Picayune, February 24, 1912, New Orleans
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