Duff Wilson wrote in “Side Effects May Include Lawsuits” that antipsychotics were a niche product for decades. Yet they have recently generated sales that have surpassed that of “blockbusters like heart-protective statins.” In the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies began marketing them for much broader uses than the original FDA approved uses for more serious mental illnesses, […]
Looking at information gleaned from the 2014 World Drug Report suggests two drug trends to expect over the next few years. A bumper crop of opium poppies globally (particularly in Afghanistan), points to an increased worldwide problem with heroin. Afghanistan grew about 80% of the world’s opium poppies in 2013. Second, the development of new […]
There’s a new drug in town—Flakka! A news report in January of 2015 from Broward County Florida’s WPBF 25 reported a disturbance call at a local nightclub that led to an arrest of an individual who was in possession of a bag of flakka. It looks like a cross between crack cocaine and meth. It […]
Jay Joseph, a licensed psychologist, has written extensively on the failure of researchers to find scientific evidence that even one psychiatric condition has a genetic basis. In “The Crumbling Pillars of Behavioral Genetics,” he followed the history of failed predictions by Robert Plomin, a genetics researcher, who claimed repeatedly that we were “at the dawn […]
Maia Szalavitz wrote on Substance.com that she stopped shooting coke and heroin when she was 23. “I quit at around the age when, according to large epidemiological studies, most people who have diagnosable addiction problems do so —without treatment.” Although she personally got treatment help, her article was about people who stop without treatment or […]
I first became aware of dietary supplements such as DMAA a few years ago. I was meeting with an individual at an outpatient drug treatment center to work out how his urine test came up positive for stimulants when he insisted he hadn’t taken any. It turns out he had been encouraged by a friend […]
In 1988, Gary Henderson, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California-Davis Medical School, predicted the coming global problem with synthetic drugs. He wrote that the scientific literature was full of potential synthetic routes and pharmacological properties for a wide variety of drugs. He said that information was readily available for “clandestine chemists” to […]
This past May, the DEA raided a Birmingham Alabama warehouse as a part of Project Synergy. Inside, agents found hundreds of thousands of “Scooby Snax” baggies containing spice (synthetic marijuana). Sales of the product were also linked to $40 million in wire transfers to Yemen. Yemen is the home base for Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian […]
Eight people at a Friday night party in Oklahoma took a liquid version of the drug 2C-E, a chemical cousin to “Smiles” (a synthetic imitation of ecstasy). They all began having seizures and coughing up blood after about an hour. A 22 year-old woman—one of eight—died. “She just kept having one seizure after another.” The […]
