For those of you who follow the controversy surrounding the treatment of ADHD with stimulants, there is a new study out that claims treating ADHD with stimulants does not increase the risk of future substance abuse. Go figure.

A new study finds that the use of stimulant drugs to treat children with ADHD has no effect on their future risk of substance abuse. The report, which will appear in the American Journal of Psychiatry and has been issued online, assessed more than 100 young men 10 years after they had been diagnosed with ADHD and is the most methologically rigorous analysis of any potential relationship between stimulant treatment and drug abuse.

“Because stimulants are controlled drugs, there has been a concern that using them to treat children would promote future drug-seeking behavior,” says Joseph Biederman, MD, director of Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the study's lead author. “But our study found no evidence that prior treatment with stimulants was associated with either increased or decreased risk for subsequent drug or alcohol abuse.”

I find this study interesting because I know so many kids who were treated with stimulants as kids who either then either abused or sold them as teens or wound up experimenting with other drugs throughout life. However, I have also noticed that people who are given stimulants as kids do not find them so interesting as adults (been there, done that, diminishing returns) but this does not rule out the natural curiosity for trying other drugs later in life.

Earlier studies from the MGH Psychopharmacology group had suggested that stimulant treatment might actually reduce the risk of substance abuse in ADHD patients, who are at elevated risk to begin with, but that result did not hold up in the current analysis, which included some of the same participants. The researchers note that those shorter-term studies only followed participants into adolescence and that treatment may delay rather than totally prevent future substance use, something that should be investigated in the future.

I agree that short-term studies may not tell the whole story. When quitting forced medication as a child there is a natural tendency for to backlash against all drug use in general as teens. However, those feelings may fade over time and circumstance. Life is long.

Hey folks, if you're planning on attending the upcoming ETech conference in San Diego, don't miss the Ignite talks that are happening Monday night, March 3rd, at 8:30 pm. I'll be performing a 5-minute adaptation of my short story "intangible method," using nothing more than 20 slides, photos by Jen Moon, and the modeling skills of CHERUB alumnus Brynn Hambly to tell the tale of a young woman who discovers first-person video footage of her own life is being posted to YouTube from the future. Hope to see you there!

Naturally I will not be posting much to DoseNation during the next week as I will be attending the conference, but I couldn't just leave in a rush. So as a special treat, please enjoy these two trailers, for documentary projects about the world of American show choir competition - via the extremely pleasingly named show choir blog, Auschglitz (which I learned about via the less pleasingly named, but still extremely pleasing Slog).

Jah mon.

Jamaica is considering the legalisation of marijuana, a drug revered by members of the island's large Rastafarian population who say smoking it is part of their religion.

A seven-member government commission has been researching possible changes to the Caribbean nation's anti-drug laws, which some police complain are clogging courts and jails with marijuana-related cases, a government official said.

"We have discussed it, and we are preparing a report to present to the prime minister," said Deputy Prime Minister Kenneth Baugh.

In 2003, a government commission recommended legalising marijuana in small amounts for personal use.

But lawmakers never acted, saying legalisation might entail loss of their country's US anti-drug certification. Countries that lose it face economic sanctions.

A US State Department report on Friday said Jamaica is the largest producer of marijuana in the Caribbean and a major hub for drugs bound for the US.

Members of the Rastafarian movement, which emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s out of anger over the oppression of blacks, have long lobbied for the legalisation of the drug that they say brings them closer to the divine.

There are an estimated 700,000 Rastafarians in the world, most of them among Jamaica's 2.6 million people.

Does anyone seriously think this is a bad idea?

As I'm always on the lookout for news of people stupid enough to mess with Datura, I ran across this local Nebraska news story which appears to confuse Jimson Weed or belladonna type nightshade plants with the less noxious Salvia divinorum. The resulting copy would be very confusing for anyone who doesn't know that the author is actually talking about two different plants.

Two 16-year-old high school students were cited by the North Platte police for use of intoxicating compounds, a Class-III misdemeanor, for allegedly smoking Jimson weed.
...

Jimson weed – also called Gypsum weed, stinkweed, locoweed and Thornapple – is a common name for a plant known botanically as salvia divinorum, which has been used as a medicine and intoxicant for centuries.

The plant is native to Mexico and much of the U.S. It has been used by young people unfamiliar with its reputation and unprepared for its side effects.

Jimson weed can reach a height of 5 feet, bearing white flowers and prickly seed pods that split open when ripe, usually in fall.

Okay, now here it is obvious they are confusing datura and salvia, but it goes on:

The plant, known as Salvia divinorum, can be chewed, smoked, or taken as a tincture to produce experiences ranging from uncontrollable laughter to much more intense and profoundly altered states, according to Wikipedia. The duration is much shorter than for some other more well known psychedelics; the effects of smoked salvia typically last for a few minutes.

The phrase "Red as a beet, dry as a bone, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter" has been used to describe Jimson's effects, and it does a good job of summing them up. All parts of the plant are toxic, so pleasant effects are limited, according to police.

Wikipedia reports that Salvia divinorum is not generally understood to be toxic or addictive, but police believe there is a real potential for accidental poisoning when using Jimson weed. Symptoms include incoherent speech, impaired coordination; rapid heart beat; and dry, flushed or hot skin. In extreme cases, users can experience seizures, intense visual or auditory hallucinations, or cardiac arrest. A Jimson weed overdose should be considered potentially serious and medical intervention sought.

So whoever wrote this story obviously did some research, but still messed it up. They are describing the effects of datura or Jimson Weed and ascribing them to Salvia. Anyone who has tried the two would clearly know the difference.

I just got this from a friend. I looked around a bit, it seems that the ad agency responsible was DDB Auckland, and that it is pretty recent, like maybe the last week or so, but I could be wrong about that. The text reads:

Terrorism-related deaths since 2001: 11,337 · Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000
For help, call 0800 ASH INFO

Kind of makes me want to smoke a cigarette, like maybe this is outrageous enough to make smoking cool again...

Click the link for a higher-resolution version.

In the post on psilocybin induced time-dilation, zuperkomputer added a string of comments about how science should be studying how psychedelics enhance the range of sensory perception in order to find limits of human perception and possibly verify hidden realities. While I am on record about my lack of faith in the "hidden reality" theory, I will share some of what I have learned about psychedelics and enhanced human perception while looking into this question for myself.

In normal waking consciousness there is a great deal of effort that goes into filtering incoming data. Filtering begins in the brainstem and continues all the way up to the higher cortex where focus and attention are controlled. While the brain is focusing on one subject it actively suppresses background noise through a process called tonic inhibition, a literal trickle of inhibitory chemicals keeping other areas of the brain quiet in service of maintaining focus. Control of this tonic inhibition comes from the top-down (higher areas of the brain suppressing info coming from lower areas) and from side to side (active areas suppressing neighboring areas to keep focus from leaking sideways through cortical networks). This inhibitory feature of the brain is active, meaning it takes energy and glucose and oxygen and constant metabolic process to maintain focus all the time. People with ADD have a harder time maintaining this active inhibition than others, but I digress.

So the question now becomes: What happens if this tonic inhibition is disrupted and all incoming sensory information is allowed to gush upward and echo up and down and back and forth through all areas the brain? Well, what you would get would be very much like a psychedelic experience.

The interruption of tonic sensory inhibition (also known as disinhibition), is what allows the senses to function beyond their normal range in psychedelic sessions. Low doses work best for simply augmenting sensory capacity, but higher doses tend to overload the senses with tangentially recursive phantasmagoria. With the proper mild dose of psychedelics it is true you can become super functioning, enjoying better hearing, better vision, better reflexes, better physical acuity, better muscle flexibility, better mood, and a sense of invincibility. Amphetamines can also do this, but psychedelics seem to do it a bit better at the proper dose range.

These psychedelic super-powers are a combination of sensory disinhibition and the release of dopamine and stress chemicals that prep the muscles to act in life-or-death peak-performance capacity. The primary culprit of all this hyper-activation of the body is the locus ceruleus, or LC, a brainstem organ responsible for activating physiological responses to stress and panic. The LC has been show to be hyper-responsive to incoming stimuli in the presence of psychedelics; meaning that instead of being filtered, any stray stimuli can send excitatory signals gushing upwards into the brain. Lights become brighter, sounds become louder and richer, textures feel more complex and distinct. Conversely, in the absence of stimulus the LC quiets down under the influence, but sensory deprivation on psychedelics is a slightly different topic.

Project Sunspot, documenting the numbers in the public at large of those who support the furthering of legitimate psychedelic research/education.
Already a diverse group from all over the world with people of all kinds of occupations have signed. Interest has even been gained by members of MAPS and the NDRI.

A much needed practical and convincing approach for the psychedelic community at large. First goal, 10,000. Then, the moon.

Cheers!

HellKat pointed this video out to me, after I posted a couple tracks from this album on my MP3 blog, Comfort Music. It's a deliriously inventive clip, full of demented devices, clever illusions, and a lead singer whose left half occasionally looks like the Joker. It is, as HellKat put it, "fucking genius."

Okay all you pharmacology geeks, a new study linking schizophrenia and psychedelic action to novel serotonin and glutamate receptor interactions was reported on this week in ScienceDaily. You tell me if this is news or not:

Mount Sinai researchers have identified a new receptor complex in the brain that responds to several types of antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia and also reacts to hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD...

The study done in mice identified that the two receptors [for the] neurotransmitters glutamate and serotonin interact and work as a hybrid complex. Hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD and psilocybin, act at serotonin receptors to cause responses similar to some of the core symptoms of schizophrenia. The researchers showed that the glutamate receptor interacts with the serotonin receptor to form functional complexes in brain cortex. This receptor complex triggers unique cellular responses when targeted by hallucinogenic drugs.

Activation of the glutamate receptor blocks hallucinogen-specific signaling and changes behavioral responses in mice.

I'm not exactly sure if this is new information. It has been long known that serotonin modulates glutamate signaling, and that partial blockade of 5-HT2A/C glutamic modulation could be one of the underlying causes of psychedelic or schizophrenic ideation. I will have to read the study closer to see what they mean by "unique cellular responses," but this "new" receptor complex has actually been in wide discussion for at least the last fifteen years. Perhaps this is the first study to actually attempt to verify this theory.