A Controversial New Drug Seems To Stop Addiction Cold The rats in Stanley Glick's lab are junkies. They spend their days and nights lounging around in steel cages, twiddling their claws, waiting for the next hit. Each rat has a small plastic tube protruding from the base of its skull. Once a day, for an hour, each tube is connected to an infusion pump that controls a syringe containing a common addictive substance: morphine, cocaine, nicotine, or methamphetamine. The rats are trained to pull levers for water, but for one hour each day they can use the same system to mainline as much of the drugs as they want. And they want. "Just about any drug that humans abuse, animals will self-administer," Glick says. [continues 1312 words]
Is the Secret to Alcoholism and Other Addictions Locked Up in the Hallucinogenic Drugs? Even with several tablespoons of peyote in me, by 3 in the morning I'm fading. For almost six hours I have been sitting in a tepee in the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the United States, with 20 Navajo men, women, and children. They belong to the Native American Church, which has 250,000 members nationwide. Everyone except the four children has eaten the ground-up tops, or buttons, of peyote, Lophophora williamsii. U.S. law classifies the squat cactus and its primary active ingredient, mescaline, as Schedule 1 substances, illegal to sell, possess, or ingest. The law exempts members of the Native American Church, who revere peyote as a sacred medicine. [continues 4506 words]
'I Think You Have To Accept That There's A Structural Change In Your Brain When You Take Drugs Like Prozac' Psychotherapists love to argue, we argue about treatment theories, about our clients and their families, about the office coffee pot. And during the past decade we have tended to fixate, as we say in the business, on the subject of Prozac. It used to be fairly easy to agree about commonly prescribed psychiatric drugs such as Valium; they anesthetized people, covered up problems illegitimately took the place of therapy. But Prozac and the other antidepressants that work by enhancing serotonin activity in the brand have eluded such easy criticism. Often we would find that our clients who took them felt more alive, more resilient, or able to engage in the honest self reflection necessary to therapy. [continues 2782 words]
More than 30 states have filed charges against women for taking illegal drugs during pregnancy. In 1997, for instance, South Carolina's Supreme Court ruled that women who use drugs during pregnancy can be prosecuted for child abuse. The vast majority of women targeted under this policy are crack cocaine users. But a new study conducted at the University of Florida suggests the laws are as misguided as they are harsh. Children born to cocaine-addicted mothers are no more likely than other kids from similar backgrounds to have significant behavioral problems during their first three years. [continues 225 words]
I was disappointed that Paul Hoffman felt it necessary to sugarcoat Paul Erdos's lifelong use of amphetamines by referring to them euphemistically as "other stimulants" ["Man of Numbers," July]. Erdos himself was certainly not the least bit apologetic about living on speed. He felt - apparently correctly - that speed helped him create mathematics. When Erdos's mother died, he became quite depressed, and his doctor prescribed amphetamines to improve his mood. Erdos took these for years, even though his friends advised him to quit. Finally a fellow mathematician bet Erdos that he couldn't stop taking the drug, so Erdos stopped, cold turkey, for about a month. When he collected the bet, he said that his output had been drastically reduced during that month and that that time was "lost to mathematics." He then resumed taking speed and his prodigious output returned. [continues 207 words]
When Erdos's mother died, he became quite depressed, and his doctor prescribed amphetamines to improve his mood. Erdos took these for years, even though his friends advised him to quit. Finally a fellow mathematician bet Erdos that he couldn't stop taking the drug, so Erdos stopped, cold turkey, for about a month. When he collected the bet, he said that his output had been drastically reduced during that month and that that time was "lost to mathematics." He then resumed taking speed and his prodigious output returned. [continues 198 words]
