Posts Tagged ‘cocaine’

Cocaine vaccine?

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

A cocaine vaccine has been being tested, and shows some promise. Addiction Radio looks at this and other cocaine related news.

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Transcript of podcast:

CNS: Hi and welcome once again to the addiction radio pod cast from CNS Productions. I’m Howard LaMere here with Dr. Darryl Inaba. Darryl, cocaine is in the news again, this week with something interesting, in the form of a vaccine?

Darryl: Yeah, you know that, its just amazingly how long its taken the vaccine to even get to this stage, because I remember during the height of the cocaine epidemic during the 80’s they were talking already about the development of a vaccine and there was a leakage of it and there was this, it didn’t hold, so its just been a long haul, finally they published a report saying they think they have something that has value now but if you read the report its only about 38% effective in ways you have antibodies high enough to really create a package that is, lops onto cocaine as it enters the blood stream so that it becomes unabsorbable – it cant go through the blood-brain barrier to enter the brain, it cant go into the heart, so it renders cocaine harmless by virtue of an anti-body, antigen reaction where this vaccine just latches onto the cocaine. Now if only about 38% of people get effective cocaine blockage that way I’m not sure how valuable it is; they also mention that, they in this study, had to give five shots of the vaccine in a twelve week period so its almost every two weeks you have to get a shot in order for the vaccine to work. Its interesting to me also that a two week period is about the time where payday occurs, and its about the time one of the obscure metabolites of cocaine sort of degrade and many people believe that metabolite as it degrades actually is one of the reasons why people crave cocaine every two weeks or you get a greater amount of craving every two weeks. I always thought it had more to do with the fact that people get paid usually around the world on a two week basis and you get into this you get into this rhythm you know where every payday you’re going to present yourself with this little gift for having to slave away and work so hard by getting a little bit of cocaine.  It just doesn’t seem to me that it’s going to be that much of a benefit or that much of a boon people fighting cocaine. I believe still that with the current treatments that we have and unfortunately expensive but starting off with residential treatment going on to maybe day care or intensive out-patient treatment that we get a good rate, at least close to a 50% rate anyway of people being able to remain cocaine free for a while, then there’s the anti-craving medicines like bupropion or wellbutrin or the other types of a anti-depressants that are helpful in decreasing cravings. So, how much of a boon is this vaccine’s going to be, I really can’t tell.

CNS: Yeah, at the rate of only a little over a third and that I also read that it seems to decrease in efficacy after a couple of months.

Darryl: I’m not sure if that’s the case or if the case was they quit injecting it. I think it showed to get the highest amount, well first of all, even though they injected everybody with five shots over twelve weeks, some people only 30% got the high antibodies and most of the other people got much lower antibodies and its just something, yeah, it didn’t work for everyone and in fact also it made it sound, I haven’t read the actual study itself, just the reports on the study from the BBC and others but it made it sound like they had to keep injecting it in order to continue maintaining levels and I don’t know if that’s worth it.

CNS: So, from what you know about the physiology of the human and the pharmaceutical function of the cocaine alkaloids, is there something that would make it particularly difficult to present an interaction to or an antagonist, something in the chemical structure that’s particularly difficult?

Darryl: well, cocaine itself…

CNS: Obviously there’s something…

Darryl: It’s a very, very rapid acting drug, within twenty, forty minutes, cocaine’s already metabolized, acetylcholinesterase one of the most abundant enzymes we have in our body and its everywhere and it just attacks cocaine and totally destroys its activity within a matter of a few minutes after cocaine enters the body, so I don’t know if that’s what we need an antagonist, the vaccine is hoping to make cocaine unabsorbable into the brain and therefore it makes it vulnerable for more acetylcholinesterase which is more prevalent outside the brain, than in the brain. Or maybe we should, you know I was thinking, maybe we can boost up acetylcholinesterase and make it more active but then I was thinking, what are the things that are important in acetylcholinesterase is breaking down and maybe that wouldn’t be a good idea. So it’s not clear to me what’s the best way of approaching this issue, obviously since this is become an issue in the news, is teaming with all these stories about the cocaine vaccine. Another story about how cocaine abuse has grown so massively in Wales, just over 1000% but we’re talking small numbers. You know only forty one people were known to abuse cocaine in the early 2000’s and now they have about five or six hundred so…

Darryl: The cocaine, I have a feeling that Plant Columbia did not work. Plant Columbia was when Bill Clinton was president, and he brought in General McCaffrey and General McCaffrey carried on toward the Bush administration and they put all their efforts into eradicating cocaine growing and the cartels in Columbia and I’m sure they were effectively able to show a decrease in the number of plantations, cocaine production in Columbia maybe the cocaine underworld who were trafficking it. But it’s clear to me that the cocaine growers, most of them and most of the producers just moved. Actually, I believe the last check on it and I’ll have to check on more modern times, but they had moved out of the, out of Peruvian high lands and Columbian high lands and actually moved into the Amazon basin where cocaine doesn’t usually grow that well but there’s another plant, there’s actually three or four species of the cocaine plant and one of those plants is the Erythroxyl Epadu. The Erythroxyl Epadu plant grows in low elevations, grows in the Amazon basin and what I remember it had more potent or more dangerous alkaloids in it and the erythroxylumcoca plant which is a common cocaine and that they were seeing in South America themselves new cocaine abusers who were abusing basica and pasta which is the intermediate product extraction of cocaine from the coca leaves and from the Epadu plant they’re seeing more toxicity because there’s a different mix of chemicals and alkaloids in the Epadu as there are in the Era toxin plant.

CNS: And of course, a couple weeks ago we talked about the activities going on in Bolivia where the government was actually encouraging coca growing and how that might be back firing.

Darryl: Cocaine is an important plant, cocaine has been a part of South America from the beginning probably of human written history and before that, even the pottery chards and the drawings we find on the walls and stuff. So people chewing cocaine, so it’s been a part of that culture for a long time and they would want them to eradicate it for exportation, cocaine is still very important to the people in that region who use it safely actually very much like we drink coffee in this country so…

CNS: Because we don’t, they don’t over, over refine it, I mean…

Darryl: They just chew it straight from the leaf.

CNS: The over-refining of food is what’s gotten us into the situation with obesity in large measure.

Darryl: In many ways, we’re doing that to everything. Opium in itself, is a mixture of twenty five different chemicals, some of them are very good to protect the heart, some are stimulants, anti-depressants and probably opium is much more healthier for you than to refine it into morphine and morphine to heroin or refining codeine which we know is much more dangerous and addictive. I think the same thing is true with cocaine, you’ve got all these eighteen or so alkaloids and the coca era toxin coca plant when they chew it, I actually read, when they chew it with guano – was the safest way and most healthiest way to chew it, because the guano – droppings, bird or bat droppings mixed with the coca leaf, was a suitable organic, if you will, way of pulling the cocaine out of the leaf where it could be absorbed into your gums and was healthier – then when the missionaries came in, the Spanish came in, found out that they couldn’t convert the natives to religion, they couldn’t make the natives work for anything else but they found out that if they were able to give the natives cocaine – not just the kings and monarchs but the common natives cocaine, the natives did anything for them. So they started allowing the natives that culminate it to have cocaine to work in their minds, coca leaf, that they told them, don’t mix it with that bird dropping that’s unsanitary, its dirty, whatever and they taught them how to mix it with soda lime, with a lime minerals, also with ash and with that from the medical records or from skulls we dig up and stuff they start with tremendous dental problems from chewing cocaine. Whereas when they used it with, or chewed it with bird droppings they didn’t have such bad dental problems.

CNS: I guess it just goes to show that the advance of civilization is not always the positive thing that we think that it is.

Darryl: You know and in line with the book, we wrote Uppers Downers All Arounders Chapter one, we find that when there’s these refinements and changes in, in how a drug is more powerful or refined out or pure, packaged in a different way for different routes of administration, it always results, if it’s a psychoactive drug able to affect the reward reinforcement center like all addictive drugs. It just results in a massive growth in addiction and problems and that’s what we are seeing and with cocaine a good history showing that all these refinements through out the whole history, of cocaine even the free base cocaine phenomena during the 1980’s, have led to spiking abuses of this drug.

CNS: Right, well we’ll see what happens with the vaccine and how that plays out. If you have any comments or questions about this topic or any others we would just very much like to hear them, drop by our website which is cnsproductions.com and you can write an email from that location or actually you can respond in the pod cast section, the blog section, to any of the pod cast that you hear there, OK then Darryl, thank you very much.

Darryl: Hey thank you Howard.

CNS: And we’ll talk again soon. That wraps our pod for today. Thanks for visiting the CNS pod cast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website www.cnsproductions.com.

 
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Dangerous Additives Altering Street Drugs

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

This weeks Addiction radio podcast looks at the news of a veterinary drug, levamisole being added to cocaine, causing illness and deaths, and other ways the street makes drug even more dangerous then their natural form. Dr Inaba explains.

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CNS: Hi, welcome once again to the addiction radio pod cast from CNS Productions. I’m Howard LaMere here with Dr. Darryl Inaba. Darryl, there’s a disconcerting story here about cocaine showing up with a dangerous veterinary medicine and I wondered what you thought about that, what you might know about that.

Darryl: Yeah, actually levamisole which is an anathematic – a medicine used to deworm cows, actually when cows pick up parasites like worms. It started appearing in as a cut or an additive to cocaine here on the west coast, actually Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and was causing a lot of concern actually caused a lot of illness as well. A month or so before this, this article broke from the midwest and back east it seems to be appearing now as well and it raised some concern about the authorities in Oregon because they didn’t know why anybody would do this and what it was meant to be. They didn’t know if it was just merely in more dense cut – sometimes drug traffickers with a chemical like cocaine or a powder like heroin used things to cut it with that are more dense, meaning weigh more from the size that these things are sold be merely by weight so if you bring in something that’s cut with something that weighs heavier you get a better price for the same amount of drug that you put into them. But as I looked at it, in a response in the mail I got for the state of Oregon it, it appeared that again, this street or traffickers, manufacturers, probably as it was coming up from South America began to look at ways of altering street drugs and, and maybe putting cuts in it that would add to the effects of the drug or, make it more potent or make it less toxic or whatever and as it turns out levamisole this anti worming drug actually releases some dopamine – that same reward reinforcement chemical that cocaine releases to make you feel good – so maybe this is an attempt to, or somebody thought, boy this felt good when they accidentally exposed themselves to levamisole mixed with cocaine in South America or something and decided to add it to the cocaine they’re trafficking. The problem is that levamisole is fairly toxic, it can affect blood cells, it can affect a variety of medical problems and now there are stories not only where dozens of several sickened by it but there were actual three deaths that occur to this combination. So it seems to me this will be a quick end to this product being added to cocaine unless some cocaine dealer was trying to kill you. I mean why would you want to kill off your customers? You want something to actually make them want the cocaine more but not to kill them off, so…

CNS: But if they’re actually doing it in Columbia and other areas where it grows then …

Darryl: This has happened before you know, street drugs continue to be adulterated and misrepresented, diluted with things that aren’t very healthy but not intentionally they’re done so to either make it more, make more money on it or make the drug more potent or have less side effects, what ever they do and they’re not, they’re not pharmaceutical manufacturer firms, they don’t have any testing requirements, they don’t have any kind of pretrial tests with it so they don’t know what’s going to happen, they don’t know what’s it all about. I remember when street chemists were trying to manufacture Demerol, that opium narcotic here and they ended up creating a chemical as an adulterant to their manufacturing product process that resulted in creating a, or causing Parkinsonism in a lot of people that were taking it or most the people were exposed to it and that’s a horrible, horrible thing to happen; they had end states Parkinson overnight due to MPTP that was an adulterant left over in the manufacturer process and everything got snuffed out very quickly because again you don’t want your customers to be, to want more of your product you don’t want them to die off or be too sick to use it.

CNS: Right

Darryl: Then when other chemists said well why don’t we just make fentanyl maybe that’s going to be safer, that’s not going to cause the Parkinsonism side effect and it’s so much more potent than heroin or morphine that you just have to make a little bit of it and dilute it real well and sell it off to people and make tons of money. Well, they knew that if they made fentanyl they would be breaking the control substance abuse act and so they went to making street derivatives, alpha-methyl, thiofentanyl, sufentanyl, a bunch of different derivatives and of course they didn’t test it out and they had no way of knowing that although fentanyl is like a hundred times stronger than morphine they knew alternative isomer products the sufentanyl, the thiofentanyl,  the alpha-methoxyfentanyl, turned out to be a thousand times, six thousand times, one, one of them was I think twenty thousand times stronger than morphine. So when they sold it off as heroin they had people just dying all over the country with it and they had to quit that right a way because again they’re losing good customers.

CNS: Where does it go, where does it lead?

Darryl: Yeah, I think it’s not the end of it. We’re going to continue to see people trying to put additives or finding new drugs. A recent story we did about ephrins, the AIDS drug, people learning in South Africa to, instead of taking it for their AIDS, just smoking it to get off on it. I mean those things are just amazing to me that people are always searching for a buzz and they’re always going and they’re going to find them and however they find them through toxic substances or natural or synthetic substances and whether or not they’re going to be toxic or not. It doesn’t seem to matter, they’re interested in finding a new buzz more than they’re interested in health.

CNS: Yeah, hopefully you don’t die along the way. You know somewhere here there’s a story here about oxycontin, which of course is a derivative another derivative of morphine and all the things that people go through to over ride the safety precautions that are built in.

Darryl: Well, you know, that’s an interesting combination of stories because here with oxycontin we have the pharmaceutical industry themselves trying to modify or change a medication and trying to prevent it from being abused so they altered it – they, they took a schedule two controlled substance which was actually sold off as Percodan and there, and a long time when in1970 when they were first developed was known to be heavily addicted and so scheduled two and they reformulated into little pellets with oxycontin that created a time release of the chemical so that you wouldn’t get a big bolus of the oxycodone just by taking it and they thought that would prevent it from being abused and they sold the government on it. I know that they had to have intelligence if you will or they had to ask people to say you know will this be a decent modification then to prevent oxycontin from being abused and I know they must have gotten input from various people you know the streets too smart for that kind stuff. The street is going to figure out how to deal with this an they went ahead the government approved it, so they went on a big oxycontin sales campaign, they sold a tons of it for the safer non addictive opiate for chronic pain condition and within only I think a matter of weeks or months the street figured out hey you just take these tablets or capsules and smash up all the things that are in them and therefore you smash up that protective coating, you can inject it, you can snort it, and you can get that rush of you know some of these products, the original percodan only contained like five milligrams of oxycodone or ten milligrams. Some of these contain eighty to hundred, over a hundred milligrams of oxycodone, but it was safe because it was wrapped up in these coatings but what they did was by crushing it, even just chewing on it, you can just chew it as you go down. They, they eliminated that protection and so we have now a mass number of oxycontin deaths, a lot of oxycontin abuse situations, and the same thing that you would see on the street, trying to manipulate drugs and stuff to make them either safer or potent they just create more problems. Its interesting because the pharmaceutical industry isn’t giving up on this, the last few conferences of American Society of Addiction Medicine many pharmaceutical companies were there presenting that they have all kinds of ways of making a very addictive opiate that’s used for pain, say morphine even or oxycodone or hydrocodone that all are being abused. They said we’ve got a way of making this so that it’s not going to be abused and one of the renditions that had been recently released that they took a tablet of oxycodone and they didn’t take a tablet of oxycodone they took a tablet of naltrexone, a narcotic antagonist, orally active narcotic antagonist. If you take this by mouth naltrexone, then you have any opiates in your system its going to block them out and they compressed that tablet to a very compressed cork or compressed powder that if somebody took that orally it, it’s so compressed that it will just go through your whole system, just come right out and as you go to the bathroom come through you without being absorbed and therefore wont affect your head and then on top of that they sprayed the morphine or they sprayed oxycontin so that if oxycodone so that if somebody wanted to abuse it for its release by crushing it they, they had the protective coating, they sprayed it on the naltrexone and if somebody took that tablet, chewed it, or they smashed it down to get all the morphine or oxycodone in it released from that protective coating what they would do is also smash up the naltrexone and therefore end up with a blocker in their head and get nothing out of that process. Well you know I’m sure the streets are going to figure out, actually I could figure it out in a second but, but we don’t want to add to probably on the street but it’s very clear to me what you’ve got to do in order to make that opiate available from that compressed tablet. Then there are a lot of other techniques being showcased and pharmaceutical companies are always looking to come up with some way of getting around abuse of these things but when there’s just too much desire from street users, they always seem to find a way.

CNS: It is true we always do, being the clever critters that we are, always figure a way around it. Well we’ll come back to this again I’m sure as the pharmaceutical world and the street world continue to make new news. If you have any comments or questions that you would like to pose to us we’d be very happy to hear them. Stop by our website which is cnsproductions.com, drop us an email, and if it’s a question we’ll try to get to it on a future program, and if it’s a comment we’d love to hear them. Darryl thank you very much.

Darryl: Hey thanks Howard, always great talking to you.

CNS: Talk to you soon, bye. That wraps our pod for today. Thanks for visiting the CNS pod cast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website www.cnsproductions.com.

 
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Coca growing in Bolivia, heroin instead of methadone, and demand reduction

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Our addiction radio podcast this week looks at news of increased coca growing in Bolivia and its complications, the War on Drugs and reports of more opium being grown in Afghanistan on less acres,  and differences in efforts at supply reduction vs. new ideas on demand reduction.

Transcript of podcast (click to listen):

CNS: Hello and once again welcome to the internet radio addiction pod cast from CNS. I’m Howard LaMere here with Dr Darryl Inaba and Darryl … a variety of interesting things in the news starting off, I was watching John Stewart show last night and there was a comment about cocaine – nine out of ten dollar bills or, US currency apparently have cocaine residue on them, which is really amazing.

Darryl: That, that’s actually, that’s actually a very old story and one of my favorite stories that dates back to the peak of the cocaine epidemic and the starting of freebase and all that back in the mid to late 1980’s and it does lead to the questions about cocaine. Behind all this meth and ecstasy, and heroin increasing, prescription drugs, you know in a way people have forgotten a little bit about cocaine. But cocaine is also on the rise I believe in, in the United States and in the rest of the world. The DEA and the office of National Drug Control Policy made the war on drugs (into a) war on cocaine and that was under General Barry McCaffrey and may have put in a lot of money and put all their efforts not at all drugs, but they said lets really concentrate on cocaine and they went to Columbia, got the government to basically outlaw any cocaine. Cocaine became outlawed in Columbia the largest growing region and, and people forget that the South Americans from the Incas on down have a real cultural tradition of chewing coca leaves.

CNS: Hundreds of thousands of years.

Darryl: Yeah, and they, they pick the leaves and they don’t extract the cocaine from it they just chew the leaves with some sort of alkaloid. I really like it because in the old days with the Incas they used to mix it with a bird crap and strangely enough I think there’s a lot of evidence that show that, that was a lot healthier than, than what they evolve into and that’s mixing it with lime or soda-lime or mixing it with ashes, now they mix burnt palm leaves that they burn down to ashes and they mix with it, and that the guano, the bat crap was actually organic. It was actually balanced, it was an actual alkaline substrate that in, in your mucus membranes it didn’t have that much damage to your gums and to your teeth and things like that where as now days using much more hygienic, they say and sterile things they’re getting all kinds of denture problems and gum problems from chewing the coca leaves. But this is as you say, for thousands of years it’s been part of the culture.  And to think that we can just eradicate it overnight just by making it illegal in Columbia and that people won’t want to do it anymore and not that I’m saying it’s addicting it’s just like coffee or um, it’s, it’s a cultural…

CNS: Norm.

Darryl: People chew coca leaves and they don’t go crazy, they don’t rob other people for it, they don’t have paranoid dilutions, they don’t crave it when they’re taken into the armed services for six or eight years to serve as, as a citizen and they don’t go through withdrawal or anything. So it, it has been a culturally  accepted norm thing but eradicating it for Columbia, stimulated Bolivia and the Bolivian President Evo Morales came in, he avowed that this, this is such an important thing to my people we are going to be, I am going to be more liberal and allow coca growing especially targeted for commercial purposes for the chewing of the leaves. I think he chewed the leaves with Oliver Stone on TV just to show, you know, how he’s behind that and it’s not a major addiction issue. For shampoos some of the ingredients, are good in shampoo, and for even tooth paste and things like that he is going to promote more cocaine growing because cocaine is a fairly resistant, it’s a good cash crop, so he’s encouraged that with the belief that the cocaine growing cash crop to Bolivia replaced what Columbia has now, the actual cocaine, the war on drugs the DEA and the Office of National Drug Control Policy were, were actually proud of the fact that there’s major decrease of cocaine production coming out of Columbia and that’s pretty much eradicated. But they didn’t look next door which is Bolivia and Bolivia now is growing a lot of coca, a lot more coca leaves actually they say it’s increased to about 65% than previous years more cocaine growing, cocaine processing. But unfortunately for President Morales there’s been a huge increase in cocaine production. He didn’t want, he wanted coca leaf production, while discouraging cocaine production.

CNS: Probably hard to keep them separate though.

Darryl: Well that’s what he’s finding out. They’re finding out that it’s hard to separate it and now that the former Columbian cartel is a Mexican cartels have all moved into Bolivia where it’s more liberalized to grow it and they’re producing the cocaine now out of, out of Bolivia. I have concern of, of different species, there are several different species of cocaine. One the Erythroxylum-ipadu plant produces different kinds of alkaloids, different types of cocaine alkaloids, that seem to be producing a much greater dependency on South Americans who are using cocaine and not the coca leaf of course and there was a concern that going into other regions, growing different species and doing the process is, it’s just going to accelerate it, it, it sort of also talks about or reminds us that the war on drugs is pretty much a failure. As far back as you look in the history of the war on drugs we continue to invest on the supply side of the equation, the two equations are demand side and the supply side and eight out of ten dollars that are spent in the war of drugs, are spent predominantly on reducing the supply. You know trying to eradicate countries from growing it, the growers, the traffickers, and all of that and it seems like every, the more we spend the more drugs there are coming into this country. Interesting thing about that was they, because they thought that had won the war on cocaine with Columbia, the Office of National Drug Control Policy really went into working on eradication of opium poppy and therefore heroin production out of Afghanistan and they bought up the crops and stopped this, put in this intervention, that intervention and they announced earlier in 2008 that they had decreased the number of acreage that was going to produce opium poppy that’s on it’s way to heroin in Afghanistan and then earlier this year they announced unfortunately that there’s more opium and more heroin being produced because somehow even though there was less acreage being planted there was much greater productivity out of the acreage that was there. But that’s all fluff because what the reality is, is I don’t think we’re ever going to accomplish anything by putting all our efforts I’m saying you can’t totally remove your efforts on supply reduction. But as shown efficacy and I keep harping on this is when you look at the demand side of the equation. You know, treatment, prevention, you look at intervention and, and different ways in which we’re approaching addicts and alcoholics and different medical developments to treat addicts now, its continued to result in improved out comes of people are getting recovered. People understand recovery. There’s less abuse now in the United States of illicit drugs among young people then there ever has been and you know for the last twenty years or so. There’s been a decrease. Unfortunately they didn’t monitor the increase in prescription drug abuse in the interim.

CNS: Right which we talked about that not too long ago.

Darryl: Right it’s, it’s a busy prescription drug abuse. But it does show overall that if we target our prevention, focus our prevention efforts and then especially in treatment, if we can provide treatment on demand. People for what ever reason, what ever time of day, what ever day of the week, they decide you now this, I’ve got to do something about my marijuana use, I’ve got to do something about my cocaine use, my meth use, my ecstasy what ever the drug is, that if they make a call they make a call they can get immediate interaction. Interaction with somebody who can give them some advise, they can come into treatment right away or very quickly there’s no waiting list and, and, and when that occurs I think we will finally be able to see some viable evidence that we, we could win this war on drugs.

CNS: This is a, the Europeans seem to be in many respects ahead of us. Do they have shorter lists or more treatment options then we do here?

Darryl: No they really don’t. There, there is you know the Portugal experiment that we wrote about recently that, that was interesting. The last I, I looked at that it was having some, some really good results in terms of treatment. But unfortunately in terms of, of primary prevention, stopping people from even initiating drug use it had, seemed to have the opposite effect. There was definitely a decrease in real hard drugs, heroin decreased, cocaine decreased, even ecstasy decreased, but there was a, a major increase in marijuana. I think it doubled and so then they were faced with having to deal with why was there, this is a great increase from these drugs and what can they do to stem that. But definitely they then put a lot of, or they, they began to change where their emphases was they weren’t emphasizing supply reduction they put their emphasis on demand reduction and I think that we need to look at that sort of approach. Europe also recently just two a, this week, two a publications in the New England Journal of Medicine which is a very prestigious medical journal, surprisingly published a case of promoting heroin use for treatment of heroin addiction in the United States and they, they sited studies I think one of the researchers was actually here at Oregon Health, Health and Science University in Portland, who analyzed the, the provision of heroin in some European countries to patients who were not able to engage in the methanon treatment approach. The whole converted to the US methanon approach pretty much. But some countries are going back to providing heroin legally as a treatment for heroin addicts in harm reduction approach and they’ve had some solid statistics or enough to satisfy New England Journal medicine head writers.

CNS: Looking at that study in my reading of it, that, it’s gone on for a number of years. It’s not a cursory study.

Darryl: But it’s showing a longitudinal data as you, as you mentioned it’s showing is that these people were put on the heroin maintenance and heroin replacement therapy or how ever you want to refer to it actually, they decreased their use of illicit drugs, cause they got heroin free. But you know the problem here with methadone although they might decrease heroin use with methadone, they greatly increase cocaine use or other ecstasy or other drugs that are out there, sedative use. But the heroin treated people in Europe seemed to decrease their abuse of all other drugs. They seem to be able to get jobs and hold jobs and they seem to be doing a lot better in comparison to their methanon contemporaries who are treated with methanon. So New England Journal of Medicine published that report and then they think it looks convincing enough and the data’s convincing enough to look at that. Unfortunately the whole history of why methanon developed was just this gut reaction fear by society about heroin, what heroin does. So I don’t know if it’s going to go any place because that reaction is still there and the prejudges is still there but it, it’s another thing to look at in terms of how we approach substance abuse treatment.

CNS: That wraps our pod for today. Thanks for visiting the CNS pod cast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website www.cnsproductions.com.

 
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Cocaine residue – false positive evidence

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Dr. Darryl Inaba relates stories new and old about cocaine residue on American money, and attempts to use this as evidence in drug cases.

 
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