http://www.cnsproductions.com/drugeducationblog Addiction and Drug Education Blogs and Podcasts, looking at drug use trends and treatment, and how addiction is tied to the brain as well as the body Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:29:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 2007-2008 service@cnsproductions.com (CNS Productions) service@cnsproductions.com (CNS Productions) Addiction education 1440 http://www.cnsproductions.com/144logo.jpg http://www.cnsproductions.com/drugeducationblog 144 144 A leader in the creation of drug education books and videos for educators, health care professionals and the public --- used by treatment facilities, counselor-training programs, law enforcement, and businesses and industries concerned about drugs in t... Addiction and Drug Education Blogs and Podcasts, looking at drug use trends and treatment, and how addiction is tied to the brain as well as the body addiction, drugs, education, recovery, substance abuse education, prevention, chemical dependency, AOD CNS Productions CNS Productions service@cnsproductions.com no no http://www.cnsproductions.com/drugeducationblog/podcasts/555/ http://www.cnsproductions.com/drugeducationblog/podcasts/555/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:17:55 +0000 CNS http://www.cnsproductions.com/drugeducationblog/?p=555 http://www.cnsproductions.com/drugeducationblog/podcasts/555/feed/ 0 00:01:01 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 ... 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. Listen to podcast 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 Cocaine, Dr. Darryl Inaba, Heroin & opiates, In the News, Podcasts CNS Productions no no