As the White House considers sweeping strategic shifts in the war in Afghanistan, heroin addicts across the nation called on President Obama Monday to stick with the current U.S. policy, which has flooded the world market with low-price narcotics. "There's no need to change nothing, Joe Biden," said addict Reginald "Bones" Dillow, who, when conscious, is an outspoken proponent of the U.S. military strategy that has resulted in a nearly 40-fold increase in Afghan opium production since the end of Taliban rule in 2001. "Everything is so cheap—it's all totally fine like it is, right? Over there, I mean. Why would you want to…do the…[garbled]." Obama is reportedly looking into economic incentives that would both persuade poor Afghans to cease opium cultivation and benefit chemically dependent Americans, the most promising of which involves constructing facilities in the war-torn country for the manufacture of methadone.As the White House considers sweeping strategic shifts in the war in Afghanistan,... more
Drug addiction clinics say they are becoming increasingly concerned by the health risks associated with the chemical -- the only known example of the body forming a third drug following the ingestion of two others.
For not only is cocaethylene toxic in the liver, it is also blamed for heart attacks in the under-40s and a surge in social problems. But because so little is known about the drug...
Excellent new documentary from National Geographic (yes you heard that right) on the latest research on the therapeutic benefits of LSD.
LSDs inventor Albert Hofmann called it "medicine for the soul." The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers. Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness. Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this "trippy" drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future. Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.Excellent new documentary from National Geographic (yes you heard that right) on the... more
China's, how to say this, unorthodox rehabilitation methods, which involve "beating and confinement" of internet addicts, have finally been fully outlawed. Following the death of one teenager due to the treatment he received at an addiction camp, the Chinese Health Ministry has come out with a statement to say corporal punishment and methods restricting personal freedom "are strictly forbidden." In the meantime, the UK and USA are playing catch-up by opening up their own computer addiction camps, which have been described as residential internet detox clinics. Their genius ploy to get you off the web juice has been to go cold turkey and teach people to do chores as a distraction (really, chores and boredom are the cure and not the disease?). The British version even has a 12-step program, but we advise doing what we all did -- if you find yourself spending most of your time on the internet, just become a full-time blogger.
Today, Wizards All-Star forward Caron Butler(notes), now blogging for NBA.com as “Agent Zero 2.0,” dives deeper into the caffeinated murk of his addiction to the “neon-yellow rocket fuel” known as Mountain Dew:Today, Wizards All-Star forward Caron Butler(notes), now blogging for NBA.com as... more
If you are or ever have been the board gaming type, you may have run across Settlers of Catan, or at least heard of it from a fanatic friend. The game, which is a bit like Risk but without the war (at least in its basic incarnation), is all about resource gathering, trading, and colonization.
If you’ve played Settlers the board game, or if you’ve played it on your PC or Xbox 360, then you’ll already be familiar with the gameplay in the iPhone version, since it uses the standard rule set. Expansions are available for the board game which add more tiles or new gameplay elements, but for now, Catan on the iPhone doesn’t offer any of these additional modes of play.If you are or ever have been the board gaming type, you may have run across Settlers... more
As the U.S. postpones a decision on Afghanistan, Gerald Posner reports on a new secret weapon in the arsenal of the Taliban and Al Qaeda: getting the Army addicted to their cheap heroin.As the U.S. postpones a decision on Afghanistan, Gerald Posner reports on a new secret... more
http://www.citizen.org A film by Brandon Augustin Ramirez, a student in the Digital Media Department of FIDM.http://www.citizen.org A film by Brandon Augustin Ramirez, a student in the Digital... more
The idea behind COMMERCIAL BREAKERS is simply to sabotage the meaning of advertising and undermine the power of brands. The average TV ad presents the consumer with a crisis: a crisis of identity, a crisis of hunger, a messy floor, an unsightly blemish or erectile dysfunction. The crisis is always a crisis of choice, but there is only one choice: the product being advertised. Each ad expresses an individual brand’s vision of utopia; a perfect world constructed around a singular message: if you buy the product being advertised, you will be happy and content … if only for a moment.The idea behind COMMERCIAL BREAKERS is simply to sabotage the meaning of advertising... more
Well this is about time for all the people struggling with addiction this is an Important advance!Well this is about time for all the people struggling with addiction this is an... more
Psychiatrists from Baylor College of Medicine have formulated a vaccine that encourages your body to make antibodies against specifically cocaine. This could be a great finding for severe cocaine addicts, but this also raises a couple key questions.
This is the first "drug vaccine" of its kind which might pave a path for a sundry of "drug vaccines".
Also politicians highly against drugs might mandate vaccination for drug abusers or just citizens in general.
And lastly this vaccine reminds me of "A Clockwork Orange", in which the star is repeatedly injected with a vaccine to make him feel sick at the mere thought of violence. This vaccine sounds like it makes cocaine abusers physically ill if cocaine is in their system, a kind of forceful and scary way to make someone quit drugs.Psychiatrists from Baylor College of Medicine have formulated a vaccine that... more
Vaccine-like shots to keep cocaine abusers from getting high also helped them fight their addiction in the first successful rigorous study of this approach to treating illicit drug use.
The shots didn't work perfectly, but the researchers say their limited success is promising enough to suggest the intriguing vaccine approach could be widely used to treat addiction within several years.
''It is such an important study. It clearly demonstrates ... that it is possible to generate vaccine that could interfere with cocaine actions in the brain,'' said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the study.
The results come just days after that government agency announced plans for the first late-stage study of an experimental nicotine vaccine designed to help people quit smoking. The NicVAX vaccine has been fast-tracked by the Food and Drug Administration, and the research will be paid for with federal stimulus money.
The cocaine and nicotine vaccines both use the same approach, stimulating the immune system to produce antibodies that attach to molecules of the drugs and block them from reaching the brain.Vaccine-like shots to keep cocaine abusers from getting high also helped them fight... more
Some children and teens are more likely than their peers to become addicted to the Internet, and a new study suggests it's more likely to happen if kids are depressed, hostile, or have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or social phobia.Some children and teens are more likely than their peers to become addicted to the... more
I have a friend who claims to be addicted to Facebook. She thought she could handle it when she first got started. She told herself that she could take it or leave it, that she would just poke around a bit on the weekends. Or maybe she would dip in when she had a little time to kill on the occasional quiet evening. Pretty soon she was only doing it on days that end with the letter “Y”. For hours. When she got in trouble at work, she started sneaking peeks at her updates on the iPhone. She misses out on live social engagements in order to stay home and farm her network. She says that she wants to take her involvement down a couple of notches, but she just doesn’t seem to be able to do it. She’s committed to limits and then fudged or outright broken them time and again. She thinks she might have to close her account to get a grip. So far, she hasn’t actually done it, though.
Into the Abyss by Spiffy SpaffySound familiar? I’ve been thinking a lot about behavioral attractors lately. What does it mean when I say that something is addictive, and what webwork of fine lines separate addiction, habituation, ritual, and obsession?............
What do I mean when I say that a person can’t stop? This is part of where the slippery free will issue comes in. I never watched any of the Saw horror movies, because I take a lot of drugs and that sort of thing always rebounds on me in the worst way. But let’s just imagine that I somehow got hold of like a hundred junkies and rigged a bomb on each one of them so that if he or she ever touched heroin again it would go off, okay? I know I know, that’s terrible and it wouldn’t work and obviously I’d never do that in real life, but play along with this as an illustration. If you prefer, let’s say the bombs are fake but the junkies don’t know that. Whatever. My thesis is that a few of the poor devils would eventually hit a spoke on their cycle where they caved in and shot up anyway. That’s the percentage who really can’t help it. There are those who really can’t stop. But I bet that quite a few of them would find a way to resist, even though they are clinically addicted.......
I go through phases in which I smoke a lot of pot, and there is an ongoing conversation between me and mine about the nature of my relationship with it. Smoking is kind of a ritual for me. It’s also a habit. I’m not going be a poseur and say that it’s always a sacrament. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. But I do use it effectively as a transition ritual. It helps me to stand down from my work set, for instance, and spin up into the version of myself that I want to be at home. Once when I was super poor, I got one of those fake hollow cigarettes and I’d just take it out a few times a day and suck on it. Most of the time, it worked! I found it fascinating that the calming effect seemed to come from the ritual itself, not from the actions of the plant ally. In the same way, cigarettes serve a primarily ritualistic function for many users, which is not to say that they’re not physically addictive. There are just overlapping processes happening simultaneously. Same with coffee. Same with alcohol. Some people always come home and have a glass of wine to unwind from work. Is it addiction, habit, or ritual?............
My husband knows a girl who is an absolutely lovely person in every respect, so long as she does her meditation every single morning. Otherwise she’s a total raging bitch. I’m not exaggerating that much. It’s really obvious if she hasn’t done it. Isn’t that a crutch...........
Drugs are tools, people. They can hurt and they can heal. They can liberate and they can enslave. It’s true of Facebook and it’s true of love. The solution is clearly not to demonize everything that we find hard to resist. Instead, we have to start getting extremely sophisticated about these things in short order. Because the world isn’t going to get any less compelling any time soon.I have a friend who claims to be addicted to Facebook. She thought she could handle it... more
The prohibition on marijuana makes its use a more addictive habit, says a prominent author and psychiatrist.
Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist at the New York University School of Medicine and author of Weekends at Bellevue, told Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today Show that the feelings of shame and suspicion associated with an illegal habit, as well as the adrenaline kick it fuels, all make marijuana use more habit-forming and harmful than it needs to be.
“The fact that [marijuana is] illegal is a very big deal,” Holland said. “People have to hide and they feel like criminals and there’s a lot of shame and guilt, and it ends up making … it decreases self-esteem a little bit and it makes [the habit] more adrenalized. The fact that you add adrenaline into it, and you have to hide and you have shame, can make it more addictive and more dangerous.”The prohibition on marijuana makes its use a more addictive habit, says a prominent... more
Mariana van Zeller on The Oxycontin Express, an episode from the upcoming third season of Vanguard, Current TV's original documentary series.Mariana van Zeller on The Oxycontin Express, an episode from the upcoming third season... more
Addicted to Exercise
Bryan Marshal and Miranda Jones are addicted to exercise. Both work out six days a week, pushing their body beyond it's limits and causing serious injuries. http://current.com/items/85528861_addicted-to-exercise.htm
Sex Addicts
Sex addicts do exist, please believe it. VC2 producer Dave O'Brien gets intimate access to both a male and female suffering from the addiction, both of which have acknowledged their addiction to sex and are seeking help. http://current.com/items/76373082_sex-addicts.htm
Here are some awfully dangerous drugs which include sleeping pills, sedatives, tranquilizers, and antidepressants that will cause many side effects particularly due to their adverse effect in suppressing central nervous and respiratory system, and they may also slow down bodily function and cause hallucinations. In short, these drugs are extremely dangerous as they may produce unwanted and unpredicted side effects.Here are some awfully dangerous drugs which include sleeping pills, sedatives,... more
Photographer Joason Flori’s brother is both a heroin addict and a working parent. Florio’s series of pictures captures his brother’s life over 10 years of addiction. As Florio states, “This work is my first attempt to confront a subject that I cannot walk away from....In a sense, his story is common, but I wanted to portray his addiction uniquely. Addicts are often depicted as being poor, undereducated, unemployed, marginalized “losers,” or rock stars succumbing to the pressures of fame.”
“He is in a sense a “functioning” addict, in that he works his life around the continual need to “score” daily whilst being a working parent. The images of him are [from] over nearly a decade and present him in a number of ways. We are all individually multiple; the faces he presents can be at moments so tender and at other times horrifying to witness.”
This piece includes a number of engaging color photographs, as well as a remarkable slide show of additional emotionally moving photographs.Photographer Joason Flori’s brother is both a heroin addict and a working parent.... more
The What Not To Wear star Trinny Woodall, has revealed the truth about her ten year battle with drugs and booze.
She said she has been left "emotionally bankrupt" by the battle with her addiction after she managed to clean herself up at the age of 26. Now 45 she has come clean about the depths of her struggle admitting 'I drove down to the rehab centre in my hire car, shoving all these pills in my mouth, these tranquilisers, and I crashed the car on the way,'
Reading this article in the metro, it appears to me that she's blaming her addiction on her family, stating 'My grandfather was an alcoholic, my uncle was an alcoholic, so I can definitely see the physical addiction through the generations..."The What Not To Wear star Trinny Woodall, has revealed the truth about her ten year... more
