Drugs « Tikkunista!

8. Marihuana: Smoke and Mirrors

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: It’s the week when, at the White House dinner, Jimmie Kimmel put it to the POTUS: “Pot smokers vote too. Sometimes a week after the election, but they vote.” We open with a clear Forbes article about why decriminalization is an idea that’s way overdue. A fine infographic sums up the arguments below. In Focus hounoured 4/20 with a set of entertaining photos of the killer weed. A utterly bizarre… there really are no words extreme enough… 1980’s anti-dope ad will make you question whether you’re stoned. (If you are stoned, your head will probably explode. Cave fumigant!) And a modern ad warns about the perils of medical marihuana as a gateway drug.

* Let’s Be Blunt: It’s Time to End the Drug War Forbes

April 20 is the counter-culture “holiday” on which lots and lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs—especially marijuana—be legal? The answer is “yes.” Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. It’s high time to end prohibition. Even if you aren’t willing to go whole-hog and legalize all drugs, at the very least we should legalize marijuana.

For the sake of the argument, let’s go ahead and assume that everything you’ve heard about the dangers of drugs is completely true. That probably means that using drugs is a terrible idea. It doesn’t mean, however, that the drug war is a good idea.

Prohibition is a textbook example of a policy with negative unintended consequences….The demand curve for drugs is extremely inelastic, meaning that people don’t change their drug consumption very much in response to changes in prices. Therefore, vigorous enforcement means higher prices and higher revenues for drug dealers.

The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery (like crack cocaine). It’s hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her.

People associate the drug trade with crime and violence; indeed, the newspapers occasionally feature stories about drug kingpins doing horrifying things to underlings and competitors. These aren’t caused by the drugs themselves but from the fact that they are illegal (which means the market is underground) and addictive (which means demanders aren’t very price sensitive).

…Freedom of contract has been abridged in the name of keeping us “safe” from drugs. Private property is less secure because it can be seized if it is implicated in a drug crime (this also flushes the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty” out the window). The drug war has been used as a pretext for clamping down on immigration. Not surprisingly, the drug war has turned some of our neighborhoods into war zones. We are warehousing productive young people in prisons at an alarming rate all in the name of a war that cannot be won.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By this definition, the drug war is insane. We are no safer, and we are certainly less free because of concerted efforts to wage war on drugs. It’s time to stop the insanity and end prohibition.

* Going Green Online Paralegal Programs Infographic of arguments for legalization

* Marijuana In Focus – The Atlantic

* Anti-Marijuana TV spot from the 1980s Boing Boing [Warning: Scary Stuff!]

* Medical Marijuana – Gateway Drug! Tom The Dancing Bug Boing Boing

5. Drug Wars Update

Mar-16-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: It does seem as though this story gets run in Tikkunista, over and over again. But like the glaciers, the drug prohibitions world wide are slowly melting as it gets clearer and clearer that the war on drugs only benefits those who make and run prisons. We look at a method that does seem to work, and at Latin America. And a useful factoid ends the section on a higher note.

* Drug Market Intervention The Economist

Police watched seven people sell drugs in Marshall Courts and Seven Oaks, two districts in south-eastern Newport News, in Virginia. They built strong cases against them. They shared that information with prosecutors. But then the police did something unusual: they sent the seven letters inviting them to police headquarters for a talk, promising that if they came they would not be arrested. Three came, and when they did they met not only police and prosecutors, but also family members, people from their communities, pastors from local churches and representatives from social-service agencies. Their neighbours and relatives told them that dealing drugs was hurting their families and communities. The police showed them the information they had gathered, and they offered the seven a choice: deal again, and we will prosecute you. Stop, and these people will help you turn your lives around…. This approach is known as drug-market intervention (DMI).

* Is It Time To Decriminalise Drugs? Al Jazeera English (Thanks, Gabe)

With trafficking-related violence increasing across Latin America, leaders call for policy changes.

As drug cartels expand their operations in Central America, the region is seeing the world’s highest homicide rates. Some Latin American leaders now say they are ready to discuss the decriminalisation of narcotics. We look at how the drug war between the military and the narco-traffickers impacts the people of Latin America.

* Colombia Set To Officially Decriminalization Drug Possession

The government of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is preparing legislation that will set “personal dose” amounts for drugs that will allow for their possession without the possibility of arrest or prosecution, the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo reported Tuesday. The decriminalization legislation could be presented as early this week, the newspaper said in its exclusive report.

Colombia was the first Latin American country to decriminalize drug possession after a ruling by its Constitutional Court in 1994. But during the presidency Santos’ predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, the government amended the constitution to criminalize drug use, effectively re-criminalizing drug possession.

Last year, the Colombian Supreme Court threw out Uribe’s changes, ruling that the possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use was a constitutional right. This pending legislation recognizes last year’s ruling and actualizes it by setting the “personal dose” amounts. The 56-page document seen by El Tiempo sets the “personal dose” amount at five grams for marijuana and one gram for cocaine. It also sets “personal dose” amounts of 200 milligrams, or three pills, for amphetamine-type stimulants, such as methamphetamine and MDMA.

* Useful fact: you would have to consume 1,500 pounds of marijuana in 15 minutes to overdose

…Simply stated, researchers have been unable to give animals enough marijuana to induce death.

7. Brains: Damage and Repair

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (1)

Bird’s Eye: Hockey fans know about concussions, and football fans are learning. Less well known, and clearly explicated is the problem that these injuries are equally likely to happen and much more serious medically among high school age players, an overwhelming percentage of whom will never play for millions of dollars. It isn’t clear that there are solutions: the best “anti-concussion” helmet reduces injuries by 2%. And linked in the vaguest of fashion is an article about what Magic Mushrooms do to your brain, and why they may be useful for long term treatment of depression.

* Concussions In Adolescents And The Future Of Football Jonah Lehrer Grantland

If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.

The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.) …While such head injuries have long been ignored — until recently, players were resuscitated with smelling salts so they could re-enter the game — it’s now clear that these blows have lasting consequences.

The consequences appear to be particularly severe for the adolescent brain….Although these teenagers are suffering concussions at higher rates and with worse consequences — the head trauma of football targets the most vulnerable areas of the developing brain — the overwhelming majority of these kids will never play the sport competitively again. They are getting paid nothing and yet they are paying the highest cost.

* Helmets For Snow Sports Ski Injury

Shealy et al conclude “…the findings are not particularly supportive of the notion that wearing helmets will significantly reduce the number of fatalities in winter snow sports”. This was supported by a presentation at the last ISSS meeting by the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Vermont, USA – Dr Paul L. Morrow. Dr Morrow was of the opinion that of 54 deaths at commercial ski areas in Vermont from 1979/80 to 1997/98, helmets would not have been of any particular value in saving any of the lives lost – as the degree of trauma simply overwhelmed any benefits that the helmet might convey in an impact. To quote Shealy et al again – a team of highly respected ski injury researchers – “On the basis of results to date, there is no clear evidence that helmets have been shown to be an effective means of reducing fatalities in alpine sports”.

Its a sobering fact for example that more than half of the people involved in fatal accidents in 2008/09 at ski areas in the USA were wearing helmets at the time of the incident (Source – NSAA). As Shealy states “Even though the prevalence of helmet utilization is rising by 4 to 5 percent per year in the U.S., there has been no statistically significant observable effect on the incident of fatality.”

* Magic Mushrooms Expand the Mind By Dampening Brain Activity Heartland

Aldous Huxley posited that ordinary consciousness represents only a fraction of what the mind can take in. In order to keep us focused on survival, Huxley claimed, the brain must act as a “reducing valve” on the flood of potentially overwhelming sights, sounds and sensations. What remains, Huxley wrote, is a “measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” necessary to “help us to stay alive.”

A new study by British researchers supports this theory. It shows for the first time how psilocybin — the drug contained in magic mushrooms — affects the connectivity of the brain. Researchers found that the psychedelic chemical, which is known to trigger feelings of oneness with the universe and a trippy hyperconsciousness, does not work by ramping up the brain’s activity as they’d expected. Instead, it reduces it.

“The results seem to imply that a lot of brain activity is actually dedicated to keeping the world very stable and ordinary and familiar and unsurprising,” says Robin Carhart-Harris, a postdoctoral student at Imperial College London and lead author of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Indeed, Huxley and Blake had predicted what turns out to be a key finding of modern neuroscience: many of the human brain’s highest achievements involve preventing actions instead of initiating them, and sifting out useless information rather than collecting and presenting it for conscious consideration.

7. Social Media: Reddit and Quora

Jan-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Social media, or web 2.0… whatever you call it, it’s growing. Reddit’s numbers speak for themselves, (2 billion pageviews in Dec!) but it’s the subreddits in which it lives. If you were diagnosed with a disease, and wanted to talk to others about their experiences with alternative treatments, there’s a subreddit for that specific disease, almost certainly. If you can’t figure out why your printer won’t run under Lion, go to the Mac subreddit. If you’re a Toronto Maple Leafs fan (my deep sympathy, by the way)…. Quora is similar in that it has user created content, but there’s less discussion, and more emphasis on experience from doctors, economists, screenwriters, police officers, and military veterans. There are two sample links, one of particular interest to Canadians.

* 2 Billion & Beyond Reddit

In December 2011, reddit served 2.07 billion pageviews. Crazy. Here are some details: 2,065,237,338 pageviews; 34,879,881 unique visitors; 12.97 pages / visit

And, more importantly, our community stats: 100,000+ subreddits; 8,400+ subreddits with over 100 subscribers

*How reddit works

The most important fact is that reddit is not a single community; it’s an engine for creating communities.

A subreddit is a class of online community, just like mailing lists, forums, and chatrooms are. Each of the thousands of subreddits is a distinct community with its own purpose, standards, and readership. Subreddits are the secret to reddit’s growth. As communities have scaled up, more focused ones have branched off of popular topics and posting practices.

* What is it like to be a drug dealer? Quora

In a single word, being a drug dealer was exhilarating. Immense rewards, more than I realized at the time, but also unbelievable stress, unavoidable paranoia, and most difficult of all, an existence in a world that does not ‘exist’ by traditional standards….

* What Is Life Like As The Scion Of A Head Of Government? Quora

For the first 13 years of my life, my father was the prime minister of Canada. My parents separated when I was seven or eight, and my brothers and I continued to live with our father in the PM’s official residence, 24 Sussex Drive, in Ottawa, although our mother purchased a home a few blocks away and we spent a lot of time with her as well….

5. The War on the War on Drugs

Dec-09-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Slowly but slowly there is progress, as it becomes increasingly clear that the war on drugs doesn’t reduce drug use, though it does help to fill prisons and pockets. Below, the latest dispatches from the front lines.

* 9 Huge Blows to the Catastrophic War on Drugs AlterNet

2011 has been a watershed year for the movement working to end our county’s disastrous war on drugs. Below are the top stories of the year that exemplify the momentum and give us hope that we can find alternatives to drug war madness.

#1. World Leaders Make International News by Calling for Marijuana Legalization and End to Drug War

This summer, the Global Commission on Drug Policy made worldwide news in more than 3,000 outlets when they released a report calling for a paradigm shift in global drug policy — including not just alternatives to incarceration and greater emphasis on public health approaches to drug use, but also decriminalization and experiments in legal regulation. The Commission is comprised of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan; Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group; four former presidents, including the commission’s chairman, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil; George P. Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State; Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve….

* US Military Admits To Guarding, Assisting Lucrative Opium Trade In Afghanistan NaturalNews

Afghanistan is, by far, the largest grower and exporter of opium in the world today, cultivating a 92 percent market share of the global opium trade. …The US military has been specifically tasked with guarding Afghan poppy fields, from which opium is derived, in order to protect this multibillion dollar industry that enriches Wall Street, the CIA, MI6, and various other groups that profit big time from this illicit drug trade scheme. [Immediately] prior to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Afghanistan was hardly even a world player in growing poppy, which is used to produce both illegal heroin and pharmaceutical-grade morphine. In fact, the Taliban had been actively destroying poppy fields as part of an effort to rid the country of this harmful plant…

* Bad Science: Idiots and Ecstasy Neurobonkers

Drug “education” pamphlets routinely state ecstasy causes “brain damage” and “Parkinson’s disease”. There is no valid evidence for the former in humans and the little evidence that exists regarding the latter actually suggests the precise opposite. The Parkinson’s claim is based on a study published by Johns Hopkins University which has beenretracted. The reason for the retraction was that the monkeys who the study were based on were “accidentally” injected (yes, injected) with crystal meth instead of ecstasy. These were not the only things wrong with this study…

Another odd thing about the Johns Hopkins study was that the monkeys were injected three times with intervals of three hours. Ricuarte, the author of the study himself conducted a study in 1988 that demonstrated that injecting doubles the toxicity of MDMA however this was not discussed in this study and the title of the study actually states “a common recreational dose”. It was also a strange conclusion for the scientists to suggest that ecstacy causes Parkinson’s without addressing their staggering finding that two of their ten monkeys dropped dead before they could be given their third dose. It’s as if they think that at raves its perfectly normal for one in five ecstasy users to inject themselves with ecstasy and then promptly drop dead.

* Swiss Cannabis Smokers To Be Allowed To Grow Four Marijuana Plants Each Mail Online

Cannabis smokers in Switzerland will soon be allowed to grow up to four marijuana plants each at home to stop them buying drugs on the black market. In a bizarre twist to the new law, four people sharing a house can grow up to 16 plants – but only if each person tends to their own crop. The deregulation of Switzerland’s already lax cannabis laws has been agreed by four neighbouring regions in the French-speaking part of the Alpine country.

6. Helping Your Brain To Work Better

Dec-02-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Teachers have long known that limitations help students to work better. But chewing gum? Why would that help? (Sugar or sugar-free: it wasn’t the sugar making the difference.) And looking at smiley faces seems to help in fighting depression, which seems pretty depressing. ☺ Then there’s the nocebo effect: the more you have been warned about a drug’s side effects, the likelier you are to experience those effects. But if they test the nocebo effect on placebos, what will happen? Looks like more research is needed here.

* Need to Create? Get a Constraint Wired

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is poetry. At first glance, the art seems to be defined by its liberation from ordinary language – poets don’t have to obey the rules of syntax and punctuation. And yet, most poetry still depends on literary forms with exacting requirements, such as haikus, sestets and sonnets. This writing method seems to make little sense, since it makes the creative act much more difficult. Instead of composing free verse, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints. Why?

A new study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam, and published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an interesting answer. It turns out that the obstacles of form come with an unexpected psychological perk, allowing people to think in a more all-encompassing fashion. … We break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

* The Cognitive Benefits Of Chewing Gum Wired

Why do people chew gum? If an anthropologist from Mars ever visited a typical supermarket, they’d be confounded by those shelves near the checkout aisle that display dozens of flavored gum options. Chewing without eating seems like such a ridiculous habit, the oral equivalent of running on a treadmill. And yet, people have been chewing gum for thousands of years, ever since the ancient Greeks began popping wads of mastic tree resin in their mouth to sweeten the breath. Socrates probably chewed gum.

It turns out there’s an excellent rationale for this long-standing cultural habit: Gum is an effective booster of mental performance, conferring all sorts of benefits without any side effects. The latest investigation of gum chewing comes from a team of psychologists at St. Lawrence University. The experiment went like this: 159 students were given a battery of demanding cognitive tasks, such as repeating random numbers backward and solving difficult logic puzzles. Half of the subjects chewed gum (sugar-free and sugar-added) while the other half were given nothing. Here’s where things get peculiar: Those randomly assigned to the gum-chewing condition significantly outperformed those in the control condition on five out of six tests. (The one exception was verbal fluency, in which subjects were asked to name as many words as possible from a given category, such as “animals.”) The sugar content of the gum had no effect on test performance. (Editor’s note: Should be compulsory in high school.)

* New brain game can train you to focus on the positiveWired

It may be possible to stave off depression before it even appears using brain-training software so simplistic in its design that even the psychologist testing it once bet it wouldn’t work. A set of girls in the pilot experiment received their training through a simple computer game instead. In this game, a pair of faces appeared on a screen every few seconds: they would be either neutral and sad, or neutral and happy. Then a dot replaced one of the faces, and the “game” was to click on the dot. For the eight girls in the control group, the face replaced by the dot was selected at random, but for eight girls in the experimental group, the dot always replaced the more positive face in the pair. Over a week of playing this game daily, these girls were in effect being trained to avoid looking at the sad faces.

Gotlib himself originally found this concept, called attentional-bias training, so simplistic that he bet Colin MacLeod, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth who pioneered the technique, that it would not alter psychological symptoms. Gotlib lost his bet.

* The Nocebo Effect: Wellcome Trust science writing prize essayPenny Sarchet The Observer

Can just telling a man he has cancer kill him? In 1992 the Southern Medical Journal reported the case of a man who in 1973 had been diagnosed with cancer and given just months to live. After his death, however, his autopsy showed that the tumour in his liver had not grown. His intern Clifton Meador didn’t believe he’d died of cancer: “I do not know the pathologic cause of his death,” he wrote. Could it be that, instead of the cancer, it was his expectation of death that killed him?

This death could be an extreme example of the “nocebo effect” – the flip-side to the better-known placebo effect. While an inert sugar pill (placebo) can make you feel better, warnings of fictional side-effects (nocebo) can make you feel those too. This is a common problem in pharmaceutical trials and a 1980s study found that heart patients were far more likely to suffer side-effects from their blood-thinning medication if they had first been warned of the medication’s side-effects. This poses an ethical quandary: should doctors warn patients about side-effects if doing so makes them more likely to arise?

7. Drug Cartels vs the World

Nov-04-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Who you going to call? As Mexican drug cartels continue to grow in power, owning police and government in Mexico, killing investigative journalists, infiltrating the US, only one group appears willing or able to take them on. It’s time to update “the pen is mightier than the sword”, as soon as we find out whether the mouse is mightier than the gun.

* Anonymous Vs. the Zetas

In just the past few days, rumors of a showdown between Anonymous and the Zetas drug cartel have been the subject of a veritable media frenzy. Speculation about the scope of the confrontation abounds, fueled by several conflicting reports about the “hacktivist” group’s intentions. The source of the confusion is a YouTube video … which shows a masked speaker accusing the Zetas in Veracruz of having kidnapped a member of Anonymous in that state. As retribution, the individual claims that Anonymous will expose Zetas-linked police officers, officials and journalists unless their associate is released. “You made a great mistake in taking one of us; release him and if something happens to him, you [expletive] will remember the 5th of November.”

The ultimatum received little attention from Mexican media until STRATFOR picked up on the story and published an analysis of the incident. In their report, the global intelligence company points out that any individual that Anonymous names as a Zetas collaborator will likely be killed, “whether or not the information released is accurate.” The report also notes that the move opens up the hackers to reprisal attacks, as the Zetas have been known to target their online critics in the past. Three individuals were tortured and killed in Nuevo Laredo in two separate incidents in September, with signs left next to the bodies accusing them of reporting crimes on Internet forums.

…the incident is an illustration of the role that fear plays in the Zetas’ exercise of power. Anonymous members’ doubts about the operation are well-founded, as the Zetas are generally thought of as the most dangerous drug cartel in Mexico, who carry out brutal public revenge on their enemies. But as the hacking collective decided to go through with the operation, the Zetas could be in a highly vulnerable position. If they give in to Anonymous’ demands and free the kidnapping victim — presuming he or she exists — then they risk opening themselves up to further challenges to their authority.

* Dying For The Truth: Drug Cartels Target Journalists In Mexico Journalism•co•uk

Early last September, two female journalists were found dead in a park in Mexico City. The crime was attributed to the work of drug cartels. Ana María Yarce Viveros, the founder of the weekly magazine Contralinea, and Rocio González Trápaga, a freelance journalist, were kidnapped after leaving work on 31 August and were strangled to death later that night. Their murders brought the journalist death toll in Mexico to 80 since the year 2000.

Mexico is now considered to be the most dangerous country in the western hemisphere in which to practice journalism. “Reporters who choose to ignore the drug trafficking scene are usually safe,” explains Michael Forbes, the editor-in-chief of the Guadalajara Reporter newspaper. For the same reason, many newspapers have also deliberately stop covering stories related to drug-related crimes.

* Beyond the Border: Measuring Mexican Cartels’ Influence in the USInsight

A report released in August by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center [claims] that overall drug availability is increasing. According to the 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment, “heroin, marijuana, MDMA [otherwise known as ecstasy] and methamphetamine are readily available throughout the United States, and their availability is increasing in some markets.” The only exception to the trend is cocaine, which remains less available than it was prior to 2007, a year which drug officials claim to have caused a supply reduction. As InSight Crime has reported, however, the evidence for this drop is not decisive. Not surprisingly, the report shows that the southern border continues to act as a gateway for the vast majority of these drugs. As it turns out, however, the quantity and type of drug smuggled across the border varies by location. Whereas remote areas along the southern Arizona border are the site of large-scale shipments of marijuana, the NDIC claims this does not apply to all drugs. Instead, smugglers of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine prefer to bring in their product in multiple, smaller shipments through border checkpoints in Texas and California. This means that a certain percentage will always be caught, but drug trafficking organizations rely on secret compartments, the law of averages and pay-offs to ensure that enough of the drugs get through to meet the level of wholesale demand in the U.S

9. Driving Us Crazy

Jun-17-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Reality is a consensual hallucination. We agree that there are witches, and then we can find them, prove they are witches, and burn them. We agree there are no witches, and there aren’t any. We agree that there are mental diseases, and – poof – there they are. More of them every day, according to psychiatrists. And some people have problems with that. The first piece is a vital attack on current beliefs of mental illness, the second an example of a lunatic notion that has been disabused, and the third is a towering eyeful… er… Eiffel.

* The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? Marcia Angell The New York Review of Books

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

…What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?

These are the questions, among others, that concern the authors of the three provocative books under review here….The authors emphasize different aspects of the epidemic of mental illness. Kirsch is concerned with whether antidepressants work. Whitaker, who has written an angrier book, takes on the entire spectrum of mental illness and asks whether psychoactive drugs create worse problems than they solve. Carlat, who writes more in sorrow than in anger, looks mainly at how his profession has allied itself with, and is manipulated by, the pharmaceutical industry. But despite their differences, all three are in remarkable agreement on some important matters, and they have documented their views well.

First, they agree on the disturbing extent to which the companies that sell psychoactive drugs—through various forms of marketing, both legal and illegal, and what many people would describe as bribery—have come to determine what constitutes a mental illness and how the disorders should be diagnosed and treated. …Second, none of the three authors subscribes to the popular theory that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

* Conversion Therapy: Pray Away the Gay Patrick Strudwick The Guardian

They described her as “reckless”, “disrespectful”, “dogmatic” and “unprofessional”. They said she showed “no empathy” towards her client. Why? Psychotherapist Lesley Pilkington had tried to turn a gay person straight.

In a landmark ruling this week, Pilkington, 60, was found guilty of “treating” a patient for his homosexuality. A hearing of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy – the largest professional body for therapists – concluded that the treatment she gave constituted “professional malpractice”.

The unanimous verdict came with heavy sanctions. Pilkington’s accreditation to the organisation was suspended. She was ordered to complete extensive training and professional development. If she does not file a report in six to 12 months, satisfying the board that she has complied, she will have her membership fully revoked: she will be struck off.

* ‘Paris Syndrome’ strikes Japanese Caroline Wyatt BBC

A dozen or so Japanese tourists a year have to be repatriated from the French capital, after falling prey to what’s become known as “Paris syndrome”. That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations. The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown.

8. Modelling the Mind

Jun-10-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Every solution is based on a model of the problem it addresses. Here are three interesting models for the mind: a historian suggests that apps work better than TV at reflecting his thought processes about history; the Boston Globe reports that the model of depression being caused by serotonin deficiency is almost certainly wrong; a science fiction story about unicorns suggests that a brutal conformity is the price we pay to be accepted. (Caveat lector: I’m not kidding about the brutal part.) The story, “Ponies” won the Nebula award this year, given to the best shot story of the year, as voted by the SF writers of America.

* David Starkey On Why Apps Reflect His Thought Processes Better Than TV The Guardian

David Starkey is already a “cross-platform” historian, best known for his projects spanning books and TV. However, there’s now an app for that too. It’s called Kings and Queens, and while its textual basis is Starkey’s Crown and Country book, the iOS app is no cash-in.

Developed by Trade Mobile, the app uses a timeline user interface to explore the history of the English monarchy, with a wealth of background material to dive into, and entirely new footage of Starkey explaining the key points. In an interview with Apps Blog, he fizzes with enthusiasm about the potential of apps for his work.

“It’s a case of the technology catching up with what I wanted to do,” he says. “Television is a performance, but apps actually reflect thought processes.”

* How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction The Boston Globe

The success of Prozac hasn’t simply transformed the treatment of depression: it has also transformed the science of depression. For decades, researchers struggled to identify the underlying cause of depression, and patients were forced to endure a series of ineffective treatments. But then came Prozac. Like many other antidepressants, Prozac increases the brain’s supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter. The drug’s effectiveness inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical hypothesis: Sadness is simply a lack of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us up because they give the brain what it has been missing.

There’s only one problem with this theory of depression: it’s almost certainly wrong, or at the very least woefully incomplete. Experiments have since shown that lowering people’s serotonin levels does not make them depressed, nor does it worsen their symptoms if they are already depressed.

* Ponies Kij Johnson Tor

The invitation card has a Western theme. Along its margins, cartoon girls in cowboy hats chase a herd of wild Ponies. The Ponies are no taller than the girls, bright as butterflies, fat, with short round-tipped unicorn horns and small fluffy wings. At the bottom of the card, newly caught Ponies mill about in a corral. The girls have lassoed a pink-and-white Pony. Its eyes and mouth are surprised round Os. There is an exclamation mark over its head.

The little girls are cutting off its horn with curved knives. Its wings are already removed, part of a pile beside the corral.

You and your Pony ___[and Sunny’s name is handwritten here, in puffy letters]___ are invited to a cutting-out party with TheOtherGirls! If we like you, and if your Pony does okay, we’ll let you hang out with us.

5. The War is Over, But the Battle Goes On

Jun-03-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: It makes sense to fight for a cause; that’s how change happens. But (as Albert Einstein may have said) insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The war against drugs is not cutting down drug use; the war on Afghanistan (started, lest we forget, to get Bin Laden) is costing lives and doing nothing to defeat the Taliban, and as for the Harper government’s “War on Crime”, the facts show we’re winning that war without the punitive aspirations he espouses. What do these people fear – a 500 foot tall Bin Laden rising from the sea?

* War On Drugs Not Working, Says Global Commission The Guardian

The global war on drugs has failed and governments should explore legalising marijuana and other controlled substances, according to a commission that includes former heads of state and a former UN secretary general.

A new report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy argues that the decades-old “global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” The 24-page paper was released on Thursday.

“Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won,” the report said.

* Time to Begin Leaving Afghanistan Juan Cole Informed Comment

The protests in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, against yet another alleged killing of 14 women and children in an airstrike that went awry, reminds us that the big counter-insurgency effort in that country still has not produced social peace, still has not yielded a government capable of taking over security duties. NATO has had to issue an apology. If Afghan police and soldiers could project authority and force in local areas, air strikes would be unnecessary. And after nearly 10 years since the overthrow of the Taliban, it is legitimate to ask when and how exactly local troops can be expected to take up this slack? (Editor’s Note: See also relevant “Get Your War On” toon.)

* The Truth About Canadian Crime Rates John Macfarlane The Walrus Thanks, Susie,

According to Statistics Canada, the crime rate fell by 15 percent between 1998 and 2007, but that’s only part of the story. In 2009, StatsCan introduced an index that measures not only the change in volume of a particular crime, but also its relative seriousness in comparison with others (for example, homicide and rape are assigned higher weights than, say, shoplifting and creating mischief). The index shows that for the same decade, 1998 to 2007, the severity of crime in Canada fell by 21 percent.

Why, then, do so many Canadians believe the situation is getting worse? How is it possible that there were 77,000 fewer crimes in 2008 than the year before — including fewer violent crimes, which account for one in five in Canada — and yet almost half of us continued to believe just the opposite?

9. Drugs

May-13-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The bird’s eyes looks a bit bloodshot this week, and its pupils are dilated. Our bird must have been flying high in Uruguay, where dope is now legal. Back at home, scientists tune in to the potential good in psychedelics (‘entheogens’ is the preferred word). And in a cartoon banned in 1934, Betty Boop gets herself a bit giggly on nitrous.

* Uruguay To Legalize Marijuana Cultivation and Possession Republic Broadcasting Network

Uruguay may once again prove to live up to its official motto of “liberty or death.” Already considered one of the freest countries in the world in terms of economic and political liberties, the Uruguayan government has agreed on draft legislation that will legalize possession and cultivation of marijuana for personal consumption.

* Researchers Re-Open Their Minds to Psychedelic Drugs Miller-McCune

In the last decade, research into the effects of psychedelic drugs on consciousness has become a growing field of study in American academia. Psychologists at UCLA, Johns Hopkins Medical School and NYU, among other places, have published research showing that psychedelics can promote happiness in ordinary people, as well as alleviate depression and anxiety among the terminally ill. The positive effects of taking psilocybin Mike described are similar to many of the case descriptions contained in these studies (though no doubt none of the researchers involved would endorse his actions).

In the fall Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, published a study in the leading journal Archives of General Psychiatry finding that people with terminal stage-IV cancer reported feeling dramatically less anxiety after taking a small, measured dose of psilocybin during a carefully administered experiment. Grob and his team checked in with their subjects after three months, and then again after six months; in each case, the subjects reported more benefits as time went on.

* Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

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