Apparently, during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a number of studies were conducted on LSD and its efficacy in treating various different disorders including alcoholism. A Norwegian research team analyzed six of these studies to better understand the findings. These studies were conducted in the US and Canada between 1966 and 1970 with surprising results. One dose of LSD was shown to help serious alcoholics quit drinking and also significantly reduced their risk for beginning to drink again.

The new study looked at 536 participants across the six older studies; the results were published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. About 59 percent of the participants demonstrated an obvious improvement compared to 38 percent of patients in other groups. Extremely effective initially, the usefulness of LSD as a treatment tool diminished over time, according to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology research team.

Teri Krebs and Pal-Orjan Johansen were researchers on the study. They said in a university news release: “We do not yet fully know why LSD works this way. But we know that the substance is nontoxic and that it is not addictive. We also know that it has a striking effect on the imagination, perception and memories. LSD may stimulate the formation of new connections and patterns, and generally seems to open an individual to an awareness of new perspectives and opportunities for action.”

LSD is not used for medical purposes in the United States, and using the drug for nonmedical purposes is illegal; however, it is still permissible to use LSD for research into using the drug for medical treatment.

Said Krebs and Johansen: “There has long been a need for better treatments for addiction. We think it is time to look at the use of psychedelics in treating various conditions.”

What Do You Think?

With the legalization of marijuana in some states for medical purposes, the doors may be opening for the use of other illegal substances in different medical treatments. Like methadone, an addictive painkiller, is used to treat heroin addiction, it might be possible that a substance like LSD could be beneficial in the treatment of dependence upon another drug, like alcohol. What do you think? Is the idea plausible? Would you take LSD to stop drinking? Would you approve of its use in a medical setting for that purpose? Leave us a comment below and let us know your thoughts.

How Bad Is the Prescription Painkiller Abuse Problem Nationally?

According to statistics from the International Narcotics Control Board, the United States accounts for 98 percent of the hydrocodone (primary ingredient in Vicodin) and over 80 percent of the oxycodone (primary ingredient in OxyContin) used worldwide. These are staggering numbers when you take into account that the US only makes up four percent of the global population. Part of this imbalance is due to the fact that Americans have better access to treatment and medication than many areas of the world, but another part of the disparity is a direct result of the abuse and illegal activity related to the highly addictive ingredients in prescription painkillers.

Ohio Has Seen a Huge Drop in Painkiller Prescriptions Over the Past Year

Brown’s home state has seen some major headway in the last calendar year on the prescription drug abuse front. Areas of the southern part of the state that had skyrocketing rates of abuse up through 2010 have now seen a 12 to 15 percent reduction in the number of prescriptions, totaling 1.5 million fewer pills last year.

Brown credits this success to “combined efforts of federal, state, and local officials” that have resulted in nine illegal clinics or “pill mills” being driven out of one of the state’s most affected counties. He sees this as a small victory, as other counties are now seeing a rise in use. Last year alone, enough OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet were prescribed in Ohio to provide 67 doses to every man, woman and child throughout the entire state. The small triumphs, however, have bolstered Brown to continue to put his energies toward tackling the larger problems of prescription painkiller abuse in his state.

If you have developed a dependence upon prescription medications, you are not alone. Painkillers are the fastest growing addiction in America and the deadliest. If you think you have a problem, no matter how big or small, seek treatment immediately. Contact us and we can explain all treatment options available to help you successfully become free from drugs. Our programs utilize evidence-based therapies that will assist you in reaching your goal of sobriety. Pick up the phone today.

Robertson’s public opinion could potentially be a tipping point for the issue on a national scale as many states around the country have been starting to lean toward opening medical marijuana dispensaries that generate tax revenue just like the sale of alcohol and cigarettes. If Robertson’s generally ultra-conservative supporters follow his lead, then we may see the movement to legalize the use of marijuana pick up steam quickly.

Political Analysts Scramble to Understand the Impact of Robertson’s Position

Robertson feels marijuana offenders are overcrowding prisons and draining much needed tax dollars in the current economic crisis. He feels that taxpayers should not be paying for people who break the marijuana laws when we can be profiting from their use. This is the same argument advocates for the legalization of marijuana have been making for decades, but it takes on a whole new significance when a staunch conservative comes forward professing this position. Robertson’s remarks would raise many eyebrows at any time but in an election year, they could have far-reaching consequences. Pundits are already hypothesizing about how the Tea Party and Republican candidates are going to react. Will this become the new Republican Party line, since it appears to make fiscal sense?

Has the ‘War On Drugs’ Been a Complete Failure as Robertson Professes?

Anti-drug advocates claim that Robertson’s statement is not accurate. They point out that in the late 1970s nearly 60 percent of high school seniors had used drugs in the past 12 months. After the “war on drugs” began, that same statistic dropped to 28 percent in 1992 – a huge reduction when compared to today’s averages that hover around 40 percent.

Calvina Fay, director of the Drug Free America Foundation, attributes the current stats to the fact that 16 states have now legalized medical marijuana and California has even had a proposition on the ballot to legalize it for recreational use. The implication is that as the public becomes more accepting, kids will be less fearful of trying it. Fay states, “We are still well below the 1978 usage rate, hardly a complete failure.”

Do you agree with Robertson that the “war on drugs” has failed here in America? What do you think about Robertson coming forward with a pro-legalization stance? We’d love to hear your opinions below.

Memory and Marijuana

The study was published in the first March issue of the journal Cell and showed that THC, the main ingredient in marijuana, affects the memory by impairing passive support cells called astroglia and not active neurons as was previously believed.

The question that many have is, if we already knew that marijuana affected memory, why does it matter how it works in the brain to perform that function? Apparently, how marijuana affects the brain is an increasing concern among medical professionals, not just so that we can better understand how to treat dependence upon the drug and reverse the effects of active addiction but also so that those who are prescribed the drug as a medication can know what to expect. Memory loss is considered a major obstacle to using the drug as a prescription medication.

Should Marijuana Be Prescribed as a Medication?

While the study opens up some doors into understand how marijuana works in the brain, it’s important to note that studies performed on mice don’t always translate when it comes to human brain and body function. That is, just because marijuana works this way in mice, it may not affect humans in the same way.

However, using marijuana as a prescription is a debate that continues in research labs across the country. Those who are worried about using the drug are concerned that it will have some of the same repercussions as other prescription medications that have been shown to be addictive. Though some refute the idea that marijuana is an addictive substance, many have checked into rehab centers begging for help to stop using the drug, unable to do it alone. The concern is that prescribing marijuana to treat various ailments without real dosage guidelines and better control over distribution could mean a marijuana addiction epidemic, increased health problems caused by overuse of the drug, and other problems related to drug abuse, including financial and social issues.

What do you think? Is marijuana a drug that should be prescribed for medicinal purposes? Or is the evidence adding up against it, making it an illicit substance that should be avoided at all costs.

The Development of an Addiction

How did a high-end trial attorney wind up with a heroin problem? It may have been the pressure of success – married to another attorney and winning multiple high-profile cases may have been caused him stress. Or it could have been the loss of his father, to whom he was extremely close.

Heroin was not Scacchetti’s first addiction, however. According to reports, he first was arrested in 2005 for buying more than $10,000 of cocaine. He closed his law practice and went to rehab, but he ultimately relapsed and lost his license in 2007. After the lobbying of some well-known lawyer friends, he was reinstated – but over the past few years, there were a number of signs that he wasn’t doing well. He was late for court and sometimes missed it altogether. He showed up to represent a client in court with a black eye that he claimed he got when robbed outside a convenience store, and his 25-year marriage ended when his wife left him.

His current legal problems started when his probation officer found drug paraphernalia in Scacchetti’s home and Scacchetti allegedly said it belonged to him. He was jailed when he didn’t show up to his hearing and refused a judge’s offer to go to rehab. Though he has since agreed to undergo drug treatment, he is still incarcerated as he awaits an opening in an appropriate treatment facility.

A friend told the Enquirer: “He’s been addicted for a while. I think he’s tried his best, but it’s hard. He’s a very sensitive man… about what’s happened to him. It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating for him to have to go to court.”

Finding Help Before It’s Too Late

It’s one thing to decide to attend heroin rehab for yourself and get the treatment you need. It’s quite another to have your personal problems aired in a public court and be ordered to go to rehab by a judge. If you are living with a drug problem, you don’t have to wait to be told to get treatment. Contact us today to learn about your options in drug rehab and let us help you find the right program today.

How Prescription Drug Databases Work

When a physician enters a patient’s prescription, including the dosage and number of refills, into the database, the pharmacist who fills the prescription will have something to reference to make sure that the paper script that the patient brings in is accurate and has not been tampered with. Additionally, should the patient attempt to get a similar prescription from another doctor or pain clinic, the pharmacist who fills that prescription will be able to see how many other active prescriptions he or she has for the same type of medication. Those who try to sell their medications or use more than is safe due to an addiction will be more easily identified, allowing their primary care physician to intercede and potentially save their life.

The Need for Prescription Drug Monitoring in Pennsylvania and Across the Country

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), prescription medications were part of more than 20,000 of the 36,000+ fatal overdoses in the United States in 2008. About 75 percent of overdose deaths were caused by narcotic pain relievers like Vicodin, oxycodone, hydrocodone and others. These numbers are triple what they were in 1999, and prescription overdose deaths now regularly outnumber overdose deaths caused by cocaine and heroin combined.

In some states, the number of deaths due to accidental drug overdose of prescription medications (not illicit street drugs) outnumbers deaths caused by car accident – in some cases, they outnumber deaths caused by car accident and suicide combined.

Prescription Drug Rehab

There is no need for you or someone you care about to continue living with the risk of overdose if prescription drug dependence is a problem for you. Contact us today to learn more about your options in treatment and to find the program that will best serve your needs. Call now to get started.

“Some patients may find it very difficult to discontinue treatment with XANAX XR due to severe emotional and physical dependence. Discontinuation symptoms, including possible seizures, may occur following discontinuation from any dose…”

Some may call this a secret hiding in plain sight, but as you can see, the devastating possibilities of Xanax use have been kept anything but confidential. Nevertheless, some people still think if they follow the prescribed dose they are completely safe. This, unfortunately, is frequently not true for many people who have been given the drug by their doctor.

In fact, it is rumored from sources close to her that Xanax may be the drug responsible for the death of Whitney Houston, although we won’t know for sure for many more weeks. If it does turn out that Houston had Xanax in her system when she passed, the circumstances surrounding her death may be difficult to determine because the drug so severely impairs judgment and clear thought. Often, if Xanax is involved, investigators have trouble surmising whether a death was deliberate or unintentional.

Facts About Xanax

Xanax is described as “alcohol in a pill” since the behavioral consequences from using it are quite similar. Even so, Xanax may have more risks associated with it than alcohol. It’s important to note that anyone with a history of a drinking problem should avoid Xanax, as its use may be a stimulus for continued alcohol abuse.

The paradox of Xanax is that it is given to individuals struggling to deal appropriately with their emotions and unfortunately, with repeated use, many times further impairs one’s ability to process both intellectual and emotional information. Mental impairment is so hazardous that oftentimes it is not the dose of Xanax that may lead to death, but the irrational choices made while under its influences that have deadly consequences. For example, someone on Xanax may:

• Become irrational and uninhibited
• Have no concept of how mentally impaired they have become
• Forget what medications they have taken
• Increase their dose or add drugs that have dangerous interactions
  

Finding Treatment for Your Addiction

For the millions of people who have an addiction to Xanax or any prescription medication because they were not made fully aware of its potential for dependency, there is help back to the life you once knew. Contact us and we can connect you with the treatment center that best fits your particular situation. Don’t spend one more day falling deeper into addiction. Seeking help is an act of bravery. Be courageous.

Hopefully, that will start to change with the Human Connectome Project. This venture, conceived in the same vein as the Human Genome Project that mapped and catalogued all the genes in the human body, hopes to correlate all brain pathways (or connections) to their resulting behavior. Research has demonstrated that mental health issues such as addiction, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia have irregularities in neural connectivity in specific regions of the brain. If detailed maps of healthy brain connections are created, then science will be one step closer to being able to repair the dysfunctional connections.

What Makes Up the Human Connectome?

Our brains have approximately 100 million nerve cells, and each cell makes thousands of connections with other cells. When enough connections are made between cells to produce a behavior, a pathway is formed. Each individual pathway or connection pattern is believed to produce its own distinct brain state. With the number of cells in the brain and the number of connections each makes, there are literally trillions of possible connection patterns. These trillions of patterns altogether are the human connectome. The hope of attempting to map this massively complicated network would be to see a particular pattern of nerve connections and know exactly what the person is thinking about. Sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but this is one of the goals of current scientific research.

How Does It Affect Addiction?

Each individual’s genes, combined with their pattern of neural connections resulting from personal experience, are what make each person unique. These two factors represent the classic scientific debate of nature (the genes we are born with) versus nurture (the way an individual’s brain is structured from their interactions with the world).

Until the Human Connectome Project starts producing concrete data over the next decade, no answers will be available to understand exactly how human neural connections impact addiction. However, studies already have shown that genes provide a predisposition to addictive behavior, so perhaps the connectome will be the missing link in understanding what activates addiction in some who are genetically prone to the behavior and not in others.

Do you think it’s possible to map unique human experiences such as love, happiness, frustration or addiction? Let us know what you think below.

Roflcoptr is also known as “mket,” which is short for the chemical it’s made of, methoxetamine, and its much longer chemical name, 2-(3-methoxyphenyl)-2-(ethylamino)cyclohexanone). The drug comes in the form of white powder, which users snort, and has been on the radar of officials since the end of 2010 when the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction first reported its use.

The question is, how dangerous is this new drug?

Risks of Club Drugs

Readily available online, many users know little about Roflcoptr. One of many new synthetic drugs that pop up on the black market every year, the substance is just one more thing that club goers experiment with in an effort to enhance their experience on the dance floor. Unfortunately, this can lead to a number of issues, including accidental overdose, blackouts, and accidents that occur because the user is too “out of it” to know what’s going on.

Monitoring Use of Roflcoptr

Roflcoptr is so new to the scene that it is unregulated in most countries, including the United States. The lack of regulation comes from an absence of documented anecdotal evidence in the form of emergency room admissions and consumer complaints as well as a lack of research into the short-term and long-term effects of the drug.

According to psychopharmocologist Dr. Valerie Curran, a lack of regulation does not mean that the drug is safe. In the New Musical Express, Curran said: “People are playing Russian roulette when they take something like this, because there’s been no research on its effects.”

If it’s anything like other club drugs, Roflcoptr may mean similar withdrawal symptoms like anxiety and sweating. So far, methoxetamine, its active ingredient, has been documented as having a risk of acute poisoning by the journal Clinical Toxicology.

Treating Club Drug Abuse and Dependence

Club drugs like Roflcoptr may or may not be physically addictive but many users report a psychological dependence and craving for their favorite drug after regular use. Many feel unable to enjoy themselves without getting high and still others find it difficult to feel happy or comfortable without using their club drug of choice.

If this describes you or someone you care about, you can learn how to find contentment without drugs and alcohol. Rehab can do that for you. Call now to find the right rehab for your needs.

What the Sober Living Study Found

According to the study, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reports that between 65 and 80 percent of those who go to opiate detox relapse within a month if they don’t follow up with psychotherapeutic addiction treatment. Researchers found that those who attend day treatment and live in a sober living facility or drug-free housing were 10 times more likely to avoid relapse.

Of the 243 participants, only 13 percent of those who did not participate in sober living and day treatment were still clean and sober six months after detox, but 37 percent of those who lived in drug-free housing and 50 percent who took part in day treatment and lived in sober housing were still drug-free at the six-month point.

As the study progressed, participants who took part in both sober living and a day treatment program were twice as likely to avoid relapse as those who only lived in drug-free housing and 10 times more likely to remain abstinent than those who took part in neither sober living nor outpatient treatment, according to the journal Addiction.

What’s the Right Course of Action for You?

Michelle Tuten was lead researcher on the study. In a news release, she said: “It’s no surprise that opioid-dependent individuals stay off drugs longer when they live in a structured, drug-free environment after finishing detox. Drug-dependent individuals frequently report housing as their most pressing need.

“If we want to help people stay off heroin and stop abusing prescription painkillers, we need to do more than help them initiate abstinence; we need to help them maintain abstinence and build a drug-free lifestyle as well.”

Find Options Today

If you would like to find out more information about the treatments available for drug addiction that will help you fight opiate dependence, contact us today. We can help you enroll in inpatient treatment, outpatient care or a sober living home that will put you on the road to long-term abstinence. Call now.