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An article entitled Heroin Task Force Addresses Hepatitis C appeared in the Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper (from the Pennsylvania town famous for Groundhog Day’s Punxsutawney Phil) on October 22nd. It discusses a commision focussing on heroin use and some of its consequences (including Hepatitis C).

The articles is worth a read. If you are interested in more information on Hepatitis C you might want to peruse the following links:

• Medline Plus listing of Hep C information.
• Hepatitis C Information Center which has frequent news updates.
• The Veteran’s Affairs National Hepatitis C Program website.

The Arab News reported: "Security forces yesterday said they have destroyed a large marijuana plantation believed to be maintained by Abu Sayyaf extremists in the southern Philippine island of Jolo. … Previous military reports said the Abu Sayyaf and allied extremist and bandit groups have been engaging in the illegal drug trade to finance their violent activities. Aside from the illegal drugs, the Abu Sayyaf group is also into extortion and kidnappings-for-ransom, it said."

"According to the 2004 World Drug Report of the United Nations, more Filipinos smoke marijuana than their Southeast Asian counterparts and that the Philippines is ranked along with Thailand and Cambodia as a major producer of cannabis in the region. … A stick of dried marijuana cigarette sells only 2 pesos (3 US cents) in the Philippines."

An editorial in the Vancouver Sun carries the headline: "CASA built on falsehood, not fact —
Family dinner vs. drug use just the latest howler from Joe Califano’s fanciful ‘U.S. research centre’."

The editorial provides an interesting real-world dissection of a research report and how to interpret the press releases from it — useful if you want to increase your critical reading quotient.

The editorial goes on to say:

"You might have seen the former U.S. first lady’s anti-drug commercials on American television recently. But it wasn’t Nancy Reagan telling kids to “Just say no,” it was Barbara Bush encouraging families to just say yes — to family dinners, that is.

The commercials accompanied the release of a survey by the U.S. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) titled The Importance of Family Dinners II. The survey, widely reported in newspapers across North America, including The Vancouver Sun, found that the frequency of family dinners is a “powerful indicator” of whether children will use drugs:

Compared to kids who eat five or more family dinners a week, children who dine with their parents twice or less a week are three times likelier to try marijuana, two and half times likelier to smoke cigarettes and more than one and a half times likelier to drink alcohol.

These results led CASA chairman and president Joseph A. Califano Jr. to conclude: “If I could wave a magic wand to make a dent in the substance abuse problem, I would make sure that every child in America had dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week.”

Alas, there is no magic wand, but Califano’s comments certainly resemble magic. Black magic."

Read on for an entertaining, err educational "dis-memberment".

Smoking decreases fertility by impairing the ability of sperm to bind to eggs, MedPage Today reported.

Researcher Lani Burkman, Ph.D., of the University of Buffalo School of Medicine and colleagues measured the binding capability of sperm taken from 18 chronic smokers and compared their data to sperm from nonsmokers. Only 6 of the 18 smokers had even 65 percent of the reproductive capacity of the control group; nine had 35 percent or less of the capacity of nonsmokers. “In a direct fertility testing situation, we can show that two-thirds of smokers have lost some or a lot of their fertilizing capacity,” said Burkman. “Not only did they fail, they failed miserably.”

Question: Do you think cigarettes might be The Male Pill, and if so, what will the Pope say?

Nukes and Nicotine. The Guardian reports: " Firm with Tories’ Ken Clarke on payroll runs factory in country with grim human rights record — British American Tobacco, the world’s second largest cigarette company, has secretly been operating a factory in North Korea for the past four years, the Guardian has learned. The company opened the plant in a joint venture with a state owned corporation shortly before the regime was denounced by George Bush as a member of the “axis of evil”, and despite widespread concern over the country’s human rights record.

BAT has never mentioned the factory in its annual accounts, and it is thought that many shareholders are unaware of its links with the country.

The discovery of the secret factory comes two years after BAT was forced to pull out of Myanmar, formerly Burma, under pressure from the UK government and human rights campaigners. The human rights record of the communist regime in North Korea is widely regarded as even worse than that of the brutal military dictatorship in Burma."

A. On the one hand: The New Zealand Hearald reports: "Heavy cannabis use could be a cause of Maori having the world’s highest lung cancer rate, ground-breaking research suggests.

Many Maori, from children to kaumatua, use cannabis in “epidemic proportions”, says a study by Professor Richard Beasley of the Medical Research Institute in Wellington.

But cannabis might not be as safe as the proponents of its legalisation say.

A paper by Professor Beasley on the health effects of cannabis was among research that prompted Wellington coroner Garry Evans last week to urge that Government policy on illicit drugs be changed from “harm minimisation” to campaigning against drug use.

The paper reviews the literature on cannabis and suggests it is more cancer-causing than tobacco and, like tobacco, causes bronchitis."

B. On the other hand: The BBC reports — "Cannabis smoke is less likely to cause cancer than tobacco smoke, a leading US expert says.

Dr Robert Melamede, of the University of Colorado, said that, while chemically the two were similar, tobacco was more carcinogenic.

He said the difference was mainly due to nicotine in tobacco, whereas cannabis may inhibit cancer because of the presence of the chemical THC.

But health campaigners warned against complacency."

C. But don’t break a leg. The Associated Press reports - Smokers’ broken bones take a lot longer to heal. But scientists now are studying whether giving up cigarettes for even a week or two after a fracture might make the difference between a speedy recovery and months of easy-to-reinjure mushy bones.

“There’s a window,” predicts orthopedic specialist Michael Zuscik of the University of Rochester.

If he’s right, it could dramatically change orthopedic practice for the nation’s 48 million smokers.

Bone damage is arguably the least publicized of tobacco’s harms.

The first time many smokers ever hear of the problem is if they need spinal fusion, a back operation that surgeons often won’t perform unless patients kick the habit — with a urine test to prove they quit. That’s because the surgery is far more likely to fail in smokers than nonsmokers.

Smokers who break a leg require 62 percent more time to heal.

Then there’s the silent toll smoking can wreak by contributing to bone-thinning osteoporosis."

AlcoholScreening.org provides a quick, scientifically valid questionnaire that assesses your drinking habits by age and gender. It is called AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test) and was developed by the World Health Organisation to identify persons whose alcohol consumption has become hazardous or harmful to their health. It takes about two minutes, is completely anonymous and you can fill it out for yourself or someone you know. Feedback is then given based on your answers and links for additional information and getting help are provided.

CESAR, the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland has put together a compilation of their informational reports from the past few years for methamphetamine. The compiled reports are available as a single PDF file (which was updated 2006.oct.19). The file includes information on treatment, prevalence of use, whether it is a national epidemic and the myth of the “meth baby.”

In an article in the October issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry it was found that buprenorphine was superior to clonidine for detoxing teenaged heroin addicts. They remained in treatment at a higher rate and were much more likely to agree to take naltrexone (an opiate-blocker) as an adjunct treatment following detox.

The People’s Journal in the Philippines reports: THE Philippines is emerging as a ketamine source as drug syndicates have turned to producing the suicide-inducing drug which they export abroad.

Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency chair Anselmo Avenido, Jr. warned that transnational drug groups have made the country their venue for ketamine production. However, he said there are no reports of ketamine abuse from various drug rehabilitation centers, particularly the government-run Center for the Ultimate Rehabilitation of Drugs Dependents or the former drug abuse rehabilitation center of the defunct Philippine National Police Narcotics Group in Taguig, Metro Manila.

According to Avenido, ketamine is not considered an illegal drug here, thus drug syndicates have exploited this legal loophole by importing ketamine hydrochloride from other countries and converting it to ketamine powder in the Philippines. The substance is later shipped abroad.

(NB: More information on ketamine is available here.)