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Drug policy research is at best a modestly sized field. Nonetheless, its findings have significant potential to help societies develop more effective public policies regarding marijuana, heroin, cocaine, nicotine and other psychoactive drugs. I am therefore very glad to announce that an extension of the international drug policy research integration conducted for the book Drug [...]
Archive for the ‘Health and Medicine’ Category
January 6th, 2012
January 1st, 2012
Christopher Wanjeck lists the five biggest retractions of science in 2011. Some were honest errors, others were likely fraud. Here are the inaccurate findings that were later retracted: (a) Closing medical marijuana dispensaries increases crime (b) Butterflies once accidentally mated with worms, thereby creating caterpillars (c) Appendicitis should be treated with antibiotics rather than surgery [...]
December 30th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Health and Medicine
Tri-Care, DOD’s health insurance program, has historically refused to cover opiate substitution therapy (e.g., buprenorphine, methadone) for military personnel and family members who are addicted to pain killers and/or heroin. Harold Pollack and I wrote about this at length in American Prospect earlier this year, noting in particular that these life saving therapies not being [...]
December 20th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine
Since I started reading tributes to the late Christopher Hitchens last week (such as Toby Young’s), I have been torn between the impulse not to upset anyone grieving the loss of a loved one and my own despair at what is inadvertently becoming an international public health miseducation campaign about addiction. Encouraged by Katha Pollitt‘s [...]
December 18th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine, Technology and Society
As has been discussed here before, driving while using electronic communication devices is dangerous whether you go hands free or not. Matt Richtel, who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering distracted driving (and is a very nice fellow to boot), has a piece in NYT today examining whether the reason people keep doing something so [...]
December 10th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine
Counselor magazine profiles my career this month. The interview is behind a login wall but you can get it directly (pdf) here. The interview is one of the loftily titled “pioneer” series, but the real pioneer is the interviewer, William (Bill) White (see video of him here). Bill is a leading advocate for the addiction [...]
November 21st, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Health and Medicine
This powerful video was produced to announce a valuable new service to support recovering people in Cardiff (“The Living Room”). It packs such an emotional wallop that I couldn’t not post it here.
November 9th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Health and Medicine
Some careful research on Hepatitis C has yielded largely frightening results. The good news is that the virus can be killed by common disinfectants. The bad news is that infectious quantities of the virus can survive on surfaces for seven days, that the virus is commonly found not just on needles but on other injection [...]
November 6th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine, Science and its methods
Professor Robert Rosenheck presented his blockbuster findings on long-acting risperidone at Stanford Psychiatry Grand Rounds this week. The injectable version of this anti-psychotic medication was heavily marketed as superior to its oral, less expensive cousins. The sticker price of $7,000/year was promised to be worth it because patients would need to be hospitalized far less [...]
October 9th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine
The other day I told a friend who is struggling with a relationship problem about a poker game logic puzzle I used to invoke back when I was treating psychotherapy patients. He found it quite helpful so I am passing it along for whatever it might be worth to others in similar situations. The logic [...]
