Category: Misuse
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What Should Prevention Look Like?
I recently attended a presentation by the phenomenal Ira Chasnoff, MD. (You can find out more about him at NTI Upstream.) Dr. Chasnoff was doing research in the field of drug-affected neonates in the early 1990s, when I first started my career in the field of addiction. I had to wait about 30 years to…
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That Deadly Drink
Just because it’s legal – and just because the government sold us out to the deep pockets of the alcohol industry – doesn’t mean that it’s safe.
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Meet the New Drugs…Just Like the Old Drugs…
So with all these “new” drugs on the market that people are misusing, testing, as in direct biomarkers using fingernails, is the only way to know what’s being used.
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The Ketamine Kure Or “Here We Go Again!”
Just as opioids weren’t a cure all, ketamine isn’t a cure all. In 2019, s-ketamine was approved for treatment-resistant depression (FDA)…and a huge warning flag should have been flown. Ketamine had already been approved in 1970, but that was for its original use for humans: an anesthetic. And in its original form it has already…
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#1 Isn’t Always A Good Thing
On Tuesday, October 17, Mueller Communications LLC took the opportunity to point out that the United Health Foundation’s 2023 Health of Women and Children Report ranked the state of Wisconsin “last (50th) for excessive drinking among women and fourth-worst (46th) for alcohol use among youths” (Mueller email). One day later, on Wednesday, October 18, State…
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How Do YOU Define “Party”?
For the last fourteen years or so, I’ve been doing assessments to determine whether or not people have substance use disorders (SUDs). We all know that the younger a person starts using substances, the more likely that a SUD will develop, so my assessments always include a version of the following questions: “How old were…
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Where’s the Rx?
Over the last few days I’ve been confronted – again – with the realization that far too many people don’t believe addiction is a disease, no matter what they actually say about it. First, the municipality where I live, one where no cannabis use is legal, decided to drop the first possession ticket to a…
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Our Next New Drug Crisis
Ketamine has a long and storied history. Developed in the early 1960s as an anesthesia, it was deemed too dangerous for people due to its “intense, prolonged emergence delirium that ultimately made it undesirable for human use.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5126726/ More studies; more testing; and the end result — well, maybe not the END result, but the…
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The Truth About Cannabis
My sister K. and I used to think that guys from our days in high school could attribute any significant hair loss they’d suffered over the years to their use of THC while in high school and beyond. There’s not yet a strong correlation or body of evidence, but who knows…maybe we’re on to something.…
Guided by Guida 