Drugs
revere | July 19, 2007The US public just doesn't get this terrorist threat business, according to John P. Wlaters, the President's drug czar:
The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment.
John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, said the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties. Walters made the comments at a Thursday press…
purepedantry | July 18, 2007Giancola and Corman wanted to know why drunks are more aggressive.
The prevailing model to explain this effect is what is called the attentional allocation model wherein the alcohol inhibits an individual's ability to focus on a broad range of stimuli -- they become attentionally myopic. This means that when they focus on something that is provocative, they will become super-provoked. When they are focusing on something less provocative, they will become less provoked because they can more successfully ignore the provocative stimuli. It is in essence the horse-blinder theory of…
moleculeoftheday | July 17, 2007Before the benzodiazepines (like Valium) became ubiquitous, chemists discovered that a wide array of molecules could really zonk you out. Chemists found themselves in heady times. They were isolating single molecules that had profound CNS effects - methaqualone (Quaalude), chloral hydrate (which is actually pretty close to hooch, really), ethchlorvynol (Placidyl - Rehnquist took too much of this for too long - at one point, he insisted to a physician the CIA was plotting against him because of the side effects of chronic use), various barbiturates, and meprobamate (Miltown), the subject of…
purepedantry | July 17, 2007Ronald Bailey at Reason has an article about the costs of the FDA black box warning on antidepressants:
Excessive caution is risky, too. Back in 1992, Congress, worried about the slow rate of approvals, passed legislation imposing FDA user fees on pharmaceutical companies. Flush with these new funds the agency hired 1000 additional drug reviewers and slashed new drug review time from 30 months to 15 months. Now critics claim that the FDA is in the thrall of drug companies and is endangering the public's health by rushing dangerous new drugs onto the market. As evidence they cite the dangerous…
purepedantry | July 2, 2007In 2004, the FDA assigned a "black box" warning on prescription of antidepressants to patients under 25. This was because of a flurry of anecdotal evidence linking the beginning of treatment with SSRIs to increases in suicide risk and because of placebo vs. drug trials that showed these increases in risk on the beginning of treatment for these age groups.
At the time, there was not enough evidence to release such a warning, but the FDA was under spectacular pressure. Mothers testified before committees about their lost children. Not heard -- or at least not heard sufficiently -- were the…
moleculeoftheday | June 28, 2007Working on a bunch of paperwork tonight so just a quickie - Ritalin.
Methylphenidate/Ritalin is probably the best-known ADD drug. It's just another phenethylamine - the broad class of drugs which includes pseudoephedrine, amphetamine, and MDMA. Another phenethylamine that is used in the treatment of ADD is simple amphetamine, which is sold as Adderall.
moleculeoftheday | June 25, 2007One aspect of opiates a lot of people don't know about is their effect on the GI. They slow gut motility, so opiate abusers often experience constipation (and diarrhea upon withdrawal). Opium used to be used medically as an antidiarrheal medication in a tincture with camphor - paregoric. Interestingly, opiates are still available OTC for the treatment of diarrhea.
Loperamide is unique among medically used opiates in that it isn't CNS-active - so you get the gut-slowing effects, without pain relief or addictive potential. It's the only opiate you can get OTC in most markets.
moleculeoftheday | June 21, 2007Sorry for the Internets silence - apparently cable modems can just up and die on you.
We have short memories. Ages ago, a molecule that was essentially a chimera of sugar and fatty acids was found to provide essentially no nutriment whatsoever (ironically, it was hoped it would be a rich source of calories). In fact, it passed right through you. It was essentially a noncaloric fat. Bafflingly, it took ages for people to realize that noncaloric fat could be a boon to the prepared foods industry. Ten short years ago, however, Olestra was loosed upon the world.
Olestra had a dark side, of course…
mikethemadbiologist | June 17, 2007There's an excellent article in the NY Times magazine about the problem of opiate addiction. One of the problems when distinguishing between patients and doctors who are trying to manage pain versus those who are dealing opiates is that there is no easy way to regularly track opiate prescribing.
I've discussed before how national databases, when privacy issues are properly addressed, are important for drug safety. One of the serious impediments to national health databases is that our healthcare system is so fragmented that electronic surveillance becomes very difficult (e.g.,…
moleculeoftheday | May 25, 2007From medicated powder to cigarettes, it's no secret that small molecule ligands can induce a cold sensation. Usually, this means menthol. However, like any protein ligand, non-natural small molecules can stand in.
Icilin has an enhanced affinity for receptors to which menthol binds:
Icilin induces sensations of intense cold when applied orally in humans, and induces 'wet dog shakes', a behavioral marker of cold sensation, when given to rats.
Icilin: 2.5X more effective than the leading thermosensory agonist at causing wet dog shakes!
mikethemadbiologist | May 25, 2007A couple of weeks ago, after I posted about a very serious emerging bacterial threat, KPC, I received an email from a reader with an elderly relative in the hospital with a very serious case of pneumonia caused by KPC. What he* told me is shocking.
The relative, who has had repeated hospital stays and a previous MRSA infection, was in the hospital for a week before any laboratory cultures were performed. That's right, a patient with practically every major risk factor for a multidrug resistant infection wasn't tested for a week. So this patient wasn't isolated, exposing other ICU patients and…
moleculeoftheday | May 14, 2007Ion-exchange resins are surprisingly simple things - here's the idea: just about everything that has a charge has to have an opposite charge around somewhere. Ususally, charged things float around willy-nilly in solution (your Na+ and Cl- in your salt, for example). If you have something insoluble, like a plastic, that will carry a charge, it will always have some intimately associated neighbors of opposite charge. This can slowly (or rapidly) exchange its charged neighbors with its environment, depending on solution conditions. Enter amberlite IRP64.
Say you're addicted to some form of…
mikethemadbiologist | May 9, 2007Tragically, Massachusetts is having a hepatitis C outbreak, and it's entirely due to surging heroin use:
The spike in hepatitis C, an illness most often spread by drug needles tainted with the virus, emerges during a period of epidemic heroin use in Massachusetts.
That is almost certainly no coincidence, said John Auerbach , the state's public health commissioner. "I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," Auerbach said. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very…
moleculeoftheday | May 7, 2007Compounding - that is, mixing up pharmaceuticals in the appropriate form for dosing - used to be something that happened at the pharmacy. You can still find "compounding pharmacies" willing to do this - they'll mix up your stuff into a kid-friendly elixir, or prepare ointments, and the like. However, increasingly complex and fragile molecules in drugs (not to mention an increased level of caution) mean that the vast, vast majority of compounding is done at the pharmaceutical company level. This often means single-dose vials and the like, and we're probably safer for this, with the trade-off…
mikethemadbiologist | April 19, 2007One of the things that has been revealed by the VA Tech shooting is that the government keeps a database of prescription drug users. This has bothered some. Glenn Greenwald writes (italics mine):
Let me ask you this question: let's say I come into your office (I'm a mentally competent adult -- at least in our hypothetical) and tell you that I want to take a Schedule II drug (or Schedule III) for Medical Problem X (or even just garden-variety insomnia, depression, or anxiety). You tell me that I shouldn't, that there is a high risk of addiction, that the problem doesn't warrant that…
moleculeoftheday | March 27, 2007Chloral hydrate was in the news yesterday because it showed up in the autopsy report for Anna Nicole Smith.
Chloral hydrate is what individuals of a certain age (or just aficionados of dated slang) refer to when they mention "slipping someone a Mickey." It is a very simple drug, discovered by von Liebig about 175 years ago.
It has largely been supplanted in popularity by the benzodiazepines, which are much better characterized and less toxic (although they're still addictive). Very small, highly chlorinated molecules like this tend to be hard on your liver, much like carbon tetrachloride and…
moleculeoftheday | March 26, 2007Friday's entry was on juvenile hormone, an epoxide-containing species (as in epoxy, see here and here). Today, I'll show you an example of how we've used it to battle bugs.
Methoprene doesn't contain an epoxide (many of the juvenile hormones don't), but it's a good mimic for JH. In its presence, juvenile insects can grow larger, but they can't achieve sexual maturity. No more adults, no more sex for the bugs, no more bugs for you. Like many insecticides, it has its own set of safety concerns, but this is far from the worst thing out there.
moleculeoftheday | March 24, 2007Special Saturday edition of MoTD: aminopterin.
People have (quite understandably) been a little frantic about the putative taint found in pet food in recent days. Friday, ABC News reported that aminopterin was the contaminant, calling it "rat poison." I can't speak to the accuracy of the claim, but I can tell you that aminopterin isn't the kindest of molecules.
aminopterin, like the previously covered methotrexate, is a folate analogue that has found use in chemotherapy. Both work by impairing nucleic acid synthesis, and are quite toxic (the toxicity, unfortunately, shares the same origin as…
scientificactivist | March 23, 2007
Back in August, I reported on an ACMD study buried in the back of a UK government report. The study gave strong evidence that the current drug classification scheme in the UK was fundamentally flawed and was not based on the actual danger of a given drug. The study has now been published in this week's issue of The Lancet. The Guardian also has a nice piece on it today. The bottom line is that the current unscientific drug classifcations that the UK (and the US) currently rely on need to change. Now.
Here's what I originally wrote:
(1 August 2006) Yesterday, the House of Commons…