Shocking article on cannabis policy

SHOCKING, I tell you. New Scientist published a thoughtful article about cannabis policy that attempts to present the evidence in a unsensational manner.

First U.S. Injection Site

San Francisco is about to open the first legal injection site in the country.

I've had a lot to say on the topic in the past. To sum up my view, context is key. A program like this can be an expression of despair, fear and/or contempt, or it can be a way to engage addicts and try to keep them healthier until the enter recovery.

Recovery is the key. I'd pose the following questions:

• Does treatment on demand exist? If not, does the facility consider it their responsibility to advocate for treatment on demand?
  
• Does the program view recovery as the ultimate goal?
  
• Does the facility believe that it's clients can achieve recovery?
  
• Are they capable of offering hope for recovery to their clients and the community?
  
• Does the program view drug use by addicts as a life style choice, or as a symptom of the treatable illness of addiction?
  
• Does the program represent the best use of scarce resources available to help addicts?

San Francisco does have a policy of treatment on demand, but it has never been anywhere near adequately funded.

Staying Sober, Reinventing Fun

A nice story from Weekend America about getting into recovery on a college campus and a campus recovery program.

About that recent Times article...

Something to piss everyone off and challenge the premise of that recent Times article. A meta-analysis of studies comparing "bona fide" treatments found "no evidence of differences among treatments for alcohol use disorders."

More interesting is this:

Although the variability of effects about zero was small, we also found evidence of an allegiance effect. Specifically, our analyses indicated that as allegiance to compared treatments became more unbalanced, the expected difference between treatments increased, in favor of the treatment forwhich there was researcher allegiance. Allegiance accounted for most of the variability in treatment differences in alcohol measures.

Not shocking to anyone who reads journals often. Researcher's findings strangely almost always support their hypothesis. It's worth noting that this study is no exception.

The authors suggest that the most important predictor of outcomes is the alliance between the helper and the client. I'm inclined to accept this, particularly with less severe substance use disorders and short term outcomes. They call for "research that focuses on developing models of the complex interactions that occur between patients", and I'd agree.

What I believe is missing from their formulation is the importance of factors like intensity and duration. I suspect that the most successful approaches will be those that respond to addiction as a chronic illness and recruit patients into managing their recovery over their life course.

Yes we cannabis!

This seems like wishful thinking to me. I could see him implementing more incremental reform, but not this:

Meanwhile, economists have been making the beer argument. In a paper titled "Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," Dr. Jeffrey Miron of Harvard argues that legalized marijuana would generate between $10 and $14 billion in savings and taxes every year -- conclusions endorsed by 300 top economists, including Milton "Free Market" Friedman himself.

And two weeks ago, when the Obama team asked the public to vote on the top problems facing America, this was the public's No. 1 question: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

I'm ambivalent about marijuana's legal status, but I find this kind of thinking horrifying. I have no interest in criminalizing alcohol and tobacco, but they've been public health disasters, their lobbies have been much to powerful, and they've repeatedly targeted kids. Unleashing capitalism on the marijuana market and creating a marijuana industry would only create more problems. If marijuana is decriminalized, I would hope it's done in a way that minimized the commercial marketplace for it--like keeping sale illegal, but allowing people to grow and possess their own.

Cynicism recharge

Just in case the holiday spirit was dulling your cynical side, here's a story about white collar criminals and corrupt politicians are trying to save their skins with claims of addictions.

I've no doubt that some of them are truly addicts, but this pattern reinforces stigma associated with addiction being a convenient scheme to avoid accountability.

Life after...

Prevention initiatives in the U.S. have often had an anti-addict tone to them. Federal prevention initiatives often make me queasy because of the policies they espouse and the hysterical tone of their education efforts. However, it's good to see them start to embrace recovery. It's especially heartening with meth when one considers the history of the crack epidemic.

The Relationship of Drug Abuse to Unexplained Sudden Death

Another hidden cost of addiction.

Drug Rehabilitation or Revolving Door?

The New York Times paints a dim view of addiction treatment and foreshadows a financial black hole once parity takes effect. The word recovery does not appear once, no mention of findings regarding the positive outcomes and cost-effectiveness of treatment, no mention of twelve step facilitation as an evidence based practice, no mention of duration of treatment as an important factor in outcomes, and, as Bill White has said, these arguments about MET vs. TSF vs. MET are all arguments within the acute care paradigm. Systems change needs to focus on long term recovery management strategies for chronic addicts.

[hat tip: Matt]

Tab dump

• Special Treatment: The rise of luxury rehab
• Something In the Air: When a Smoker Gets Lung Cancer, Sympathy Is Stained With Blame
• Law gives strength in fight against heroin
• College Students Say ADHD Drugs Help Them Study

Tobacco criminalization

Odd that there's growing cultural pressure toward greater criminalization of tobacco and decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs.

Michigan's Medical Marihuana Program

Michigan's Department of Community Health has fleshed out the medical marijuana program. It will be interesting to see how the role of caretaker takes shape.

Inhaling fear

This writer suggests that smoking warnings actually trigger cravings.

There's something a little too neat and a little too certain about his op-ed, particularly from a study of 32 subjects.

It's easy to imagine how a warning that contains the words cigarettes, tobacco or smoking might trigger craving. It's a little more difficult to understand how an image of a tumorous lung would provoke craving, unless subjects have been desensitized to the image and have developed an association between the image and a cigarette. The op-ed suggests that all warnings are useless, but only explicitly addresses subject response to the text warnings.

I tried to learn a little more about the author, but the Wikipedia page on his was deleted because it was deemed to be blatant advertising.

Misuse of legal drugs

A troubling trend continues:

15.4 percent of 12th-grade students reported nonmedical use of legal prescription or over-the-counter medications

This is particularly troubling for 2 reasons. First, as JAMA recently pointed out, overdose deaths associated with prescription drugs are skyrocketing in some areas. Second, people who develop problems with prescription opiates often end up switching to heroin because it's cheaper. They often start out by snorting heroin and end up switching to injecting.

Homelessness and crack use

A harm reduction group reports that half of the homeless people in Toronto use crack.

This seems difficult to believe. Worth watching.

More drug company chicanery

Celebrities and politicians aren't the only ones using ghostwriters.

Good news and bad news in British Columbia

Good news - drug deaths decline

Bad news - 1 in 10 drivers test positive for drugs, and 1 in 12 drivers test positive for alcohol

Doctors and addiction

Dirk Hanson makes several important points--that medical training on addiction is inadequate, that doctors don't respond well to patients with addiction, that the medical reimbursement system does not support a response to the problem, and that there are enormous barriers for doctors who do want to respond to addiction.

This is even more important as we attempt to implement recovery management approaches. Physicians are a natural point of contact for recovery checkups and long term monitoring.

Ramstad

I'm persuaded.

The other name I'd heard was Thomas McLellan. He was always my preference. Let's hope he gets it.

French Doctor Says Baclofen Cures Addiction

Hmmm.

The HBO Addiction documentary played like a baclofen ad. I honestly don't know much about it and don't have a lot to say, but I did admit someone who was treated with baclofen for neurological pain and used it to get high. The patient was eventually cut off by the prescribing physician because she overdosed on it several times and required hospitalization.

Pedophilia an addiction?

OMG. I'm speechless.

The Second Road

FYI - This blog is being cross-posted at The Second Road, a web-based community of recovery. They have several other blogs, videos and chats. Check them out when you get a chance.

Stuck on stupid

Mark Kleiman also takes on the drug warriors and sums up the drug policy freak show:

Walters and Nadelmann are like a pair of aging vaudeville comedians, still whacking away at each other with their slapsticks long after everyone in the audience has gotten bored with them.

I only wish I thought that the editors of the Wall Street Journal had deliberately chosen these two exercises in unreality to illustrate how completely what passes for the drug policy debate in political and journalistic circles is stuck on stupid. But I'm just about certain that they have been taken in by the illusion that they, in turn, foist on their readers, an illusion that the Walters drug-warrior crowd and the Nadelmann drug-legalizer crowd have done their best to foster because it's in their mutual interest: the illusion that there's no alternative to the War on Drugs other than a virtual free market in drugs with a few not-very-important regulations, more or less on the alcohol model.

The arguments for the drug war and for "an end to prohibition" are symmetrically nonsensical, only with opposite signs: rather like a particle and its anti-particle. Sadly, there's a difference; I see no hope that the "drug war" and "drug policy reform" might someday meet and disappear in a flash of photons. 

So it begins

The Hemp and Cannabis Foundation has come to Michigan!

Don't forget to visit the Church of Cognitive Therapy.

Prop 5

Join Together deconstructs the failure of Prop 5 in California. It seems to boil down to mistrust of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and the DPA's failure to include others in developing the proposal.

It's not the cool thing to say these days, but my mistrust might have caused difficulty deciding how to vote. This explains why:

NORA supporter John DeMiranda, executive director of the National Association on Alcohol, Drugs and Disability and Pacific Southwest regional representative for Faces and Voices of Recovery, said that the treatment community in California "jumped on the bandwagon and talked about NORA as a treatment initiative," even though DPA mainly cast Prop 5 as a drug-policy reform effort.

I've never been able to shake the feeling that the DPA's support for treatment is more strategic than sincere.

Also, does FAVOR really want to get associated with aggressive decriminalization efforts?

"If we were to do our own initiative it would be very different, and the politics would be very different," said DeMiranda. However, he scorned the state's drug courts for failing to embrace the reforms embodied in NORA. "We need wholesale decriminalization, not retail decriminalization," said DeMiranda, noting the relatively small number of clients currently served by drug courts.

Feed your brain

Film Exchange on Alcohol & Drugs is pretty cool. Brief videos on policy, treatment and recovery.

A bad idea that won't go away

Time has an article lending credibility to the idea of treating stimulant addiction by placing addiction on a stimulant maintenance program. I've posted about this idea before.

What is there to say? Didn't we give up on treating alcoholism with benzos a long time ago?

It's argued that stimulant maintenance reduces drug use among participants and that abstinence-based programs only work for about a 1/3 of participants. This begs at least 2 questions:

• How many of those patients get treatment of an adequate duration and intensity?
  
• How many of the other 2/3 reduce their drug use? Is she using the same measuring stick for the two?
  

Ideas like this are rooted in despair, rather than hope. (see here, here, here) We get overwhelmed by the problem. (here) We're too cheap to offer adequate help. (here) We don't believe that these people can recover. We think they have no chance. We're scared that they'll hurt us and get us sick. (here)  So, we offer them these kinds of interventions. Often, these programs represented in the name of choice, (here) when, the addicts themselves, want better from us. (here, here) They actually want to get well, but often lose hope that it's possible for them. The system starts patting them on the head an encouraging them to be more realistic. (here, here, here) What they need from professional helpers is for us to lend them our hope to cultivate some of their own. (here, here) They need a system that stops talking about if they recovery and starts talking about when they recover. (here)

The article acknowledges that recovery rates for stimulant addicts are the same as for other drugs. We know what works. Recovery rates are very high when we offer long term treatment with longer term monitoring and swift re-intervention in the event of relapse. Some people respond, "Well, that's with addicted health professionals. It won't work with other addicts." How would we know? We don't try it.

If we truly tried everything and nothing worked for a sizable group of addicts, I might feel differently. But context matters, and the current context is ugly. We've had an explosion in incarceration and, in a period of explosive growth in health care spending, private spending on treatment has dropped and overall spending has grown at a rate much lower than other health care spending.

It's also worth noting that the writer is a frequent critic of treatment, AA, and the disease model. (I'm not suggesting that her criticism has no basis, but that she frequently paints with a broad brush and that there is a bias against specialty addiction treatment.)

More on prohibition

Mark Kleiman has a great post in response to Ethan Nadelmann's Wall Street Journal op-ed:

As Talleyrand said about the restored Bourbons, the
anti-prohibitionists have learned nothing and forgotten nothing in
thirty years of making exactly the same points in exactly the same way.
Ethan Nadelmann's op-ed in Friday's Wall Street Journal
doesn't admit that "an end to prohibition" means increased
availability, and that one of the consequences of increased
availability is increased abuse. (It's not true that "booze flowed as
readily" during the Noble Experiment as it did before and after;
cirrhosis deaths plunged by 2/3.)


Of course that isn't where the argument ends; maybe the increased level
of abuse is a price worth paying to avoid the bad consequences of the
illicit market, and of enforcement. But that's where any honest
argument has to start: how much more abuse are we going to have as a
result of a given change in the laws? And that's where Nadelmann &
Co. relentlessly refuse to start it. Their "vigorous and informed
debate" refuses to face the basic trade-off involved.

As I keep saying, there is no ideal or problem-free drug policy. The real question is what problems are we most willing to tolerate and how do we minimize them.

Note that, in spite of the false binary world of Nadelmann and others, Kleiman is not a neo-prohibitionist or a drug warrior. He wants strategies that don't clog the criminal justice system and jails with possession cases or low level dealers.

That's the honest debate we ought to be having: just what should we
permit and what should we prohibit, and how should we go about
enforcing those prohibitions, to steer between the Scylla of drug abuse
and the Charybdis of prohibition side-effects?



David Kennedy has shown in North Carolina that it's possible to break up street drug markets, thus protecting neighborhoods, with a very small number of arrests. Steve Alm has shown in Hawai'i that it's possible to keep probationers off meth and out of jail with frequent tests and reliable but mild sanctions. Phil Cook persuasively argues that alcohol is now grossly under-taxed in the U.S. and that we are all "paying the tab" for cheap booze.
Yet the Drug Policy Alliance has been conspicuously silent on all of
this, and Nadelmann keeps writing the same essay he's been writing
since the mid-70s.

Choice and addiction

I just listened to this podcast on choice. I'm only half way through and, so far, it has said nothing about addiction, but it's content is very relevant to addiction.

First, a little background. We know that the limbic system and frontal cortex both play important roles in addiction. The limbic system (The primitive part of the brain that controls drives for food and sex. It's the "go" part of the brain.) responds very strongly to drug cues in drug addicts, and the frontal cortex (The rational part of the brain that weighs the pros and cons of decisions. It might be thought of as your brain's brakes that help prevent you from making impulsive decisions.) appears to be impaired in drug addicts. Loss of control is attributed to this disrupted balance between the limbic system and the frontal cortex.

Back to the radio show. In the first segment, it talked about an experiment that seems to demonstrate the power of this disrupted balance. Subjects were led into a room one by one and given a number to remember. One group was given a 2 digit number and the other group was given a 7 digit number. They were asked to report to another room down the hall and recite the number to the researcher in the other room. On their way to the other room they were stopped by someone offering them a snack--a choice between a piece of chocolate cake and an apple. The subjects who were given a 2 digit number overwhelmingly chose an apple and the subjects who were given a 7 digit number overwhelmingly chose the cake.

Why? Here are 3 assumptions that the researchers made when explaining the results:

1. That cake is the prefered snack of the "emotional brain"--it's tasty and sweet. I'm assuming that emotional brain and the limbic system are the same or overlap.
2. That an apple is the preferred snack of the rational brain--it's healthy and you won't have any regrets.
3. The remembering 7 digits places demands on the rational brain. It is the part of the brain involved in remembering this kind of information on a short term basis.

The researchers believe that the subjects trying to remember 7 digits chose chocolate cake because their rational brain was focused on remembering the numbers and was not able to fully engage in the snack decision to steer the person toward the healthy low-regret snack.

Think about that for a minute.

These are subjects with healthy, normal limbic systems and frontal cortexes. This relatively minor distraction had a significant impact on subject choices. Imagine people with ramped up emotional brains and impaired rational brains. The loss of control in addiction becomes easier to comprehend.

Alcohol prohibition = drug criminalization?

I've recently expressed a preference for a shift from a focus on medical to a more honest debate on legalization.

Well, here it is.

I've posted extensively about this subject before. (Look here and here.) Here are a few thoughts:

• Prohibition did reduce alcohol use. This point isn't to defend alcohol prohibition, rather to suggest that legalization of drugs will result in increased drug use.
• Why is alcohol policy pointed to as a model. Doe we really want the ubiquitous marketing and consumption of alcohol to be replicated with drugs?
• He offers a false choice between the status quo of insane incarceration rates and legalization. There's a lot of room in between.
• All drug policies will bring problems, the question is, which problems are we willing to live with and how can we minimize them?
• Developing a dependence on tax revenue from the sale of drugs strikes me as a pretty bad idea.
  
• I'd like to end use of the phrase "war on drugs" (WOD), but the failure of the current tactics in the WOD to end drug use isn't really a good argument for ending the WOD. It's an argument for revisiting the tactics and goals, but it does not mean that the goals should be abandoned. For example, of we have a war on organized crime and organized crime persists, does it mean that the goal of minimizing or eliminating organized crime should be abandoned?
  

Giving addicts $ for research participation

I don't know what to think about this. The researchers found that giving subjects money for participating in research on cocaine addiction does not increase cocaine use in the days following the study. They gave the subjects between $150 and $300.

I'm kind of skeptical, but open to having my assumptions challenged if larger future repeat these outcomes.

A couple of subject traits seem important to me. For obvious reasons, the severity and pattern of their dependence might be important, and their income or access to money might be important. If having $150 to $300 is no big deal, then it seems a lot less likely to lead to increased use. The subjects of this study report an average 10 to 12 days of cocaine use per month, and average of $50 to $100 per day of use, and total monthly use of $600 to $1000. (Ranges are because of differences in subject groups.) This is less than what a typical cocaine addict reports at admission to residential treatment at Dawn Farm. Also, more than half were employed. These data points don't suggest manipulation, but leave room for questions about response differences.

If these outcomes are supported in chronic, severe cocaine addicts, doesn't this raise big questions about our understanding of addiction--that you can hand a cocaine addict $300 and that are not very likely to buy cocaine with it?

It's worth noting that these researchers have an interest in finding that this kind of compensation does not adversely affect participants.



 

Parity

The National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers has issued a new document offering some pretty detailed analysis (but not too long) of what the new parity law will mean.

I'm glad it finally passed. It won't mean equity, but it's a step in the right direction.

1 in 5 young adults has personality disorder

Come on. 20% of young people have a personality disorder? Wikipedia (not my favorite source, but I'm short on time.) offers this definition of personality disorders:

Personality disorders are defined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it". ^[1] These patterns, as noted, are inflexible and pervasive across many situations, due in large part to the fact that such behavior is ego-syntonic (i.e., the patterns are consistent with the ego integrity of the individual), and therefore, perceived to be appropriate by that individual.

8% with obsessive compulsive personality disorder? 12% with anxiety disorders?

Counting substance abuse, the study found that nearly half of young people surveyed have some sort of psychiatric condition, including students and non-students.

So, if a young person is seated in from of a psychiatrist, they have a 1 in 2 chance of being diagnosed with a psychiatric condition?

If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Medical marijuana victory

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a California case on the matter.

Beginnings, projects, designs and expectations

I saw Joe Biden quote Emerson at a Governor's conference today. The quote referred to the U.S. as, "a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations."

The expression really caught my imagination. Isn't that what a good addiction treatment or outreach program needs to be?

More posts on hope here.

Expert or Shill?

I posted in June 2007 about Dr. Biederman and his role in the explosion in diagnosis of childhood bipolar.

Today's New York Times says it's impossible to know whether he's a shill for the drug industry because of previously undisclosed connections to drug manufacturers, including $1.4 million dollars of income from manufacturers, $1 million for Biederman's research center, and signing his name to studies written by a manufacturer.

In the piece last June Biederman said:

Biederman dismisses most critics, saying that they cannot match his scientific credentials as co author of 30 scientific papers a year and director of a major research program at the psychiatry department that is top-ranked in the "US News & World Report" ratings.

The critics "are not on the same level. We are not debating as to whether [a critic] likes brownies and I like hot dogs. In medicine and science, not all opinions are created equal," said Biederman...

No, all opinions are not "created equal." Let's hope that all of the experts are not "on the same level."

Is an anti drug war army amassing?

Another op-ed joins the chorus of pieces hoping that Obama will have the courage to learn from the failures of the war on drugs. The writer makes a great case that avoids the ideological sticking points.

I'm getting you Vivitrol for Christmas!

I'm underwhelmed with this breathless commentary.

If I'm reading it correctly, the actual study found decreases in drinking days and drinks per day for all groups during the holidays compared to non-holiday periods. Heavy drinking days was the only measure that was worse on holidays for the placebo group.

The original study was also pretty underwhelming to me. Again, if I'm reading it correctly, it found an advantage of about 10 days over a 6 month period for the drug over placebo. It didn't report on other measures and was done by researchers who receive funding from the manufacturer. It also framed its support as a public health measure (I read drunk driving reduction, though they could also be referring to medical problems.) That, combined with the intimation of court ordered Vivitrol in the commentary smacks a little too much of methadone arguments based on crime control and reduced drug use. Reduced use is a fine step in the right direction, but we need to be wary of success being redefined downward.

Health professional recovery rates

Wired in to recovery has a great post on recovery rates for addicted physicians.

We know what works. What's holding us back? Are we too cheap? Stigma? Ideological bias?

Children benefit from recovery

Not surprising, but nice to see someone studying children of alcoholics:

We investigated longitudinal associations between alcohol-dependent fathers' 12-step treatment involvement and their children's internalizing and externalizing problems (N = 125, M_age = 9.8 ± 3.1), testing the hypotheses that fathers' greater treatment
involvement would benefit later child behavior and that this effect would be mediated by fathers' posttreatment behaviors. The initial association was established between fathers' treatment involvement and children's externalizing problems only, whereas Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) results supported mediating hypotheses. Fathers' greater treatment involvement predicted children's lower externalizing problems 12 months later, and fathers' posttreatment behaviors mediated this association: Greater treatment involvement predicted greater
posttreatment Alcoholics Anonymous attendance, which in turn predicted greater abstinence. Finally, fathers' abstinence was associated with lower externalizing problems in children. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Methadone from a general practitioner or clinic

This study was done in England, but it's easy to imagine these findings being replicated in metro Detroit. I suspect the culture of the treatment milieu has a lot to do with these findings.

[hat tip: dailydose.net]

Learned helplessness and external control in treatment

This finding provides some guidance regarding when control might be therapeutic and when it's not:

Based on 80 patients randomly allocated to two styles of therapy, this had found that neither better overall but that some types of people did better in one than the other. Specifically, clients high in ‘learnt helplessness’ (feeling unable to control one’s everyday life) did much better in structured therapy where the counsellor took the lead and focused on behaviour rather than emotions. Clients who felt more in control did better in a less structured therapy where the therapist facilitated self exploration and focused on feelings. With now 120 patients randomised, the new report confirms this finding for during-treatment measures including patient and therapist ratings of benefit, attendance, and number of drug-free urines, and finds that the matching effect persisted to six months after treatment on measures of drug, family, social and psychiatric problems. Pre-treatment levels of depression (another relevant variable – more depressed clients did best in the more structured therapy) did not account for the findings: when depression was statistically ‘evened out’, learned helplessness was still just as or even more important.

All of this fits well with Bill White's writing on the subject.

Harm Reduction Flip Flop

A harm reduction approach that never occurred to me.

Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here are a few things I'm grateful for:

Recovery - 18 years ago I was 4 weeks abstinent (not in recovery) and 1 week away from being coerced into a psych unit because my therapist was convinced I was going to kill myself in the coming weeks. He was right. The patients (not the doctors) in the psych unit to me that my main problem was my alcoholism and that I should go to the meetings in the cafeteria. They were right. After I was released (4 weeks later), I was fortunate that my therapist was humble enough to recognize that his ability to help me was limited and that the long term solution to my problem was outside his office. He encouraged me to keep going to meetings, though he frequently expressed disgust at the smoking at meetings.

Community - I was welcomed into the recovering community in a way I had not been welcomed anywhere for some time. My first time at my first home group, Dan F. insisted that I take his seat (The meeting was too big for the small meeting space and did not have enough seats. This meant that he would have to stand or sit on the floor. He was in his 60s and needed a knee replacement.) Ron S. made sure that I never had to leave my seat for coffee, refilling my cup frequently. John M. told me that he was an atheist and that there was room for him in this program and that there was room for me. Dave H. told me that he had faith that things would get better for me and said, "if you can't believe that things will get better, just believe that I believe things will get better for you." Bill C. who had sponsees stop by my place to invite me to go to meetings with them. Today, my home group is a wonderful group of people who are patient, kind and generous with newcomers and relapsers. We support each other through blessings and trials.

Today, my experience of community has expanded far beyond the rooms that the recovering community meets in. I'm an active member of the larger community, getting to spend time with people I like and admire and hopefully making the community a little better in the process.

Family - All the damage of addiction has been healed in my family and I now I have a family of my own with a wonderful wife and happy, healthy children. When I got sober, I didn't want a family and, now, I can't imagine life without them.

Work - I'm grateful to work in a place that understands and respects recovery. We accept addicts for who they are and who they can become. In return, we get to play a small part in miraculous transformations of people who were once hopeless into healed, whole people who are fully engaged in their families and their communities--often helping others stumble through the same transformation.

Bill White did a good job summing up this experience in the context of the history of addiction treatment: "So what does this history tell us about how to conduct one's life in this most unusual of professions? I think the lessons from those who have gone before us are very simple ones. Respect the struggles of those who have delivered the field into your hands. Respect yourself and your limits. Respect the addicts and family members who seek your help. Respect (with hopeful but healthy skepticism) the emerging addiction science. And respect the power of forces you cannot fully understand to be present in the treatment process. Above all, recognize that what addiction professionals have done for more than a century and a half is to create a setting and an opening in which the addicted can transform their identity and redefine every relationship in their lives, including their relationship with alcohol and other drugs. What we are professionally responsible for is creating a milieu of opportunity, choice and hope. What happens with that opportunity is up to the addict and his or her god. We can own neither the addiction nor the recovery, only the clarity of the presented choice, the best clinical technology we can muster, and our faith in the potential for human rebirth."

Gratitude itself - On last thing. I'm grateful that Rob M. instructed me to practice gratitude on a daily basis. It was so unnatural and difficult for me. It also challenged my worldview that was colored with self-pity and pessimism about human nature and the human condition. The gratitude he taught me has kept me humble (most of the time) and free from (extreme) bouts of self-pity.

A little context please

Insite would save $14 million over 10 years. I don't doubt it. And, as I've said before, Vancouver's HIV rates call for radical action. However, if RAND's previous calculations are correct, 10 years of Insite's budget* spent on treatment would result in $175 million dollars in savings. If they were advocating both/and, the discussion might be a little different.

* Assumes a $2.5 million annual budget. I've seen references to $2 million and $3 million, so I split the difference.

Ramstad for Drug Czar

Personally, I'd like to see McLellan get the job.

I'm also concerned about some of Ramstad's positions on the war on drugs, but what I find noteworthy about the article is the high profile that the Drug Policy Alliance has established. They've been successful in shifting their identity from radical outlier (They do favor a blanket decriminalization of drugs.) to respected "liberal" advocacy group.

I agree with them in several areas, but I worry about them becoming the de facto liberal voice on drug policy. I consider myself pretty liberal and in attempts to apply liberal values to drug policy, I find myself reaching very different conclusions on some matters.

UPDATE: Clearly the DPA is libertarian, but their positions are presented as the alternative to the conservative pro-WOD position. I suppose this is because liberals have failed to articulate a liberal drug policy of their own? Have liberals been so concerned about being characterized as soft of crime/drugs that they've failed to take a stand? Wouldn't the debate benefit from an alternative position?

Smoking bans save lives

Findings like this are piling up.

Global Guide to Smoking Pot

In case you were wondering, "it's all good" in India.

Seriously, I thought you might be interested in a peek at drug policy in other countries.

[hat tip: Andrew Sullivan]

When the only tool you have is a hammer...

...everything looks like a nail.

Oy vey.

It also brings to mind this quote from H.L. Mencken: "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

Major Depressive Disorder or Normal Sadness?

An important question in the new issue of Psychiatric Times:

A diagnosis of MDD is warranted, according to DSM, when a patient has at least 5 of 9 specified symptoms for at least 2 weeks, and the 5 symptoms include either depressed mood or an inability to derive pleasure from life. The sole exception is that bereaved patients are not considered to have a disorder if they otherwise meet the criteria, as long as their symptoms are not unusually severe and last no longer than 2 months. The reason for the bereavement exclusion seems obvious: people who respond to the loss of an intimate with intense sadness, sleep and appetite difficulties, a loss of concentration on usual roles, and the like, do not have a mental disorder. Rather, they are responding normally to a situation of intense loss. The distinction between sadness that is a normal result of painful losses and depressive disorder is a fundamental one that has been explicitly recognized throughout the 2500-year history of psychiatric medicine.

Yet, the bereavement exclusion raises the question of whether people with enough symptoms to meet the MDD criteria—after, for example, the unexpected loss of a valued job, the collapse of a marriage, the failure to achieve a highly valued goal, or the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness in oneself or a loved one—are similarly reacting normally to situations of intense loss. For thousands of years, until DSM-III, physicians understood that these kinds of situational contexts were an important consideration in determining whether someone was experiencing normal—although intensely distressing—sadness or a depressive disorder in which something has gone wrong with mood processes and the sadness symptoms are no longer linked to the situation or likely to remit over time. Unlike many other diagnoses in DSM, which contain qualifiers that require symptoms to be “excessive” or “unreasonable,” no such qualifiers exist for MDD. Aside from the bereavement exclusion, the diagnostic criteria do not take into account the context in which symptoms arise.

Ample scientific evidence—ranging from infant and primate studies to cross-cultural studies of emotion—suggests that intense sadness in response to a variety of situations is a normal, biologically designed human response. Recent epidemiological analysis suggests that the consequences of stressors can be either normal or abnormal, similar to those for bereavement.1 In its quest for reliability via symptom-based definitions that minimized concern with the context in which the symptoms appeared, DSM unintentionally abandoned the well-recognized, scientifically supported, indeed commonsensical distinction between normal sadness and depressive disorder.

Along these lines, what about an addict who burns their life to the ground in their addiction? Even the exclusionary criteria are limited to physiological effects of drugs. In many cases, are depressive symptoms in the face of a life ravaged by addiction not a sign of intact reality testing, an indication of some strengths, or, at least, a possible crack in denial? Should depressive symptoms in the face of these difficulties really be treated as mental illness? Isn't it an indication of some mental wellness?

[hat tip: Andrew Sullivan]

Drug war wisdom

From a column in the Washington Post:

There is a simple strategy that Obama and his congressional colleagues could take that would save about $6 billion a year: Cut supply-side spending by the Office of National Drug Control Policy and require that two-thirds of its funding be spent on demand-side programs. While that is simple, it won't be easy.

Drug Policy Alliance's Plan

Regarding the next drug czar:

Our goal is to get someone who supports treatment, not incarceration; science, not religious moralizing; and civil liberties, not punitive policies. We're also going to do some legislative Judo, flip the agency's budget on its head, and refocus it on health and human rights. Imagine a Drug Czar that is required by law to reduce the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars -- or required to implement policies that protect people's privacy.

I'm all for treatment and ending the criminalization of addiction, but what, exactly, do "religious moralizing", human rights and "protecting people's privacy" mean?

I hear a lot or religious moralizing about a lot of things, but not so much about drug policy. I can't help but think that a little religious moralizing might help with access to treatment and the immorality of incarceration rates.

As for human rights and protecting people's privacy, are they working toward establishing drug use as a right? Again, I think incarcerating addicts for using is stupid and immoral, but do we want to establish drug use as a human right?

In spite of drug reform advocates rhetoric, their positions are not value-neutral and these are values that our culture won't share and would probably bring unintended consequences.

Finally, we're going to launch a national campaign to highlight the fact that America cannot afford drug prohibition. We couldn't afford it when times were good and we certainly cannot afford it now that deficits are rising, tax revenue is shrinking, and the economy is teetering.

Well, that's the sales pitch we'll be hearing.

Let's hope that these goals get moderated in debate and some good comes of this agenda. Though I don't expect it, I look forward to an end to the drug war and hopeful that there will be movement in that direction.

Am I ,the only liberal that is maddened by the positioning of legalization and Vancouver style harm reduction as the liberal position on drug policy? I really see myself as a potential ally, but they push the agenda too far and embrace much of this just a little too enthusiastically.

Addiction as a disease

Wired in has another great post that makes the case for addiction as a disease.

Wired in to recovery

A new online community has been launched in the U.K.

It's got content for addicts (both in and out of recovery), families and practitioners.

They've got a great post about low expectations, bias against residential treatment and recovery capital.

If the comments are any indication of what's to come in this community, I'm excited. One thought about the debate in the comments--while there is too much either/or thinking in the field and not enough both/and thinking, there really are sides and we can't ignore this. People who don't believe addicts can recover, shouldn't work with addicts. This isn't to say that all services should be abstinence oriented, but ALL services should offer hope that recovery is possible and ALL services for addicts should view recovery as the ultimate goal for their clients.

Prospects for Drug Reform in Obama's Washington

AlterNet reviews the prospects for drug policy reform under Obama.

Let Junkies Be Junkies

AlterNet has an article on harm reduction in Vancouver.

Vancouver has essentially become a gigantic field test, a 2 million-person laboratory for a set of tactics derived from a school of thought known as "harm reduction." It's based on a simple premise: No matter how many scare tactics are tried, laws passed or punishments imposed, people are going to get high. From winemaking monks to coca-leaf-chewing Bolivian peasants to peyote-chomping Navajos to caffeine-fueled office workers to the junkies of Vansterdam, human beings have never been willing to settle for our inherently limited palette of states of consciousness.

If you accept the notion that people aren't going to stop abusing drugs [emphasis mine], it makes sense to try to minimize the damage they inflict on themselves and the rest of us while they're at it. Harm reduction is less about compassion than it is about enlightened self-interest. The idea is to give addicts clean needles and mouthpieces not to be nice but so they don't get HIV or pneumonia from sharing equipment and then become a burden on the public health system. Give them a medically supervised place to shoot up so they don't overdose and clog up emergency rooms, leaving their infected needles behind on the sidewalk.

Give them methadone -- or even heroin -- for free so they don't break into cars and homes to get money for the next fix.

It clearly is trying to offer some balance, with this wise observation from the AMA...

But it doesn't have to be an either/or choice. As the American Medical Association states in its official position on the issue, "Harm reduction can coexist, and is not incompatible, with a goal of abstinence for a drug-dependent person, or a policy of 'zero-tolerance' for society."

...and a quote from Neil McKeganey that's prefaced with a slap at people with questions about harm reduction.

The critique of harm reduction best supported by actual evidence is that it doesn't do enough.

"The harm reduction approach within the UK appears to have had only modest success in reducing the breadth of drug-related harms," University of Glasgow researcher Neil McKeganey wrote in a recent overview published in the journal Addiction Research & Theory. "Despite a plethora of initiatives aimed at increasing drug (injectors') awareness of the risks of needle and syringe sharing, and of providing drug users with access to sterile injecting equipment, around a third of injectors are still sharing injecting equipment."

Overall, the article provides a good introduction to harm reduction from the point of view of a harm reduction advocate. (Catch that students?) However, I have a few problems with it:

• It uncritically advances the notion that addicts won't get well and don't want to get well. A few subpoints. First, clearly some people don't want to recover and some people will never recover, but we don't know who will and who won't, so the humane thing to do is treat them all as though they can recover.Second, motivation is not static. Those who don't want help today, may want it tomorrow.Third, it's important to ask why some people don't want to recover. How many of these people aren't interested in recovery due to a lack of hope? How can hope be fostered in these people? (We know something about this.) Can people who doubt addicts interest and ability to recover offer this hope?
  
• It advances the tired meme that most objections/concerns about harm reduction are irrational and anti-science.
• The writer fails to acknowledge the suffering caused by addiction and that harm reduction addresses only a few, secondary causes of that suffering.
• The writer fails to acknowledge the context of limited access to treatment. Vancouver might be much less controversial if their harm reduction efforts were in the context of a system that was also putting significant energy into getting people well.
  
• Finally, the focus of the argument is infection and crime control. What about compassion? What about health care (treatment) as a right?
  

Treatment in the U.K.

Its problems are different, but every bit as dysfunctional as the treatment system in the U.S..

Too many highlights to quote, just read the whole thing here.

Previous comments on the subject here.

Culture and alcohol

If anyone doubts the power of culture on problem drinking, I give you Wisconsin.

Genetic causality and addiction

Martin Nicolaus caught my attention a month ago when he made some bold statements about the genetics of addiction:

Modern genetic research has wiped away any basis for the idea that alcoholism is a genetically transmitted disease. The most that can be said is that some people appear to inherit a lower responsiveness to alcohol, so that if they drink, they must drink more to get the same high.
...
Much of the myth of genetic causality rests on twin studies.[emphasis mine]

A recent commentary in Addiction wrestles with the elusiveness of easy genetic causality but doesn't throw the baby out with the bath water, explaining the difficulty in identifying genetic markers for diseases:

...there are two main reasons why association studies may not identify genes for addiction.

First, as stated above, there is the absolute requirement of adequate exposure to the drug in question for addiction to occur. For most illegal drugs the majority of the population, from which the control group is drawn, have not been exposed to the drugs and they are, therefore, unscreened controls. (The effect this may have on statistical analysis of association studies is described below.)

Secondly, the required exposure to illegal drugs is not likely to be random, but due rather to genetic and environmental characteristics of the individuals who choose to seek out these drugs, or if offered to them, choose to experiment.

The problem is that many, perhaps most, linkage or association studies will result in finding genes which predispose people to start taking illegal drugs in the first place rather than genes involved in the addiction process. The genes they find may be involved in risk taking, sensation seeking, impulsivity, etc. It seems likely that these genes/variants may also predispose individuals to mountain climbing, race-car driving, extreme sports, etc. and are therefore not related to the biological processes involved in the development of addiction. This does not necessarily mean that identification of such genes are not helpful, but they are not likely to be related to the addiction process of any specific drug, nor of its treatment, which usually does not have alteration of personality as its goal.

Further, it explains that genetic effects can be divided into two categories:

...those which directly affect the process which is perturbed during drug addiction and those which modify the known environmental effect, i.e. the liability to take drugs in the first place.

The author goes on to explain the difficulty in defining and obtaining controls for genetic studies:

While the definition of the phenotype is a major problem for any genetic study of addiction, the definition of an unaffected control is at least as problematic. For most diseases a control subject is someone who has been exposed to the known specific environmental risk factors, such as passing a certain age in studies of Alzheimer's, but who is disease free. For addiction to drugs to occur, as stated above, at a minimum there is a requirement that the individual has taken the drug in question for a sufficient length of time and in sufficient quantities as to have become addicted should they have the propensity to become so, and has continued access to the drug. Buckland suggested previously that students, at least in the United Kingdom, would make good controls for alcohol addiction [36]. However, there is no evidence that students drink more than their peers, and in addition students are relatively young to manifest alcohol addiction. Given this, it is even less easy to find a sample who have been exposed sufficiently to other drugs and are clearly not addicted; for most purposes control groups must be considered to be unscreened. The power to detect an effect is lowered by the use of unscreened controls, the extent of this depending upon the population frequency of the underlying trait, but this can be compensated for by increasing the number used by twofold or more. A statistical study [44] shows two things of importance to this concept: first, to achieve the same power, if the population frequency of the trait is less than 10% then in general simply doubling the number of controls will be enough. However, above this population frequency, the required number of controls increases exponentially. Secondly, in general, the number of unscreened controls required to give equivalent power to one screened control increases as the odds ratio of the associated allele decreases, and therefore screening controls appears to be more important when studying small genetic effects with a high prevalence of the trait [44].

He sums up the challenges in his conclusion:

There are numerous reasons why it has proved far more difficult to find genes associated with complex illnesses than what was predicted in the early years of these studies. Only now are serious advances being made by using very large sample sizes; however, the genes for addiction may still be out of sight. There are two principal specific impediments to the identification of susceptibility variants for drug addiction.

First, it is likely that a greater portion of the genetic variance in drug abuse originates from effects which are non-specific to any one drug, or to drug abuse in general, than from genetic variance which underlies the specific addiction process.

Secondly, when compared to other complex phenotypes, addiction to drugs is far less well defined, the structure of the phenotype is not fully understood, controls are effectively unscreened and heritability is relatively low.

Both of the above suggest that far larger cohorts of probands are required for genetic studies in addiction compared to other complex illnesses. Unfortunately, the largest study to date of any drug of abuse has used numbers of samples an order of magnitude fewer than are being used currently in comparative studies.

What does all this mean? Clearly, establishing the extent and specifics of genetic causality is proving far more difficult that most of us anticipated and it is pretty clear that no single gene will exert a very strong influence and that it will be certain combinations of genes that predict addiction.

I've always thought that there is a lot for us to learn about typologies of addiction. Maybe learning more about the genetic combinations that contribute to addiction will help us understand who is more or less susceptible to multi-drug addictions. We may also learn more about shared genetic traits with some process addictions. We'll know more in a decade.

Farm staff who want a copy, let me know.

More heroin maintenance drama

The heroin/methadone death match continues. Pretty troubling, of accurate.

Remember, DeVlaming is a methadone advocate. I like his use of quotation marks around the word treatment in reference to the heroin maintenance approach.

Capitalism and pharmacology

I don't expect altruism, but this and this are creepy.

Back to the future

Unfortunately, access to longer term treatment is often limited to those who can afford to pay out of pocket, but it looks like long term treatment may be making a comeback:

In fact, data suggest 30 days aren't nearly enough.

• Research published in 1999 by Bennett Fletcher, a senior research psychologist at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has shown that though 90 days isn't a magic number, anything less than that tends to increase the chances of relapse. One study, of 1,605 cocaine users, looked at weekly cocaine use in the year after treatment. It found that 35% of people who were in treatment for 90 days or fewer reported drug use the following year compared with 17% of people who were in treatment for 90 days or longer. The study was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
• Another study, part of an NIDA-funded project called Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Studies, followed 549 patients who had several problems in addition to their drug use and who entered a long-term residential program. Those who dropped out of treatment before 90 days had relapse rates similar to those who stayed in treatment only a day or two. After 90 days, however, relapse rates dropped steadily the longer a person stayed in treatment.
• Studies of youth also reflect the connection between longer care and a greater chance of recovery. A 2001 UCLA study of 1,167 adolescents receiving substance-abuse treatment found that those in treatment for 90 days or more had significantly lower relapse rates than teens in programs of 21 days.

One bit of advice we've always given people is to investigate what treatment physicians with your problem receive. Well, here you go:

Some of the earliest evidence emerged from high success rates in treatment of addicted health professionals, says Haroutunian: The Federation of State Physician Health Programs has long recommended 90-day treatments and continued follow-up care for doctors who abuse drugs.

Fortunately, Dawn Farm and other programs are finding ways to offer this support in cost effective ways by bundling treatment and recovery support services.

[hat tip: jointogether.org]

Same old, same old

Oy vey.

What is there to say. More of the freak show.

Truth is, most addicts will tell you that they started with tobacco or alcohol. For several years, I've been seeing more young clients report pot as the first drug they tried. Now, it looks like pain relievers may be overtaking pot for initiation into illicit drug use.

Denying autonomy in order to create it

The new issue of Addiction has a provocative editorial on mandated treatment. It's an issue that I'm very interested in and posted about recently.

The writer makes the case that autonomy is usurped by addiction, making it ethically justifiable to coerce treatment for the purpose of restoring autonomy.

The author then goes on to propose naltrexone as a candidate for mandated treatment. He proposes that mandated addicts could regain their autonomy by complying with involuntary treatment. Kafkaesque, no?

Anyone who witnesses the suffering and insanity of addiction first hand can easily find themselves thinking, "If only we could get this person in treatment and make it impossible for them to leave until their addiction is no longer holding them hostage."

All this might be wonderful if there wasn't a history of horrific professional abuse of addicts and alcoholics.

Bill White also recently wrote about choice in the context of treatment and recovery and wrestled with the issue of impairment of volitional control and self-determination:

One way to partially reconcile the dilemma between the traditional and emerging views of choice is to first acknowledge that free will in addiction and recovery is not an all or none phenomena. The capacity for volitional control over AOD use and related decisions is variable across individuals (as a function of the interaction between problem severity/complexity and recovery capital) and is dynamic (shifts incrementally on a continual basis within the same individual through both addiction and recovery processes). Recovery can be viewed as progressive rehabilitation or reclamation of the will — the power to reclaim personal choice (Smith, 2005). There are times the recovery process may involve consciously not choosing — relying on resources and relationships outside the self, and times that the next recovery steps require an assertion of self. At a practical level, this means that the first hours of acute detoxification are not the best time to rely exclusively on client choice. And yet, long-term recovery is not possible without choice. If there is no rehabilitation of the power to choose and encouragement of choice, we are left with, not sustainable recovery, but superficial treatment compliance. 

To effectively apply a philosophy of choice requires great skill on the part of the addiction professional, particularly where a client’s immaturity, cellular craving, impulsivity, psychiatric symptoms and impaired judgment severely limit choice generation, choice analysis and the capacity to stick with any personal resolution. In such cases, we must carefully plot a path between complete autonomy (total choice and clinical abandonment) and paternalism (no choice and intrusive control). Most clients have a sense of this need as well.

The import question is, if the addict is denied his or her right to choose, who gets to choose? Their family, a doctor, counselor? Under what conditions. What treatments can be involuntarily ordered?

We already accept coerced treatment with the courts and impaired health professional monitoring bodies, but these people still have a choice. They've committed a crime or practiced in a way that endangers patients, and they being offered an alternative to incarceration or loss of their license. There is a great distance between coerced treatment as a sentencing alternative and involuntary treatment "for your own good."

I understand that well-intentioned people might be drawn to this idea, but there is far too much history of abuse and far too much stigma and pessimism among modern professional helpers.

Besides, how could we ever consider such a thing when treatment isn't even accessible to millions of addicts and alcoholics? We don't even know what would happen if addicts had access to high quality treatment of adequate duration and intensity. When we offer every addict the same treatments we offer doctors, maybe...maybe we could discuss something like this, but we have a long, long way to go first.

BTW-In the case naltrexone, what happens if the person gets into a car accident or needs emergency surgery and needs opiates for pain management? 

Sexual abuse and treatment outcomes in men

I don't remember seeing a study looking at sexual abuse in men and its impact on treatment outcomes. The findings look a lot like what studies of women have found:

Men with a history of physical or sexual abuse had more severe drug problems at intake, but by 6 months, there were no group differences in drug use. However, relative to men without an abuse history, men with a sexual abuse history had more severe psychiatric problems at all three time points and were more likely to report significant suicidality at intake and 6 months. Findings suggest that men with a history of sexual abuse benefit from SUD treatment, but additional intervention may be warranted to remedy persisting psychiatric distress.

Next steps in pot policy

NORML's planning it's next steps:

This week, Massachusetts became the 13th state in the country to decriminalize marijuana when voters approved Question 2 on the ballot, which made getting caught with less than an ounce of marijuana punishable by a civil fine of $100.

The change in the law means someone found carrying multiple joints will no longer be reported to the state's criminal history board. The law will require those younger than age 18 to complete a drug awareness program and community service, and for those who don't, the fine will increase to as much as $1,000.

The vote in Massachusetts follows a form of decriminalization that passed seven years ago in Nevada, where it remains a felony for anyone under age 21 to possess marijuana. The other states - Maine, New York, California, North Carolina, Oregon, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska - decriminalized marijuana in the 1970s, according to NORML.

13 states have similar laws? Where possession of small amounts is punishable by fine only? I didn't know it was that many. If this is accurate and there are 11 states with similar laws dating back to the 1970s, why aren't we hearing more about the impact (ot lack thereof) of state law on use by young people and age of first use?

They [advocates] cited a bill introduced in the spring by Representative Barney
Frank, which would decriminalize possession of marijuana in amounts of
3.5 ounces or less anywhere in the United States. The bill, if it
became law, would end federal prosecution of such crimes, but it would
not supersede state laws.

The advocates said they hope the bill would lead to hearings and spark more support from fellow lawmakers in the coming session.

"We
anticipate the bill will be reintroduced fairly early in the next
session," said Keith Stroup, legal counsel and founder of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which has long
lobbied for the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana. "Then
what we expect is that we will be able to get legislative hearings this
session, and maybe a vote on the floor of the House."

He said his organization, which helped Frank draft his bill, is looking for a sponsor in the Senate.

Drug Policy in the Obama Era

Ethan Nadelmann looks forward to drug policy reform opportunities under the Obama administration:

"...he has said that America should start treating drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal justice issue. He supports repealing the federal syringe ban and ending the DEA's raids on medical marijuana patients. He is also co-sponsor of Senator Biden's bill to eliminate the 100-to-1 crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity."

All great news. I'm hopeful about the new administration, but I believe he may be more pragmatic than many people think. We'll see. Know hope.

Penny wise and pound foolish

What is there to say? This is just sad.

No recidivism rates were offered to provide context?

In Michigan, the two year recidivism rate for parolees is almost 50% and Washtenaw County is around 75%.

Three months of residential treatment costs about $8000 and they can then move into sober housing and pay their own way. Three months of outpatient treatment costs about $500. A year of prison costs $30,000. You do the math.

What drives this insanity? First we send them to prison in staggering numbers rather than offer help. Doing prison time assures that they lose nearly every shred of recovery capital and then we release them (Locally, often to the homeless shelter.) and cut back on treatment?

It's easy to explain this by pointing to short-sighted bureaucracies, but that explanation doesn't cut it. The truth is that they view it as willful misconduct and they hate addicts.

Recovery capital

A primer on recovery capital just became available.

Meth by powerpoint

Powerpoint presentations and other files from the Global Methamphetamine Conference are here.

The social cost of smoking

Tobacco use is continuing its transition from celebrated to tolerated and is slinking in the direction of prohibition.

Election roundup

Join Together has put together a roundup of the election ballot proposals.

Looks like it was a good day for marijuana advocates and mixed day for other areas of the drug war.

A Peek Inside Heroin Maintenance

Robert's story:

Long-time addict Robert Vincent says he's living proof that getting free, daily heroin can improve the quality of a drug user's life, possibly steering him closer to recovery.

"I wasn't waking up in the middle of the night worrying where I was going to get the money to get my fix," said Mr. Vincent, who speaks with a slight lisp, the result of large gaps between his teeth. "I started to eat better, regain my appetite."

Mr. Vincent, 36, was one of 115 men and women, all diehard heroin addicts, who were part of a groundbreaking but controversial Canadian medical trial, called NAOMI - the North American Opiate Medication Initiative - which doled out free heroin for a year to addicts in Vancouver and Montreal. Others in the study received methadone or hydromorphone, a prescription painkiller.

Its preliminary results were released last month, with researchers concluding that most addicts committed fewer crimes and took better care of themselves when they didn't have to steal and panhandle to support their pricey heroin habits. They say they will use the results to press the government to consider free heroin as a treatment option for incurable addicts.

Mr. Vincent, they say, is an example of how an addict's life can improve when freed from the constraints of scrounging for money to feed a costly, illegal habit. While on the study, Mr. Vincent left the street, found an apartment, landed a job and gained 30 pounds.

But then the free heroin stopped.

Today, he is back living on the street, delving through back-alley garbage bins for returnable bottles to earn money to buy drugs. He said he uses street-purchased morphine and hydromorphone. The day after an initial interview with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Vincent failed to show up for a follow-up meeting. He was spotted a few hours later standing outside Vancouver's supervised injection site, his eyes fluttering and his chin drooped on his chest. He was clearly high.

To be sure, Robert's crash will be presented as evidence for and against the effectiveness of heroin maintenance. What I found most revealing was this line: "...researchers...say they will use the results to press the government to consider free heroin as a treatment option for incurable addicts."

Who knows whether the researchers used the word incurable, but the reporter was given that impression. Says it all, doesn't it? What treatments have or haven't been tried for these incurable addicts? What do they want?

Strange bedfellows. A methadone advocate weighs in:

"There is a fine line between harm reduction and enabling," said Stanley deVlaming, who has treated addicts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for years. Dr. deVlaming believes the study, which he says was based largely on self-reporting, was politicized. Severely addicted people knew that if they responded positively to the free heroin, it could bolster the chances of receiving the illegal drug down the road.

Dr. deVlaming argues that the best way to treat heroin addiction is with methadone, a synthetic drug that helps prevent withdrawal sickness but does not induce euphoria.

"For many of these patients, if I hand them their heroin, if I make it easier for them to stay addicted, am I doing them any favours?" Dr. deVlaming asked. "When I treat a patient, I often say that I am treating two sides of that person. There's one side that's trying to get better and there's that side of them, the addicted side, that wants to stay addicted. I try to align myself with the side of them that wants to get better."

From another physician:

Another Vancouver addiction physician, Milan Khara, said doctors who speak against the effectiveness of the heroin trials have been harassed, as have those who have criticized another so-called harm-reduction initiative, Vancouver's supervised injection site.

Dr. Khara criticized the NAOMI results, saying he too thinks the participants in the heroin study were motivated to report positive results.

"At the end of the day, these individuals have an addiction," he said. "If they believe their answers are going to lead to a lifetime of free heroin, their answers become highly unreliable.

PICC lines anyone?

Dr. deVlaming says he has concerns too with any treatment that involves daily injections, which often cause serious infections in the heart, spine or bones. "There is nothing safe about repeated daily injections directly into your veins," he said.

From a research subject:

Greg Liang, an addict who was part of the heroin trial, says the program helped stabilize his life. Mr. Liang felt tremendous relief at not having to hustle for money to buy drugs. The NAOMI heroin was pure and uncut, providing a longer high than street heroin. "It was quite delicious," he said in an interview at a Vancouver coffee shop.

But Mr. Liang, 41, who began using drugs at 18, says the free heroin made him complacent about his addiction. Other addicts, he says, took advantage of the free heroin, even competing for how much they could consume each day. For some, their habits grew worse. "They were heroin pigs," he said, shaking his head.

After nine months on the heroin trial, Mr. Liang says, he switched to methadone because he knew it would be hard to stop cold turkey when the study ended.

Today, Mr. Liang is still using heroin and cocaine. He says he's not sure if the heroin program helped his addiction. Like Mr. Vincent, his quality of life improved for a period. He began volunteering for the city of Vancouver, helping addicts. It eventually became a paid, part-time position.

But Mr. Liang says his life is still controlled by drugs. A stressful day can set off a binge. He thinks the only way to quit drugs is to move far from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where there are scores of services for addicts.

I want to repeat what Mr. Liang said, "the only way to quit drugs is to move far from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where there are scores of services for addicts."

He feels his only hope is to get away from the professionals that are trying to help addicts!!! (Read our position paper on harm reduction. Note that it's not against harm reduction.)

A closing thought from the lead researcher:

Martin Schechter, NAOMI's chief investigator, said researchers have no qualms about giving addicts free heroin and denied the program helped enable their addictions.

"This is a way of providing a maintenance therapy that allows them to get out of the street cycle of illicit drugs because these people are injecting heroin right now," Dr. Schechter said. "It's not like we're starting them on heroin. They're on it now. So the question is: Who do you want prescribing it? You have the black market or doctors or nurses."

I'd like to hear more about the values that drive his practice. Maybe the next trial should include PICC lines?

Online recovery support

I've been waiting for a large treatment program to implement a web-based recovery support program. I've been curious to see what it might look like and how they would navigate privacy issues.

MORE is hardly innovative. We'll see what future iterations look like.

Extended vs Short-term Buprenorphine for Young Opiate Addicts

In a study with subjects receiving low intensity outpatient treatment, those who received buprenorphine for 12 weeks did significantly better than those receiving it for 2 weeks.

The difference in retention is striking 70% for extended detox, compared with 20% for short term detox. There were also improved short term and 12 month outcomes in opiate and cocaine use. Outcomes related to alcohol and marijuana use were comparable and pretty low in both groups.

One of the reported limitations was this:

We had no way to compare these results with intensive outpatient therapy, residential treatment, therapeutic community, or naltrexone. It was impossible to design a random assignment study including the first 3 options because they are in limited supply, and the programs we contacted did not feel comfortable using an agonist medication with this population except for short-term detoxification.

What, exactly, was responsible for the improved outcomes? I suspect that most of the benefits, particularly long term, are related to enhanced treatment retention. (As a treatment provider, of course I'd think this!)

Other questions:

• To what degree are these benefits a function of the low intensity of treatment?
• What would the disparity be like if more recovery support been provided? If they were provided intense treatment?
• Unfortunately, we have to ask, what have unpublished studies found?
  

Lip balm addiction

Fox is winning the race to render the term addiction meaningless.

Michigan's medical marijuana proposal

Michigan has a ballot proposal that, if passed, will legalize medical marijuana. It looks like it will easily pass. Moreover, it seems to be getting very little attention--it's noncontroversial.

How did we get here? I think it's safe to say that this proposal would have been a major flashpoint 8 years ago. In fact, I attended a treatment provider meeting 8 years ago only to suffer through a presentation by a local prosecutor about a marijuana ballot proposal in which he repeatedly referred to George Soros and others as "crack daddies."

This time around most people seem to be barely aware of the proposal and few people seem to have strong feelings. Yesterday is the first time I remember seeing a commercial. I've seen no serious analysis of the proposal. No one seems to be seriously wrestling with questions like the following:

• Is marijuana good medicine?
• Does this proposal integrate lessons from other states like California?
• has legalization of medical marijuana led to increased marijuana use by teens or lowered the age of first use?
• Are there other options (like Savitex) that are better?
• Instead of changing state constitutions one at a time, should we pressing for unbiased clinical trials and if those trials merit it, have the FDA seriously review it for approval? 
• Are there legitimate reasons for the FDA to withhold approval? If so, is this a good way to make medical policy?
• How many cancer or MS patients have been arrested for using marijuana?

My suspicion is that the reason there's no serious discussion of these questions is because it's too difficult to trust what anyone has to say on the subject. We've all been held hostage by the drug policy freak show with the ONDCP on one side and legalization advocates on the other. We know the drug war is a disaster but we're not comfortable with decriminalization and we hate the drug policy war too. It's spilled beyond drug enforcement policy and is polluting discussion of treatment and prevention. We feel like we can't trust what anyone says, so we just tune it all out. 

In this way, the drug war is the gift that keeps on giving.