Tag: drugs

Crazymeds

amazing that some enterprising soul managed to put together such a good site.

It’s excellent because it gives mostly accurate and readable descriptions of the costs and benefits of every psychiatric medication. It has a laser-like focus on what patients will actually want to know and was clearly written by someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of every treatment’s strengths and potential pitfalls.

This is important because the standard psychiatric response to someone who wants to know about a medication (when it’s not “shut up and trust me”) is to print out an information sheet from somewhere like drugs.com or webmd.com. These sites at worst just copy paste the FDA drug information sheet, and at best list off side effects in a rote and irrelevant way that only a robot could love.

Pot Stocks

battle of the finance bros.

“But who cares about any of that?. Look, Theo. There’s money to be made. One guy I read about: 4 trades, he paid off the loans on 2 cars. Can you imagine?” The first words out of Theo’s mouth were, “OK, I’m in for $5000. What’s the next step? Let’s go make a trade!” “Whoa, Nelly. The stock market isn’t open on weekends.” “It isn’t?”

Adderall is meth

During the 5 years Heisenberg spent as a blue-meth cook, the nation experienced a nonfictional explosion in the manufacture and sale of sapphire pills and azure capsules containing amphetamine. This other “blue,” known by its trade names Adderall and Vyvanse, found its biggest market in classrooms like Walter White’s. As this blue speed is made and sold in anodyne corporate environments, the drama understandably focused on blue meth and its buyers, usually depicted as jittery tweakers picking at lesions and wearing rags on loan from the cannibal gangs of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

2021-10-20 update, a story what meth at scale looks like:

Thus, as P2P meth spread nationwide, an unprecedented event took place in American drug use: Opioid addicts began to shift, en masse, to meth. Meth overdoses have risen rapidly in recent years, but they are much less common than opioid ODs—you don’t typically overdose and die on meth; you decay. By 2019, in the course of my reporting, I was routinely coming into contact with people in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia who were using Suboxone to control their opiate cravings from long-standing addiction to pain pills and heroin, while using methamphetamine to get high. Massive supplies of cheap P2P meth had created demand for a stimulant out of a market for a depressant. In the process, traffickers forged a new population of mentally ill Americans. P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe. “I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore”. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young. Now people in their 30s and 40s with no prior history of mental illness seemed to be going mad.

Last American Man

At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since.

Eustace travels through life with perfect equanimity. He has never experienced an awkward moment. During his visit to New York City, I lost him 1 day in Tompkins Square Park. When I found him again, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you’d ever want to meet. They’d offered Eustace crack, which he’d politely declined, but he was chatting with them about other issues.

“Yo, man,” the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, “where’d you buy that dope shirt?”

Eustace was explaining to the drug dealers that he did not, in fact, buy the shirt at all but had made it out of a deer. He described exactly how he had skinned the deer and softened the hide with the deer’s own brains and then sewed the shirt together using strands of sinew taken from alongside the deer’s spine. He told the drug dealers that it’s not a difficult process and that they could do it, too, and that—if they came to visit him in the mountains—he would show them all sorts of wonderful ways to live off nature. “Eustace, we gotta go.”

The drug dealers shook his hand: “Damn, Eustace. You something else.”

DEA shark-jumping

A good example of organizations fighting for their survival whether they have reason to exist or not:

Legalizing marijuana “insults our common values” and insisted that “every single parent out there” opposed legalization. What do you think, that people who are in favor of decriminalization or changing policy don’t procreate?

Drug Take-Back Day

The Next National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day is scheduled for October 26, 2013. One or more of your local pharmacies will likely accept your old pharmaceuticals free, no questions. It disposes of them safely and keeps them out of landfills or sewers where they apparently are having ever-worsening effects on water supplies — for example putting female hormones from birth control pills into what you drink from the tap. Go through your cabinet!

Universal flu vaccine?

I hope this pans out. That would be extra amazing.

Current flu vaccines use inactivated whole viruses and must be regularly remade to target the strains most likely to cause illness in the coming year. But the new nanoparticles would require fewer updates because they induce the production of antibodies that neutralize a wider range of flu strains. They could even protect against varieties of flu that have not yet emerged.

2020-12-08: Targeting the stalk

The beauty part of this vaccine is that it’s not only broad, but multifunctional with stalk-specific antibodies that can neutralize many kinds of influenza viruses. This universal vaccine could be particularly beneficial to low and middle income countries that don’t have the resources or the logistics to vaccinate their populations each year against influenza.