Texas has some great drug rehabs. The State has seen an expansion in addiction treatment services in the last five years. Most of the expansion has come from the private sector. Many industry veterans have questioned the need for new facilities that have emerged. Much talk has taken place in the area of market research. It seems that some of the facilities have been blinded by the grass is greener on the other side mentality.
The Texas economy is possibly going to reduce it's budget for publicly funded treatment beds this 2011-2012 legislative year. The reality is that 8.4% of people are unemployed. Certainly other States have higher rates, however this is not good for the current treatment industry in Texas. To make things worse health-care benefits have slowly dwindled down or gone away completely with some companies in Texas.
Texas Drug Rehabs are in situations where they must take a look at the actual market and make sound healthy decisions with the opening and expansion of treatment services in the organizations of private and publicly funded drug rehab programs.
The addiction treatment community has wrestled for years fighting addictions and pain. Programs have developed different approaches to treating those with chronic pain issues. It is a difficult and a delicate issue that concerns many in the medical and addiction treatment industry. How to properly detoxify a patient and treat the underline pain that the individual is suffering from can be very tricky. The patient will present for drug treatment with the desire to be removed from pain medications, however the fear from the patient of the pain that will present as soon as medications are removed from the body becomes a barrier for the individual seeking treatment. It is a double edge sword and if not properly done, can create unnecessary pain for the patient.
A powerful new painkiller, which was developed on the basis of the research conducted at Stony Brook University and with no apparent side effects or addictive qualities, may now be only a year or two from the consumer market.
"This offers a major paradigm shift in the control of pain," declares Dr. Simon Halegoua, Professor of Neurobiology & Behavior at Stony Brook who in the 1990s, teamed up with fellow Stony Brook professors Dr. Gail Mandel and Dr. Paul Brehm to identify a novel sodium ion channel involved in the transmission of pain. They predicted that a drug aimed at blocking this channel, PN1/Nav 1.7, would control pain. PN1 (Peripheral Neuron 1), is uniquely expressed in peripheral nerves such as those involved in pain transduction.
When a patient is given an opiate like morphine, pain signals are still transmitted from sensory nerves to the central nervous system. Morphine action throughout the brain reduces and alters pain perception, but it also impairs judgment and results in drug dependence," explains Halegoua, also director of the Center for Nervous System Disorders at Stony Brook University. "With drugs targeting the PN1/Nav1.7 sodium ion channel, the pain signals would not be transmitted, even by the sensory nerves. And since the central nervous system is taken out of the equation, there would be no side effects and no addictive qualities."
The potential for such drugs is enormous -- the reduction or elimination of pain for patients with cancer, arthritis, migraine headaches, muscle pain, pain from burns, and pain from other debilitating diseases.
He notes that drugs in both oral and topical ointment forms, based on the research he conducted in a basement laboratory at Stony Brook with Mandel, a molecular biologist, and Brehm, an electro physiologist, are currently in Phase II clinical trials in England and Canada.
The Research Foundation of the State University of New York is the holder of the various patents originating from the work of the Stony Brook researchers. Icagen Inc., now in partnership with Pfizer, holds the exclusive license to these patents and has announced their own drug has now entered Phase I clinical trials in the U.S.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by Sober Sky) from materials provided by Stony Brook University.
FULTON, MISS. - When Neil Brown got high on bath salts, he took his skinning knife and slit his face and stomach repeatedly. Brown survived, but authorities say others haven't been so lucky after snorting, injecting or smoking powders with such innocuous-sounding names as Ivory Snow, Red Dove and Vanilla Sky.
Law enforcement agents and poison control centers say the bath salts, with their complex chemical names, are an emerging menace in several U.S. states where authorities talk of banning their sale. Some say their effects can be as powerful as those of methamphetamine.
From the Deep South to California, emergency calls are being reported over exposure to the stimulants the powders often contain: mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.
Sold under such names as Ivory Wave, Bliss, White Lightning and Hurricane Charlie, the chemicals can cause hallucinations, paranoia, a rapid heart rate and suicidal thoughts, authorities say. In addition to bath salts, the chemicals can be found in plant foods that are sold legally at convenience stores and on the Internet. However, they aren't necessarily being used for the purposes on the label.
Mississippi lawmakers this week began considering a proposal to ban the sale of the powders, and a similar measure is being sought in Kentucky. In Louisiana, the bath salts were outlawed by an emergency order after the state's poison center received more than 125 calls in the last three months of 2010 involving exposure to the chemicals.
In Brown's case, he said he had tried every drug from heroin to crack and was so shaken by terrifying hallucinations that he wrote to one Mississippi paper urging people to stay away from the bath salts.
"I couldn't tell you why I did it," Brown said, pointing to his scars. "The psychological effects are still there."
While Brown survived, sheriff's authorities in one Mississippi county say they believe one woman overdosed on bath salts there. In southern Louisiana, the family of a 21-year-old man says he cut his throat and ended his life with a gunshot. Authorities are investigating whether a man charged with capital murder in the December death of a Tippah County, Miss., sheriff's deputy was under the influence of the bath salts.
The stimulants are not regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, but are facing federal scrutiny. Law officers say some of the substances are being shipped from Europe, but origins are still unclear.
Gary Boggs, an executive assistant at the DEA, said there is a lengthy process to restrict these types of designer chemicals, including reviewing the abuse data. But it's a process that can take years.
Mark Ryan, director of Louisiana's poison control center, said he thinks state bans on the chemicals can be effective. He said calls about the salts have dropped sharply since Louisiana banned their sale in January.
Ryan said cathinone, the parent substance of the drugs, comes from a plant grown in Africa and is regulated. He said that MDPV and mephedrone are made in a lab and that they are not regulated because they are not marketed for human consumption. The stimulants affect neurotransmitters in the brain, he said.
The drugs cause "intense cravings," he said. "They'll binge on it three or four days before they show up in an ER. Even though it's a horrible trip, they want to do it again and again."
Ryan said at least 25 states have received calls about exposure, including Nevada and California. He said Louisiana leads with the greatest number of cases at 165, or 48 percent of the U.S. total, followed by Florida with at least 38 calls to its poison center.
Rick Gellar, medical director for the California Poison Control System, said the first call about the substances came in Oct. 5, and a handful of calls have followed since. But he warned: "The only way this won't become a problem in California is if federal regulatory agencies get ahead of the curve. This is a brand-new thing."
In the Midwest, the Missouri Poison Center at Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center in St. Louis received at least 12 calls in the first two weeks of January about teenagers and young adults abusing such chemicals, said Julie Weber, the center's director. The center received eight calls about the powders all of last year.
Richard Sanders, a general practitioner working in Covington, La., said his son, Dickie, snorted some of the bath salts and endured three days of intermittent delirium. Dickie Sanders cut his throat but missed major arteries. As he continued to have visions, his physician father tried to calm him. But the elder Sanders said that as he slept, his son went into another room and shot himself.
"If you could see the contortions on his face. It just made him crazy," Sanders said. He added that the coroner's office confirmed that the chemicals were detected in his son's blood and urine.
Sanders warns that the bath salts are far more dangerous than some of their names imply.
"I think everybody is taking this extremely lightly. As much as we outlawed it in Louisiana, all these kids cross over to Mississippi and buy whatever they want," he said.
A small packet of the chemicals typically costs as little as $20.
In northern Mississippi's Itawamba County, Sheriff Chris Dickinson said his office has handled about 30 encounters with bath-salts users in the past two months alone. He said the problem grew last year in his rural area after a Mississippi law began restricting the sale of pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in making methamphetamine.
Dickinson said most of the bath-salts users there have been meth addicts and can be dangerous when using them.
"We had a deputy injured a week ago. They were fighting with a guy who thought they were two devils. That's what makes this drug so dangerous," he said.
But Dickinson said the chemicals are legal, leaving him no choice but to slap users just with a charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
Kentucky state lawmaker John Tilley said he's moving to block the drug's sale there, preparing a bill for consideration when his legislature convenes shortly. Angry that the powders can be bought legally, he said: "If my 12-year-old can go in a store and buy it, that concerns me."
ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2010) — A little-used medication can help treat alcoholism, an updated review of studies confirms. At any given time, about 5 percent of the population suffers from an addiction to alcohol, often with devastating consequences to work, family, friends and health. Twelve-step programs have been the mainstay for helping alcoholics to quit drinking, but a significant number of people who try these programs do not find them helpful or suffer relapses.
The Cochrane review finds that the medication naltrexone -- brand names are Depade and ReVia -- when combined with counseling or interventions like Alcoholics Anonymous, can help cut the risk of heavy drinking in patients who are dependent on alcohol.
Naltrexone works by blocking the pleasurable feelings, or "high," a person gets from drinking alcohol, thereby reducing motivation to drink. Naltrexone can be taken daily as a pill and is available as a long-acting injection.
The review was published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing medical trials on a topic.
"Hundreds of drugs have been tried for relapse prevention [in alcoholism] and basically all others have failed," said Michael Soyka, M.D., senior author of the review. "From a clinical point of view, there are few pharmacologic options for the treatment of alcohol dependence, so it is important to study those options that look promising." Soyka and lead review author Suanne Roesner are associated with the psychiatric hospital at the University of Munich.
Alcohol dependence is different from alcohol abuse or misuse. The symptoms of alcohol dependence include craving for alcohol, an inability to control drinking, the presence of withdrawal symptoms if one tries to quit and tolerance -- the need to increase alcohol amounts to feel the same effect. People who only abuse alcohol and are not dependent on it have no trouble controlling their drinking, once they decide to do so.
Soyka and colleagues examined the results of 50 previously published high-quality studies on naltrexone and alcohol dependence. Overall, the studies enrolled nearly 7,800 patients diagnosed with alcohol dependence. Of these, about 4,200 patients took naltrexone or a similar drug called nalmefene. The rest of the patients took a placebo or had some other type of treatment. Treatment with naltrexone ranged from four weeks to a year, with most patients receiving about 12 weeks of treatment. Most patients also received counseling.
Researchers found that patients who received naltrexone were 17 percent less likely to return to heavy drinking than were patients who received a placebo treatment. "That would mean that naltrexone can be expected to prevent heavy drinking in one out of eight patients who would otherwise have returned to a heavy drinking pattern," Soyka said.
Naltrexone also increased the number of people who were able to stay abstinent by 4 percent.
While at first glance that might not seem like a miracle cure for alcoholism, Soyka said that the effectiveness of naltrexone is on par with medications used for other psychiatric conditions.
"Naltrexone is moderately effective in reducing alcohol intake. It's about as effective as antidepressants in depressive disorders," he said. "From a safety point of view, there are few safety concerns. Nausea is the most frequent side effect."
Carlton Erickson, Ph.D., director of the Addiction Science Research and Education Center at the University of Texas in Austin, says naltrexone can help a person with alcohol dependence move toward the goal of abstinence.
"Anytime you reduce the severity of drinking, the individual is more open to treatment for abstinence," he said. "It's almost like putting them through a series of steps if you can get them to cut down; once they start to cut down they are more likely to become abstinent with continued treatment and continued exposure to 12-step programs." Erickson is not associated with the review or any of its authors.
Despite its possible benefits in treating alcohol dependency, naltrexone is not widely used in the United States or elsewhere, Erickson said. Some addiction specialists fear that the widespread use of naltrexone or other medications will result in patients not receiving the counseling or psychological interventions they need.
There is also a lingering attitude that the treatment of alcohol dependency must rely solely on psychological or spiritual methods.
"People in 12-step programs typically don't believe in medications for the treatment of alcoholism," Erickson said. "Therefore they are unlikely to accept anyone into their 12-step meetings who is on a medication like naltrexone. Secondly, they would not want to accept it for themselves, unless a physician talked them into it as part of their treatment plan."
In addition, most large alcohol treatment centers, with the exception of Hazelden, do not advocate for the use of medications in the management of addiction, he said.
However, Erickson said that naltrexone is FDA-approved only as an adjunct to abstinence-based therapies, like Alcoholics Anonymous. "Naltrexone is not something you give to someone who says 'I want to stop drinking, give me a pill.' Naltrexone is only a helper to that process. The medication itself is not a magic bullet."
The review discloses that two authors received speaker/consultancy/advisory board honoraria from pharmaceutical companies.
In their study, published January 4, 2011, in the advanced online edition ofMolecular Therapy, the researchers say this novel strategy might be the first to offer cocaine addicts a fairly simple way to break and reverse their habit. The approach could also be useful in treating other addictions, such as to nicotine, heroin, and methamphetamine.
"Our very dramatic data shows that we can protect mice against the effects of cocaine, and we think this approach could be very promising in fighting addiction in humans," says the study's lead investigator, Ronald G. Crystal, chairman and professor of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.
"The vaccine suppresses the stimulant effects of the drug," said Scripps Research Professor Kim Janda, a co-author of the paper and a pioneer in the field of developing vaccines against addictive drugs such as cocaine. "Unlike other types of treatment, a vaccine such as this one does not interfere with the neurological targets of the drug, but instead blocks cocaine from ever reaching the brain in the first place."
In the new study, the vaccine effect lasted for at least 13 weeks, the longest time point evaluated in such an approach. Since the vaccine likely will not require multiple expensive infusions, the researchers hope that it can move quickly into human trials.
Clinically, this sort of therapy could be given to people in treatment programs to aid in their recovery. And, like most other types of treatment, it will only be useful for those who want the help.
"This vaccine would be most applicable for addicts who are who are interested in getting off the drug," said Janda, the Eli R. Callaway Jr. Chair in Chemistry and a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps Research. "In essence we view such vaccines as 'immuno-helpers' for treating substance abuse, and, in the case at hand, it might prove to be extremely useful for crack addicts whose relapse rate is exceedingly high."
The Drug
According to the latest statistics available from National Institutes of Health (NIH)National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in 2008 5.3 million Americans age 12 and older had abused cocaine in any form and 1.1 million had abused crack at least once in the year prior to being surveyed.
Cocaine, derived from the leaf of the Erythroxylaceae coca plant, is a highly potent drug that, as a salt, is either snorted or dissolved in water and injected directly into the bloodstream. The salt is also often neutralized to make an insoluble "free-base" form that is smoked.
Once ingested in the bloodstream, the drug crosses the blood - brain barrier and accumulates rapidly in the brain. "The brain levels rise very rapidly once cocaine is taken into the system," said Janda.
The parents of 15-year-old Sasha Rodriguez, who died of an ecstasy overdose after attending a rave, have filed a claim against the management of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The parents are seeking $5 million in damages from the Coliseum Commission.
The claim, filed Dec. 23 with both the city and county of Los Angeles, is a necessary step before suing in court. The claim says the commission, a joint state, city and county board, did not fulfill its "duties and was negligent in creating and/or allowing others to create a dangerous condition of public property" during the two-day Electric Daisy Carnival rave at the Coliseum in June.
Sasha Rodriguez, a high school student and drill team member from Atwater Village, was able to get into the event despite the 16-and-over age requirement advertised by Los Angeles-based Insomniac Events, the producer of the rave. Those under 16 needed a parent or guardian to attend, according to the event's website. Sasha attended with friends; her parents have said they did not know she was going to a rave.
She died days after falling into a coma after attending the rave.
The Coliseum "knew, or should have known, that the rave would attract, promote, encourage, facilitate and enable widespread illegal and illicit activity, including but not limited to the possession, sale and consumption of illicit drugs," the claim says.
The Coliseum Commission also "knew, or should have known, that the rave would attract minors under the age of majority … yet it failed to enforce such minimum age requirement," the claim said.
Patrick Lynch, general manager of the Coliseum, said in an e-mail Thursday that he was out of the office and unaware of the claim, and so was unable to comment.
In November, in a controversial vote, the commission lifted its moratorium on raves — all-night dance parties featuring electronic music. A month later, it voted to require rave promoters to come before the panel at least 60 days in advance of an event for approval.
"We're going to limit whatever abuses take place," Commissioner David Israel said at the December meeting.
The Electric Daisy Carnival rave, which drew 185,000 people over two days, resulted in 120 people being taken to local hospitals, mostly for drug intoxication. Coliseum managers said there were no major problems at subsequent raves Aug. 21 and Oct. 23, which attracted 6,000 and 22,000 people, respectively. A New Year's Eve rave, Together as One, at the Sports Arena resulted in 25 arrests and 17 hospitalizations.
All three raves that took place after the June event had been scheduled before the rave moratorium enacted after the teen's death.
The L.A. Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena relies on raves for 28% of its revenue, according to a consultant report filed to the commission in July.
Commissioners said they were not driven by the bottom line when they voted to continue holding raves at the public facility. Some expressed worry that raves would be forced into unregulated "back alleys" if no longer allowed at the Coliseum or Sports Arena.
Israel said commissioners weighed both public safety and free-speech concerns, and said recommendations from the county Department of Public Health would be enacted to ensure safety and reduce risk at future events. Among the recommendations: strictly enforcing an 18-and-over age limit, adding security and drug searches, and hiring medical staff to work at the raves.
Another publicly owned facility took a different approach. The state-run Cow Palace in Daly City, south of San Francisco, banned raves in November, citing numerous drug and alcohol overdoses at recent events, including two deaths following a rave in May.
On Dec. 22, Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill to ban raves at publicly owned venues. Ma cited a study that found many teenagers attending raves use "club drugs" such as ecstasy, GHB, methamphetamine and LSD.
Rave promoters denounced the legislation as heavy-handed.
Steven Archer, a lawyer representing Sasha's parents, Grace Rodriguez and Leonard Contreras, said the claim does not seek any injunction that would ask a judge to stop raves at the facility.
"However, one of the collateral results of a successful lawsuit may be a change in policy of the Coliseum Commission to further control or limit raves," Archer said. "It's not our goal to limit them … but when the Coliseum Commission is called upon to pay monetary damages to this family for what happened to their daughter, maybe by hitting them in the pocketbook, the Coliseum Commission will have its eyes opened."
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Hillsborough County jail records show that King refused to take a blood alcohol test when sheriff's deputies stopped him at 2:12 a.m. Sunday.
He posted $500 bond and was released.
King played seven NFL seasons with the Buccaneers andArizona Cardinals. He recently was hired as a football analyst for Bright House Sports Network.
The 33-year-old lives in St. Petersburg. A message left at a phone number listed for his address was not immediately returned.
A spokesman for Bright House Networks would not comment on the arrest but said King was a part-time employee, not full time.
Do you suffer from a Alcohol Problem? Call Summer Sky Treatment Center a place that has restored more than 10,000 patients to sane sober lifestyle. Many Texas Drug Rehabs exist, but one facility stands out over the rest and that is Summer Sky.
They're hoping the law will be used as punishment under the deffered ajudication bill, which gives first time DWI offenders probation instead of jail time.
MADD is also proposing sobriety checkpoints in Texas. The road blocks are already being used in 41 other states to check for drunk drivers.
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Washington (SmartAboutHealth) – According to a new study, children of alcoholics are more likely to face and suffer from obesity than kids who are not born into a family with a history of alcoholism.
Researchers analyzed data that came from two different surveys that involves alcoholism.
The surveys were conducted through the 1990s as well as through the 2000s and involved over 75,000 people in total.
Researchers found that those who had a family history of alcoholism were far more likely to be obese than those who did not.
The belief is that this is due to the fact that the addiction may be passed odwn in the family.
The only difference is that the new entrants into these families are becoming addicted to junk food more than they are addicted to alcohol.
As the years went by in the study, they found that the more recent adults with a family history of alcoholism were more likely to suffer from obesity than those from the early 1990s.
The family history of alcoholism and obesity are more directly linked now because the food that is available today has more calories and more fat than the food some years ago.
Still, the addictive nature between these foods and the brain is similar to the addiction that is seen from alcohol.
AUSTIN, Texas – A new legislative proposal would allow first-time drunken drivers in Texas to be acquitted if they complete supervision and treatment, a move supporters say would reduce court backlogs and shift the judicial system's focus to punishing repeat DWI offenders.
Rep. Todd Smith, R-Euless, filed the proposal that would allow for deferred adjudication for first-time DWI offenders. Repetition of the offense would become grounds to increase future punishments.
The bill, which has supporters including Mothers Against Drunk Driving, prosecutors and defense attorneys, would be a change from the state's stance that all drunken drivers should face fines and jail. In the mid-1980s, deferred adjudication for such offenses was abolished in the state. Opponents at the time, including MADD, had argued that the form of probation was being accepted for repeat offenders.
"It's a needed change," said Richard Alpert, a Tarrant Countyprosecutor. "It's not like they are getting a free DWI, but a type of probation that would not technically be a conviction. If they don't reoffend, they can say they have not been convicted. But if they do reoffend, it can be used to enhance their punishment."
Supporters say that by routing cases out of courtrooms, the plan could ease court backlogs. Also, they say, it could improve efforts to track and punish repeat DWI offenders and remove the threat of jail that makes some first-timers refuse guilty pleas.
"Generally we do not support deferred adjudication bills, but we are going to support this one," Bill Lewis, public policy liaison for the Irving-based nonprofit group MADD, told the Austin American-Statesman. "Right now, we are hearing that many cases are not getting prosecuted for DWI but for a bogus charge. We hope the practice of reducing charges will be reduced if this bill does indeed pass."
Supporters of the bill also say it could give prosecutors a new negotiating tool.
Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley said that the plan would still require supervision of the defendant and could enforce fines and allow a judge to impose jail time as a condition of probation.
"This would be a first step to putting some sanity in that system as long as people make sure to retain it only for the true first-time offender," Bradley said.
While the proposal has been in front of the Legislature before, Alpert said there is plenty of support this time.
"I think there is some momentum for this," Alpert said. "It would give people who want to take responsibility an incentive to plead guilty, as opposed to setting these cases for trial. We have too many cases on the docket."
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Information from: Austin American-Statesman, http://www.statesman.com
