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:: 8.12.2003 ::
Although most of the stuff I post here is political, occasionally I come across other stuff that seems worth noting. For example, the FDA recently ruled that doctors could prescribe a drug called buprenorphine in their offices for addiction treatment; this drug is thought to be an improvement upon methodone for several reasons: withdrawal is easier, the high is milder, one dose can last up to 2 days, and it has a "ceiling effect" - that is, beyond a certain dosage, taking more does not make the person any higher, or depress breathing any more (reduces the risk of both abuse and overdose). Also, it bonds so well to opiate receptors in the brain that similar drugs cease to have an effect. A bonus of the "ceiling effect" is that doctors can prescribe an entire supply to a patient - rather than a dose a day, as is the case with methedone. This means that a middle-class professional can privately wean himself off heroin without having to visit a clinic every day. Here's a quote from the New York Times article I found on the subject:
"...[some] experts see the change as more evolutionary than revolutionary, warning that much remains to be learned about buprenorphine, and that methadone, too, was once seen as a wonder drug. But they are enthusiastic, saying that since doctors began prescribing buprenorphine in October, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive."
Along the same lines, I read a very interesting review of a book called Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use in Mother Jones the other day. Here's an excerpt:Saying Yes is not primarily (as its subtitle says) a defense of drug use. It is, rather, a critique of anti-drug propaganda and a plea for reason. Sullum, a scholar on drug policy and an editor for Reason magazine, argues that there is a "silent majority" of drug users who smoke pot, snort cocaine, even shoot smack without losing their lives, jobs, or families. They stay quiet, because if they spoke up they would be ridiculed, fired (in 2000, two-thirds of big companies drug-tested), or arrested.
"People who use illegal drugs in a controlled, inconspicuous way are not inclined to stand up and announce the fact," Sullum writes. "Prohibition renders them invisible." The visible minority, then, are mostly people in trouble -- under arrest, on the streets, in the morgue. But to mistake them for the average drug user, Sullum argues, "is like assuming that the wino passed out in the gutter is the typical drinker."
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The central argument of Saying Yes is that we should replace the current model of selectively coerced abstinence with one of universal temperance. As it is, some drug dealers sit in jail while others sit in corporate suites. Robert Downey Jr. is a disgrace for using cocaine. Robert Dole is "brave" for pitching Viagra. This system, Sullum writes, makes no sense intellectually, morally, or practically. Yes, many people do hurt themselves badly with coke and heroin and pot -- and Ecstasy and LSD, and so on. But they are the small minority. Even drug czar William Bennett acknowledged this in 1989 when he wrote, "Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population."
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The point -- which physicians and psychologists affirm -- is that however good or overwhelming a drug, human beings never fully lose their ability to choose. Drugs are never satanic or angelic in themselves, but rather agents of human possibility. [emphasis added] Indeed.
:: Deb 3:39 PM :: permalink ::
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