The Front Page

Alternet, Eric Sterling
April 5, 2013 |

In the 1980s, Hilary Rosen was lobbying for the City of San Francisco's programs of health care for gays and lesbians (and drug users) with HIV and AIDS, she writes in the Washington Post Friday, March 29, 2013. Sen Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) warned her that she should not be lobbying to help "those kind of people," meaning gays and lesbians, she wrote.

I recall a similar situation in those days. I was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Crime Subcommittee and attending a hearing of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control regarding heroin use. A Member of Congress said encouragingly at one point,"We don't have to worry about heroin anymore. They're all going to die of AIDS."

That chillingly indifferent phrase epitomized the ability of some people to dehumanize the un-favored "others:" gays, lesbians, drug users. In their eyes, if "those people" die, not only is their death not a tragedy, it is a good thing.

This is the powerful belief system that underlies outbreaks of genocide - there are amongst us "others" who endanger us, and we would be better off without them. This belief system is alive today. ...

Wired
BY GREG MILLER 04.26.13

Timothy Leary really screwed things up for science. By abandoning the scientific method for a mystical embrace of hallucinogenic drugs, the Harvard-professor-turned-LSD-evangelist became a symbol of ’60s-era drug-fueled degeneracy. Worse, the ensuing backlash pushed these drugs underground and caused an enormously promising field of research to go dormant for nearly half a century.

Or so say some scientists who met in Oakland, California last weekend for a conference on the science and therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs. “The antics of Timothy Leary really undermined the scientific approach to studying these compounds,” psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University told the audience.

But the times they are a-changin’. In recent years, a small cadre of scientists has cautiously rekindled the scientific study of psychedelics. At the conference, they reported new findings on how these drugs scramble brain activity in ways that might help explain their mind-bending effects. They’re also slowly building a case that these drugs might help people with depression, anxiety and other disorders. ...

David Nutt
The Guardian

In the future, harm reduction approaches must explicitly incorporate the maintenance, and possibly even the enhancement, of pleasure, if we really want people who use drugs to see that harm-reduction advice is balanced and truly non-judgmental.

Harm minimisation, harm reduction, drug-related harm, drug overdose, addiction: these are the dominant narratives that are used when we talk about drugs. As doctors we diagnose those seeking treatment for many drug-use problems as having an illness.

And government policies are driven by the drug use consequences of the minority of users who develop drug dependence. Don't get us wrong: drugs – legal, illegal and prescribed – can ruin lives. Governments must provide treatment services and information. But the discourse almost always fails to explicitly and openly discuss drug-related harms in the context of the real driver behind most drug use, which is not dependence, but drug-related pleasure. ...

Naloxone is key to fighting overdose deaths, but sky-high prices threaten community distribution programs.

Tessie Castillo
Alternet

A remarkable thing happened in 2008: drug overdose surpassed auto fatalities as the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Public health officials declared an epidemic, and communities united to battle this new enemy that had left a staggering body count in its wake. The people had a weapon, naloxone, an antidote that reverses opiate overdose, and programs began popping up across the country to provide training and free naloxone to people at risk for overdose. But then Big Pharma stepped in. The same year that naloxone became so critical to saving lives, one pharmaceutical company secured a monopoly on its production and jacked up the prices by 1,100%.

The company, Hospira, claims its monopoly on injectable naloxone was unintentional. Naloxone has enjoyed price competition from manufacturers since it first came on the market in the 1960s, but in the early 2000s manufacturers began closing production lines without explanation. Hospira became the sole producer of injectable naloxone by default – a position it still holds today as no new manufacturers have stepped into the market. Generic, sterile injectables like naloxone can be difficult and costly to produce, and low return on investment is likely a deterrent to new manufacturers. ...

It is with great pride and enthusiasm that we announce today a major collaboration between Bluelight.ru and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Through the efforts of Brad Burge, MAPS’ Director of Communications, Rick Doblin, MAPS’ Founder and Executive Director, Sebastians_Ghost and The_Love_Bandit of Bluelight.ru, we will soon undertake an exciting partnership to reinvigorate the MAPS forum and increase opportunities for public education about psychedelic science and medicine. The existing plaintext email MAPS Forum will be migrating to Bluelight.ru, the world's leading drug information website. We're aiming to unveil the new MAPS Forums on Bluelight shortly before the Psychedelic Science 2013 symposium in mid-April.

In the coming weeks, the MAPS Forum will no longer be linked from maps.org. Instead, MAPS will provide a link to the new MAPS Forum hosted at Bluelight. MAPS will work closely with Bluelight to encourage public participation in our new “home” at Bluelight.ru as the migration of the MAPS Forum topics is completed.
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