Tag Archives: Better
Box Corner: Drug Policy Alliance needs a better sense of humor
If you combined Saturday Night Live‘s “Really?” segment with ESPN’s celebration of boneheaded NFL plays titled “C’Mon Man!” you would have my reaction to Derek Rosenfeld’s recent HuffPo article trashing our commander in chief. In his piece “President Obama Is the Last Person Who Should Joke About Marijuana”, Rosenfeld, who is the Internet communications associate at the venerable Drug Policy Alliance, took issue with one joke from the Prez’s annual White House Correspondents Dinner.
What was so egregious about Obama’s marijuana diss? It wasn’t one to begin with.
As jokes go, in fact, it couldn’t be more innocuous:
“But the problem is that the media landscape is changing so rapidly,” the president quipped. “You can’t keep up with it. I mean, I remember when Buzzfeed was just something I did in college around 2 a.m.”
If you think that has to do strictly with cannabis or was a jab at pot smokers only, I’ve got a greenhouse to sell you. Barry is a well-documented night owl, but if you’re up at 2AM, it’s probably because you closed down the bar, not smoked down with your friend.
I get it: pot gives you the “munchies”. But we potheads don’t own that any more than the gays own rainbows. Did the folks over at the DPA have a little too much sativa and, in a bout of paranoia, assume he was talking about them?
They must have, because the rest of the article is an unabashed rant against his presidency. Rosenfeld goes on to tout one of the most specious statistics that pot warriors throw around: Obama “has overseen more law enforcement raids on medical marijuana dispensaries than George W. Bush during his entire eight years in office.”
Hey, here’s a fact for you: he’s allowed more legal marijuana businesses to operate than the last 10 presidents.
Combined.
Let’s also ignore that some of those DEA raids hit fronts for cocaine traffickers, amongst other things. Or that U.S. Attorneys were carrying out busts contradictory to instructions by the Obama administration during his run for re-election, knowing a strong pro-pot stance could jeopardize his campaign. Ignore all of that.
Next, Rosenfeld throws out some good facts about racial profiling when it comes to marijuana charges, but claims that today he would “very likely lose the chance of becoming President.” I could see the argument if he had bothered to make one. Losing access to student loans, for example, could have derailed young Barack. An arrest record? The guy he replaced, the loathsome GW Bush, had three priors before getting to the White House. Somewhere in Texas, he’s working on his fourth.
As a comedian, my biggest issue is that this article advances the notion of marijuana as a sacred cow. Especially after the DPA has held comedy fundraiser after fundraiser, even buying Prop 19 spots on Comedy Central. Whether it’s Cheech Marin or Doug Benson, humor has long been an effective tool for getting people to confront things they’re uncomfortable with.
What’s their alternative? Attack the guy who even the author admits has smoked marijuana, believes the drug war has failed and believes in science over ideology.
Because they didn’t get a punchline.
Everyone knows the president can, with a flick his magic wand, legalize whatever he wants! Don’t go after members of Congress, you know… the ones he mentions at the end of the piece that are capable of having an actual impact when it comes to legislation.
Rosenfeld must have spent a lot of time inside of that Trojan horse, because his argument reeks.
Box Corner is a weekly opinion column by Box Johnson, a Denver-area comedian and Toke of the Town contributor. When not writing, he can be found working on creating laser technology to clean dirty pipes.
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Is a Better Sleeping Pill on the Way?
WEDNESDAY April 3, 2013 — A new class of sleep medications appears to help people fall asleep without causing grogginess the next day, researchers say.
These new medications — known as dual orexin receptor antagonists (DORA) — target a more specific region of the brain than popular sleep drugs such as Ambien and Lunesta, promoting sleep without affecting learning and memory (also called “cognition”), according to the new research.
“We’ve shown that these compounds improve sleep at doses that don’t impact cognition,” said Jason Uslaner, lead author of a study published in the April 3 issue of Science Translational Medicine. Uslaner is director of In Vivo Pharmacology at Merck & Co., which funded the study.
Merck already has one such drug, suvorexant, under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
More than 30 million Americans struggle to get a good night’s sleep, and about one-third of these use drugs to help the process, the study authors pointed out.
But widely prescribed sleep medications such as Ambien (zolpidem) and Lunesta (eszopiclone) can leave people feeling hung over and inattentive the next day. So much so that the FDA recently cut recommended doses of Ambien and other drugs that contain zolpidem for fear that their use, even the night before, might impair driving or other activities the next day.
Lunesta and Ambien affect GABA receptors, which are found throughout the brain and are associated with side effects, including thinking disturbances, and deficits in attention and memory, explained Uslaner.
About 15 years ago, scientists discovered chemical messengers known as orexins, which are released by a relatively small brain region known as the lateral hypothalamus. This area of the brain releases orexins during the day to keep us awake and lowers levels at night so we can sleep.
The appeal of orexin antagonists, said Dr. Michael Thorpy, director of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, is that they “target a system that’s more specific for sleep.”
That means, theoretically, fewer side effects and perhaps less of a tendency to be habit forming, Thorpy explained.
Uslaner and his colleagues investigated a compound called DORA-22, which has the same mechanism of action as suvorexant, to see how it fared alongside not only Ambien and Lunesta but also diazepam (Valium) in rats and rhesus monkeys.
DORA-22 did not lead to the same mental impairments as the other three drugs. Rhesus monkeys and rats performed just as well on memory and attention tasks shortly after being administered DORA-22 as they did on an inactive placebo.
In each case, the minimum dose to achieve sleep was compared with the minimum dose that altered memory and thinking. DORA-22 promoted sleep at lower doses than those that impaired mental skills when compared with the “control” drugs.
This is the first time in years that scientists have targeted a totally different receptor in the quest to combat insomnia, said Dr. Alexandre Abreu, co-director of the UHealth Sleep Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
But many questions remain: Do the drugs truly have fewer side effects? Will they be habit forming? And will they change the quality of sleep in any way?
Those questions will only be answered with more testing and use in humans, he said.
Experts note that findings from animal studies do not always hold up in human trials.
More information
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more on insomnia.
Posted: April 2013
Combo Inhaler May Give Better Relief for Some With Asthma
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, March 4 (HealthDay News) — Asthma patients typically use two inhaled drugs — one a fast-acting “rescue inhaler” to stem attacks and another long-lasting one to prevent them.
However, combining both in one inhaler may be best for some patients, two new studies suggest.
Patients with moderate to severe asthma who used a combination inhaler had fewer attacks than those on two separate inhalers, researchers report. Both studies tested the so-called SMART (single maintenance and reliever therapy) protocol.
“The SMART regime was more effective as a treatment for asthma than the conventional treatment, where you just use a inhaler at a fixed maintenance dose and a short-acting inhaler for the relief of symptoms,” said Dr. Richard Beasley, director of the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand in Wellington and lead researcher of one of the studies.
These drugs are a combination of a corticosteroid (such as budesonide or fluticasone) and a long-acting beta-2 agonist (such as salmeterol or formoterol) and are sold under various brand names including Seretide, Symbicort and Advair.
In asthma, treatment increases as the severity of the condition does, Beasley said. So, this combination therapy isn’t the first choice. When the asthma is difficult to control with other methods, “we are now recommending the SMART regime,” he said.
“You treat the patients according to their needs,” Beasley said. “This is certainly not what you start them on — it is something you would use on moderate to severe patients.”
In the United States, use of these combination inhalers is also not considered first-line therapy for asthma, according to Dr. Len Horovitz, a pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.
“Patients, however, are currently using these combination inhalers,” he said. If the asthma is moderate to severe, then a combination inhaler is appropriate, said Horovitz, who was not involved with either new study.
The reports were published in the March issue of the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
One study was funded by Italian pharmaceutical company Chiesi Farmaceutici, whose products include asthma medications. The multi-center European study was led by Dr. Klaus Rabe, a professor of pulmonary medicine at the University of Kiel, in Germany.
The study included more than 1,700 patients with moderate asthma. Researchers found that participants using the single, combination inhaler had significantly fewer severe asthma attacks and were seen at a hospital or urgent medical facility less than those patients using the two inhalers.
Rabe and colleagues wrote that although drugs like Symbicort (the specific budesonide/formoterol combination used in the study) can be more expensive than separate inhalers, the ability to prevent asthma attacks and reduce hospital and emergency room visits may be cost-saving in the end.
In the second trial, funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand, Beasley’s team randomly assigned 303 patients to the single-inhaler protocol or to usual care with two inhalers. Over six months, the researchers found that those using Symbicort had fewer severe asthma attacks.
One concern had been that patients using the combination inhaler would get overexposed to corticosteroid or would overuse the inhaler, Beasley said.
They found, however, that patients using the combination inhaler reduced their overuse of corticosteroid by 40 percent, compared to those using separate inhalers.
While those in the SMART program took in more corticosteroids a day, they had fewer asthma attacks so their overall exposure to corticosteroid was the same as for people in the two-inhaler group, the New Zealand researchers explained.
More information
For more about asthma, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Moving Forward and Looking to Indies, Not Better Graphics
Excited as I was to finally see a next-generation console, much of the PlayStation 4 software we saw last week struck me as underwhelming. It was pretty, certainly, and I’m all for beautiful games; I paid a great deal to upgrade my PC in 2011 so that Battlefield 3 would look its finest, and it irks me that Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 each stresses my computer to the point that I can’t see every last bit of visual goodness they have to offer and maintain a decent framerate. Still, gorgeous graphics are not all I want out of new games, and yet it would seem as if the PS4′s hardware is being extolled purely for its ability to accommodate even nicer-looking visuals.
That belief is representative of the majority of what Sony had on show last week. While the capabilities of the hardware to push more pixels was invariably going to be a major part of the event, with the way things went you could be left thinking the future of games entails little more than better-looking games that boot up faster than ever. That’s all well and good — I am legitimately excited for auto-downloads, suspend modes, and all manners of hurdles between player and game being removed — but the hurdles Sony and Microsoft should be doing their damndest to remove lay between independent developers and next-generation consoles.
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Allergy ‘Rescue’ Shots May Work Better in Lower Thigh of Overweight Kids
MONDAY Feb. 25, 2013 — In overweight and obese children who suffer a severe allergic reaction, it may be more effective to inject epinephrine into the lower thigh rather than the upper thigh, according to a new study.
Epinephrine is a medication used when a person has a serious, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Epinephrine typically comes in a single-dose, pre-filled automatic injection device that is jabbed into the thigh.
“Delivering epinephrine into the muscle allows for more rapid absorption and leads to higher blood levels than if it’s injected into the overlying fat,” study first author Dr. Peter Arkwright said in an American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology news release. “Considering the rising obesity rates in children, there is concern that epinephrine autoinjectors will not adequately deliver the medication in overweight children who may be experiencing anaphylaxis.”
“Without proper treatment, anaphylaxis can be fatal, so it’s extremely important that epinephrine is administered quickly and effectively,” Arkwright added.
Arkwright and colleagues from the University of Manchester and Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital in England used ultrasound to measure the depth from skin surface to muscle at different points in the thighs and legs of 93 children.
They found that the depth in the upper part of the thigh was greater than the length of the needle in the epinephrine autoinjector in 82 percent of obese children, compared with 25 percent of non-obese children.
On the lower part of the thigh, depth from the skin surface to the muscle was greater than the length of the autoinjector needle in only 17 percent of obese children and 2 percent of non-obese children.
“Based on our study, injecting epinephrine into the lower rather than upper thigh would be advised in overweight or obese children,” Arkwright said. “If a child is experiencing anaphylaxis, this information would be important for a caregiver to know so that epinephrine can be administered into the child’s muscle in the most effective way.”
The study was scheduled for Monday presentation at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology’s annual meeting in San Antonio. Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
More information
The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about anaphylaxis.
Posted: February 2013
