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Teenage E-Cigarette Use Drops to a 10-Year Low

By Christina Jewett The number of teenagers who reported using e-cigarettes in 2024 has tumbled from a worrisome peak reached five years ago, raising hopes among public health officials for a sustained reversal in vaping trends among adolescents. In an annual survey conducted from January through May in schools across the nation, fewer than 8 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past month, the lowest level in a decade. That’s far lower than the apex, in 2019, when more than 27 percent of high school students who took the survey reported that they vaped — and an estimated 500,000 fewer adolescents than last year. The data is from the National Youth Tobacco Survey, a questionnaire filled out by thousands of middle and high school students that is administered each year by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, it found that just under 6 percent of middle and high school students reported vaping in the last month, down from nearly 8 percent among those surveyed last year. Use among high school students largely accounted for this year’s decline; middle school use stayed fairly steady with 3.5 percent reporting they had vaped compared to 4.6 percent the year before. “I want to be unequivocally clear that this continued decline in e-cigarette use among our nation’s youth is a monumental public health win,” Brian King, the director of the F.D.A.’s tobacco division, said during a news briefing on Wednesday. Public health experts said several factors may have contributed to the decline in teenage vaping, including city and state flavored tobacco bans, a blitz of enforcement against sellers of flavored vapes and three public messaging campaigns aimed at young people about the dangers of vaping. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29467 - Posted: 09.07.2024

Rethinking Addiction as a Chronic Brain Disease

By Jan Hoffman The message emblazoned on a walkway window at the airport in Burlington, Vt., is a startling departure from the usual tourism posters and welcome banners: “Addiction is not a choice. It’s a disease that can happen to anyone.” The statement is part of a public service campaign in yet another community assailed by drug use, intended to reduce stigma and encourage treatment. For decades, medical science has classified addiction as a chronic brain disease, but the concept has always been something of a hard sell to a skeptical public. That is because, unlike diseases such as Alzheimer’s or bone cancer or Covid, personal choice does play a role, both in starting and ending drug use. The idea that those who use drugs are themselves at fault has recently been gaining fresh traction, driving efforts to toughen criminal penalties for drug possession and to cut funding for syringe-exchange programs. But now, even some in the treatment and scientific communities have been rethinking the label of chronic brain disease. In July, behavior researchers published a critique of the classification, which they said could be counterproductive for patients and families. “I don’t think it helps to tell people they are chronically diseased and therefore incapable of change. Then what hope do we have?” said Kirsten E. Smith, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a co-author of the paper, published in the journal Psychopharmacology. “The brain is highly dynamic, as is our environment.” The recent scientific criticisms are driven by an ominous urgency: Despite addiction’s longstanding classification as a disease, the deadly public health disaster has only worsened. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Out of Your Head

By Steve Paulson Oliver Sacks wasn’t always the beloved neurologist we remember today, sleuthing around the backwaters of the mind in search of mysterious mental disorders. For a few years in the 1960s, he was a committed psychonaut, often spending entire weekends blitzed out of his mind on weed, LSD, morning glory seeds, or mescaline. Once, after injecting himself with a large dose of morphine, he found himself hovering over an enormous battlefield, watching the armies of England and France drawn up for battle, and then realized he was witnessing the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. “I completely lost the sense that I was lying on my bed stoned,” he told me in 2012, a few years before he died. “I felt like a historian, seeing Agincourt from a celestial viewpoint. This was not ordinary imagination. It was absolutely real.” The vision seemed to last only a few minutes, but later, he discovered he’d been tripping for 13 hours. These early experiences with hallucinogens gave Sacks an appreciation for the strange turns the mind can take. He had a craving for direct experience of the numinous, but he believed his visions were nothing more than hallucinations. “At the physiological level, everything is electricity and chemistry, but it was a wonderful feeling,” he said. When I asked if he ever thought he’d crossed over into some transpersonal dimension of reality, he said, “I’m an old Jewish atheist. I have no belief in heaven or anything supernatural or paranormal, but there’s a mystical feeling of oneness and of beauty, which is not explicitly religious, but goes far beyond the aesthetic.” I’ve often thought about this conversation as I’ve watched today’s psychedelic renaissance. Clinical trials with psychedelic-assisted therapy show great promise for treating depression, addiction, and PTSD, and a handful of leading universities have recently created their own heavily endowed psychedelic centers. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29453 - Posted: 08.28.2024

FDA rejects ecstasy as a therapy: what’s next for psychedelics?

By Sara Reardon Last week’s decision by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reject MDMA, also known as ecstasy, as a psychiatric treatment surprised many researchers. Lykos Therapeutics, the company that has been testing MDMA, plans to ask the FDA to reconsider the decision, but scientists are now wondering what the agency’s ruling will mean for other potential psychedelic therapies. In a press release posted on 9 August, Lykos, which is based in San Jose, California, said that the FDA had sent a letter requesting that the company undertake another large-scale trial of the drug in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and resubmit its application. “The FDA request for another study is deeply disappointing,” Lykos chief executive Amy Emerson said in the press release, adding that the company plans to work with the agency to “resolve scientific disagreements”. Conducting another study “would take several years”, she said, adding that Lykos has already addressed many of the FDA’s concerns. In an e-mail to Nature, Lykos declined to provide the complete letter detailing the agency’s specific concerns and directed the news team instead to its press release. Experts say that without access to the letter, it’s hard to determine why the FDA reached the decision it did. “We really are going off incomplete information,” says Mason Marks, who studies drug policy at Florida State University in Tallahassee, adding that he was “a little surprised” by the agency’s decision. Trial concerns But Marks points out that the FDA typically follows the advice of its independent advisory committees — and the one that evaluated MDMA in June overwhelmingly voted against approving the drug, citing problems with clinical trial design that the advisers felt made it difficult to determine the drug’s safety and efficacy. One concern was about the difficulty of conducting a true placebo-controlled study with a hallucinogen: around 90% of the participants in Lykos’s trials guessed correctly whether they had received the drug or a placebo, and the expectation that MDMA should have an effect might have coloured their perception of whether it treated their symptoms. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 29433 - Posted: 08.15.2024

Older Adults Do Not Benefit From Moderate Drinking

By Roni Caryn Rabin Even light drinking was associated with an increase in cancer deaths among older adults in Britain, researchers reported on Monday in a large study. But the risk was accentuated primarily in those who had existing health problems or who lived in low-income areas. The study, which tracked 135,103 adults aged 60 and older for 12 years, also punctures the long-held belief that light or moderate alcohol consumption is good for the heart. The researchers found no reduction in heart disease deaths among light or moderate drinkers, regardless of this health or socioeconomic status, when compared with occasional drinkers. The study defined light drinking as a mean alcohol intake of up to 20 grams a day for men and up to 10 grams daily for women. (In the United States, a standard drink is 14 grams of alcohol.) “We did not find evidence of a beneficial association between low drinking and mortality,” said Dr. Rosario Ortolá, an assistant professor of preventive medicine and public health at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the lead author of the paper, which was published in JAMA Network Open. On the other hand, she added, alcohol probably raises the risk of cancer “from the first drop.” The findings add to a mounting body of evidence that is shifting the paradigm in alcohol research. Scientists are turning to new methodologies to analyze the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption in an attempt to correct what some believe were serious flaws in earlier research, which appeared to show that there were benefits to drinking. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Psilocybin desynchronization persists in the human brain

Jake Rogers Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2024)Cite this article To better understand the therapeutic potential of the psychedelic drug psilocybin, we need a fuller understanding of its short-term and long-term effects on the human brain. In this study, Siegel et al. reveal individual-specific psilocybin-induced acute and persistent brain network changes in neurotypical young adults. The authors used longitudinal precision functional mapping — involving ~18 sessions of fMRI per individual — to capture individual-specific functional brain networks. Through this approach, acute (during) and persistent (between or after) intervention-induced changes to individual-specific network organization could be detected in young adult participants who received either high-dose psilocybin or dose-matched methylphenidate (a non-psychedelic stimulant chosen as an active control for psilocybin-induced cardiovascular and arousal effects) and who then, 1–2 weeks later, received the compound not administered first. Acutely, psilocybin caused not only widespread cortical functional connectivity (FC) changes (most prominently in association areas), but also disruption in subcortical regions connected with the default mode network (DMN), including the thalamus, basal ganglia, cerebellum and hippocampus. Furthermore, FC changes correlated with the intensity of the subjective experience documented using the 30-item mystical experience questionnaire (MEQ30). Several participants also received a second high dose of psilocybin and repeated an acute fMRI session six months later. Despite it being entirely plausible in a second acute session that individuals might experience the same effect, this repeated session revealed that individuals had substantially reduced or increased MEQ30 scores compared to their first acute session, and that the degree of the widespread brain changes and intensity of subjective experience correlated across and within individuals. By contrast, acute methylphenidate was associated with substantially less whole-brain FC disruption and most FC changes localized to sensorimotor systems. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

This Is Literally Your Brain on Drugs

By Andrew Jacobs July 17, 2024 If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this. The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner. The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain. The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. “Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.” The study included seven healthy adults who were given either a single dose of psilocybin or a placebo in the form of methylphenidate, the generic version of the amphetamine Ritalin. Each participant underwent a total of 18 brain scans, taken before, during and after the initial dosing. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29398 - Posted: 07.18.2024

We’re Not Asking the Right Question to Solve the Overdose Crisis

By Zachary Siegel Why do people use drugs? It’s one of those neglected questions with answers right in front of our noses. We just refuse to look. Getting high—and overdosing—is after all, as American as apple pie. Over 46 million people in the U.S. have an alcohol- or drug-use disorder. Everyone knows someone who died, or who lost a son or daughter, mother or father, to a drug overdose, one of the 100,000-plus now yearly recorded nationwide. Lost in today’s raging debate over drug policy and how to curb this spiraling mortality is the deep malaise that lies at the root of substance use in America. We are stuck on a loop, veering from “drug war” to legalization to backlash against legalization, without a record of improving lives and setting people on a successful path of recovery. And that’s because we are frankly unwilling to fix the economic cruelty that drives and keep people locked in dangerous drug use. In a 2022 photographic-ethnography published in the journal Criminology, investigators did the obvious thing and asked people using meth in rural Alabama how they made sense of their tumultuous lives. Rather than gathering post-hoc justifications for using meth, the study aimed to hear people who use drugs tell their own stories. The results painted a remarkably vivid portrait of poverty and drug use in 21st-century rural America. Across small towns in the northern tier of Alabama, a state with the sixth lowest median household income and seventh highest poverty rate, the researchers observed lives caught in repetitive and destructive patterns. Women felt trapped in relationships that were volatile and often violent. They would flee but have nowhere to go. People felt a pervasive sense that they lacked freedom and agency to improve their circumstances. If you feel boxed in by the absence of opportunity and mobility, then daily meth use, adding a synthetic buzz and thrill to otherwise boring or dreadful moments, isn’t such a stretch. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Is That Drink Worth It to You?

By Susan Dominus About a year ago, a friend of mine started evading my invitations to grab a drink. It was only when we caught up for a walk that she explained she wasn’t putting me off for any personal reason — it was just that she had stopped drinking. She wasn’t a heavy drinker — she had a glass of wine with dinner, the occasional Aperol spritz — but she’d been hearing on podcasts and reading in the news that even a small amount of alcohol was much worse for her health than had previously been understood. Listen to this article, read by Kirsten Potter My friend was picking up on a swing in the public-health messaging around alcohol. For many years, she might have felt that she was making a healthy choice in having a glass of wine or a beer with dinner. Right around the time when she came of legal age to drink, the early 1990s, some prominent researchers were promoting, and the media helped popularize, the idea that moderate drinking — for women, a drink a night; for men, two — was linked to greater longevity. The cause of that association was not clear, but red wine, researchers theorized, might have anti-inflammatory properties that extended life and protected cardiovascular health. Major health organizations and some doctors always warned that alcohol consumption was linked to higher cancer risk, but the dominant message moderate drinkers heard was one of not just reassurance but encouragement. More recently, though, research has piled up debunking the idea that moderate drinking is good for you. Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health; and in 2022, a well-designed study found that consuming even a small amount brought some risk to heart health. That same year, Nature published research stating that consuming as little as one or two drinks a day (even less for women) was associated with shrinkage in the brain — a phenomenon normally associated with aging. © 2024 The New York Times Company

F.D.A.’s Review of MDMA Cites Health Risks and Study Flaws

By Andrew Jacobs and Christina Jewett The Food and Drug Administration on Friday raised concerns about the health effects of MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, citing flaws in a company’s studies that could pose major obstacles to approval of a treatment anticipated to help people struggling with the condition. The agency said that bias had seeped into the studies because participants and therapists were readily able to figure out who got MDMA versus a placebo. It also flagged “significant increases” in blood pressure and pulse rates that could “trigger cardiovascular events.” The staff analysis was conducted for an independent advisory panel that will meet Tuesday to consider an application by Lykos Therapeutics for the use of MDMA-assisted therapy. The agency’s concerns highlight the unique and complex issues facing regulators as they weigh the therapeutic value of an illegal drug commonly known as Ecstasy that has long been associated with all-night raves and cuddle puddles. Approval would mark a seismic change in the nation’s tortuous relationship with psychedelic compounds, most of which the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies as illegal substances that have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Research like the current studies on MDMA therapy have corralled the support of various groups and lawmakers from both parties for treatment of PTSD, a condition affecting millions of Americans, especially military veterans who face an outsize risk of suicide. No new therapy has been approved for PTSD in more than 20 years. “What’s happening is truly a paradigm shift for psychiatry,” said David Olson, director of the U.C. Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics. “MDMA is an important step for the field because we really lack effective treatments, period, and people need help now.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Marijuana surpasses alcohol in daily use for Americans

By Jennifer Hassan More people in the United States say they are using marijuana daily or near daily, compared with people who say they are drinking alcohol that often, according to a new study. In 2022, about 17.7 million people reported daily or near-daily marijuana use, compared with 14.7 million people who reported drinking at the same frequency, said the report, which was based on more than four decades of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It was the first time the survey recorded more frequent users of cannabis than alcohol, the report added. The research was published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction. The research window spans the years 1979 to 2022, and the 27 surveys that were analyzed involved more than 1.6 million participants during that time frame. The study described the growth in daily or near-daily cannabis use as “striking.” While “far more people drink” than use marijuana, high-frequency drinking among Americans is less common, the report said. The 2022 survey found that the median drinker reported drinking on four to five days in a month, compared with 15 to 16 days in a month for cannabis. The study noted that changing trends in cannabis use “parallel corresponding changes in cannabis policy, with declines during periods of greater restriction and growth during periods of policy liberalization.” It stressed, however, that this did not mean there was a causal link, as “both could have been manifestations of changes in underlying culture and attitudes.” Thirty-eight states and D.C. have legalized medical marijuana programs, and 24 states have approved recreational cannabis use.

Two distinct neural pathways may make opioids like fentanyl so addictive

By Claudia López Lloreda Fentanyl’s powerful pull comes from both the potent, rapid euphoria people feel while on the drug and the devastating symptoms of withdrawal. Researchers have now zeroed in on brain circuits responsible for these two forces of fentanyl addiction. The study in mice, reported May 22 in Nature, suggests two distinct brain pathways are in play. “Addiction is not a simple disorder — it’s very complex and dynamic,” says Mary Kay Lobo, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore who was not involved with the new research. She appreciates that the study looks not only at reward in the brain, but also at the withdrawal symptoms, which are “this dark side of addiction.” Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are highly addictive (SN: 4/28/23). About one of every four fentanyl users becomes addicted. And in 2022 in the United States alone, there were more than 70,000 deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses, primarily fentanyl. Researchers have known that dopamine-releasing neurons in an area of the midbrain called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, mediate feelings like euphoria. But the circuits driving withdrawal symptoms were less clear. Such symptoms include nausea, pain, irritability and an inability to feel pleasure. To find out more, neuroscientist Christian Lüscher of the University of Geneva and colleagues injected mice with fentanyl for three consecutive days then stopped, inducing withdrawal by giving the mice naloxone. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Does Legalizing Cannabis Increase Adolescent Use? This Expert Found Mixed Results.

By Matt Richtel With weed these days, it’s a Willy Wonka world: chocolate bars, lollipops, exotic-flavored gummies — to say nothing of joints, vapes, drinks and the rest. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have now legalized the sale of marijuana for recreational use, prompting innovation, lowering prices and making the drug — more potent than ever — more widely available. The Biden administration this week recommended easing the federal regulations on cannabis. What does all of this mean for adolescents? Studies have demonstrated that marijuana use can harm the developing brain. Some new strains have been linked to psychosis. Many health experts have worried that relaxing the laws around cannabis will lead to more use of the drug among minors. But Rebekah Levine Coley, a developmental psychologist at Boston College, is less certain. In April, she and colleagues published a study in JAMA that examined drug use patterns among 900,000 high school students from 2011 to 2021, using self-reported data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. They found that fewer minors reported having used cannabis in the previous month in states where the drug had been legalized. But they also found that in the 18 states that had both legalized cannabis and allowed retail sales of the drug, some adolescents who were users of the drug used it more frequently. The net effect was a flat or slight decline in cannabis use among adolescents. Dr. Coley spoke to The New York Times about the study, and its implications for state and federal drug policy. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. It seems sensible to assume that legalizing marijuana would lead to more use by young people. Yes, common sense might argue that as cannabis becomes legalized, it will be more accessible. There will be fewer potential legal repercussions, hence availability would increase and use would increase. © 2024 The New York Times Company

A new gel stops mice from getting too drunk

By Darren Incorvaia Wouldn’t it be nice if you could stave off the miserable effects from a night out drinking by simply popping a pill? Researchers are now one step closer to that reality, developing a gel that helped mice quickly and safely break down alcohol. The gel is a combination of iron atoms and the milk protein beta-lactoglobulin. When it encounters alcohol in the digestive system, this combo mimics the behavior of an enzyme that converts ethanol into acetate, food scientist Jiaqi Su of ETH Zurich and colleagues report May 13 in Nature Nanotechnology. As the body naturally breaks down alcohol, it produces the by-product acetaldehyde, which causes hangovers and can damage the liver. “One really nice feature of [the new gel] is they’re able to convert alcohol directly to acetate, which means there’s no accumulation of the toxic intermediate,” says biochemist Duo Xu of Stanford University. “It’s like a hydrogel-based nano-liver that does the work for us.” If the gel works in humans, Su and colleagues say, it could be used to prevent hangovers and potentially the harms of chronic drinking (SN: 3/22/23). Over time, excessive alcohol use can damage vital organs such as the heart, liver and brain. A 2023 study found that about 5 percent of the global population suffers from liver diseases related to drinking too much alcohol. To test the gel, Su’s team fed it to eight mice and then waited 20 minutes before plying the rodents with booze. Eight other mice received gel without iron and eight more were given a saline solution and force-fed alcohol 20 minutes later. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Cocaine, morphine commandeer neurons normally activated by food, water in mice

By Lauren Schenkman Repeated exposure to cocaine and morphine subverts the reward-system neurons that underlie hunger and thirst, according to a new study in mice. “The nerve cells get scrambled at the neural level in terms of their responses to food and water,” says lead investigator Eric Nestler, professor of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “So the ability of the brain, in a way, to compute that the individual is hungry or thirsty becomes lost.” In addiction research, there has been a “long-appreciated hypothesis that drugs of abuse hijack the natural reward circuitry of the brain,” says Marcelo Wood, professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the new work. “It’s something that everyone talks about and writes about,” he says, but the exact physiology behind it “remained rather unknown.” In the new work, mice injected daily with morphine or cocaine for up to five days showed progressively increased activity in neurons in the nucleus accumbens that also respond to food and water, according to measures of FOS protein, a marker of neuronal activation. The drugs also elicited a stronger response than the natural rewards, two-photon calcium images showed, confirming what scientists have thought based on behavioral evidence, Nestler says. These alterations ultimately curbed the animals’ urge for sustenance, the study also shows: The mice ate less food and drank less water than mice given a saline solution, and lost weight—even after withdrawing from the drugs for three days. That confirms the hijacking hypothesis “pretty convincingly,” Wood says. “I thought that was brilliant.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Justice Dept. Recommends Easing Restrictions on Marijuana

By Eileen Sullivan, Glenn Thrush and Zolan Kanno-Youngs The Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had recommended easing restrictions on marijuana in what could amount to a major change in federal policy. Even though the move, which kicks off a lengthy rule-making process, does not end the criminalization of the drug, it is a significant shift in how the government views the safety and use of marijuana for medical purposes. It also reflects the Biden administration’s effort to liberalize marijuana policy in a way that puts it more in line with the public as increasingly more Americans favor legalizing the drug. The decision comes at an opportune time for President Biden, who is trailing the presumptive Republican nominee, former President Donald J. Trump, as they approach the November election, according to a recent CNN poll. It could also lead to the softening of other laws and regulations that account for the use or possession of cannabis, including sentencing guidelines, banking and access to public housing. People familiar with the recommendation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland planned to tell the White House Office of Management and Budget that the government should change the drug’s categorization. After the office assesses the recommendation, it will still face a long road before taking effect, including being subject to public comment. The Associated Press earlier reported the Justice Department decision. For more than half a century, marijuana has been considered a Schedule I drug, classified on the same level as highly addictive substances like heroin that the Drug Enforcement Administration describes as having no currently accepted medical use. Moving marijuana to Schedule III, as the Department of Health and Human Services recommended in August, would put it alongside less addictive substances like Tylenol with codeine, ketamine and testosterone, meaning that it would be subject to fewer restrictions on production and research, and that eventually it could be prescribed by a doctor. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Teens are using an unregulated form of THC. Here’s what we know

By Helen Bradshaw Walk into a gas station in the United States, and you may see more than just boxes of cigarettes lining the back wall. Colorful containers containing delta-8, a form of the substance THC, are sold in gas stations and shops across the country, and teens are buying them. A recent survey of more than 2,000 U.S. high school seniors found that more than 11 percent of them had used delta-8 in the past year, researchers report March 12 in JAMA. This is the first year the Monitoring the Future study, one of the leading nationally representative surveys of drug use trends among adolescents in the United States, looked at delta-8 use. Because more than 1 in 10 senior students said they used the drug, the survey team plans to monitor delta-8 use every year going forward. “We don’t really want to see any kids being exposed to cannabis, because it potentially increases their risk for developmental harms … and some psychiatric reactions” such as suicidal thoughts, says Alyssa Harlow, a researcher on the survey and an epidemiologist at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. Despite its prevalence, especially in the South and the Midwest, delta-8 is still new to consumers and research. Science News talked with Harlow and addiction researcher Jessica Kruger of the University of Buffalo in New York to help explain the delta-8 craze and its effects on kids. What is delta-8-THC? Cannabis plants contain over 100 compounds known as cannabinoids. Delta-8 is one of them. The most well-known is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or delta-9-THC. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29248 - Posted: 04.11.2024

Teen Drug Use Habits Are Changing, For The Good. With Caveats.

By Matt Richtel Historically speaking, it’s not a bad time to be the liver of a teenager. Or the lungs. Regular use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among high school students has been on a long downward trend. In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is a precipitous drop from 88 percent in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national poll of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and 10th graders, and for those three age groups when it came to cigarette smoking. In 2023, just 15 percent of seniors said that they had smoked a cigarette in their life, down from a peak of 76 percent in 1977. Illicit drug use among teens has remained low and fairly steady for the past three decades, with some notable declines during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2023, 29 percent of high school seniors reported using marijuana in the previous year — down from 37 percent in 2017, and from a peak of 51 percent in 1979. There are some sobering caveats to the good news. One is that teen overdose deaths have sharply risen, with fentanyl-involved deaths among adolescents doubling from 2019 to 2020 and remaining at that level in the subsequent years. Dr. Nora Volkow has devoted her career to studying use of drugs and alcohol. She has been the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse since 2003. She sat down with The New York Times to discuss changing patterns and the reasons behind shifting drug-use trends. What’s the big picture on teens and drug use? People don’t really realize that among young people, particularly teenagers, the rate of drug use is at the lowest risk that we have seen in decades. And that’s worth saying, too, for legal alcohol and tobacco. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Why Are Older Americans Drinking So Much?

By Paula Span The phone awakened Doug Nordman at 3 a.m. A surgeon was calling from a hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., where Mr. Nordman’s father had arrived at the emergency room, incoherent and in pain, and then lost consciousness. At first, the staff had thought he was suffering a heart attack, but a CT scan found that part of his small intestine had been perforated. A surgical team repaired the hole, saving his life, but the surgeon had some questions. “Was your father an alcoholic?” he asked. The doctors had found Dean Nordman malnourished, his peritoneal cavity “awash with alcohol.” The younger Mr. Nordman, a military personal finance author living in Oahu, Hawaii, explained that his 77-year-old dad had long been a classic social drinker: a Scotch and water with his wife before dinner, which got topped off during dinner, then another after dinner, and perhaps a nightcap. Having three to four drinks daily exceeds current dietary guidelines, which define moderate consumption as two drinks a day for men and one for women, or less. But “that was the normal drinking culture of the time,” said Doug Nordman, now 63. At the time of his 2011 hospitalization, though, Dean Nordman, a retired electrical engineer, was widowed, living alone and developing symptoms of dementia. He got lost while driving, struggled with household chores and complained of a “slipping memory.” He had waved off his two sons’ offers of help, saying he was fine. During that hospitalization, however, Doug Nordman found hardly any food in his father’s apartment. Worse, reviewing his father’s credit card statements, “I saw recurring charges from the Liquor Barn and realized he was drinking a pint of Scotch a day,” he said. Public health officials are increasingly alarmed by older Americans’ drinking. The annual number of alcohol-related deaths from 2020 through 2021 exceeded 178,000, according to recently released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: more deaths than from all drug overdoses combined. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Long Before Amsterdam’s Coffee Shops, There Were Hallucinogenic Seeds

By Rachel Nuwer In 2011, archaeologists in the Netherlands discovered an ancient pit filled with 86,000 animal bones at a Roman-Era farmstead near the city of Utrecht. It fell to Martijn van Haasteren, an archaeozoologist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, to sort through them. Deep into the cataloging process, Mr. van Haasteren was cleaning the mud from yet another bone when something unexpected happened: Hundreds of black specks the size of poppy seeds came pouring out from one end. The specks turned out to be seeds of black henbane, a potently poisonous member of the nightshade family that can be medicinal or hallucinogenic depending on the dosage. The bone — hollowed-out and sealed with a tar plug — was an ancient stash pouch that had kept the seeds safe for some 1,900 years. Researchers determined that the bone was deposited in the pit somewhere between A.D. 70 and 100 — a time when the Netherlands represented the Roman Empire’s northern border. Parts of the container were smooth, suggesting frequent handling. This “very special” discovery provides the first definitive evidence that Indigenous people living in such a far-flung Roman province had knowledge of black henbane’s powerful properties, said Maaike Groot, an archaeozoologist at the Free University of Berlin and a co-author of a paper published in the journal Antiquity last month describing the finding. At the time that the original owner stuffed the container full of seeds, the properties of black henbane were already well known in Rome. Writings by Pliny the Elder and others testify to the medicinal use of black henbane seeds and leaves, but warn that an overindulgence will result in mind-altering effects. The plant was mostly used during Roman times as an ointment for pain relief, although some sources also reference smoking its seeds or adding its leaves to wine. It seems its psychedelic effects came to the fore in the Middle Ages, when black henbane became associated “with witches and summoning demons,” said Mr. van Haasteren, who is a co-author of the paper. © 2024 The New York Times Company

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