By Nicole Branan Losing a loved one is always painful, but for most people time eventually heals the wounds. For about 10 to 20 percent of the bereaved, however, accepting and getting over a loss remains extremely difficult, even years later. Now researchers have come a step closer to elucidating the neurobiological underpinnings of this condition called complicated grief (CG). An August 15 functional MRI study in NeuroImage shows that in CG patients reminders of the deceased activate a brain area associated with reward processing, pleasure and addiction. A team led by Mary-Frances O’Connor of the University of California, Los Angeles, studied 23 women—11 of whom suffered from CG—who had lost a mother or sister to breast cancer in the past five years. While in the scanner, the women saw pictures and words that reminded them of their loved one. Brain networks associated with social pain became activated in all women, but in the CG patients reminders of the deceased also excited the nucleus accumbens, a forebrain area most commonly associated with reward. O’Connor believes this continued neural reward activity probably interferes with adaptation to the new situation. “When we see a loved one or reminders of a loved one, we are cued to enjoy that experience,” she says. “But when a loved one dies, our brains have to adapt to the idea that these cues no longer predict this rewarding experience.” Scientists do not yet know why some people adapt better than others do. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12142 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Chad Boutin The Eighth Annual Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin' Festival in Sopchoppy, Florida, hardly seems like the place to make an important scientific discovery. But that's what happened this year, when two teams of researchers descended on the event, intent on figuring out why grunting noises bring burrowing earthworms to the surface. Dozens of Florida Panhandle residents earn their living by grunting. Rising before dawn, they head out to the pine forests, hammer a wooden stake about 30 cm into the ground, and rhythmically scrape its top with a long, smooth piece of steel called a rooping iron. The rasping noises, which sound like low-pitched grunts (see video), bring hundreds of earthworms above ground, and the grunters sell them as fish bait. Yet scientists have never successfully explained why the technique works. Hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery, a team led by biologist Jayne Yack of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and another led by biologist Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, dragged geophones and other seismic equipment used to detect underground vibrations to the Sopchoppy festival last April. Yack and colleagues confirmed that worm grunting actually works. With help from experienced grunters, the researchers took up their own rooping irons and scraped their stakes about 25 times in 30 seconds, producing vibrations in the ground of about 100 hertz. As they report online 15 October in Biology Letters, in less than 2 minutes, their efforts brought up scores of native Diplocardia mississipiensis earthworms within a few meters of the grunting stake. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 12141 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Long thought the province of the abstract, cognition may actually evolve as physical experiences and actions ignite mental life With gargantuan ears, gleaming brown eyes, a fuzzy white muzzle and a squat, furry body, Leonardo looks like a magical creature from a Harry Potter book. He’s actually a robot powered by an innovative set of silicon innards. Like a typical 6-year-old child, but unlike standard robots that come preprogrammed with inflexible rules for thinking, Leonardo adopts the perspectives of people he meets and then acts on that knowledge. Leonardo’s creators, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Personal Robots Group and special effects aces at the Stan Winston Studio in Van Nuys, Calif., watch their inquisitive invention make social strides with a kind of parental pride. Consider this humanlike attainment. Leo, as he’s called for short, uses sensors to watch MIT researcher Matt Berlin stash cookies in one of two boxes with hinged, open covers. After Berlin leaves the room, another experimenter enters and creeps over to the boxes, a hood obscuring his face. The mysterious intruder moves the cookies from one box to the other and closes both containers before skulking out. Only Leo can unlock the boxes, by pressing buttons on a panel placed in front of him. Berlin soon returns and vainly tries to open the original cookie box. He asks Leo to unlock it for him. The robot shifts his gaze from one box to the other, his mental wheels seemingly turning. Then Leo unlocks the second box. The robot has correctly predicted that Berlin wants the cookies that were put in the first box, and that Berlin doesn’t realize that someone moved those cookies to the other box. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 12140 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Of course, many experiences in daily life reflect the physical stimuli that enter the brain. But the same neural machinery that interprets actual sensory inputs is also responsible for our dreams, delusions and failings of memory. In other words, the real and the imagined share a physical source in the brain. So take a lesson from Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.” One of the most important tools neuroscientists use to understand how the brain creates its sense of reality is the illusion. Historically, artists as well as illusionists have used illusions to develop deep insights into the inner workings of the visual system. Long before scientists were studying the properties of neurons, artists had devised a series of techniques to “trick” the brain into thinking that a flat canvas was three-dimensional or that a series of brushstrokes was actually a still life. Applied to architecture, their work continues to astound. Visual illusions are defined by the dissociation between physical reality and subjective perception of an object or event. When we experience such an illusion, we may see something that is not there, or fail to see something that is there, or even see something different from what is there. Because of this disconnect between perception and reality, these optical tricks demonstrate the ways in which the brain can fail to re-create the physical world. By studying these failings, we can learn about the computational methods the brain uses to construct visual experience. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12139 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jim Horne ASK people whether they would like more sleep, and most will say yes. Does that mean they are not sleeping enough? The apparent desire for more shut-eye, together with oft-repeated assertions that our grandparents slept longer, all too easily leads to the conclusion that we in the west are chronically sleep-deprived. Adding to these concerns are recent claims that inadequate sleep causes obesity and related disorders, such as diabetes. Plus ça change. Claims of widespread sleep deprivation in western society are nothing new - in 1894, the British Medical Journal ran an editorial warning that the "hurry and excitement" of modern life was leading to an epidemic of insomnia. Even then it probably wasn't true. The fact is that most adults get enough sleep, and our collective sleep debt, if it exists at all, has not worsened in recent times. Moreover, claims that sleep deprivation is contributing to obesity and diabetes have been overblown. My assertion is that the vast majority of people sleep perfectly adequately. That's not to say that sleep deprivation doesn't exist. But in general we've never had it so good. Over the past 40 years, there have been several large studies of how much sleep people actually get, and the findings have consistently shown that healthy adults sleep 7 to 7½ hours a night. The well-known "fact" that people used to sleep around 9 hours a night is a myth. The figure originates from a 1913 study by researchers at Stanford University in California, which did find that average daily sleep was 9 hours - though this applied to children aged 8 to 17, not adults. Even today, children continue to average this amount. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12138 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Linda Geddes JOSH VILLA was 26 and driving home after a drink with a friend on 28 August 2005 when his car mounted the kerb and flipped over. Villa was thrown through the windscreen, suffered massive head injuries and fell into a coma. Almost a year later, there was little sign of improvement. "He would open his eyes, but he was not responsive to any external stimuli in his environment," says Theresa Pape of the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Chicago, who helped treat him. Usually there is little more that can be done for people in this condition. Villa was to be sent home to Rockford, Illinois, where his mother, Laurie McAndrews, had volunteered to care for him. But Pape had a different suggestion. She enrolled him in a six-week study in which an electromagnetic coil was held over the front of his head to stimulate the underlying brain tissue. Such transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been investigated as a way of treating migraine, stroke, Parkinson's disease and depression, with some promising results, but this is the first time it has been used as a potential therapy for someone in a coma-like state. The rapidly changing magnetic fields that the coil creates can be used either to excite or inhibit brain cells - making it easier or harder for them to communicate with one another. In Villa's case, the coil was used to excite brain cells in the right prefrontal dorsolateral cortex. This area has strong connections to the brainstem, which sends out pulses to the rest of the brain that tell it to pay attention. "It's like an 'OK, I'm awake' pulse," says Pape. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12137 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith A monkey's paralysed wrist can be moved and controlled by electrical signals artificially routed from its brain, according to scientists who say that their experiment is a step towards helping paralysed people to regain the use of their limbs. Previously, scientists have been able to train monkeys to move robotic arms using signals routed from electrodes in their brains1. This involved decoding the activity of tens of neurons at a time to replicate actions such as grasping, and required considerable computing power. Now, Chet Moritz and his colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle have used similar signals to deliver direct electrical stimulation from just one neuron to a paralysed muscle. They first implanted a number of electrodes in the motor cortex of two macaque monkeys. Each electrode picked up signals from a single neuron, and those signals routed through an external circuit to a computer. The neuronal signals controlled a cursor on a screen, and the monkeys were trained to move the cursor using only their brain activity. The scientists then temporarily paralysed the monkeys' wrist muscles using a local anaesthetic. They re-routed the signals from the electrodes to deliver electrical stimulation to the wrist muscles, and found that the monkeys could control their previously paralysed limbs using the same brain activity. The monkeys learnt to do this in less than an hour, the team report in Nature2. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 12136 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jessica Griggs Grief could be nature's way of keeping couples together, say neurobiologists. Using one of nature’s only monogamous mammals, the prairie vole, as a model for human attachment, Larry Young from the Emory University School of Medicine in Georgia and Oliver Bosch from the University of Regensburg, Germany, looked at the role stress plays in the grieving process. They paired 18 male voles with females and 20 males with males for five days, enough time for male and female to mate and form an enduring attachment to each other. Half of each group was then separated from its partner and their "mental state" assessed. Males that were separated from their female partner showed behaviour reminiscent of depression and anxiety in humans, say the researchers. They spent more time floating rather than swimming when dunked in water and struggled for less time when held upside down by the tail, compared with those voles that had been separated from another male. In vole terms, this means that they showed less will to fight against stressful situations. The bonded voles also had double the level of the stress hormone corticosterone in their blood, suggesting that CRF, the brain peptide that regulates the stress response, has a role to play in the grieving process. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12135 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ann Gibbons Bonobos have a reputation as the hippies of the primate world, with a make-love-not-war image. But scientists appear to have underestimated their bloodthirsty tendencies. In a new study, researchers report observing wild bonobos hunting and eating monkeys, which shows that the apes are not so different from their more aggressive cousins, the common chimpanzees. Ever since researchers recognized bonobos (Pan paniscus) as a different species from common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) 75 years ago, they have noticed fundamental differences between the two apes. Male common chimpanzees form gangs that hunt monkeys, dominate female chimpanzees, and even murder other males in territorial skirmishes. By contrast, bonobo males spend more time having sex, are pushed around by females, and have even been observed grooming monkeys. One explanation for the difference is that bonobo males are kept in check by females, which form tight alliances that prevent males from dominating them and forming macho hunting parties necessary to capture elusive monkeys. Researchers thought that bonobos hunted only prey such as forest antelopes and squirrels that were easy for an individual to capture. But far less is known about bonobos than about common chimpanzees, because there are so few bonobos left in the wild. Only between 5000 and 60,000 remain in the lowland forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where regional conflicts have made it difficult for researchers to get an accurate picture of their behavior. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 12134 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Anna Salleh for ABC Science Online Female lab mice can respond quite differently to male mice when it comes to anxiety, a new study has found, a discovery which could have important implications for scientific research. Neuroscientist Dr Tim Karl of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and colleagues have reported their findings in the European Journal of Neuroscience. "In the end it has general implications for how to use animal models," he said. "At the moment male mice are used to apply findings to both male and female humans. That's definitely not the ideal situation." Dr Karl and colleagues studied the impact of a neurotransmitter known as neuropeptide Y (NPY), which helps lower anxiety levels as well as influences aggression and appetite. Previous studies have shown that when mice are given a drug that mimics NPY it reduces anxiety when they are put under stress. Studies have also shown that mice genetically-modified to lack the gene for NPY are more prone to anxiety than normal mice. But these previous studies used male mice, which are the standard laboratory animal. Dr Karl and colleagues studied the behaviour of both female and male mice that had their NPY gene knocked out. To their surprise, they found that while both sexes were more anxious than normal mice, lacking the NPY gene made the male mice more anxious than female mice. © 2008 ABC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 12133 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Increasing numbers of people are using prescription drugs like Ritalin to boost alertness and brain power, say experts. Up to a fifth of adults, including college students and shift workers, may be using cognitive enhancers, a poll of 1,400 by Nature journal suggests. Neuropsychologist Professor Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge University said safety evidence is urgently needed. Experts gather to debate this topic at a meeting in London on Monday evening. Professor Sahakian's own work shows 17% of students in some US universities admit to using the stimulant Ritalin (methylphenidate) - a drug designed to treat hyperactive children - to maximise their learning power. One in five of the 1,400 people who responded to the Nature survey said they had taken Ritalin, Provigil (modafinil) or beta-blockers for non-medical reasons. They used them to stimulate focus, concentration or memory. Of that one in five, 62% had taken Ritalin and 44% Provigil - a drug normally prescribed to alleviating daytime tiredness in people suffering from the rare sleep disorder narcolepsy. Most users had somehow obtained their drugs on prescription or else bought them over the internet. Although these are only snapshots of use, Professor Sahakian says it does suggest these drugs are becoming more popular. Professor Sahakian said given the increasing use of these drugs outside of their intended clinical setting, safety trials were urgently needed. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12132 - Posted: 10.14.2008

Scientists are testing whether vitamin D supplements can ease symptoms of Parkinson's disease. A US team found 55% of Parkinson's patients had insufficient levels of vitamin D, compared to 36% of healthy elderly people. However, the Emory University researchers do not yet know if the vitamin deficiency is a cause or the result of having Parkinson's. The study appears in the journal Archives of Neurology. Parkinson's disease affects nerve cells in several parts of the brain, particularly those that use the chemical messenger dopamine to control movement. The most common symptoms are tremor, stiffness and slowness of movement. These can be treated with oral replacement of dopamine. Previous studies have shown that the part of the brain affected most by Parkinson's, the substantia nigra, has high levels of the vitamin D receptor, which suggests vitamin D may be important for normal functions of these cells. Vitamin D is found in the diet, but is primarily formed in the skin by exposure to sunlight. However, the body's ability to produce the vitamin decreases with age, making older people more prone to deficiency. One theory is that people with Parkinson's may be particularly vulnerable because their condition limits the amount of time they spend out of doors. However, scientists say it may also be possible that low vitamin D levels are in some way related to the genesis and origin of the disease. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 12131 - Posted: 10.14.2008

By GINA KOLATA This is a story about M.R.I.’s, those amazing scans that can show tissue injury and bone damage, inflammation and fluid accumulation. Except when they can’t and you think they can. I found out about magnetic resonance imaging tests when I injured my forefoot running. All of a sudden, halfway through a run, my foot hurt so much that I had to stop. But an M.R.I. at a local radiology center found nothing wrong. That, of course, was what I wanted to hear. So I spent five days waiting for it to feel better, taking the anti-inflammatory drugs ibuprofen and naproxen, using an elliptical cross-trainer, and riding my road bike with its clipless pedals that attach themselves to my bicycling shoes. By then, my foot hurt so much I had to walk on my heel. I was beginning to doubt that scan: it was hard to believe nothing was wrong. So I went to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York for a second opinion from Dr. John G. Kennedy, an orthopedist who specializes in sports-related lower-limb injuries. And there I had another M.R.I. It showed a serious stress fracture, a hairline crack in a metatarsal bone in my forefoot. It was so serious, in fact, that Dr. Kennedy warned that I risked surgery if I continued activities like cycling and the elliptical cross-trainer, which make such injuries worse. And I had to stop taking anti-inflammatory drugs, since they impede bone healing. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 12130 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Melinda Wenner The leading cause of infant death in developed countries, sudden infant death syndrome, is still largely a medical mystery. Past studies have revealed that in the brain stems of more than half of infants who die from SIDS, the neurons that produce serotonin—a chemical responsible for regulating heart rate, body temperature and mood—are overly prevalent and abnormally shaped. Until now, no one has known how these problems might cause death, but a July 4 Science study reveals clues about what might be going wrong in SIDS and how doctors might prevent it. Mood researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Monterotondo, Italy, were investigating how serotonin levels affected anxiety-related behavior in mice when they got a surprise. They bred the mice to have too many 5-HT1A receptors, which are known to signal neurons to slow down the release of serotonin when the chemical is abundant in the brain. Having more receptors ultimately lowers serotonin levels and overall serotonin activity. The team was startled to find that nearly three quarters of the mice died before they turned four months old, typically after suffering sudden drops in heart rate and body temperature so drastic that the complications killed the animals. Although the researchers do not yet know what prompts these crises, co-author Cornelius Gross speculates that they occur when serotonin activity cannot ramp up properly. For instance, serotonin systems are turned off during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, so waking is typically accompanied by a rapid increase in serotonin activity. In the mice, Gross explains, the compromised 5-HT1A feedback loop may prevent serotonin neurons from firing when they should, disrupting nervous system function. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12129 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eric Bland -- Vocal cords were overrated anyway. A new Army grant aims to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. No need to type an email, dial a phone or even speak a word. Known as synthetic telepathy, the technology is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Similar technology is being marketed as a way to control video games by thought. "I think that this will eventually become just another way of communicating," said Mike D'Zmura, from the University of California, Irvine and the lead scientist on the project. "It will take a lot of research, and a lot of time, but there are also a lot of commercial applications, not just military applications," he said. The idea of communicating by thought alone is not a new one. In the 1960s, a researcher strapped an EEG to his head and, with some training, could stop and start his brain's alpha waves to compose Morse code messages. The Army grant to researchers at University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland has two objectives. The first is to compose a message using, as D'Zmura puts it, "that little voice in your head." © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12128 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Daniel Cressey Assessing the ratio of males to females in endangered populations is vital for conservation work. But sexing a dolphin is tricky — not least because the crucial parts of the mammal are usually concealed beneath the waves. Researchers generally have to rely on time-consuming observations, either inferring a female's sex from its close association with a calf, or noting genitalia when animals leap from the water or are captured on underwater video. The alternative is a biopsy that is potentially unpleasant for the animal. Lucy Rowe and Stephen Dawson, marine biologists at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, have now come up with a accurate alternative that could spare their fellow researchers, and the dolphins, this inconvenience. In a recently published paper in Marine Mammal Science the pair report successfully using fin photographs to determine the sex of bottlenose dolphins in a well-studied population in New Zealand's Doubtful Sound1. "Our technique allows bottlenose dolphins to be sexed from [characteristics] measured solely from dorsal fin identification photographs, which are routinely collected as part of non-invasive population monitoring," Rowe and Dawson told Nature News in an email. Rowe and Dawson found that male fins had significantly more scars than female fins, probably as a result of fighting. Male fins had a median of 15% scar tissue, whereas in females this was just 3.9%. Conversely, female fins tended to have a greater number of patchy skin lesions than male fins, with a median of 12.1% coverage compared with males' 6.8%. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 12127 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeanna Bryner We know our siblings and in-laws have personalities — sometimes to a fault. But science recently has revealed that such individual differences are widespread in the animal kingdom, even reaching to spiders, birds, mice, squid, rats and pigs. Now a new mathematical model helps to explain how and why such animal temperaments develop over time. The model explains a central question of both animal and human personality — why certain individuals are more rigid or flexible than others, and why some change their behavior in response to changes in their environment while others do not. The answer, says Franz Weissing of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, comes down to costs and benefits. A group in which both rigid and flexible personality types co-exist makes for an optimal system, his model shows. The field of animal-personality study is starting to gain some substance and credibility, said University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling, who does research in this field. "When I started doing this, like 10 years ago, things were really different. I remember people thought it was anthropomorphic [to use the term animal personality]," said Gosling, who was not involved in the recent study.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12126 - Posted: 06.24.2010

HealthDay News) -- Brain oxygen levels and blood pressure may play a role in the complex relationship between sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) and cognitive problems in children, a U.S. study finds. About two-thirds of children with SDB (snoring or obstructive sleep apnea) have some degree of cognitive deficit, but it's been difficult to match the severity of cognitive deficit to the severity of the SDB. This suggests that other factors may be involved or that the correct factors weren't being measured, according to background information in an American Thoracic Society news release about the study. "A history of snoring is a predictor for cognitive deficit in children with SDB," study principal investigator Dr. Raouf Amin, a professor of pediatrics and director of the division of pulmonary medicine at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, said in the news release. ad_icon "However, the frequency of apnea events during sleep does not predict cognitive deficit and does not correlate with the degree of cognitive deficit. Such a paradox raised the question of whether there are some variables that we do not traditionally measure in the sleep laboratory that might modify the effect of SDB on cognition," Amin said. For this study, which included children aged 7 to 13, the researchers used infrared spectroscopy to determine whether a new factor -- the degree to which the brain's blood remains oxygenated during sleep -- could explain variability in cognitive dysfunction better than SDB severity. The children's blood pressure was also measured.

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12125 - Posted: 10.13.2008

By STEPHEN CASTLE BRUSSELS — Noise from personal music players is a routine annoyance for travelers on buses, trains and planes. But it also threatens permanent hearing loss for as many as 10 million Europeans who use them, according to a scientific study for the European Union that will be published Monday. The report said that those who listened for five hours a week at high-volume settings exposed themselves to more noise than permitted in the noisiest factory or work place. Maximum volume on some devices can generate as much noise as an airplane taking off nearby. The study — from a team of nine specialists on the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks — also warns that young people do not realize the damage until years later. “Regularly listening to personal music players at high-volume settings when young,” the report said, “often has no immediate effect on hearing but is likely to result in hearing loss later in life.” The report is the latest of several to warn that the “MP3” generation of youths may be heading for hearing impairment in later life.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 12124 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Tierney In 2002, the Bush administration’s National Drug Control Strategy set a goal of reducing illegal drug use by 25 percent in five years. This was followed by an unprecedented campaign of persuasion (more than 100 different anti-drug advertisements and commercials) and law enforcement as the number of annual arrests for marijuana possession climbed above 700,000 — higher than ever before, and greater than the combined total for all violent crimes. Now that the first five years’ results are available, the campaign can officially be called a failure, according to an analysis of federal drug-use surveys by Jon Gettman, a senior fellow at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. The prevalence of marijuana use (as measured by the portion of the population that reported using it in the previous month) declined by 6 percent, far short of the 25-percent goal, and that decline was partially offset by a slight increase in the use of other illicit drugs. As a result, the overall decline in drug use was less than 4 percent. Dr. Gettman’s report was sponsored by the Marijuana Policy Project Foundation, a group opposed to current drug laws, but it draws on the same five years of federal drug-survey data used by John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. When the data became available this year, the White House’s press release hailed the numbers as evidence of “tremendous progress” after five years, but the press release failed to mention the original goal of a 25-percent reduction in overall drug use. Instead, the White House highlighted reductions for specific drugs (like cocaine) and among specific groups (like teenagers). Such selective press releases, Dr. Gettman told me, have been the norm for two decades because there’s been so little overall progress in the federal war on drugs.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12123 - Posted: 06.24.2010