Researchers into “magic mushrooms” have found out for themselves what users always suspected. Just a single trip can prompt an enduring but “positive” personality change in almost 60% of subjects—the increased levels of “openness” discovered encompass possible boosts to adventurousness, curiosity, imagination and vocabulary. This is startling, as personality traits have long been regarded as largely stable characteristics. The researchers, at John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, were experimenting with psilocybin, the active ingredient in ‘shrooms. Study author Roland R. Griffiths, a psychiatry and neuroscience professor, said, “psilocybin actually changes one domain of personality that is strongly related to traits such as imagination, feeling, abstract ideas and aesthetics, and is considered a core construct underlying creativity in general.” What’s more, “the changes we see appear to be long term.” Researchers used 51 “psychologically healthy” volunteers—almost all deemed themselves “spiritually active” and more than half had completed postgrad education. These brainy guinea pigs were given “moderate to high” psilocybin doses over two to five sessions of about eight hours, while lying down wearing eye masks and headphones with music. Each time neither they nor their monitors knew whether they’d been given the drug or a placebo. Follow-up “states-of-consciousness” testing showed that most baseline personality traits remained unchanged—neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness matched pre-drug testing. But “openness” not only increased dramatically, but remained elevated throughout a 14-month follow-up period. The findings echo what a long line of luminaries like Aldus Huxley, Timothy Leary, tribal shamen and AA founder Bill Wilson have believed; counter-culture author Ken Kesey once said, “LSD lets you in on something…And I don’t know of anybody who hasn’t come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding.” The news follows reports that August’s Hurricane Irene may have helped produce a bumper crop of magic mushrooms on the East Coast. But the study’s authors add the obligatory disclaimer: “we certainly don’t want to imply that there’s not risk associated with these compounds,” stressed Griffiths. “And we wouldn’t want to be a reason for an uptick for non-medical, uncontrolled use of this sort of thing.”

One drunken joyrider had an irony-filled night in Chicago this weekend. At 1:40 am on Sunday morning, 36-year-old local Juan Hernandez, in an advanced state of intoxication, came upon two paramedics loading an empty stretcher into an unoccupied ambulance at the city’s Norwegian-American Hospital. As they busied themselves at the back of the vehicle, Hernandez opportunistically jumped into the front and drove off, say the police. But he only got about a mile and a half—smashing into a few parked cars along the way—before crashing to a final halt. The injuries he sustained—which, fortunately, were only minor—meant that a second ambulance had to be dispatched to collect him. And rush him straight back to the Norwegian-American Hospital, which may have seemed vaguely familiar, his condition notwithstanding. Hernandez’ next stop is likely to be the courthouse; his charges include criminal damage to government property, possession of a stolen vehicle, reckless driving, driving without a license and, of course, a DUI. But drunken ambulance theft isn’t as unusual a crime as you might think—a wasted Wisconsin resident aged 24 went one better by hijacking an ambulance complete with paramedics treating an injured person in the back in February 2010. And 52-year-old Paul John Sos stole yet another ambulance after checking himself out of a San Diego hospital a couple of months later, to which he’d been brought—by an ambulance—dead drunk.

Zeta and Sinaloa Cartels Now Dominate Mexico Drug War, Actor and Addict Jeff Conaway’s Death Ruled Accidental, and Broadway Drama Turned Samuel L. Jackson to Crack.

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Express-Times Photo | PAMELA SROKA-HOLZMANNBushkill Township physician Albert DeFranco hopes to open a drug and alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation center next year in Bushkill Township.

Northampton County’s first drug and alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation center is slated to open next year in Bushkill Township.

Northampton County officials and township family physician Albert DeFranco hope to break ground by late December on the Better Health Institute at 448 Moorestown Road.

DeFranco has a family practice near the Route 512 site. He said he has worked with county officials on the project since 2007 and hopes to open its doors by late spring 2012, he said.

The county is supplying about $2.2 million in state reinvestment funds while DeFranco said he has contributed about $8,000 to $9,000.

“This is historic,” said Ross Marcus, director of human services for the county. “This is the first time Northampton County will have a drug and alcohol establishment.”

Express-Times Photo | PAMELA SROKA-HOLZMANNThe Better Health Institute is slated to open on this tract at 448 Moorestown Road, Bushkill Township.

DeFranco said once completed, the 10,000-square-foot, 24-unit, one-story building across the street from the Country Junction General Store and the St. Luke’s Wind Gap Medical Center will offer seven beds for detoxification patients and 16 beds for rehabilitation patients.

Patients living in Northampton County will receive priority, however, DeFranco said residents from surrounding counties will be welcome.

Nearby residents had mixed views about the facility.

“It is our neighborhood,” said Mike Zimmer, co-owner of Original Dough Boy’s Restaurant, 230 W. Moorestown Road. “It’s questionable of what’s going to come out.”

Zimmer’s wife, Intsafka, also said she is concerned about the center’s patients.

Robert Wambold, however, said DeFranco is free to do what he wants with his property.

“I don’t want people telling me what to do on my property,” he said.

DeFranco said he sympathizes with residents, but stresses his patients are regular people who might have lost their jobs in a tough economic climate or became homeless and had nowhere to turn but to drugs and alcohol.

“This isn’t arch criminals here. This could be your next-door neighbor,” he said. “Some people can’t cope with the stress of life. Most of these people are going undiagnosed in early years when they should have been diagnosed with these problems. Now, it festers into the adult phase.”

The project has approvals from Bushkill Township’s zoning hearing board and board of supervisors.

“They weren’t opposed to it,” DeFranco said. “The only voices of opinion were it was needed and a well-deserved thing.”

Bushkill supervisors and planners did not return calls seeking comment Friday.

About 32 employees will work at the center, including nurses, physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and other counselors and medical personnel. Employees will work during three available shifts.

In the program, which DeFranco described as “very structured,” patients will receive evaluations and a physical exam before entering into the detoxification program, which could last two to three days on average. During the rehabilitation portion of the program, there will be various forms of individual and group counseling.

Patients will stay at the facility for about one to two weeks on average. Following the program, they will continue to receive outpatient treatment.

“We’re not going to allow them to go out there with no patient support,” DeFranco said. “The whole idea of this program is to teach them a new way of life and adjust to life’s stressers and be able to handle them.”

The funding for the project comes from HealthChoices reinvestment funds and was approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare. HealthChoices is Pennsylvania’s name for its Medicaid program, which provides health care for low-income residents and is funded by the federal and state government.

Marcus said counties are given the option of administering the behavioral health portion of HealthChoices, to assure coordination with county-based mental health and drug and alcohol services.

Aside from his work as a physician, DeFranco is a former teacher, principal and schools superintendent in a Sussex County, N.J., school district, is a U.S. Army veteran and was a physician for the Northampton County Prison.

Among the hundreds of thousands of secret US State Department cables recently released by WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblower website, a cache reveals US diplomats defending the interests of big pharmaceutical companies, even at the risk of the hosting nation’s own public health priorities. The memos dutifully detail the many embassy meetings with local Big Pharma reps, during which US officials are presented with laundry lists of issues to raise with one or another local government ministry. Invariably the goal of the exercise is for pharma to pressure the US to pressure the host country to give favorable treatment to expensive brand name drugs, typically by preventing in-country manufacturing or marketing of far cheaper generic versions.

Separate cables show such industry profiteering tactics threatening to taint US diplomatic relations in emerging nations such as Hong Kong, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and India. Overall, a familiar picture emerges of a diplomatic corps if not held hostage by, at least a captive audience to, the financial interests of the biggest American pharma companies as they come into covert conflict with developing nations that quite naturally prioritize the health care of their people over the high margins that Big Pharma has come to expect. With several hundred drugs and vaccines in development to treat addiction, the scourge of hundreds of millions worldwide, the affordability and accessibility of these innovative (and, no doubt, expensive) medicines will become a pitched battle in global public health over the next decade. The outcome of the skirmishes sketched in the WikiLeaks cables will help decide whether profits or people prove victorious.

The cables by no means paint a uniform portrait of government lackeys doing industry’s bidding. Many memos betray a between-the-lines irritation at pharma’s monomaniacal self-interest. Still, there is a disturbing silence on the obvious moral or ethical objections to industry demands for high price, long patents, and other protections despite the cost in human lives. Only a single cable—from the outgoing US ambassador to Poland in 2009—lays bare the vast greed that drives these complex, highly technical negotiations.

The developing nations, contrary to what you might expect, in many ways hold the best cards in this political game. Emerging nations have the fastest-growing economies, the most upwardly mobile middle classes, and the biggest untapped markets in the world. And in their impressive pushback against Big Pharma, India has been the 800-pound gorilla over the past decade. A democracy with well-educated but relatively inexpensive brain power, the pharma industry views India not merely as a market but as a potential new hub of drug development and testing.

There is a disturbing silence on the obvious moral objections to industry demands for high prices, long patents, and other protections despite the cost in human lives. Only a single cable lays bare the vast greed that drives these complex, technical negotiations.

Aware of its advantage, India has played hardball, starting with its approval of local generic HIV drugs for its hundreds of thousands of citizens with the virus—a defiant challenge to Big Pharma, which had refused to discount its own brand-name AIDS drugs to affordable levels. (In the US, HIV treatment costs as much as $15,000 a year; the Indian generic knocked out knockoffs with a $350 price tag.) In addition, India’s supreme court has been fearless in shooting down foreign pharmas when they sue for patent infringement by Indian generic companies. When an emerging nation’s entire legal and legislative apparatus unite to oppose industry interests, the company can either fold its hand or fold up its tent. When drug companies retaliated by boycotting India and refusing to sell new drugs there, they attracted universal opprobrium for denying sick people medicines.

Typically, the WikiLeaks memo from the US embassy in New Delhi detail a laundry list of complaints by the Organization of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, including a new price-control regime to keep drug costs more affordable and a wholesale rejection, over US objections, of so-called data exclusivity, allowing a generic firm to bring knockoffs to market as soon as a branded patent ends.

Drug prices are only one of the issues raised in the cables. Equally important to Big Pharma is obtaining patent protection in new markets. Patents, which confer market exclusivity on a product, are especially dear to drugmakers because truly innovative medicines are among the riskiest and most expensive investments around; a company spends, on average, $1 billion and 10 years to bring a new drug to market, and the rate of failure in late-stage development is more than 50%. Without a patent to allow the manufacturer a monopoly to sell the drug for a limited period of time, a competitor could copycat the molecule virtually overnight. 

But what is a fair compromise between an innovator’s need to recoup profits from an invention and the public’s need to access medicine at an affordable price? In the US, with its political system owned and operated by corporations, the answer is, as much as the market will bear—one reason that our health-care is the most expensive and the least efficient in the developed world. But it turns out that most nations in the rest of the world are far less servile to Big Pharma than Uncle Sam.

In the Dominican Republic a group of Big Pharma reps met with a US counsel to request a speedup in the very slow rate at which the small nation’s patent approval office was stamping drugmakers’ filings: out of 700 filed over the past decade, fewer than 10 had been processed! The diplomat penning the memo, which was all analysis and no action, commented wryly that the Dominican Republican was evidently waiting to see if the anti-corporate winds blowing across Latin America marked a lasting change in the political weather. 

The politics of patent protection of pharmaceuticals tend to make for tedious reading, as do the details of the World Trade Organization’s treaty called the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which gives private companies broad protections for their medicine monopolies, including a guarantee of 20-year patent protection before competitors can flood the market with generics. (A monopoly is, by definition, not a free market.)  But, as longtime consumer activist James Love, who heads the Knowledge Ecology International organization, explained to The Fix, “All the things the US is doing is whatever benefits a handful of companies like Pfizer, Abbott, Merck, and so on. The US basically pushes for anything they want.” Whenever they score a major victory for these companies, they try to push it further. Love explained, “What does the US want? The US wants more.” 

Although under the TRIPS agreement, pharmaceutical companies could register their drugs for 20-year patents in any nation via that country’s regulatory apparatus. But they don’t want to risk the sly Dominican Republic–style delay. So they want more. They want automatic monopolies in every country. In practice, the easiest way to get these monopolies is by having the State Department pressure governments in the developing world to grant them long periods of data exclusivity. The data at issue consists of the mountain of information from the numerous clinical trials showing safety and efficacy to win approval from the FDA. By demanding data exclusivity, Big Pharma is essentially trying, Love explained, “to create an intellectual property right over the very knowledge that a drug is safe and effective—something that is completely independent of a patent.”

Throughout the month of September, initiatives surrounding its designation as National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month have promoted recovery and supported the growth of healthy, resilient individuals and families in the United States.

When President Barack Obama acknowledged this annual event, his proclamation underscored the reality that alcohol and other drugs threaten the future of millions of Americans. “Abuse of prescription medication has reached epidemic levels, drunk and drugged driving pose significant threats to public safety,” the President noted. “As a nation, we must strive to promote second chances and recognize each individual’s ability to overcome adversity.”

However, despite national efforts to increase education and recovery programs, many Americans question if we are actually winning this battle. What have we learned in recent years and are we on the right track?

For some answers, I spoke with my MHA-NYC colleague Dr. Ellen Friedman, a psychotherapist with extensive experience as a clinical director at many substance abuse treatment programs.

As Dr. Friedman noted, technology now plays a disturbing role in the promotion of drug and alcohol abuse.

“When you search online, it’s easy to find blogs extolling the virtues of drugs, websites to order them directly, and videos identifying how best to use them,” she said. “Popular music and television often promote substance abuse as a popular, commonplace activity. It can be argued, therefore, that technological advancement presents the opportunity for alcohol and substance abuse to be promoted, facilitated and normalized.”

As a result, substance abuse has become more generally accepted and common among a range of demographics. Dr. Friedman pointed out that 4.7 percent of Americans age 50 and older used illicit drugs during the past year — a figure that is on the rise.

Of particular concern for Dr. Friedman is the impact on younger Americans.

“For generation X, prescription drug abuse and binge drinking are becoming ever more acceptable,” she said. “Almost half of teens say that they do not see a great risk in heavy daily drinking and 1 in 5 teens have abused prescription medicines. Most either don’t understand or simply ignore the risks.”

At the same time, Dr. Friedman believes that we have increased our understanding of addiction. This is good news for helping families and communities in the future.

“Based on advances in scientific understanding, how we define addiction has changed,” she noted. “It is now accepted wisdom in the field of substance abuse that addiction is a disease, specifically a chronic disease of brain rewards, motivation, memory and related circuitry.”

As we learn more about the long lasting effects of drugs on the brain, Dr. Friedman believes it’s time to change our perspective on the disease and its victims.

“The profile of the addict as an amoral thrill-seeker is not only pernicious but scientifically wrong. As noted by the Institute of Medicine, stigmatizing people who need treatment results in the unwillingness of individuals to seek treatment as well as the reluctance of some medical professionals to treat people with addiction problems.”

Recovery Month 2011 has certainly helped increase awareness and support for this important issue. As Dr. Friedman firmly believes, we now have an opportunity to shift the emphasis to the problem rather than the person. Let us correct our perception of those who abuse substances to reflect current understandings that support humane, non-judgmental and comprehensive treatment.