What’s behind the limited supply of drugs to help stem attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Is there a connection to the rise in abuse of ADHD meds?

Those who regularly take prescription medication to treat their attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are finding a shortage of the drugs at their local pharmacy. The problem is so bad that the FDA is receiving hundreds of complaints daily from patients unable to get their prescriptions filled.

What’s behind the shortage? It turns out it is the result of a troubled partnership between drug manufacturers and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Manufacturers want to maximize profits while the FDA wants to minimize abuse of the increasingly popular drugs, often misused by college students looking for a quick, cheap way to stay awake.

Curbing abuse is a noble cause, but kids who rely on drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are caught in the middle. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has told its membership of more than 8,000 doctors that the shortage seems to be “widespread across a number of states” and called the lack of meds “devastating” for children.

Placing blame is tricky. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is the agency responsible for setting manufacturing quotas aimed at controlling supplies and preventing abuse. The FDA blames the shortages on overly strict quotas set by the DEA. The DEA, in turn, questions whether the shortages are real or manufactured, suggesting manufacturers are simply choosing to make more of the expensive pills than the generics, creating supply and demand imbalances.

That means fewer generics are being produced, so those who can’t afford the pricier name-brand drugs are forced to go without. Another issue is that ADHD drugs aren’t always interchangeable. Individuals can react differently to similar but not identical meds, meaning they don’t just need any ADHD drug to be available, but the generic or brand that has been proven to work for them.

Another contributing factor is surely the fact that ADHD drugs are being prescribed in record numbers. Doctors wrote 51.5 million prescriptions for ADHD drugs in 2010, with a total sales value of $7.42 billion — an increase of 83 percent from the $4.05 billion sold in 2006, according to IMS Health, a drug information company. Along with this rise in legitimate use, abuse of ADHD drugs rises as well.

Prescription Drug Abuse Help at The Canyon

If you or someone you love needs help with a prescription drug addiction, call The Canyon at the toll-free number on our homepage. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about drug treatment, financing or insurance.

A new study proves the care shown by “high-touch” moms in early childhood can lessen the risk of drug use by those children in later life.

Good news: Moms may have more control than they think over keeping their kids off drugs – and it starts in early childhood. A new study conducted by Duke University and the University of Adelaide in Australia seems to prove that an attentive, nurturing mother may be able to help her children better resist the temptations of drug use later in life.

The study was conducted on rats and showed that a rat mother’s attention in early childhood actually changes the immune response in the brains of her pups by permanently altering genetic activity, according to Staci Bilbo, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, who led the research. Interestingly enough, high-touch mothering increased the brain’s production of an immune system molecule called Interleukin-10, leaving these rats better able to resist the temptation of a dose of morphine much later in life.

This is the first study to show how morphine causes a molecular response in the glial cells of the brain’s reward centers, which had only recently been identified as part of drug addiction’s circuitry.

To find out what that response looked like, the researchers used a technique called the “handling paradigm,” in which very young rat pups are removed from their mother’s cage for 15 minutes and then returned. “As soon as they’re returned, she checks them out vigorously,” grooming the pups and cleaning them, Bilbo said. For a control group, another set of pups were never removed. Some of them had more attentive mothers than others, just by natural variation.

The animals then were put through a test called the “place preference chamber,” a two-roomed cage in which they would be given a dose of morphine if they entered one side, or a dose of saline on the other. Over the next four weeks, the rats were returned to the two-sided chamber three times a week for five minutes, but were never given another dose of morphine. Initially, they all showed a preference for the morphine side, but over time, the handled rats showed little preference, which indicated their craving had been “extinguished,” Bilbo said.

“Two exciting things have been uncovered by this groundbreaking research,” said coauthor Mark Hutchinson, a research fellow at the University of Adelaide. “One, we have proven a mother’s touch changes brain function and two, we have demonstrated an exciting way to intervene in the cycle of drug abuse.”

Next up, Bilbo’s team plans to look at the long-term effects of maternal stress on the brain’s immune response. They’ll be working with the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative at Duke, which examines real-world environmental health effects in Durham, NC in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Drug Rehab

If you or someone you love needs drug rehab, call The Canyon at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

Experts are still trying to make sense of a new study that shows those with high IQs are two to three times more likely to take illegal drugs.

A new UK study has produced some interesting findings. It appears that people with high IQs are more likely to smoke marijuana and take other illegal drugs, compared with those who score lower on intelligence tests. It would seem that those who are smart enough to know better would show higher instances of abstaining, but when it comes to drugs, that’s just not true.

“It’s counterintuitive,” says lead author James White of the Center for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement at Cardiff University in Wales. “It’s not what we thought we would find.”

The research was part of a much larger study that has spanned decades. The findings are based on interviews with some 7,900 British people born in early April 1970. Researchers measured the participants IQs at ages 5 and 10, then followed up with them at ages 16 and 30, asking about symptoms of psychological distress and drug use as part of a larger survey.

Researchers found that by age 30, approximately 35 percent of men and 16 percent of women said they had smoked marijuana at least once in the previous year. Over that same time period, 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women said they had taken cocaine. Previous-year drug users tended to have scored higher on IQ tests than non-users.

The IQ effect was a big factor in women, with ultra-smart members of the fairer sex proving to be three times more likely to have tried drugs and high-IQ men twice as likely. And these results held even when researchers controlled for factors like socioeconomic status and psychological distress, which are also correlated with rates of drug use.
So why might smarter kids be more likely to try drugs? “People with high IQs are more likely to score high on personality scales of openness to experience,” says White. “They may be more willing to experiment and seek out novel experiences.”

Another factor could be that the messages used to attempt to deter teens from drug use — particularly during the 1980s in the UK when the study group was in adolescence — weren’t exactly known for the subtlety of their reasoning, so they may not have targeted the smarter group well.

Drug Rehab

If you or someone you love is in need of drug addiction treatment, call The Canyon at our toll-free number. Someone is there to take your call 24 hours a day and answer any questions you have about treatment, financing or insurance.

Harm reduction is a pretty broad term, referring to any changes that an addict or alcoholic makes to make themselves safer during active addiction and live another day to potentially move one tiny step closer to a life that doesn’t include addiction. Here are a few examples:

• Choosing a designated driver while drinking
• Using clean needles
• Marking your own drug paraphernalia to avoid inadvertently sharing with someone who has a contagious disease like Hepatitis C or HIV
• Learning how to handle an overdose
• Getting tested for contagious diseases or getting treatment for infections to avoid passing them along
• Learning about the dangers of certain practices and what the safer methods of ingestion are

Needle Exchanges Proven Effective in Harm Reduction: What About Crack Pipes?

Needle exchanges have been extremely effective in many major cities in cutting down on the transmission of Hepatitis C and HIV. Active addicts bring in their “dirties” or used needles and get an equal number of clean needles to take with them. There are no questions asked and no one questions how they will use the needles or where they get the drugs they use in those needles, and needle exchange sites often offer resources to counseling, testing, and other drug addiction treatment help options if there is interest.

As a result, the overburdened health care system in these cities has seen a lessening of new diagnoses of deadly illnesses which in turn lowers their costs – something government officials always like to see. Plus, making it legal to carry needles means less of a burden on the court system who no longer has to process related cases.

Vancouver wants to take the theory behind the needle exchange sites and apply it to a different method of drug ingestion: crack pipes. A new pilot program has been developed with the hope that free crack pipes will help to cut down on disease transmission even more and help alleviate some of the problems that their healthcare system is seeing as a result.

What Do You Think?

Are free crack pipes a good way to help fight the transmission of HIV and help patients get involved in the healthcare system in a positive way so that they can learn how to avoid picking up illnesses during active addiction? For that matter, do you agree with needle exchange sites and their benefit of helping heroin addicts move ever closer to the treatment they need to fight heroin addiction – and win? If so, how can we improve available programs? If not, what’s a better way to fight drug addiction on the street level?

Employment is a big part of an active and positive recovery. You need goals. You need something positive to fill your days. You need a way to pay back your debts. Finding a job is one of the best ways to do those things, but here are a few things to consider as you undertake the process.

Finding a Job You Can Deal and Assessing Your Career After Drug Rehab

Many in recovery report that the atmosphere at their job and how they feel while at work can make or break their recovery. This isn’t just a money issue. You may find a job that pays you six figures, but if the stress is too much for you to bear or you are surrounded by people who are actively abusing drugs and alcohol and you ultimately relapse back into addiction, it won’t matter at all. Here are a few “must-haves” when it comes to choosing a job after drug addiction treatment:

• No drug abuse or use. If you are surrounded by co-workers who smoke marijuana or do crystal meth on the job or come into work while high, it’s only a matter of time before you relapse. Avoid these jobs at all costs.
• Low stress. Any job that causes you stress due to a demanding boss, intense hours that are difficult for your schedule, work that is hard for you to undertake, or too much work expected in a short period of time can ultimately push you to relapse.
• Interesting work or advancement opportunities. If you find a low-key, laidback job where you get to work with good people – great! But if it starts to bore you or you find that you have a hit a ceiling in terms of your advancement opportunities, this too can be an obstacle to your sobriety.

The best idea is to find a job that is interesting to you that provides you with room for growth and progress, allows you to work with positive people, and means working hours that allow you to attend 12-step meetings or personal therapy and care for your physical health. Ultimately, if your current career path or the career you were in before drug rehab no longer serves you, it’s time to change focus.

Living Your Life After Drug Rehab

Stay tuned for the last post in the series, After Drug Rehab: The Question of Relationships. In the meantime, check out other posts in the series:

1.       After Drug Rehab: Getting the Support You Need to Succeed

2.       After Drug Rehab: Create Your Own Treatment Plan

3.       After Drug Rehab: Focus on Relapse Prevention

4.       After Drug Rehab: Paying Off Your Drug Addiction Treatment Bill

California legalized marijuana for medical purposes. So too did Alaska, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont – in total, 21 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana. Even New Jersey has determined that marijuana is a suitable medication for certain illnesses. Will New York join them?

State Senator Diane J. Savino (NY-D) has sponsored legislation in hopes of getting the ball rolling in that direction. She recently spoke with L Magazine and voiced her opinions on the subject, discussing how her own parents’ passing due to cancer pushed her to believe that perhaps medical marijuana can have some benefits. As a co-sponsor to the bill started by Senator Tom Duane and Assemblyman Gottfried, State Sen. Savino believes that, while New York has always been in the middle in terms of its approach to the issue of drug abuse, drug addiction legislation, and medical marijuana, it’s time to push forward and make some definitive decisions.

Comparing Medical Marijuana to Prescription Drugs

On the question of legality and medical merit, State Sen. Savino had some interesting points to make for her cause. When asked what she thought of the fact that many federal agencies like the DEA seemed to think that marijuana could be used medicinally, Savino pointed out that an agency whose primary goal is law enforcement will always err on the side of fighting addiction and upholding laws that ban the addictive use and abuse of any substance.

Savino said: “They’re right to be concerned about that. But morphine is far more addictive than marijuana. Morphine is [an addictive substance]. OxyContin is tremendously addictive, almost instantaneously to people. Vicodin is addictive. What’s the difference between these two [classes of] drugs? One is dispensed by a pharmacy and one isn’t. But if marijuana has a more palliative treatment to people, why would we not figure out a way to control the distribution of it, the way that we attempt to control the distribution of other controlled substances?

Creating a Medical Marijuana Model that Protects Against Addiction and Abuse

State Sen. Savino is not interested in replicating the mistakes that many states made by being one of the first to implement medical marijuana. Rather, she’s looking at the evidence-based practices that have been successful in different states and hoping that New York can create an effective and functional medical marijuana program. The goal is to mitigate the risks of abuse and the development of addiction that has plagued other states in both the use of medical marijuana and prescription drugs.

What do you think? Can it be done? Should it be done?

More than 2200 pounds of marijuana were stopped on their way into the country in by crews from the US Coast Guard, US Customs and Border Protection Office of Air and Marine, US Navy, and the San Diego Marine Task Force in July. Four smugglers were arrested on suspicion of drug smuggling in connection with the seizure on the coast of San Diego. The drugs and the suspected smugglers were turned over to MTF officials.

A few days later, another 21 bales of marijuana were recovered by the Coast Guard off the coast of Point Loma, California. Three Coast Guard vessels were dispatched to stop the boat that had thrown them overboard and recovered the drugs and brought in two smugglers.

Does Interception of Marijuana Smugglers Have an Effect on Marijuana Addiction?

Absolutely. If there are fewer drugs to go around, then there is less for people to buy. If there is less for people to buy, prices go up. If prices go up on the remaining marijuana, then some people have a moment of clarity that can help them recognize what marijuana is doing to their lives. Others will spend the money for the marijuana and may come closer to the moment that they realize that they are giving up too much in the pursuit of getting high.

On the distribution end, losing huge shipments of marijuana is a cost issue. Growers and smugglers who are in it for the money quickly learn that there’s a high price to pay if they get caught. Losing large shipments can be frustrating and as lower level smugglers are arrested and provide information about those higher up in the organization, they can slowly be dismantled by law enforcement.

Marijuana Addiction and Struggling: A Huge Fight Fought by the Few

Of course, there will always be new smugglers to replace the old and people who are desperate for money who will agree to run boats of marijuana illegally. And addicts who want their drugs will find a way to come up with the money to pay for what’s available – or grow their own or turn to other suppliers.

The best way to fight marijuana addiction is with marijuana rehab. Here, those who are living with a marijuana addiction will be able to get the help they need. If there are no addicts, then there is no demand and when there’s no demand, there is no more distribution.

What do you think? What’s the best way to fight marijuana abuse and addiction?