There’s a dangerous new trend that involves the popular candy Smarties. Instead of eating them, kids are snorting them. They’re crushing the candy and inhaling it, in videos seen all over YouTube. The motivation behind the crushing and snorting of Smarties isn’t known.The bizarre trend is happening across the nation, including at a Rhode Island middle school, where the principal sent an email about it to students. And a health expert is warning about the dangers. “Anytime you snort or inhale a substance into your lungs that is not meant to be it is definitely hazardous to your health and could have significant health consequences for individuals,” said behavioral care expert Rebecca Boss. Some of the negative side effects of snorting Smarties include infection and scarring of the nasal cavity.
Tag Archives: Drugs
How to Talk to Your Kids About Drugs
Tell your children that you love them and you want them to be happy and healthy. Say that you do not find alcohol and other illegal drug use acceptable. Many parents fail to state this simple fact. Explain that drug use hurts people. It can cause AIDS, impaired coordination, slowed growth, and emotional harm such as feelings of isolation or paranoia. It is also important to discuss the legal issues associated with drug and alcohol use because a conviction for a drug offense can lead to prison, loss of a job or college loan. Talk about positive, drug-free alternatives and explore them together. Some possibilities may include sports, reading, movies, bike rides, hikes, camping and games.
Approach your children calmly and openly and do not exaggerate. Talk face to face. Try to understand each other’s point of view. Be an active listener and let your child talk about fears and concerns while not interrupting or preaching. Establish an ongoing conversation rather than giving a one-time speech. It is also important that you set an example and avoid contradictions between your words and actions. To help your child deal with peer pressure, act out various situations in which one tries to convince the other to take drugs and come up with at least two ways to handle each situation.
As parents, be alert to changes in your child’s mood. Drug use may cause your child to become more irritable, secretive, withdrawn, overly sensitive, or inappropriately angry. In addition, your child may become less responsible by not going to school or coming home late. Watch for changes in friends or lifestyles. Physically, drugs may cause your child to concentrate less, lose coordination, weight and create an unhealthy appearance.
New Drug Called ‘Krokodil’ Eats Flesh
The first cases of a terrifying new drug called ‘Krokodil’ that eats flesh from the inside out, is flammable and leaves addicts with reptilian-like skin have been reported this week in Arizona – and the state fears the beginning of an epidemic. Popular in Russia, Krokodil is homemade, is three-times cheaper than heroin and created by mixing codeine with gasoline or oil, filtering it and then injecting the rancid concoction into the users body.
Banner’s Poison Control Center most likely encountered the drug when two addicts arrived in emergency rooms with their flesh hanging off their body, exposing bone or with skin resembling that of a crocodile, hence its name.
‘We’ve had two cases this past week that have occurred in Arizona,’ said Dr. Frank LoVecchio, the co-medical director at Banner’s Poison Control Center. Continual use of Krokodil causes blood vessels to burst, leaving skin green and scaly among addicts eventually causing gangrene and their flesh to begin to rot. Rabid use in Russia has caused up to 2.5 million people to register and seek treatment as addicts and the average life span for a user is only two to three years.
‘When drug users do it repeatedly, the skin sloughs. It causes hardening of their skin. It will cause necrosis,’ explained LoVecchio. LoVechhio says that the two cases he has encountered are most likely linked and he declined to comment on the appearance of the two users. ‘Where there is smoke there is fire, and we’re afraid there are going to be more and more cases,’ said LoVechhio.
In Russia, Krokodil usage is spreading like a virus among young people and according to a Time magazine investigation, even those who manage to quit their addiction come away disfigured for life. Some users in Russia develop brain damage and speech impediments in addition to the horrific scars.
Krokodil, whose medical name is desomorphine, has the same mental effect as heroin but is produced with over-the-counter codeine and mixed with gasoline, paint thinner, hydrochloric acid and even the red phosphorous scraped from the tips of matches.
Prevalent in Siberia and the Russian Far East, the explosion of users began in 2002, but over the past five years in Russia, usage has trebled. In 2011 alone, Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service confiscated 65 million doses. The flesh rotting that is specific to Krokodil occurs directly at the injection site which could be anywhere from the feet to the forehead to the more traditional arms. According to Time magazine, ‘Gangrene and amputations are a common result, while porous bone tissue, especially in the lower jaw, often starts to dissipate, eaten up by the drug’s acidity.’
Heroin Support Group Founder Caught Dealing Dope
A Chicago-area man who helped found a heroin-abuse support group faces felony charges after allegedly selling heroin to undercover police.
Peter K. Rundo, 21, who lives near the Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve near west suburban Naperville, was ordered held on a $50,000 bond after being charged with two felony counts of manufacture or delivery of heroin, according to records on file in Will County Circuit Court. Officials said they received word a little more than a month ago that Rundo was buying heroin in Chicago and selling it in Naperville. John Arizzi, the deputy director of the Joliet Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad, said undercover investigators made contact with Rundo and arranged to buy the drug from him in “controlled purchases.”
Rundo allegedly met undercover officers three times in Naperville, with the third and final sale occurring about 8 p.m. Sept. 16. Arizzi said Rundo drove to the area in a silver, 2000 BMW and offered no resistance when taken into custody. The heroin, allegedly delivered each time in small, foil packets, totaled six grams, Arizzi said.
Rundo in July 2012 was convicted in DuPage County of driving under the influence of narcotics, following an arrest in Naperville. He and two friends in recent years helped found the Open Hearts/Open Minds heroin-abuse support group. Rundo also was interviewed for and appeared in a segment of the national TV program “48 Hours” on heroin abuse.
Addicted for life?
Breaking an addiction is often the hardest thing someone can do, and many never completely eliminate their attraction to the abused substance.
New research appears to support this premise by finding that even long-term abstinence from cocaine does not result in a complete normalization of brain circuitry. The brain just doesn’t appear to go back to what a “normal,” non-addicted brain looks like.
Research on drug addiction often involves chicken-and-egg questions surrounding the abuse of drugs. In particular, one of those questions is whether individuals who abuse psychostimulants like cocaine are more impulsive and show alterations in brain reward circuits as a consequence of using the drug, or whether such abnormalities existed prior to their drug use.
In the former case, one might expect brain alterations to normalize following prolonged drug abstinence.
In the new research, Krishna Patel and colleagues compared neural responses between three groups of people who were asked to complete a task that resembles bidding on eBay items.
The 3 groups consisted of 47 healthy controls, 42 currently drug-abusing cocaine users, and 35 former cocaine users who had been abstinent an average of 4 years. They also compared all three groups on their levels of impulsivity and reward responding. They found that active users showed abnormal activation in multiple brain regions involved with reward processing, and that the abstinent individuals who were previously cocaine-dependent manifested differences in a subset of those regions.
Both current and former cocaine users displayed similarly elevated impulsivity measures compared to healthy controls, which may indicate that these individuals had a pre-existing risk for addiction. Indeed, the degree of impulsivity correlated with several of the brain activation abnormalities.
These findings suggest that prolonged abstinence from cocaine may normalize only a subset of the brain abnormalities associated with active drug use.
“The knowledge that some neural changes associated with addiction persist despite long periods of abstinence is important because it supports clinical wisdom that recovery from addiction is a lifelong process,” says Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “Further, it is the start of a deeper question: How do these persisting changes develop and how can they be reversed?”
Researchers believe additional further studies will be needed to investigate such questions, including the continued attempt to determine the extent to which differences in former cocaine users reflect aspects of pre-existing features, exposure to cocaine, or recovery.
Source: Elsevier
The Effects of Synthetic Marijuana
Emily Bauer, 17, was left paralyzed, blind and on life support after smoking ‘Spice,’ and her family prepared to say their goodbyes. Less than a year later, she has returned to high school in Cypress, Texas.
Emily Bauer’s family was told in December the teenager would never recognize them again. She had suffered multiple strokes after smoking synthetic marijuana, and a large portion of her brain was damaged. She would be unaware of her surroundings and never regain control of her arms and legs, doctors said.
Nine months later, 17-year-old Emily returned to Cy-Fair High School in Cypress, Texas.
Now she rolls through the hallways with the help of aides who also read materials to her and take her notes. Emily is still partly blind and can no longer read or write, but she spends her mornings in class and afternoons taking steps and working toward recovery in therapy.
Emily’s family believes her near-death experience was caused by synthetic marijuana, a dangerous substance also known as Spice, K2 or fake weed. It contains dried, shredded plant material and a variety of chemical compounds that are supposed to give users a high similar to smoking pot. Fake weed is marketed as a “safe” and “legal” alternative to drugs — although the National Institute on Drug Abuse says it is neither — and is sometimes sold as potpourri or incense at gas stations, head shops and convenience stores.
The teen had been smoking it daily two weeks before she landed in the hospital, her family told CNN. One day in December 2012 Emily complained of a migraine and went to lie down. She then entered what her sister called a psychotic-like state. She began slurring her words and hallucinating.
Emily was still acting violent 24 hours after smoking the synthetic marijuana, her sister said. Doctors put her in an induced coma and ran tests that showed she had suffered multiple strokes resulting in serious brain damage. They performed emergency brain surgery to drain excess fluid and relieve pressure.
Things looked bleak. Her family took her off life support a few days before she turned 17. But, even without her breathing and feeding tubes, Emily fought back. The next day, she whispered to her mom that she loved her.
“On her 17th birthday, even though she couldn’t move, is blind, and could hardly be aware of what was going on around her, she laughed with us as we made jokes and listened to her soft whisper replies,” her sister, Blake Harrison, wrote for CNN’s iReport.
Emily’s family started a non-profit called Synthetic Awareness for Emily (SAFE), to educate the public of the dangers of fake weed. Tommy Bryant, Emily’s stepfather, told CNN that the family hopes her story will save others.
“I’m trying to get the kids to realize that one bad decision could lead to a lifetime of pain,” he said. “Not just for them, but for their loved ones.”
Related links:
Synthetic Awareness For Emily (SAFE)
Pure but not so simple
At a party not long ago in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Kaitlin, a 22-year-old senior at Columbia University, was recalling the first time she was offered a drug called Molly, at the elegant Brooklyn home of a cultural figure she admired. “She was, like, 50, and she had been written about in the Talk of the Town,” said Kaitlin, who was wearing black skinny jeans and a tank top. “This woman was very smart and impressive.”
At one point, the hostess pulled Kaitlin aside and asked if she had ever tried the drug, which is said to be pure MDMA, the ingredient typically combined with other substances in Ecstasy pills. “She said that it wasn’t cut with anything and that I had nothing to worry about,” said Kaitlin, who declined to give her last name because she is applying for jobs and does not want her association with the drug to scare off potential employers. “And then everyone at the party took it.”
Since that first experience, Kaitlin has encountered Molly at a birthday celebration and at a dance party in Williamsburg. “It’s the only drug I can think of that I have to pay for,” she said. “It makes you really happy. It’s very loose. You just get very turned on — not even sexually, but you just feel really upbeat and want to dance or whatever.”
Molly is not new, exactly. MDMA, or 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, was patented by Merck pharmaceuticals in 1914 and did not make much news until the 1970s, when psychotherapists began giving it to patients to get them to open up. It arrived at New York nightclubs in the late 1980s, and by the early ’90s it became the preferred drug at raves at Limelight and Shelter, where a weekly party called NASA later served as a backdrop in Larry Clark’s movie “Kids.”
Known for inducing feelings of euphoria, closeness and diminished anxiety, Ecstasy was quickly embraced by Wall Street traders and Chelsea gallerinas. But as demand increased, so did the adulterants in each pill (caffeine, speed, ephedrine, ketamine, LSD, talcum powder and aspirin, to name a few), and by the new millennium, the drug’s reputation had soured.
Then, sometime in the last decade, it returned to clubs as Molly, a powder or crystalline form of MDMA that implied greater purity and safety: Ecstasy re-branded as a gentler, more approachable drug. And thanks in part to that new friendly moniker, MDMA has found a new following in a generation of conscientious professionals who have never been to a rave and who are known for making careful choices in regard to their food, coffee and clothing. Much as marijuana enthusiasts of an earlier generation sang the virtues of Mary Jane, they argue that Molly (the name is thought to derive from “molecule”) feels natural and basically harmless.
A 26-year-old New York woman named Elliot, who works in film, took Molly a few months ago at a friend’s apartment and headed to dinner at Souen, the popular “macrobiotic, natural organic” restaurant in the East Village, and then went dancing. “I’ve always been somewhat terrified of drugs,” she said. “But I’d been curious about Molly, which is sold as this pure, fun-loving drug. This is probably completely naïve, but I felt I wasn’t putting as many scary chemicals into my body.”
Robert Glatter, an emergency-room physician at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side, might disagree. Dr. Glatter used to go months without hearing about Molly; now, he sees about four patients a month exhibiting its common side effects, which include teeth grinding, dehydration, anxiety, insomnia, fever and loss of appetite. (More dangerous ones include hyperthermia, uncontrollable seizures, high blood pressure and depression caused by a sudden drop in serotonin levels in the days after use, nicknamed Suicide Tuesdays.)
“Typically in the past we’d see rave kids, but now we’re seeing more people into their 30s and 40s experimenting with it,” Dr. Glatter said. “MDMA use has increased dramatically. It’s really a global phenomenon now.”
Nationally, the Drug Abuse Warning Network reports that the number of MDMA-related emergency-room visits have doubled since 2004. It is possible to overdose on MDMA, though when taken by itself, the drug rarely leads to death, Dr. Glatter said. (Official mortality figures are not available, but a study by New York City’s deputy chief medical examiner determined that from 1997 to 2000, two people died solely because of MDMA.)
According to the United States Customs and Border Protection, there were 2,670 confiscations of MDMA in 2012, up from 186 in 2008.
“Oh, we’re very aware of it,” said Rusty Payne, an agent at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s national office. Mr. Payne had not heard of Molly before 2008. Since then, the agency has used the term to document arrests in Syracuse and Jackson, Miss. “Molly has been very much glamorized in pop culture, which is obviously a problem,” he said.
Indeed, many attribute MDMA’s resurgence to the return of Electronic Dance Music (or E.D.M.), the pulsating Euro beat that has infiltrated the sound of pop radio acts like Rihanna, Kesha and Katy Perry. At the Ultra Music Festival in Miami last year, Madonna was criticized for asking her audience, “How many people in this crowd have seen Molly?” (She later said that she was referring to a friend’s song, not the drug.)
In the last year, rappers have also embraced Molly, with references to the drug appearing in lyrics by Gucci Mane, Kanye West and Lil Wayne, who raps, “Pop a Molly, smoke a blunt, that mean I’m a high roller,” on Nicki Minaj’s 2012 hit “Roman Reloaded.” Rick Ross was recently dropped as a Reebok spokesman after he rapped about spiking a woman’s Champagne with Molly. And Miley Cyrus has a new single called “We Can’t Stop,” in which she sings what sounds like, “We like to party, dancing with Molly.” (Her producer has said the lyric is “dancing with Miley.”)
People who like Molly, which can cost $20 to $50 a dose, say it is a more socially acceptable drug than cocaine, because it is not physically addictive. Cat Marnell, 30, the former beauty director at xoJane.com who recently sold a memoir about drug addiction to Simon & Schuster for a reported $500,000, has noticed that many of her friends who sell Molly like to pack the powder into clear capsules that they buy from LifeThyme Market, the health food store next to C. O. Bigelow in the West Village. “Molly is the big thing now,” Ms. Marnell said. “Coke is sort of grimy and passé. Weed smells too much and is also sort of low rent and junior high.”
But Ms. Marnell scoffed at MDMA’s reformed image. “People think Molly is this flower-child drug,” she said recalling photos from the 2011 Coachella music festival showing the former Disney star Vanessa Hudgens, wearing a floppy ’70s hat and American Indian-inspired jewelry, dipping into a white powder that the gossip blogs ruled to be Molly. (Her publicist said it was white chocolate.) “It’s true that it’s not like cocaine in that it doesn’t make you bloated and it doesn’t make your nose raw, but sometimes you take it and you can’t sleep or you get really sick. It’s still a hard-core drug.”
MDMA was first classified as an illegal substance in 1985. By the early 2000s, public officials nicknamed Ecstasy “Agony,” and warned that MDMA use could lead to Parkinson’s disease, a lifetime of depression and “holes in your brain.”
Those claims have since been disproved, according to Dr. John Halpern, a psychiatrist at Harvard who has conducted several MDMA studies. In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has approved studies looking into whether MDMA can be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety in terminal cancer patients. And Dr. Halpern has found no evidence that the drug impairs cognitive performance. “A drug that actually does kill brain cells — which MDMA doesn’t — is alcohol,” he said.
But a greater worry for doctors and law enforcement officials is the many substances that people might be ingesting unknowingly when they take Molly. “Anyone can call something Molly to try to make sound less harmful,” said Mr. Payne of the D.E.A. “But it can be anything.”
According to Dr. Halpern, many of the powders sold as Molly contain no MDMA whatsoever; others are synthetic concoctions designed to mimic the drug’s effects, Mr. Payne said. Despite promises of greater purity and potency, Molly, as its popularity had grown, is now thought to be as contaminated as Ecstasy once was.
“You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s somehow safer because it’s sold in powdered form,” Dr. Halpern said.
But to some users, Molly still feels like a more respectable substance than others.
“I think people are much more aware of where coke comes from and what it does in those countries,” said Sarah Nicole Prickett, 27, a writer for Vice and The New Inquiry, a culture and commentary site, who called cocaine a “blood drug.” “Molly, if it’s pure, it feels good and fun.” (Much of it comes from Canada and the Netherlands, Mr. Payne said.)
Ms. Prickett, who moved to New York from Toronto last year, added that she could see why the drug might be taking hold in her new habitat.
“My impression of New York was that everyone just did drugs for work, that everyone was on speed,” she said. “Molly makes you feel unplanned, and that’s not a common feeling in New York, where everyone knows where they’re going all the time and they’re going very, very fast.”
Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has helped finance MDMA studies since the drug first entered the club scene, put Molly in the context of past drug trends: in the 1960s, he suggested, people searched for deeper spirituality and found LSD; in the ’70s, as hippie culture became mainstream, marijuana entered the suburban household; in the ’80s, cocaine complemented the extravagance and selfishness of the greed decade; and by the early ’90s, youths dropped out of reality, dancing all night on Ecstasy or slumping in the corner on heroin. MDMA, which in addition to acting as a stimulant also promotes feelings of bonding and human connection, just might be what people are looking for right now.
“As we move more and more electronic, people are extremely hungry for the opposite: human interaction on a deeper level where you’re not rushing around,” Mr. Doblin said. “The rise of Molly is in tune with how people are feeling emotionally.”
Sobriety is a journey, not a destination. 