Today we acknowledge and remember those who served our country in the armed services. To all who sacrificed – we honor you. You are the best of our nation. Our pride is deep and our commitment to you is never ending. From the beaches of Peleliu in the west to the sands of Normandy in the east, you are in our thoughts. May you find comfort in the love of a nation lucky to have you in our midst.
Thank you all for voting yesterday. The turnout was good and the people have spoken. Now, it’s time to unite behind our President and work in the service of making things better. While you may or may not be happy with the outcome, we must ALL get behind the choice that’s been made.
Thanks again…
Hurricane Sandy has devastated the northeastern US. Our thoughts are with all those who were in its path. While our resolve is strong and our future bright, we are currently in a state of shock over our vast lost. Please help those who need it most. Text ‘redcross’ to 90999 and donate $10 to the cause. The stress and anxiety that fills the hearts and minds of our neighbors is beyond belief. These are the kinds of environmental triggers that often result in relapse to drug seeking behavior. Please help. Please….
Brookhaven National Laboratory’s chemistry building receives a special designation Friday for the role researchers there played in the 1970s producing a breakthrough way to visualize sugar metabolism in the brain and cancerous tumors.
The American Chemical Society’s New York division is designating the building a Historic Chemical Landmark, based on a major advance by Brookhaven scientists that led to the development of positron emission tomography, or PET scanning.
Last year, the chemical society similarly honored Stony Brook University’s chemistry department because it was the site of research that led to the development of the MRI.
At Brookhaven, the designation renews a sense of pride among scientists a generation later.
In 1974, Brookhaven scientists embarked on a project that culminated two years later in the development of a highly specific radioisotope that forever changed what scientists could learn about the brain and cancer.
The human brain is often said to be the most complex entity in the known universe. It is a voracious consumer of glucose, its primary fuel. Tumors, likewise, gobble glucose at an accelerated rate.
Brookhaven scientists developed the isotope known as fluorodeoxyglucose, or FDG, also called a radiotracer.
FDG is a chemical analog of glucose, which means it’s a compound that is structurally identical to glucose, but with the exception of one important component. In this case, a form of radioactive fluorine with a brief half-life takes the place of a hydrogen atom on a glucose molecule.
Development of the radiotracer makes PET visualization possible in real time. FDG generally is infused into a line from a saline drip that is connected to a patient’s vein. Brain cells and malignant tumors metabolize FDG, causing them to light in brilliant color on a scan.
“I’ve been here for many years,” said Joanna Fowler, a senior chemist at Brookhaven Lab. “And I participated in its [FDG's] development in the early 1970s.
“I’ve seen how useful it has been in understanding the brain and in the diagnosis of cancer,” she said.
She said ADHD, drug addiction, Alzheimer’s and epilepsy are a few conditions that PET scanning has helped researchers better understand.
Fowler noted that Brookhaven wasn’t alone in the development of PET scanning. The collaborative effort involved scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and the National Institutes of Health.
see www.Newsday.com
(CNN) — Leo McCarthy gives college scholarships to teenagers who pledge not to drink while they’re underage.
In 2007, McCarthy lost his 14-year-old daughter, Mariah, when an underage drunken driver hit her and two of her friends as they walked down a sidewalk near her home in Butte, Montana.
Through McCarthy’s nonprofit, Mariah’s Challenge, more than 140 teenagers have received $1,000 scholarships.
CNN asked McCarthy for his thoughts on being chosen as one of the top 10 CNN Heroes of 2012.
CNN: What do you hope this recognition will mean for Mariah’s Challenge?
McCarthy: It’s a very quiet sense of pride for this town. We have such a hard history of living here. … (We use) the term “Butte tough.” Now, it’s more about character and strength, about growing old and helping our youth to grow old.
People come up and say, “Hey, congratulations.” And some kid said, “I am Mariah’s Challenge.” And that totally blew me away. So, it’s formulating to them that it’s really them, not me, that are seen in CNN Heroes. To them, it’s growing up by changing this situation a generation at a time.
We’re seeing this in sixth-graders coming up; they automatically know about Mariah’s Challenge. They automatically know that they’re not supposed to drink for four years in high school. So, will they? I don’t know. But hey, it’s a better start than it was prior to October 27, 2007.
And it’s a great honor for parents and youth that are sitting at the table and talking about it. It just gives parents more power to say: “Hey, this is a good deal. Let’s talk about it. What’s going on in your life?”
So, (the CNN recognition) is a validation of the three girls, and it’s a validation of the tool that parents can use at the dinner table. The dinner table is the most powerful place in the world.
CNN: How will you use the $50,000 award that you receive for being selected as a top 10 CNN Hero?
McCarthy: (It) will provide at least 40 scholarships, hopefully this year, that we’re going to immediately give out to courageous youth.
Also, the money is going to be used to start our Mariah’s Education Initiative for the local elementary and junior highs. Basically, it’s going to be a template for teachers to use to assist (the students) in empowerment, honesty, integrity and character.
CNN: What do you want people to know most about your work?
McCarthy: It’s about making sure that our youth have an option and a tool to talk to their parents and their loved ones about what’s going on in their life.
This is such an in-your-face situation because it stole the innocence of our town when three 14-year-old girls were basically mowed down a half a block from my house, on a pedestrian pathway. That innocence was shaken in this town.
I want this to be a platform for people to say, “OK, I don’t want to be like that guy who killed Mariah. But I need some help, because I’m getting group pressure.” And I hope that it’s a way for them to choose “yes” instead of “no.”
I’m not asking you to say “no” to drugs. I’m asking you to say “yes” to yourself and a life of simple self-respect. That’s all it is.
CNN: We’re coming up on the five-year anniversary of Mariah’s death. What does the timing of this honor mean to you?
McCarthy: Surreal, going back to those lonely, sleepless nights after it happened and trying to make sense of this. Stumbling and bumbling about, realizing it’s got to be up to me and my family to try to bring something out of this and always believing about the legacy of love … and seeing it now.
It would have been so easy to build a monument to misery and light the torch of vengeance. … But we decided to go the tough way, the hard way, which is acknowledging we can all be better and we can always bring good out of bad. There is grace in that, and there is deep peace in that.
see www.cnn.com
If you’re the parent of a tween, be warned: your cautious 10-year-old is bound to turn into a wild child in a few short years, with seemingly no regard whatsoever for safety. Indeed, teenagers have the double the risk of dying compared to their preteen selves.
Adults have long reckoned with ways to protect adolescents from their own misjudgments. Only recently, however, have researchers really begun to understand how the teen brain is wired and that some of what appear to be teens’ senseless choices may result from biological tendencies that also prime their brains to learn and be flexible.
Take teens’ perception of risk. It’s certainly different from that of adults, but not in the ways you’d expect.
Research shows, for instance, that teens tend to wildly overestimate certain risks — of things like unprotected sex and drug use — not to lowball them as one would predict.
So, it may be that teens’ notorious risk-taking behavior stems not from some immunity to known risks, but rather, as a new study now suggests, from their greater tolerance to uncertainty and ambiguity — that is, unknown risks.
“Relative to adults, adolescents engage more in unknown risks than they do in known risks,” says Agnieszka Tymula, a postdoctoral student at New York University and the lead author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Teens, it seems, love the unknown.
To examine the differences in risk-taking between teens and adults, researchers studied 33 healthy adolescents aged 12 to 17, along with 30 normal adults aged 30 to 50. They all engaged in a gambling game, in which they could take a definite $5 reward or choose between the possibility of getting a much larger payout or nothing at all.
The payout was based on whether there was a greater number of red or blue poker chips in a stack of 100; to vary the ambiguity, larger or smaller portions of the stacks were hidden from view.
In this way, the trials provided different amounts of information about the risks involved: for example, in some trials, participants could choose between the $5 and a clear 50% chance of winning $50. In others, however, they had a choice between $5 and varying amounts of money, up to $125, but the probability of winning appeared to vary from 25% to 75%. In reality, they always had a 50% chance of winning, but were led to believe their odds varied, which allowed researchers to look at how participants thought about ambiguity.
“If the risks are known, adolescents engage (in risk-taking) less than adults do, but if they are unknown, this is reversed,” Tymula says. In fact, when the payout was known to be $125, adults always gambled — but this was not so for teens.
“I think (the finding) adds very nicely to the literature,” says Valerie Reyna, professor of human development and psychology at Cornell University, who was not associated with the research. “The new breakthrough here is that it extends our knowledge about adolescent risk-taking into the realm of ambiguity aversion.”
Reyna’s own research has shown how excessively teens tend to overestimate risk: for example, when asked about the risk of AIDS in one study, adolescents estimated that a teenage girl who is sexually active has a 60% chance of contracting HIV. (The actual odds are miniscule for most Americans.)
This perception, however, doesn’t prevent teens from engaging in risky behavior. Why? Because teens have a different style of information processing, Reyna argues. They may get lost in the details about specific risks and overly focused on possible rewards, while ignoring the overall “gist” of the problem — i.e., the ultimate consequences.
In the case of unprotected sex, for example, even if the odds of contracting HIV are low, a bad outcome would be irreversible. Unlike teens, adults tend to focus on the end result and the consequences.
Oddly, teens’ information-processing style seems to rely on the uniquely human “rational” parts of the brain. Reyna’s work has shown that adolescents carefully think about risks most adults wouldn’t even consider taking — like, say, playing Russian roulette — using their prefrontal cortex.
They use quantitative reasoning and take about twice as long as adults do before responding, while adults immediately have a negative reaction to such risks, stemming intuitively from the insula, and almost automatically say no.
So why might the teenage brain be wired this way? Their greater tolerance for uncertainty and the unknown — and an increased desire for and focus on rewards — probably helps them leave the nest.
Such explanations are speculative, Reyna cautions, but notes that “in rats, for example, adolescent rats are more likely to explore a new environment. You don’t know what you’re going to find: that’s sort of the definition of a novel environment. If you are more ambiguity tolerant, that would enable that sort of exploration.”
In other words, it takes some acceptance of uncertainty and comfort with not knowing in order to learn and to be open to new knowledge.
“We come into the world with limited knowledge about what kind of consequences we will experience after making decisions and also about how likely these different outcomes are,” says Tymula. “But, of course, we want to learn, so this tolerance for unknown risks might stem from an underlying biological feature that makes learning about the unknown less unpleasant for adolescents than it is for adults.”
An early part of learning any type of new skill — from typing to teaching — is accepting instruction and consciously thinking about all of the tactics and techniques involved in performing the skill.
While novices need to think step-by-step, however, experts will have incorporated the best routines into their brains to the point that they become automatic. This may be why the teen brain uses the higher-order cortex for risk decisions: it hasn’t yet made enough of them to develop an intuitive reaction that it can “offload” to other brain regions.
Such new information about how the teen brain works — and why its characteristics shouldn’t simply be seen as negative or dysfunctional — is only just beginning to inform teen health programs.
Reyna, for example, has studied how teaching “gist”-based reasoning can help teens avoid dangerous sexual choices, finding that teens who are taught to focus on potential, catastrophic negative outcomes, rather than the odds, make fewer risky sexual decisions and have fewer partners.
Tymula suggests that allowing teens opportunities to safely experiment — for example, a simulator that shows sober teens what drunk driving is like — could also help, by making an unknown risk seem more real and known. Allowing teens the opportunity to take risks in a safe context could also help them develop expertise that underlies gist-based thinking.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that while adults tend to prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty, as family therapist Virginia Satir once put it, the same may not be true for teens.
see www.cnn.com
We are finally making significant strides in the distribution of Narcan across LI to prevent fatal overdoses. The placement of Narcan kits in some police cars in Suffolk as part of a pilot program was a giant leap forward and Nassau last week announced that it had become the first county in NYS to gain certification to conduct trainings and distribute the kits. Efforts like these will help us reverse the steady increase in overdose fatalities on Long Island, which last year totaled 370 – more than one per day.
That’s why it’s disconcerting that Suffolk police reportedly arrested an 18-year-old overdose victim on Friday after reviving him with Narcan.
Recognizing that young people afraid of such prosecution often hesitate to call for help, the state legislature two years ago passed the 911 Good Samaritan Law, which provides for limited immunity for overdose victims and witnesses who call 911. The protections don’t apply to major drug crimes and the man arrested in Patchogue on Friday was charged with the low level offenses of possession of a hypodermic instrument and criminal possession of a controlled substance, both of which fall squarely under the new law.
Here’s what the laws says: “A person who is experiencing a drug or alcohol overdose or other life threatening medical emergency and, in good faith, seeks health care for himself or herself or is the subject of such a good faith request for health care, shall not be charged or prosecuted for a controlled substance offense under this article or a marihuana offense under article two hundred twenty-one of this title, other than an offense involving sale for consideration or other benefit or gain, or charged or prosecuted for possession of alcohol by a person under age twenty-one years under section sixty-five-c of the alcoholic beverage control law, or for possession of drug paraphernalia under article thirty-nine of the general business law, with respect to any substance, marihuana, alcohol or paraphernalia that was obtained as a result of such seeking or receiving of health care.”
Arrests are an important part of fighting substance abuse and often propel addicted folks to get the help they need. Still, keeping folks alive long enough to ever see the inside of a treatment facility is primary and putting punishment before public health – especially now – will hamper our progress.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey L. Reynolds, Ph.D., CEAP, SAP
LICADD Executive Director
Jaclyn Kinkade, a 23-year-old doctor’s-office receptionist and occasional model, was a casualty of America’s No. 1 drug menace when she overdosed and died, alone, in a tumbledown clapboard house in Dunnellon, Fla.
The drugs that killed her didn’t come from the Colombian jungles or an Afghan poppy field. Two of the three drugs found in her system were sold to Ms. Kinkade, legally, at Walgreen Co. WAG and CVS Caremark CVS shops, the two biggest U.S. pharmacies. Both prescription drugs found in her body were made in the U.S.—the oxycodone in Elizabeth, N.J., by a company being acquired by generic-drug giant Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc., WPI and the methadone in Hobart, N.Y., by Covidien Ltd., COV another major manufacturer. Every stage of their distribution was government-regulated. In addition, Ms. Kinkade had small amounts of methamphetamine in her system when she died.
The U.S. spends about $15 billion a year fighting illegal drugs, often on foreign soil. But America’s deadliest drug epidemic begins and ends at home. More than 15,000 Americans now die annually after overdosing on prescription painkillers called opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—more than from heroin, cocaine and all other illegal drugs combined.
Rising opioid abuse means that drug overdoses are now the single largest cause of accidental death in America. They surpassed traffic accidents in 2009, the most recent CDC data available.
Paradoxically, the legality of prescription painkillers makes their abuse harder to tackle. There is no Pablo Escobar to capture or kill. Authorities must contend with an influential lobby of industry representatives and doctors who argue against more restrictions, saying they would harm legitimate patients. And lawmakers have been reluctant to have the federal government track Americans’ prescriptions, leaving states to piece together a patchy, fragmented response.
Ms. Kinkade’s final days, and the path of the drugs that killed her, were reconstructed from medical and prescription records, police files and interviews. Many records were assembled by Ms. Kinkade’s father and stepmother.
Shuffling through the documents at their living-room table, Bruce Kinkade, a garage-door salesman, and his wife, Ann, said they don’t wish to absolve their daughter of responsibility. “We’re not naive and want to say she was a perfect angel,” said Ann Kinkade, Jaclyn’s stepmother.
But the Kinkades say the companies and licensed professionals that supplied her with the drugs must also bear some responsibility. “Jackie didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to be a drug addict today,’” Ann Kinkade said. “Jackie pretty much got sent there by a doctor, got hooked and continued to go back.”
There are few easy villains in prescription drug abuse. Companies, physicians and addicts alike are all pieces in a complex puzzle. For some time, regulators have been cracking down on doctors who prescribe to addicts for profit. Now, federal and state officials are starting to move up the supply chain to pursue pharmacies and distributors.
On Sept. 12, the Drug Enforcement Administration revoked the licenses of two Florida CVS stores, which it claims sold excessive amounts of oxycodone without ensuring the pills weren’t diverted to the black market. CVS is fighting the DEA’s order in administrative and federal courts.
Two days later, the agency served Walgreen with a suspension order halting sales of controlled substances from its Jupiter, Fla., distribution center, calling it an “imminent threat to public safety.” The DEA’s regulatory action alleges that the facility—the state’s largest oxycodone distributor—”failed to maintain effective controls” of its narcotic painkillers.
Walgreen said it is working with regulators and has tightened its procedures. CVS said it was committed to working with regulators “to reduce prescription drug abuse and diversion while ensuring access to appropriate, effective pain medication for our patients who need them.”
Participants in the drug-supply chain acknowledge the problems but point to others as the weak link. Doctors involved say pharmacies should be able to tell if patients are secretly using several physicians to obtain more drugs. Druggists say they can’t second-guess a valid prescription. Manufacturers and distributors say they are simply delivering products ordered by health-care professionals.
What makes this drug scourge different from previous ones, such as heroin in the 1970s and cocaine in the 1980s, is that everyone in the distribution chain is identifiable. The DEA itself controls the supply spigot by setting drug companies’ production quotas for opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone.
For years, opioids were reserved mainly for cancer or terminally ill patients because of fears over their safety and addictiveness. But over the past 15 years, many doctors have come to view them as an essential tool to manage chronic pain. Around the same time, drug makers began marketing patented, time-release formulations of the drugs, making it a lucrative category.
Today, a growing number of doctors say the pendulum has swung too far, with powerful narcotics being dispensed for even relatively minor complaints. Last year, pharmacies dispensed more than $9 billion in prescription opioid painkillers, more than twice the amount a decade earlier, according to IMS Health, a research firm. The number of prescriptions has risen fourfold. The generic version of Vicodin, a blend of hydrocodone and acetaminophen, is now the most prescribed drug in the country.
Opioids come from the same narcotics family as heroin and can produce similar addictions, researchers say. “We’re basically talking about heroin pills,” said Andrew Kolodny, chairman of the psychiatry department at Maimonides Medical Center in New York.
Studies show that opioid addicts come from a surprisingly broad swath of the population: the middle-age, the elderly and, increasingly, young adults. Many U.S. veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical and mental injuries are also becoming dependent on prescription painkillers, researchers say.
In recent decades, researchers have come to view addiction as a disease, rather than just a personal failing. Some people are more predisposed to becoming addicted because of heredity, experience and other factors that have yet to be fully understood. But some drugs are simply more addictive than others.
New research suggests that drugs like opioids cause long-lasting changes to the brain, rewiring some areas to crave more drugs while simultaneously damaging the parts that can control those cravings. The drugs can damage the brain’s ability to feel pleasure, so regular users eventually need to take them not to get high or help with pain, but just to feel normal. Avoiding unpleasant withdrawal symptoms end up conditioning many drug users’ daily lives.
One of the most confounding aspects of this latest epidemic is that it blurs the lines between legal and illegal drug use. Some people first take drugs from their family medicine cabinets to get high, then go to doctors to get more. Others are originally prescribed the pills for legitimate reasons, then buy them on the street once they’re hooked.
Many, such as Ms. Kinkade, end up mixing legal and illegal drugs in ways that can prove lethal.
Ms. Kinkade was a lively, talkative woman with blond hair, a fear of caterpillars and a pit-bull terrier, Bentley, that traveled everywhere with her.
She was first prescribed an opioid on Oct. 27, 2006, by the doctor who employed her as a receptionist, prescription records show. According to medical records and an entry from her diary, she had been suffering back and neck pain. Thomas Suits, her employer, prescribed 20 pills of Endocet, a drug containing oxycodone. “I’d never taken opioids before,” Ms. Kinkade wrote in a diary entry. “But I started the med routine and OMG I felt no pain.”
Please see www.wsj.com
Suffolk County police officers Friday used a drug-overdose antidote to save a teenager who had overdosed on heroin in Mastic — and then they arrested him.
Responding to a 911 call reporting the possible overdose at about 2 p.m., Seventh Precinct officers found an 18-year-old man — incoherent with shallow breathing and a very weak pulse — in the back yard of a home on Patchogue Avenue, police said.
Officer Michael Trotti, assisted by Officers Robert Tedesco and John Priest, administered naloxone hydrochloride into the man’s nose, police said.
The antidote, also known as Narcan, is administered through the nose to reverse the effects of heroin and other opiates.
The man was revived and taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center for treatment. He was then charged with possession of a hypodermic instrument and criminal possession of a controlled substance, police said.
Police did not immediately identify the man.
The Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Police Precincts and Marine Bureau are participating in Suffolk County’s pilot program that aims to put the drug-overdose antidote in the hands of thousands of EMTs, saving 23 lives in its first 10 weeks, a county official said last month.
see www.Newsday.com
