Posts by debunk
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Hard News: The perilous birth of the…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Concluding sentences in "The Bitterest Pills" by psychiatrist academic Joanna Moncrieff palgrave macmillan 2013:
"The increasingly indiscriminate prescribing/_availability_ of these noxious substances represents a substantial public health problem waiting to happen. The vision of a population incapacitated by prolonged chemical toxicity may be be realised if we don't wake up to the real nature of antipsychotic/_"legal high"_ drugs."
I have substituted "availability" for "prescribing" and "legal high" for "antipsychotic" ..this is what is happening and it will only get worse. Hon Peter Dunne has sealed his political legacy and it will not be a proud one!
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Hard News: The perilous birth of the…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Robert Whitaker's two books "Mad in America" and "Anatomy of an Epidemic" are instructive for anyone interested in how much research has gone into mainstream psychiatric drugs ..not a lot. The only useful test for the effects of these assorted "legal highs" will be hospital attendances, symptoms, deaths and disabilities, that one hopes will be recorded against the product type (assuming that the hospital can find this out). What would you measure otherwise? And how will the governments who allow this account for the social and health costs? These are the questions this blog should address, in my view. Despite the rugby terminology of prescription "pills" there's no difference in the basic issues. Richard Bentall's "Doctoring the Mind" is also useful; times and attitudes are changing. What will happen is that "legal high" users will end up in the psychiatric wards and be treated with the even more noxious anti-psychotics, "antidepressants" and various offlabel drugs meant for epileptics but now favoured for "seizures"..that's where this Act and these sales are heading. British Psychiatry lecturer Joanna Moncrieff's "The Myth of the Chemical Cure"and "The Bitterest Pills" are also timely and informative.
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The point is that "A large number of synthetic cannabinoids have been designated class B drugs" (UK) "As with all legal highs, it is unfortunately not clear for users" (that) "many brands vary enormously in the compounds they contain" ie they are not THC - the main active compound in cannabis www.theguardian.com/society/2013/Jan14/mephedrone-benzo-fury=legal-highs
As a post-grad psychopharmacologist I am appalled at the state of ignorance in New Zealand about psychoactive drugs and their dangers - and this includes anti-depressants, "mood" changers etc - all of which are poorly researched. No-one is going to "research" these legal highs if they can't even do proper assessments of main stream drugs! And now the money is in "neuroscience" and brain manipulations no-one is ever going to bother. It will all end in tears for the NZ health system and for those who pay for it.
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Suggest you read "'Legal high' production gathers pace" 4 June 2013 by Maria Burke in chemistryworld www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/06/europe-legal-high-report-production ..these products are not as benign as comments here suggest.
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Amused at the Willingness To Pay touch. NBR has disappeared from sight if interested reader not WTP and can't see this model working for present venture where the economic debate, for starters, is hanging on the coat-tails of varied and various explanations pouring out in books from all and sundry wrt 2008+ hysterical response to the state of the finance world.