Honest words from Sir David Goldberg

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-psychiatrist/article/professor-sir-david-goldberg/70F529C865F9EA0F41867F5124DA3E3C

CBD and social anxiety

This article from 2011 just surpassed an Altmetric threshold.

Hooked on Video Games?

Can one become addicted to video games?

Depends upon how you define the terms.

Andrew Przybylski says it’s an ‘epistemic dumpster fire’ with pathologizing of a generally benign hobby in a fashion that allows promotion of sham treatments.

Merry merry!

NPR transcript and 7-minute podcast

Heckman and powerpoint

Link to Powerpoint collection with Heckman example

More on Walter Pahnke

Seeing the world through eyes of others

Read:

https://raypeatforum.com/community/members/nestito.5085/

More is here:

https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/poll-about-ayahuasca.20844/page-2

Brought to mind by the late Walter Pahnke, who was a pioneer in psychedelics research, and who shared his thoughts with me long ago.

Walter died July 1971, not long after I met him, an inexplicable scuba death.

An interesting cannabis consumer perspective

The question to the Quora community was:

Does smoking pot make you unhappy?

This answer was:

Old compounds: new indications

Leads for future medications development

Not sure it’s possible to understand the experience without reading the book. (A to -do list item).

sanity and madness

RIP, Mark

Obituary

I always enjoyed being on panels with Mark.

World Drug Report, 2019

World Drug Report link

Broaden your view beyond the US, but beware the politics and stigma-laden vocabulary and rhetoric.

Good public health advocacy: Opioids OD prevention

NYT Op-Ed

Latkin et al., 2018

Going around social media: 19th century nostrum

Not sure it is authentic.

Cannabis images: signs of our times

For a time you can see the video with this search:
@sideofricepilaf joint

I do not take responsibility for whatever else it dredges up.

Still shot of video:

Interactive map for cannabis laws, state by state in US

Interactive map

Update on retail adult-use cannabis business licensing in Michigan

Recreational weed probably won't be for sale in Michigan until March, April

Review and description of LA cannabis cafe

Link to online review with photos

Isocrates; earliest global health utterance?

Philosopher Peter Adamson quipped that Isocrates had a corporate sponsor: Apple.

Should you rely solely on Google Scholar for your literature reviews.

Link to a review article

cannabis cafe in LA now

cannabis cafe article

DEA lost control of legal opioids supply reservoir

Link to KHN consolidated articles

Emerging drug trends website

Emerging trends reports from Hazelden Foundation

Coevidence for systematic reviews

Covidence is a systematic reviews production tool for title/abstract screening, full-text screening, data abstraction, and quality assessment. Covidence was designed by researchers familiar with the systematic review process in order to make conducting reviews more efficient. It is the primary screening and data extraction tool for Cochrane authors. It can be used for any kind of literature review that requires reproducible and reportable reviewing and screening procedures. To access this tool, please contact the libraries at

healthsciencesgroup@lib.msu.edu

CDC Says for First Time That THC Could Be Behind Vaping Deaths and Illnesses

CDC press release

MMWR article

From Time magazine, 27 Sept 2019

Link to Time article

Controlling opioids injection problems: Advances from Canada

Link to article

Aren’t you glad someone out there is paying attention to these issues?

Voice of America. Our Efforts To Improve Comprehension

Harlow redux

Harlow and the new neuroscience

Judgment about inter-species research is required:

Gain/Pain Ratio

p

From: 

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=pWqLBQAAQBAJ&rdid=book-pWqLBQAAQBAJ&rdot=1&source=gbs_vpt_read&pcampaignid=books_booksearch_viewport

Fox and Davidson, 2014.

Worth reading.

media view of vaping as of late Sept 2019

link to vaping article

Drug prevention in Iceland (per Proesora Zila Sanchez, UNIFESP)

Iceland prevention approach

More on Measurement Equivalence Modeling: MGCFA

On Detecting Systematic Measurement Error in Cross-Cultural Research: A Review and Critical Reflection on Equivalence and Invariance Tests

Diana Boer, Katja Hanke, Jia He

Journal of Crosscultural Research

Volume: 49 issue: 5, page(s): 713-734

Article first published online: May 21, 2018; Issue published: June 1, 2018

ESEM

ESEM (Asparouhov & Muthén, 2009; Marsh, Morin, Parker, & Kaur, 2014) is especially helpful when dealing with many groups where strong levels of invariance are often unattainable, and goodness-of-fit indices are weak. ESEM is an extension of the CFA approach. According to Marsh and colleagues (2010), ESEM integrates the best aspects of the CFA/SEM and the EFA approaches. The use of SEM in the exploratory approach means that it makes use of confirmatory tests of a priori factor structures as well as associations with latent factors, and multigroup tests of full measurement invariance (Marsh et al., 2014). The advantage of the ESEM is that it is not restricted because, in a conventional CFA approach, each item only loads on one factor. Items are allowed to load on all factors in ESEM. ESEM can be used for interrelated or independent factors by modeling oblique or orthogonal factor structures (Bowden, Saklofske, van de Vijver, Sudarshan, & Eysenck, 2016). ESEM is a fairly novel procedure that has not yet been often applied in content-related research; yet, it appears promising, and we would welcome further testing of its applicability in future research.

Bayesian approximate invariance

Bayesian approximate invariance testing is another promising approach to remedy some of the problems of conventional MGCFA. Instead of constraining the parameters of loadings and/or intercepts to be exactly the same across groups, this approach allows small differences in these parameters across groups (Muthén & Asparouhov, 2012; van de Schoot et al., 2013). The underlying rationale is that absolute invariance is unattainable and slight variations may not severely hinder comparability. Hence, a valid comparison can still be achieved. In two simulation studies (Muthen & Asparouhov, 2012; van de Schoot et al., 2013) involving a two-group and a 10-group comparison, respectively, appropriate model specifications (also called priors) that admit a certain degree of flexibility were proposed. In operational terms, pairwise differences in each parameter (loadings and/or intercepts) across groups can be modeled to follow a normal distribution with a mean of zero and a very small variance (.01 or .05).

Several applications with such prior specifications have been reported in multiple group comparisons (see, for example, Bujacz, Vittersø, Huta, & Kaczmarek, 2014; Cieciuch, Davidov, Schmidt, Algesheimer, & Schwartz, 2014; Davidov et al., 2015; He & Kubacka, 2015; Zercher, Schmidt, Cieciuch, & Davidov, 2015). We know that ignoring the lack of invariance may lead to biased comparative research results (Guenole & Brown, 2014). We do not know yet in the case of approximate invariance, whether the relaxed constraints would bias the parameters and distort the findings. In a few studies, it was shown that factor scores derived from a conventional CFA and the approximate approach were very similar (Davidov et al., 2015; Zercher et al., 2015). Simulation studies that examine the impact of different priors and the consequences of demonstrating approximate invariance are in much need (van de Schoot et al., 2013).

Alignment

Alignment is a third promising approach to estimate group-specific factor means and variances without requiring full measurement invariance (Asparouhov & Muthén, 2014). In a sense, alignment can be viewed as exploratory, where it incorporates a simplicity function similar to the rotation criteria used in EFA to discover the most optimal measurement invariance pattern (i.e., the simplest model with the fewest noninvariant parameters) and to estimate the factor mean and variance parameters in each group. This approach has been tested in multigroup CFA models with maximum likelihood as well as in Bayesian estimation, and it has been extended to IRT modeling (Muthén & Asparouhov, 2014).

Given its very recent development, only a few applications are available to date. De Bondt and Van Petegem (2015) used the Bayesian approximate invariance test with alignment optimization in evaluating the psychometric quality of an overexcitability scale, in which they showed the superiority of this combined approach compared with a conventional CFA with modification indices when comparing male and female students. Desa and Carstens (2015) proposed to apply this approach in the future in large-scale assessment contexts such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), as it legitimates mean comparisons in dozens of groups without requiring full measurement invariance. Weziak-Bialowolska (2014) tested gender ideology in the World Value Survey with CFA with and without alignment. She reported different patterns of country factor means from these two methods, and suggested that comparisons of the country rankings were valid provided that a correction for noninvariance of certain factor loadings and/or intercepts is applied in the alignment framework. Similar to the Bayesian approximate invariance tests, the implications of using alignment on the validity of cross-cultural comparisons await further investigation.

In sum, various older and newer techniques are available to assess measurement invariance and to distinguish error from cultural variance. Given the importance of establishing ground of comparability for drawing conclusions about how and in which form culture influences psychological states and processes, we further investigate to what extent invariance tests have been implemented in cross-cultural research.

Peyote

Link do online book

International Talk Like A Pirate Day, Every 19th of September, me hearties...

Learn to dance like a pirate on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, Every 19th of September, me hearties...

Dance like a pirate!

English-to-Pirate Online Translator:

English/Pirate Translating Tool

ABC-Oz article by linguistics professor:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-19/international-talk-like-a-pirate-day-preserving-old-languages/11527148

Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review

J. Webster, R.T. WatsonAnalyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review

MIS Quarterly, 26 (2) (2002)

xiii–xxiii

Read free online via JSTOR

SALIS: online library

The SALIS Collection: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs

bibliographic resource

Online Probing (OP) To Complement Measurement Equivalence Modeling

NECESSARY BUT INSUFFICIENT:

WHY MEASUREMENT INVARIANCE TESTS NEED ONLINE PROBING AS A COMPLEMENTARY TOOL

By:Meitinger, K (Meitinger, Katharina)^[ 1 ]

PUBLIC OPINION QUARTERLY

Volume: 81

 Issue: 2

 Pages: 447-472DOI: 10.1093/poq/nfx009 Published: SUM 2017

Link to article

Examples of online probing approach:

Online supplement to article

See also:

Meitinger, K., Braun, M., & Behr, D. (2018). Sequence Matters in Online Probing: the Impact of the Order of Probes on Response Quality, Motivation of Respondents, and Answer Content. Survey Research Methods, 12(2), 103-120. https://doi.org/10.18148/srm/2018.v12i2.7219

https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/7219

“Drug Addicts Are Human Beings”

“Drug Addicts are Human Beings” 1938

Concepts and names

This PLOSOne article deserves a careful look.

PLOS Medicine

I studied operations research, as a discipline, in JHU Prof Charles Flagle’s NIMH T32 program’s regular workgroup series and seminars on Operations Research in Mental Health, with a reach back to ‘efficiency studies’ of 100+ years ago (leading to assembly line cost savings) and learning WE Deming’s work to re-build the Japanese economy after WWII. Flagle stressed context, as in this VA oriented contribution.

We used Deming’s quality control concepts to construct our Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) field survey’s multi-stage sequenced sampling design (MSSS) in 1980, published in 1985:

Anthony et al., Archives of General Psychiatry, 1985

I am hopeful that ‘Implementation Science’ will emerge with its own theory, concepts, principles, and approaches, and with more than a ‘purple passion,’ as fields sometimes emerge in the public health sciences.

Deming

Flagle:

Charles D. Flagle, (2002) Some Origins of Operations Research in the Health Services. Operations Research 50(1):52-60.

OR origins 

Iraq and methamphetamine in 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/world/middleeast/iraq-drug-addiction-meth.htmlLink to NYT article

The Distracting Draw Of Smartphones

Link to transcript. 2-3 minute podcast

The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'

The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'
by Terry Gross

FA - September 9, 2019

Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies.

Link to article

Online resource for you to monitor

Prof. Samet’s Informative Newsletter from his R25 program

Vaping in the news

Vaping in the news link.

Johns Hopkins Opens New Center for Psychedelic Research

Hopkins center article

Don’t believe every cats and dogs story you’ve been told.

Satterberg drug policy in Seattle: More evidence of local versus federal impact

Kristof article on Satterberg policy in Seattle

Why Illicit Marijuana Sales Are Up — In States Where It's Legal

NPR Podcast 45” from 21 August 2019:

Why Illicit Marijuana Sales Are Up — In States Where It's Legal

First, the vaportini. Now the balloon.

Vaportini link, 2013

Alcohol Mist, 2019, Milwaukee

VapShot into Balloon, 2019, Kent, UK

Not just for ‘lanca perfume’ or crack-cocaine, nicotine, or cannabinoids.

Add it to your vaping and inhalant lectures.

[Thanks to Profesora Zila Sanchez of UNIFESP, São Paulo.]

Link to lanca article, Brasil, 1998

Our brave new world in cannabis research

First:

Second:

Testing challenges

commentary by Andrew James

An epidemiological puzzle that awaits your creativity to solve the puzzle. Will younrise to the challenge?

Vaping death

Judge in Mexico creates loophole for two cocaine users

link to : A Mexican judge has granted two people the right to recreational cocaine use, in the first ruling of its kind, the organisation behind the cases said.

A nuanced view of the addiction syndrome (ASAM)

Link to ASAM short and long case definitions

Prof. Tom Kosten’s view on opioids

Link to transcript

We like to think of federal solutions. Wrong! Except to make sure resources are there when called for.

The solutions are at the local level:

link to story

To screen: For what, and why, and externalities?

NYT article on proposed guidelines

Link

Think about it?

1. What is the syndrome to ask about? ‘Drug abuse’ is not in either ICD nor DSM-5.

2. Is there evidence of efficacious or effective treatment interventions under these conditions? Few RCT under the prescribed guideline circumstances.

3. Externality: Will insurance company use the diagnostic code against anyone? (Answer = yes)

On opioids crises (S. Satel, The Atlantic, August 2019)

Opinion piece with patient vignettes

Don’t care much for the ‘seduction’ metaphor.

Persuasion: Always been prominent in public health epidemiology

Link

From The New York Times:

Health Facts Aren’t Enough. Should Persuasion Become a Priority?

Those with the least understanding of science oppose it the most and also think they know the most, according torecent study evidence. 

Will opioid crisis end before federal support for prevention and treatment ends?

NYTimes article

NSDUH under the Barr DOJ

In a new order.

Ask me if you want the video of this break-in to a suburban grow house in Colorado.

Wondering about societal opportunity costs.

Which murderers are being left alone while these law-abiding officers are following DOJ orders in Colorado?

The US tends to ignore these ‘opportunity costs’ but criminologists such as A. Blumstein does not:

An example of A.B.’s important work:

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6847&context=jclc

“Cannabis” is the preferred word, even if using it can make you sound like a stuffed owl. “ and...

...

 “If this book’s prose had a tail, it would always be wagging.”

Link to Lizette Post book on cannabis etiquette

break.... Cannabis regulatory policy and a note on DSM-5

Irwin and Sen. Sheldon Neeley, D-Flint, are working on a package of bills that would automatically erase criminal records of those convicted of certain marijuana-related crimes and help streamline the expungement process for the thousands who are working to move beyond missteps of the past.

“This is for anyone convicted of a non-violent marijuana crime,” Neeley explained. “These people will no longer have an albatross or a shadow of a criminal record. Right now, we’re asking people to carry around the burden of criminal convictions for things that are now legal. That’s not fair at all. We have an obligation to remedy this.”

Link to article on Michigan, New Jersey, other states.

Let’s consider DSM-5 implications for jurisdictions with and without these approaches to cannabis policy liberalization.

To eliminate policy-variation as a source of distortion in comparisons of individuals (and population groups), the DSM-5 drug use disorders task force wisely dropped ‘legal problems’ from the set of diagnostic criteria, but retained ‘social consequences’ without considering that many serious social consequences are downstream from the arrest or conviction.

Get arrested, and by itself, family and school responses kick in.

Get convicted, even more.

Research project awaits. Re-program the diagnostic algorithm with two switches: one switch focused on individual-level responses such as giving up other reinforcing activities (e.g., reading novels) once cannabis use occupies a larger fraction of the individual’s behavioral repertoire; the other switch lets the social consequences rip.

Without consideration of these two switches, do not expect definitive evidence from current projects to assess effect of policy on transitions from cannabis use onset to cannabis use disorder onset, andbe wary of CUD prevalence comparisons across jurisdictions.

Taking a break from taking a Summer break: Cannabis policy in the news

Cannabis delivery illegal, but overlooked by LARA in Michigan.

LARA is the Michigan licensing authority.

Taking a break: Will post next....? But in the meantime: Colorado cannabis in the news

Colorado cannabis in the news

Summer Slowdown. I’m taking a break. But I’ll post from time to time. Here: An Old Story Seldom Told

The link speaks for itself.

The Dark Secret Of Lake Malawi: Trading Sex For Fish

Pertinent to drugs, HIV/HCV/AIDS/etc.....

Nicky Barnes, Mr. Untouchable

Link to NY Times story

A Story of a Virginia County in the Current Opioids Crises

Yes, plural.

Podcast

Dateline: Wise County, Virginia

It says go back to first season episod and George HW Bush and the “fake news” about crack bought near the White House. (A kid got set up.) But you can start here.

Source:

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/the-uncertain-hour/welcome-wise-county/

IBM on opioids

IBM link

What’s Your Story?

Important lessons tolearn early on? Before your 40 second “elevator talk” even?

Joao da Caridade smoking a pipe (Salvador da Bahia)

JSTOR history of smoking in america

Important lessons I learned from David Goldberg, now Sir David

Some more advice

Opioids in US communities: NPR story

NPR opioids newscast May 2019

Link to transcript and recording.

Heroin supply disappearing? See what DEA (Katherine Pfaff) says near end of article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/health/heroin-fentanyl-deaths-baltimore.html

Heroin in Baltimore, May 2019

Photo of Eastern Baltimore Health District & ECA area rowhouses I took from the train in early 1980s, looking over the RR track berm and up the hill toward Hopkins Hospital.

Corresponding approximate view in 2019 via Google Earth 3D, without obstruction of weeds and trash on RR berm:

Other parts of our Baltimore ECA Survey’s neighborhoods, also early 1980s:

Cocaine deaths in the news, along with psychostimulants

Link to MMWR report

2003-2017

Time to pull out Frank Zappa’s PSA?

Youtube link to Zappa PSA, 16 seconds duration

This image of Zappa often appeared with the sideways quotation.

Listen to “Peaches en Regalia” if you don’t know his music:

Link to Peaches en Regalia, 6 minute version

Great example of how ‘synergy’ differs from ‘interaction’

I think this example might be a case of a departure from an ‘inverse interaction on the additive scale’ for people who would give negative signed ratings to (1) rancid sweat, (2) cabbage, and (3) vinegar, and a positive sign on the dark chocolate. In that case, it is a  clear departure from additivity and more ‘infra-additivity’ rather than ‘supra-additivity’ (for many people). I happen to like the smell of most vinegar (positive sign on that rating), some cabbage, but not rancid sweat.

Link to article in NYTimes, May 15, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/by/veronique-greenwood)

CBD in the news, 2019

Link to NYT article

Brilliant health survey critique by Feldman, 1958

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3348554

Deals with retrospection.

Endogenous and exogenous variable concepts.

Advocates a time series solution (final paragraphs).

Feldman,

Pregnelolone: Cannabis Buzzkill?

Cannabis Buzzkill: The steroid Pregnelolone

From 2018

Indonesia and some interesting thoughts about culture and treatment programs

Traditionally, Indonesia has frowned on drug use.

Death penalty history, etc.

A different perspective here:

Link to NPR description and short NPR radio feature recording.

For the drug use and stigma file?

Opioids, heroin, and asian studies

Link to UN report

You will find the map in the report.

Ahmed (2015) estimated 700 opioid deaths per day in Pakistan.

Consider that number in relation to the US number.

The Human Envirome and a Scholarship Prize to be won.

Something you might be able to use some day.

One of my main points in this invited lecture was to talk about the passivity implied by ‘exposome’ and ‘exposures’ of the type that our 18th century ancestors might have experienced.

In the 21st century, there is a broader array of active behavioral choices that influence the environmental characteristics, circumstances, conditions, and processes we face with potential impact on health and disease, morbidity and mortality.

The behavioral choice to try oxycodone or psilocybin or to travel to Ebola-affected areas of Africa either was non-existent or remarkably rare in the past. 

Today, epidemiology has not yet come to grips with the modeling required to bring behavioral choices into play.

Our closest allies are in econometrics, which has a head start of roughly 50 years in research on behavioral choices (e.g., see origins of McFadden’s choice model, akin to our conditional form of multiple logistic regression for matched risk sets).

Epidemiology cannot ignore what Glen H. Elder called ‘life course’ and this mandate unites epidemiology and econometrics with developmental sciences and Elder’s pioneering conceptual models.

There is a future for epidemiology at this intersection. See some encouragement in an image down below.

A layperson essay on injectable naltrexone (Alkermes’ Vivitrol)

https://oceanbreezerecovery.org/blog/vivitrol/

An entry into issues that deserve more in-depth consideration.

Comments are worth reading.

This month, May. 1997, Clinton Riggs died. Posthumous prevention award is needed.

Link to information about Riggs and his ‘YIELD’ sign

Excerpts from the Gonsalves interview posted yesterday

Community based opioid initiatives

What policy changes would slow the death rate?

We know what to do about opioids. Dayton, Ohio, used to have one of the worst overdose rates the country. They cut it in half. How? They did it by providing naloxone to first responders, which reduced overdose fatalities. They did it by having a clean-needle program, so that drug users stopped sharing needles. They did expanding access to methadone to treat addiction.

By contrast, Scott County in Southern Indiana is a place where the state authorities failed to act decisively. In 2008, public health officials began to discern the first signs of opioid abuse. By 2015, they had 215 cases of H.I.V. in Scott County.

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]

My colleague Forrest Crawford and I wondered if this could have been prevented. The C.D.C. had data showing when individuals in Scott County were infected and who their contacts were. Using that, we made a computer simulation where one can, essentially, run the epidemic back in time and see what might have been.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/gonsalves-aids-actup-epidemiology.html

Hepatitis and injecting in the news, April 2019

i

https://issuu.com/theepidemiologymonitor/docs/final-april-2019-the-epidemiology-m

Gregg Gonsalves, Yale epidemiologist working on epidemics, MacArthur Awardee

Link

From 1957 (with involvement of Dr. Rema Lapouse)

Heroin and opioids in the UK

A PhD dissertation from the London School: 

Link to online PDF

Hallam, Chris (2016) Script Doctors and Vicious Addicts: Subcultures, Drugs, and Regulation under the ’British System’, c.1917 to c.1960. PhD thesis, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17037/PUBS.03141178

Downloaded from: http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/3141178/ DOI: 10.17037/PUBS.03141178

More on crack and harm reduction in epidemiology

https://www.catie.ca/en/pif/fall-2014/safer-crack-cocaine-smoking-equipment-distribution-comprehensive-best-practice-guideli

Trump Administration proposes major health sciences and environment research budget cuts

https://www.aip.org/fyi/2019/trump-again-seeks-sweeping-budget-cuts-science

Public inhalation rooms for supervised crack cocaine use?

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-3137-3

Evaluating drug harms, per Vox

Caulkins suggests a way to crack this Nut.

https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8094759/alcohol-marijuana

Crack in the news

2007 article:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8991023

2018 article:

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/11/646801811/pen-dispensers-in-long-island-actually-sold-crack-pipes

2019 podcast:

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/07/elections/uncertain-hour/uncertain-hour-season-3-inside-america-s-drug-war

Public speaking tips per NYT

All NYT guides

Public speaking guide

Origin of MDMA (not appetite suppressant)