Is this the kind of society you wish for your children or grandchildren?

You can make a difference.

atrocious

Web sales of fentanyl

NYT article

Neglected classics

Balter's work with Nurco was in the criminological tradition: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1211378

(I'm looking for someone to do a literature review based on this line of studies, and the most highly cited of the work that subsequently cited these studies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7327796 . I think DAD would publish that lit review.)

This line of studies, sustained by the late David Nurco, as well as John Ball, from a base in the Friends Research Institute in Baltimore, is important reading for anyone seeking to master drug dependence epidemiology. David was at University of Maryland and John had been a NIDA Intramural Program researcher (Lexington, KY: Addiction Research Center) before he moved to the Baltimore area. They were somewhat dismissive of the kind of field surveys we were doing -- didn't think 'serious' drug users would participate and be found in our samples (left truncation problem, and a sense of left-censoring, although they did not use those terms).

After Mary Monk and I submitted and got trashed for our NIDA proposal to create a primary care study base in Washington County, Maryland (with primary care and community controls) which we wanted to start to  use to conduct a series of case control studies on cannabis dependence, before studying other IRD, David came up to me at a seminar. He disclosed that he had been on the study section, and asked me why I was interested in marijuana, whether I truly thought people become dependent on marijuana, and why I wasn't studying 'real' drug problems like cocaine and heroin. My next proposal to NIDA was to study cocaine use and problems in the United States. It got the equivalent of 1.8 and then 1.7 priority scores, not good enough for funding, mainly because we only had cross-sectional samples of users, and too few newly incident users from the 1-year followup of the ECA samples.

Some of you know what happened next, and how it came to pass that my first NIDA R01 award was to complete these proposed studies in cocaine epidemiology. I thank David for that advice, even though he had misjudged the public health importance of cannabis.

(As of last December, John Ball was still alive, per our mutual friends Faith and Jerry Jaffe.)

R.I.P. for Mitch and for David.

Age of Anxiety now?

Echoes of the 1960s.

NYT article

Expert opinion about dependence, 1999

Literature review

US only?

This team, led by Mitchell Balster, my 'teacher' at NIMH when I was Assistant Professor at Hopkins, were responsible for the first field surveys on this topic.

More by that group:

California survey before national survey.

US survey

When I read this article, I learned what kind of research methods I wanted to try to master. At that time, I didn't think of it as epidemiology. I thought of it as social science survey research.

Reading, Writing, and Reefer

Scare tactics of the 1960s-70s.

This one from 1979.

Educational film

Heroin by Velvet Underground

URLs to the right: Top one opened a new web page and the song started playing once I used cursor to press PLAY triangle.

Heroin

Live Version, top of page: 

Live version

Julie Bosman's NYT article from January 2017 is here.

Background reading: children and adolescent mental health, IACAPAP

Could be a useful resource for those interested in children and adolescent mental health:

IACAPAP text

Please leave comments if you find something particularly interesting, especially if it involves neuropsychiatric epidemiology.

I am looking for pediatric psychiatry examples to illustrate clearly how neuropsychiatric epidemiology should strive to be neither mindless nor brainless.