On drugs

A couple of items that caught my attention this month.

First, there appears to be an shortage of the attention-deficit medication Adderall in the States, mostly because of quotas imposed on manufacturers by the DEA. The DEA, naturally, refuses to take the blame for getting in the way of much-needed medication for a lot of people by saying that drug companies simply want to sell more brand-name drugs instead of cheaper generics: “Any shortage of these products is therefore a result of decisions made by industry regarding manufacturing or distribution." This might well be true - why sell a generic when you can sell a brand-name drug instead? - but still misses the point, and the direct harm the DEA is causing because of an arbitrary desire to regulate the chemicals that people are willing to put into their own bodies, with or without a note from their doctor.

Second, four Columbia University scientists have published an important review in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology that calls into question the amount of damage that meth use can inflict on the human brain. In the short term, they found, meth use can actually improve, among other things, attention and visual and spatial perception. More importantly, long-term users don't seem to show the kind of cognitive damage that has been assumed so far, which means that rehab treatments might be more effective against meth addiction than previously thought. This research could drastically change the way that we approach meth consumption and addiction, which unfortunately means it will probably be largely ignored by policy-makers.