Tag: News

Florence Welch On Sobriety: "Performing Without Booze Was A Revelation"

“Before, I thought I ran on a chaos engine, but the more peaceful I am, the more I can give to the work. I can address things I wasn’t capable of doing before.”

Florence Welch, the voice of Florence and the Machine, is at a different pace in life. She’s more at peace, less afraid, and sober as well.

The singer admitted that she was “drunk a lot of the time” in the band’s last phase. “That’s when the drinking and the partying exploded as a way to hide from it… The partying was about me not wanting to deal with the fact that my life had changed, not wanting to come down,” Welch said in a recent interview with the Guardian.

The English singer and songwriter decided as she approached the 10th year of her illustrious career that she would sober up.

“When I realized I could perform without the booze it was a revelation,” she said. “There’s discomfort and rage, and the moment when they meet is when you break open. You’re free.”

Welch admits that every now and again, she’ll be tempted to go back to her old ways. But it never lasts. “It’s still there. This, ‘What if I could take a day off, a break from this magical energy?’ But, it passes,” she said.

Sobriety went hand-in-hand with inner peace. “Before, I thought I ran on a chaos engine, but the more peaceful I am, the more I can give to the work,” she said. “I can address things I wasn’t capable of doing before.”

Through self-reflection, Welch also came to terms with her eating disorder, addressing it for the first time in the single “Hunger” from the band’s upcoming album High as Hope. “At 17, I started to starve myself,” she sings.

She said the terror of admitting this to anyone, let alone the whole world, inspired her to sing about it. This terror, she says, has been with her for most of her life, fueling some of the “self-destructive” behavior that she’s now working on undoing.

“I learned ways to manage that terror—drink, drugs, controlling food,” she told the Guardian. “It was like a renaissance of childhood, a toddler’s self-destruction let loose in a person with grown-up impulses.”

Welch admits she’s “still figuring it out,” but is learning more than ever how music can be invaluable to her self-discovery journey, by helping her realize that she is not alone.

“I’ve realized that that nugget of insecurity and loneliness is a human experience. The big issues are there however you address them,” she said. “The weird thing is, that as personal as it feels, as soon as you say it, other people say: ‘I feel like that, too.’”

View the original article at thefix.com

10 July 2018
Kids, Parents & Grandparents All Face Strain Of Opioid Crisis

One expert estimates that for every child in foster care due to a parent’s addiction there are 18 to 20 children who have been informally taken in by family members.

When parents are living with opioid addiction—or even trying to establish their lives in recovery—it can take a toll on the whole family, from kids to grandparents, as roles are redefined.

Donna Butts, the executive director of Generations United, a Washington, D.C.-based organization, has seen how families have coped with drug epidemics fueled by cocaine or meth. This time, she told CBS News, feels different.

“With the opioid epidemic, it seems so much more severe and, in some ways, more hopeless,” she said. “Which is why I think the grandparents and other relatives that are stepping forward are playing such a critical role because the hope is with the children.”

Oftentimes family members will step up to care for the children of people who are addicted without going through the formal foster care system, making it difficult to get an estimate on how many families have been rearranged because opioid addiction.

The foster care statistics themselves are overwhelming; Butts estimates that for every child in foster care because of a parent’s addiction there are 18 to 20 children who have been informally taken in by family members.

This has financial implications for the family member taking responsibility for the children, usually the grandparents. Twenty percent of grandparents raising grandchildren are living in poverty, and 40% are older than 60, which often means they are retired or semi-retired and living on a fixed income.

In addition, many children have been exposed to trauma, and their grandparents have been through their own traumatic experiences in seeing their child battle addiction.

“What they really need is to understand the impact of trauma on the children and try to help support them as they deal with that. Also, they need to have access to trauma-informed services, the services that can really help them to overcome what they’ve experienced,” Butts said.

However, she noted that having stable grandparents can really help children overcome the harms of having a parent battling addiction.

Even for parents who are working to get clean, keeping custody of the children can be challenging.

Jillian Broomstein, of New Hampshire, was in a methadone program when her son was born. Because the baby tested positive for opioids, he was taken by the Division for Children, Youth and Families. Broomstein had just one year to be off opioids and in a stable housing situation, or she would risk losing custody permanently, according to WGBH.

“I cannot stress enough that 12 months is a really short window for somebody who’s in early recovery,” says Courtney Tanner, who runs a New Hampshire recovery home where pregnant women and new moms can live with their babies while getting sober.

Situations like Broomstein’s are too common, she said.

“Here in New Hampshire what I have seen is a mom can be enrolled in this program and compliant in treatment and they are giving birth to a child and that child is still being removed and put into foster care.”

However, given the right resources, people in recovery are able to be reunited with their children.

“We see a lot of that,” said Dr. Frank Kunkel, the president and chief medical officer of Accessible Recovery Services. “We see a lot of people that spin out of control. They’re involved with the judicial system and all that. And we see grandma have the kids for a while. Then they’ll get back on track with things legally, and they’ll get on our medications, and they’ll get in seeing their therapist, and they’ll turn their life around. We see that every day.”

View the original article at thefix.com

10 July 2018
Opioid Makers Cut Back On Marketing Payouts To Doctors

In 2016, Big Pharma shelled out more than $15 million to doctors for opioid-related marketing—33% less than the year prior.

Drugmakers are cutting back on opioid-related marketing payouts to doctors, according to a data analysis by ProPublica.

The newly released figures come as the latest update to the nonprofit news site’s Dollars for Docs online tool that tracks payments to physicians from drug companies and other medical companies.

In 2016, the latest numbers show, Big Pharma shelled out more than $15 million to doctors in exchange for opioid-related speaking and consulting work. That was 33% less than the 2015 figure and 21% less than the 2014 figure. Repeatedly, research has drawn a link between marketing and prescribing practices.

“Given the deluge of media attention with the opioid epidemic, I think we’ve seen the pendulum swing in the opposite direction,” Michael Barnett, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard, told ProPublica. “If this is actually a result of manufacturers actually saying, ‘Holy crap, people actually care about opioids being used responsibly’ and they’re aware that their advocacy and payments to physicians could be seen as pushing these medications in a way that is ethically dubious, then that’s a beneficial development and something I’d like to see more of.”

The shift comes amid a growing number of lawsuits against drug companies accused of downplaying the risks of painkillers in aggressive marketing campaigns over a yearslong uptick in opioid use.

It’s not clear exactly what’s driving the changing numbers, though, experts said.

“It’s possible that the pharmaceutical companies voluntarily reduced their marketing, realizing that they may have been contributing to overprescribing,” Dr. Scott Hadland of Boston University School of Medicine told ProPublica.

At the same time the marketing dollars decreased, the number of opioid prescriptions started on the downswing as well. But, so far, the fall in marketing funds has outpaced the reduction in prescriptions.

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma cut off its speaker program for the drug in 2016, and this year the company halted all physician-targeted promotional efforts of its addictive painkillers and laid off sales reps.

“While the development of important new medicines will be the company’s priority going forward,” the company said last month, “we will continue to support our opioid analgesic product portfolio while continuing our commitment to take meaningful steps to reduce opioid abuse and addiction.”

The FDA greenlit OxyContin in 1995 and since then it’s been Purdue’s biggest financial success, even amid the rise of generic alternatives and the growing popularity of other opioid painkillers.

View the original article at thefix.com

9 July 2018
Kratom Draws Support And Controversy As Opioid Addiction Treatment

“It’s like a cruel joke that I finally found something that works and the FDA and DEA want it banned,” said one kratom user.

A controversial supplement, kratom, could have benefits when it comes to treating opioid use disorder, according to a new study. However, there is still much controversy around it due to safety concerns.

Kratom is a psychoactive drug that comes from the leaves of Mitragyna speciosa, which is an Asian plant in the coffee family.

Some believe it is effective for treating substance use disorders, but organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration are wary of that. In fact, the DEA even attempted to ban the substance.

In February, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb spoke against kratom, saying “there is no evidence to indicate that kratom is safe or effective for any medical use.”

Scott Hemby, a professor of pharmaceutical science at High Point University in North Carolina, led a new study recently published in Addiction Biology, which found that kratom may in fact have some benefits.

Kratom has two main ingredients: mitragynine (MG) and 7‐hydroxymitragynine (7‐HMG). MG accounts for 60% of the compound in the plant while HMG is about 2%. Using rats, Hemby’s study examined how both these ingredients affect the brain.

Hemby and other researchers allowed rats to self-administer both components of kratom. They found that the rats quickly began self-administering HMG, but did not have interest in MG.

“In other words, while one of kratom’s main compounds appeared to be addictive, the other wasn’t at all—in fact, it appeared to have the opposite effect,” Business Insider reported.

Because kratom affects some of the same receptors in the brain as opioids, the FDA announced in February that it would be called an “opioid.” But others believe kratom could be beneficial and treat cravings while reducing symptoms of withdrawal and the likelihood of relapse.

The results of the study suggest that it could be beneficial to breed the plant to have higher concentrations of one compound versus the other. However, the results are preliminary because the study was not done on humans.

Some people, such as 26-year-old Bryce Avey, began using kratom because they could not get access to other opioid treatments like buprenorphine and naltrexone. “It’s like a cruel joke that I finally found something that works and the FDA and DEA want it banned,” Avey told Business Insider.

David Juurlink, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, told Business Insider that the use of kratom makes sense, as it affects the same brain receptors as opioids. “It makes sense that this product would mitigate the symptoms of opioid withdrawal or allow someone to transition from a higher dose to lower dose, or help get them off of opioids altogether,” he said.

Business Insider notes that concern about the supplement arises because there is no “quality oversight of kratom,” meaning people don’t know what the pills actually contain.

“Personally, I would never take this stuff,” Juurlink told Business Insider. “When you go to a pharmacy, you know there’s quality control, you know precisely how much you’re getting, and you know exactly what you’re getting. With this, it’s impossible to know.”

View the original article at thefix.com

9 July 2018
Can Ayahuasca Help Those With Severe Depression?

Those suffering from severe, untreatable depression may find relief from the psychedelic drug ayahuasca.

A new study suggests that ayahuasca might be able to help people suffering from treatment-resistant depression.

The study is among the first of its kind investigating ayahuasca as a treatment for depression, testing 30 subjects in a randomized and placebo-controlled environment.

Such results could be significant, as some forms of depression do not respond to known drug treatments, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

Ayahuasca is a psychedelic brew derived from Amazonian plants. It’s been used for therapeutic and medicinal purposes for centuries by people living in the Amazonian regions in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. By boiling the vine banisteriopsis caapi and the shrub psychotria viridis together, the psychoactive compound DMT is extracted.

According to CNN, researchers at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte found 218 depression patients and selected 29 of those with treatment-resistant depression.

Some of the subjects were given the real thing while others were given a convincing placebo, a concoction made of water, yeast, citric acid, and caramel coloring to look brown and taste as sour and bitter as the real thing. As an extra touch, zinc sulphate was added to simulate the nausea and vomiting that often comes with ayahuasca.

Participants took their respective drinks in a hospital room made to look like a living room. In anticipation of the psychedelic effects that can last up to four hours, researchers prepared two playlists for participants, one instrumental and the other in the Portuguese language.

The day after the experiment, 50% of all the patients reported better moods and a reduction in anxiety. After a week, 64% of patients who took the real ayahuasca reported they still felt a reduction in their depression. In comparison, only 27% of the participants who took the placebo still felt better.

Using ayahuasca as a treatment for depression has been explored before, but without proper controls, such as a placebo group. This is a problem because placebos can result in a reduction in depression in 45% of patients, which researchers believe can muddy results and make it hard to find out what’s actually helping.

In the case of this study, participants who experienced more intense hallucinations from the ayahuasca seemed to have a greater reduction in depression, but the researchers warn against calling it a cure, as no single treatment works for everyone.

View the original article at thefix.com

9 July 2018
New York Federal Judge Admits He’s Been Too Tough on Marijuana

The judge says he wants to make things right, in both his current and future judgments.

Judge Jack Weinstein of Brooklyn, New York admits he’s probably been too harsh on marijuana offenders throughout his career. To make amends, he has vowed to be more lenient in future cases and to fix the cases he can now.

To that end, he plans to dig back through his cases and do away with supervised releases for marijuana offenders. Assigning probation officers to offenders who are simply trying to get their lives together after time in jail is a waste of time for all parties involved, Weinstein reasoned.

He’s already begun by prematurely terminating the three-year supervised release of 22-year-old Tyran Trotter, despite the fact that Trotter had smoked marijuana to stay “calm and on the right path.” While Trotter was in the system after pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin, Weinstein believes that booking him just for marijuana would be a mistake.

“If his supervision continues, he will probably end up in the almost endless cycle of supervised release and prison,” wrote Weinstein of the case in a 42-page ruling.

Besides Trotter’s case, Weinstein also wrote more broadly about marijuana’s legal status in general, mentioning that it’s “becoming increasingly accepted by society.” Law enforcement and the court systems are beginning to reflect this change in perception as well. Weinstein notes that even New York prosecutors aren’t aggressively pursuing lower-level marijuana cases.

Additionally, the New York Police Department has taken to issuing summonses to people caught smoking marijuana instead of arresting them.

However, Weinstein notes, the use of marijuana is still illegal at the federal level and federal probation officers will act accordingly. If marijuana offenders don’t stay mindful of this distinction, it could lead to getting booked for violating probation or even getting thrown in a cell.

Potentially, that’s a lot of offenders considering 13% of supervised releases in Brooklyn and Long Island area courts are drug-related. Weinstein isn’t the only judge who feels that way; a 2014 survey revealed that more than 85% of 650 federal court judges felt that offenders should not be automatically locked up when charged with illegal drug possession.

View the original article at thefix.com

9 July 2018
Kelly Osbourne Gets Candid About Sobriety, Relapse & Mental Health

“What I’ve learnt is that no amount of therapy or medication is going to work unless you want it to.”

Fighting off stigma and advocating for self-care, Kelly Osbourne opened up to a British tabloid about her ongoing reliance on weekly therapy to help her battle with addiction.

“I believe everybody should have therapy,” the 33-year-old told The Sun. “Your mind, body and soul are the full package. I try and go once a week.”

The former reality star also spoke of her seven trips to rehab and two mental hospital stays, and what was different the last time, the thing that finally got her sober. “What I’ve learnt is that no amount of therapy or medication is going to work unless you want it to,” she said. “Until you want to be a good person, you will never be one.”

Osbourne—whose father, rock legend Ozzy Osbourne, has also had very public struggles with addiction—also touched on public perceptions around mental health care. “There’s still a huge stigma, especially in this country,” she said. “You work out to keep your body good so you go to therapy to keep your mind good.”

This isn’t the first time the perpetually purple-haired celeb has dished on her history of treatment and institutionalization; last year, she laid it all out in a book.

The TV star first got into drugs as a teen, when she started taking Vicodin after having her tonsils removed. “I found, when I take this, people like me,” she later told People. “I’m having fun, I’m not getting picked on. It became a confidence thing.”

Over the years, her drug use ballooned into a broader problem. “The only way I could even face my life was by opening that pill bottle, shaking out a few pills—or a handful—into my palm, and throwing them down my throat,” she wrote in her 2017 memoir, There is No F*cking Secret: Letters from a Badass Bitch.

After multiple trips to rehab, she sobered up once—then relapsed while living in Los Angeles. “Every day, I was taking more and more pills, hoping that I wouldn’t wake up,” she wrote.

But she pulled through it and got off drugs again, eventually going on to pen her book about it all.

“Now, I manage pain through creativity, friendship and self-care,” she wrote in a final chapter titled, “Dear Rehab.” “The crazier my life gets, the more focused I become on the things that make me feel good.”

View the original article at thefix.com

9 July 2018
Too Often, Insurers Cover Opioids But Not Addiction Treatment Meds

“Buprenorphine and methadone are incredibly effective medications… So I really do think it’s a stigma issue.”

As is the case for many people battling opioid addiction, Mandy’s dependency started at home. She was prescribed an opioid for back pain, and her insurance company gladly covered the cost of the pills.

However, after Mandy became dependent on opioids and was prescribed buprenorphine to help with her rehabilitation program, her insurer stepped back, unwilling to pay.

“It makes me want to go out and use [drugs],” Mandy said when she spoke to Vox. The 29-year-old who lives in the Chicago area asked that only her first name be used. “It’s way easier to get opiates or heroin… It’s so much easier than dealing with this bullshit.”

Many Americans who had no problem getting their insurance companies to pay for addictive opioid pain pills have found that getting insurers to cover treatment—particularly medication-assisted treatment (MAT) that relies on pharmaceuticals like buprenorphine—is an uphill battle despite the fact that the drugs have been proven effective.

“Buprenorphine and methadone are incredibly effective medications,” said Tami Mark, a health economist at RTI International, a non-profit that conducts policy research. “If you had any other drug with their kind of effect size, it would be immediately covered… So I really do think it’s a stigma issue.”

For people in early recovery, like Mandy, refusals to cover medications or delays in getting prescriptions approved can be deadly.

“The risk of relapse is incredibly high,” said Sara Ballare-Jones, a social work case manager at the University of Kansas Health System. She often has patients wait three days to get their medications approved because they require prior authorization from the insurance companies.

In Mandy’s case her claim was denied, leaving her to pay out of pocket for buprenorphine, which costs nearly $3,000 each year. The 29-year-old said that is a huge amount to have to pay while also handling daily expenses like student loans and rent.

“I’m feeling all these old issues and all this shit, and then it’s just more bullshit,” she said. “I’m just trying to reenter society… It’s really hard.”

It’s also incredibly frustrating for Mandy, who knows firsthand how easy it is to get insurers to cover opioids. “I never paid a dime for my opioids. Those were always covered,” she said. “But I’m paying all this money for the treatment.”

Mandy’s doctor, Dennis Brightwell, said that he usually sees issues with private insurance companies. While Medicaid is required to cover most medication-assisted treatments, most private insurers balk at covering them, putting vulnerable patients in an awkward position.

“If you send a commercial patient to the pharmacy, you don’t know until they get there how it’s going to go,” Brightwell said. “Sometimes it’s not such a problem. Sometimes it’s a prior authorization that is pretty straightforward. Sometimes it’s very difficult to get them to approve it. And there’s not an easy way to find out upfront what medications they approve.”

View the original article at thefix.com

7 July 2018
Drug Shortages Affect Hospitals Across US

The national drug shortage has been severe enough for the FDA to allow Pfizer to sell products that normally would have been recalled.

Emergency departments across the United States are feeling the strain of drug shortages that are affecting physicians’ ability to treat pain and other ailments.

According to the New York Times, some hospitals, like Norwegian American Hospital in Chicago, have been “struggling for months” lacking crucial drugs like morphine, epinephrine (adrenaline) and diltiazem, a heart medication. Norwegian has not had morphine since March of this year, the Times reported.

According to a May 2018 survey of 247 emergency doctors, conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians, 9 in 10 said they did not have access to important medicines, which they said negatively affected nearly 4 in 10 patients.

While the Times notes that while the reason behind the drug shortage is complex—including the fact that drug companies have little incentive to manufacture drugs that are difficult to make but “cheaply priced”—much of it has to do with manufacturing issues at Pfizer, which produces the majority of generic injectable drugs in the U.S.

“Most of the time, the problem is some type of quality issue related to machine or raw materials,” said Erin Fox, senior director of the University of Utah’s drug information and support services, according to CBS News. “It could be contaminated particles, bacteria, metal shavings, glass particles—all kinds of things. There’s a real quality control problem.”

Pfizer has received multiple warning letters from the Food and Drug Administration regarding issues of quality control, forcing it to slow down production while it addresses these issues. The company estimated that many of its drugs, like morphine, will not be available until 2019, according to the Times.

Incredibly, the drug shortage has been severe enough for the FDA to allow “Pfizer to sell products that normally would have been recalled: In May, Pfizer released morphine and other drugs in cracked syringes, with instructions to health care providers to filter the drugs before injecting them,” the Times reported.

Being the largest pharmaceutical company in the nation, Pfizer’s shortage issues have carried over to competitors who have struggled to fill the void.

The lack of pain medications has been a “huge issue,” according to one emergency room doctor at Norwegian American Hospital. “[Patients] are often disappointed and frustrated that the system is not functioning at the level it should be.”

Fox, who studies drug shortages, explained that the shortage of pain medications not only has to do with manufacturing issues, but opioid restrictions put in place by the government in response to the drug abuse epidemic.

View the original article at thefix.com

6 July 2018
Parents Reunited With Son After Losing Custody For Treating Epilepsy With Marijuana

The teenager must undergo monthly drug tests and is not allowed to use the smokeable marijuana that helped his ailments.

After treating their chronically ill son’s debilitating seizures with smokeable marijuana, Matthew and Suzeanna Brill lost custody of 15-year-old David for more than a month and faced criminal charges as well as a possible prison sentence.

But as High Times reported, the Georgia couple has been reunited with their son with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The organization appealed to the Twiggs County Juvenile Court in support of the family and their son’s health issues; in response, the court issued a 12-month protective order, which allows the family to stay together, and may ultimately lead to dismissal of the criminal charges against the Brills.

David Brill suffers from constant and severe epileptic seizures that, according to the Brills, did not respond to the marijuana extract cannabidiol (CBD) oil, which has been suggested by some clinical trials as an effective treatment for such a condition.

Concerned for their son’s health, the Brills gave him smokeable marijuana—possession of which is considered a misdemeanor in the state of Georgia—which, they claimed, allowed him to live without seizures for nearly three months.

The Brills said that they never forced David to smoke marijuana, and informed their doctors, a therapist and the police about their decision.

A visit from the police led to David’s removal from his family’s home by Georgia’s Division of Family and Children’s Services (DFCS) for more than 30 days, during which his seizures returned, while the Brills spent six days in jail on reckless conduct charges. Upon their release, the Brills launched a GoFundMe campaign to offset the cost of a lawyer to advocate for David’s return and their pending charges.

But in late June 2018, the Georgia branch of the ACLU stepped in to file an amicus brief to reunite David with his parents, which argued that the Brills’ use of marijuana was done only to provide relief for their son and in a manner supported, albeit indirectly, by the Georgia Legislature, which allows the possession and use of 20 fluid ounces of low THC oil for specific medical conditions, including seizure disorders.

In response to the ACLU’s efforts, the Twiggs County Juvenile Court issued a 12-month protective order, which reunited David with his parents on condition that the family checks in twice a month with the DFCS and provides them with his medical records.

David must also undergo monthly drug tests, but will be allowed to continue to take cannabidiol along with other epilepsy medication to treat his seizures.

If David does not test positive for THC and his parents cooperate with the DFCS, the juvenile court can terminate the protective order and dismiss the charges against Matthew and Suzeanna Brill. A review is scheduled for December 13, 2018.

View the original article at thefix.com

6 July 2018