From The Associated Press

Forty years after Woodstock, some baby boomers haven’t let go of one part of the 1960s: getting high on illicit drugs.

The percentage of Americans age 50-59 who reported use of illicit drugs within a year nearly doubled between 2002 and 2007, from 5.1 percent to 9.4 percent, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported Wednesday.

The agency said that percentage rose because baby boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — continued to use drugs as they got older.

SAMHSA Acting Administrator Eric Broderick said the continued drug use “is likely to put further strains on the nation’s health care system.”

The rates of illicit drug use among all other age groups stayed the same or decreased over the five-year period, the agency said.

From thelocal.de/national:

The consumer ministries in the two states confirmed on Friday they had ordered retailers to pull the drink off their shelves after a food safety institute in North-Rhine Westphalia found cocaine in samples of the beverage.

“The institute examined Red Bull Cola in an elaborate chemical process and found traces of cocaine,” Bernhard Kühnle, head of the food safety department at the federal ministry for consumer protection said.

Authorities said the cocaine levels do not pose a health threat but are not permitted in foodstuffs.

The Frankfurter Neuen Presse reported that the investigation was prompted by the use of a de-cocainized extract of coca leaf in the drink. That means the drink cannot be classified as a foodstuff but as a narcotic and needs a special license, authorities said.

The newspaper reported that German retail group Rewe had already issued orders to remove the fizzy drink from its shops. Wilhelm Deitermann, spokesman for the North-Rhine Westphalia consumer ministry said he expected other German states to follow suit and ban the drink.

But Red Bull Cola has protested the action. “De-cocainized extract of coca leaf is used worldwide in foods as a natural flavouring,” the paper quoted the company saying. The company added that Red Bull Cola as well as other food that contains coca leaf extract is considered safe in the EU as well as in the US.

The more popular Red Bull, dubbed the “clubbers’ drink,” is often mixed with vodka. It contains caffeine, vitamins, and sugar which, the company claims, kick-starts the body’s metabolism and keeps people alert.

From Los Angeles Times

A large and respected association of physicians is calling on the federal government to ease its strict ban on marijuana as medicine and hasten research into the drug’s therapeutic uses.

The American College of Physicians, the nation’s largest organization of doctors of internal medicine, with 124,000 members, contends that the long and rancorous debate over marijuana legalization has obscured good science that has demonstrated the benefits and medicinal promise of cannabis.

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In a 13-page position paper approved by the college’s governing board of regents and posted Thursday on the group’s website, the group calls on the government to drop marijuana from Schedule I, a classification it shares with illegal drugs such as heroin and LSD that are considered to have no medicinal value and a high likelihood of abuse.

The declaration could put new pressure on Washington lawmakers and government regulators who for decades have rejected attempts to reclassify marijuana.

Bush administration officials have aggressively rebuffed all attempts in Congress, the courts and among law enforcement organizations to legitimize medical marijuana.

Clinical researchers say the federal government has resisted full study of the potential medical benefits of cannabis, instead pouring money into looking at its negative effects.

A dozen states including California have legalized medical marijuana, but the federal prohibition has led to an enforcement tug of war.

In California, federal agents continue to raid cannabis dispensaries, and the small cadre of physicians specializing in writing cannabis recommendations so that people can use medical marijuana has come under regulatory scrutiny.

Given the conflicts, most mainstream doctors have steered clear of medical marijuana.

The American College of Physicians’ position paper calls for protection of both doctors and patients from criminal and civil penalties in states that have adopted medical-marijuana laws.

“We felt the time had come to speak up about this,” said Dr. David Dale, the group’s president. “We’d like to clear up the uncertainty and anxiety of patients and physicians over this drug.”

Medical-marijuana advocates embraced the position paper as a watershed event that could help turn the battle in their favor.

Bruce Mirken, a San Francisco spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, said the ACP position is “an earthquake that’s going to rattle the whole medical-marijuana debate.”

The group, he said, “pulverized the government’s two favorite myths about medical marijuana — that it’s not supported by the medical community and that science hasn’t shown marijuana to have medical value.”

But officials at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said calls for legalizing medical marijuana were misguided.

“What this would do is drag us back to 14th century medicine,” said Bertha Madras, the agency’s deputy director for demand reduction. “It’s so arcane.”

She said guidance on marijuana as medicine ought to come from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which she said is unlikely ever to approve leafy cannabis as a prescription drug.

Two oral derivatives of marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient, THC, have won FDA approval, and the agency is also in the early stages of considering a marijuana spray.

An FDA spokeswoman declined to comment on the group’s position and referred inquiries to a 2006 media advisory noting that the agency has never approved of smoked marijuana as a medical treatment

In the 12 years since California voters approved the nation’s first-ever medical marijuana law, several medical organizations — including the American Nurses Assn. and the American Public Health Assn. — have urged Congress to make cannabis a legal medicine.

From Medical News Today

Children with symptoms of anxiety and depression may have an increased tendency to use ecstasy in adolescence or young adulthood, finds a study published online by the BMJ today.

The use of ecstasy is associated with emotional health problems, such as depression, psychotic symptoms, and anxiety disorders. But it’s not clear whether emotional problems are a consequence of using ecstasy or emotional problems lead to ecstasy use.

Researchers in the Netherlands investigated whether use of ecstasy is preceded by symptoms of behavioural and emotional problems in childhood and early adolescence.

They assessed ecstasy use in 1580 individuals from childhood into adulthood. The first assessment took place in 1983, before ecstasy appeared as a recreational drug in the Netherlands. Use of the drug was then assessed 14 years later, providing a unique opportunity to investigate if a pathway from behavioural and emotional problems leading to ecstasy use exists.

Individuals with signs of anxiety and depression in 1983 showed an increased risk of starting to use ecstasy.

Ecstasy’s effects are supposed to include enhanced feelings of bonding with other people, euphoria, or relaxation, say the authors. Individuals with signs of anxiety or depression may be particularly susceptible to these positive effects and may therefore use ecstasy to relieve their symptoms.

However, long term exposure to ecstasy may result in increased depressive symptoms. Individuals with signs of anxiety or depression in childhood are at risk of using ecstasy and may develop depressive symptoms. This may explain part of the link that has been found between ecstasy use and later depression in other studies, add the authors.

Other factors not tested in this study may account for the increased tendency to use ecstasy in some individuals. They include the social environment, novelty seeking, or substance use of parents.

“Focusing on these vulnerable individuals in future studies will increase our insight into the potential harmful effects of ecstasy on brain neurotransmitter systems and associated psychopathology,” they conclude.

From MedlinePlus:

From Elvis to Hendrix, from Janis Joplin to Kurt Cobain, rock and pop stars are more than twice as likely to die early compared with the general population, British researchers report.

What’s more, pop stars often die within a few years of achieving fame, often due to drug and alcohol abuse. But it’s their role as icons that worries the researchers behind the report that appears in the September issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

“People should understand the type of lifestyle that many of these performers live,” said study author Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University. “In addition, the music industry should consider not just the short-term health of popular rock stars, but also the longer term health even as they disappear later into obscurity.”

Part of the problem is living with the stress of fame, Bellis said. “Also, living in an environment of money and fame, which protects people from some of the consequences, which would make members of the general public give up drugs,” he said.

“Generally,” he added, “affluence enhances people’s lifestyles and prolongs life, whereas in this particular case the exposure to fame and what comes with it is associated with a mortality which is higher than that in the general population.”

For the study, Bellis and his colleagues collected data on 1,064 pop artists from North America and Europe who shot to fame between 1956 and 1999. These musicians were all featured in the All Time Top 1,000 albums, selected in 2000, covering rock, punk, rap, R&B, electronica and new age music.

Bellis’s team compared how long the stars survived after achieving fame to the life expectancy of the general population, matching for age, sex, ethnicity and nationality, up to the end of 2005.

The researchers found that between 1956 and 2005, 100 pop music stars had died. Their average age was 42 for North American stars and 35 for European stars. More than one in four died from long-term drug or alcohol problems, the researchers found.

But, for European stars who survived 25 years after achieving fame, their life expectancy returned to normal. North American pop stars, however, continued to suffer higher death rates. “The higher mortality in the rock business has elements about achieving fame, but also coping with obscurity,” Bellis said.

The lesson to be learned from the study, the researchers said, is that the music business needs to take substance abuse and risky behaviors more seriously. Not only because of the effect on the stars, but also because the stars serve as role models for others.

One in 10 children in the United Kingdom wants to be a pop star, the study authors said, and many take part in series such as the British show the “X Factor” and the U.S. hit “American Idol,” which reinforce the attractiveness of a singing career.

Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center, said the study findings should serve as a wake-up call for performers and their fans about the hazards that can accompany fame.

“Pop culture has a major influence on the lifestyle and behaviors of impressionable young people. Rock stars rank among the premier icons of pop culture, and thus de facto role models for their fans,” he said.

“While we have all witnessed the high-profile implosions of the rich and famous, there is little if any scientific data to confirm the intuition that fast living speeds up one’s demise, Katz said. “But that’s just what this study shows.”

“That is a sobering consideration, and one might hope not just for the musicians but their legions of fans,” Katz said. “But translating alarming statistics into policy and behavior change is the real challenge.”