First the cartel cut its teeth with drug trafficking. Then avocados, real estate and construction companies. Now, a Mexican criminal group known for its brutality is moving in on seniors and their timeshares.

The operation is relatively simple. Cartel employees posing as sales representatives call up timeshare owners, offering to buy their investments back for generous sums. They then demand upfront fees for anything from listing advertisements to paying government fines. The representatives persuade their victims to wire large amounts of money to Mexico — sometimes as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars — and then they disappear.

The scheme has netted the cartel, Jalisco New Generation, hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, according to U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly, via dozens of call centers in Mexico that relentlessly target American and Canadian timeshare owners. They even bribe employees at Mexican resorts to leak guest information, the U.S. officials say.

Read it all.

“Over 5 years, American timeshare owners were bilked out of $288 million. The real number is most likely $350 million, as about 20% never register a complaint.”

A Mexican Drug Cartel’s New Target? Seniors and Their Timeshares https://t.co/DAKwfJwE37

— Dan Beucke (@DanBeucke) March 21, 2024

“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”

The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global powerhouse, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The huge revenue stream from marijuana fuels that laundering apparatus, which is “the most extensive network of underground banking in the world,” said a former senior DEA official, Donald Im.

“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal networks to expand their underground global banking system for cartels and other criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight against Chinese organized crime.

U.S. law enforcement struggles to respond to this multifaceted threat. State and federal agencies suffer from a lack of personnel who know Chinese language and culture well enough to investigate complex cases, infiltrate networks or translate intercepts, current and former officials say. A federal shift of priorities to counterterrorism after 2001 meant resources dedicated to Chinese organized crime dwindled — while the power of the underworld grew.

And the shadow of the Chinese state hovers over it all….

Read it all.

Officials estimate the value of the illegal marijuana market grown in Oklahoma at somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion a year.

Investigators have found links to foreign mafias and say that more than 80% of the groups are of Chinese origin. https://t.co/A4WKYfaCet

— ProPublica (@propublica) March 16, 2024

The death certificate for Ryan Bagwell, a 19-year-old from Mission, Texas, states that he died from a fentanyl overdose.

His mother, Sandra Bagwell, says that is wrong.

On an April night in 2022, he swallowed one pill from a bottle of Percocet, a prescription painkiller that he and a friend bought earlier that day at a Mexican pharmacy just over the border. The next morning, his mother found him dead in his bedroom.

A federal law enforcement lab found that none of the pills from the bottle tested positive for Percocet. But they all tested positive for lethal quantities of fentanyl.

“Ryan was poisoned,” Mrs. Bagwell, an elementary-school reading specialist, said.

Read it all.

Overdose or Poisoning? A New Debate Over What to Call a Drug Death.: Grieving families want official records and popular discourse to move away from reflexive use of “overdose,” which they believe blames victims for their deaths. https://t.co/EE9BNjgr23

— Sophia Devetzi (@SophiaDevetzi) March 11, 2024

As the saying goes, dogs, and pets in general, have long been viewed as man’s best friend. But pet pharmaceuticals haven’t always matched that, and often a tick or flea collar was the lone preventive medicine many pets saw, outside of necessary vet visits.

But Peck said she has seen a shift in mentality from pet owners, as well as a shift in the pharmaceutical pipeline, that is bringing animal medicine more in line with human medicine.

“Newer generations see their pets very differently than previous generations,” Peck said. “Fifty, sixty years ago, your dog was in the backyard; now it has moved into your house, often your bed and sometimes replaced your children — your dog or cat has a stroller, a backpack and an outfit.”

Read it all.

The pet drugs vets are now prescribing look a lot more like human medications https://t.co/FWzmo1Cro8

— CNBC (@CNBC) March 5, 2024

Not long ago, sobriety was broadly understood to mean abstaining from all intoxicating substances, and the term was often associated with people who had overcome severe forms of addiction. These days, it is used more expansively, including by people who have quit drinking alcohol but consume what they deem moderate amounts of other substances, including marijuana and mushrooms.

“Just because someone has a drinking problem doesn’t mean they have a problem with every single thing,” Mr. Reed said.

As some drugs come to be viewed as wellness boosters by those who use them, adherence to the full abstinence model favored by organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous is shifting. Some people call themselves “California sober,” a term popularized in a 2021 song by the pop star Demi Lovato, who later disavowed the idea, saying on social media that “sober sober is the only way to be.”

Approaches that might have once seemed ludicrous — like treating opioid addiction with psychedelics — have gained broader enthusiasm among doctors as drug overdoses kill tens of thousands of Americans each year.

Read it all.

What Does Being Sober Mean Today? For Many, Not Full Abstinence. More younger Americans are shunning alcohol while embracing cannabis, ketamine and psychedelics, shaking up the field of addiction medicine. https://t.co/K8m4zrRc3H

— Carl Hindy, Ph.D., HSP, Clinical Psychologist (@DrCarlHindy) February 5, 2024

Using a type of artificial intelligence known as deep learning, MIT researchers have discovered a class of compounds that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium that causes more than 10,000 deaths in the United States every year.

In a study appearing in Nature, the researchers showed that these compounds could kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) grown in a lab dish and in two mouse models of MRSA infection. The compounds also show very low toxicity against human cells, making them particularly good drug candidates.

A key innovation of the new study is that the researchers were also able to figure out what kinds of information the deep-learning model was using to make its antibiotic potency predictions. This knowledge could help researchers to design additional drugs that might work even better than the ones identified by the model.

“The insight here was that we could see what was being learned by the models to make their predictions that certain molecules would make for good antibiotics,” said James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering, a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Our work provides a framework that is time-efficient, resource-efficient, and mechanistically insightful, from a chemical-structure standpoint, in ways that we haven’t had to date.”

Read it all.

We are thrilled to announce the latest discovery by our partners at the Collins Lab: a novel class of antibiotics with activity against MRSA! Read more about the team's "explainable AI" approach underlying this groundbreaking discovery.https://t.co/o8PRSLULwM

— Phare Bio (@PhareBio) December 21, 2023

A recently unsealed federal indictment in South Florida opens a rare window into the source of nitazenes: manufacturers in China that officials say sell the drugs online and ship them to dealers in the United States. Prosecutors allege that a Deerfield Beach, Fla., man used WhatsApp and bitcoin to purchase nitazenes to mix with fentanyl or heroin, to stretch out his supplies of opioids and make an “ultra powerful substance.”

“The nitazenes can make [a drug mix] stronger than fentanyl,” said Anthony Salisbury, the special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Investigations field office in South Florida. “As if we needed something stronger than fentanyl.”

The South Florida case from October included indictments against a Chinese chemical sales company and an employee of that company. According to one of the indictments, the Chinese company selling nitazenes used websites, social media accounts and messaging apps to sell chemicals such as protonitazene and metonitazene to customers in the United States, Europe, Asia and South America. As part of the investigation, a U.S. Postal Inspection Service agent posing as a buyer ordered nitazenes from the company, according to the indictment.

It was among the first criminal prosecutions to target an overseas source of nitazenes, Salisbury said.

Read it all.

Novel opioids can be many times more powerful than fentanyl and can complicate overdose revivals and addiction treatment. The increasing presence of nitazenes adds another layer of health concerns as users often don't know they are consuming those opioids. https://t.co/mNmgMGXhW2

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 10, 2023

We have now had years of headlines talking about new research into using psychedelic drugs for therapy and, along with it, an increase in spiritual seekers.

Studies about the use of psychedelic drugs for therapy have been growing for years, with increased institutional involvement from universities, Congress, and the US Department of Defense to name just a few.

Outside of clinical trials, psychedelic use among young adults has nearly tripled in the past decade. Religious leaders—including hospital chaplains and religious psychotherapists—are also exploring the use of these drugs, as recently reported by NPR and Esquire. Ordained clergy are even conducting underground retreats that blend psychedelics with Christian worship with an emphasis on “healing.”

While I believe there are likely legitimate-use cases for psychedelic therapy that will bear out in time, I want to raise awareness of the many psychological risks of psychedelics that are often underemphasized in the research. And as a pastor, I feel an urgency to inform Christians of the serious spiritual risks of psychedelics—including the idolatry of spiritual experience.

Read it all.

“As a pastor, I feel an urgency to inform Christians of the serious spiritual risks of psychedelics—including the idolatry of spiritual experience.”

From @revjoewelker: https://t.co/HcusnXPudl

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) November 16, 2023

Americans are more negative about U.S. progress in dealing with the problem of illegal drugs than at any prior point in Gallup’s trend, which dates back to 1972. For the first time, a majority of U.S. adults, 52%, say the U.S. has lost ground in coping with the illegal drug problem, while a record-low 24% say it has made progress. Another 23% believe it has stood still.

Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have risen sharply in recent years, with much of the increase due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. But overdoses linked to other types of drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamines, have also grown since 2019.

Gallup has updated its trend on progress in addressing the illegal drug problem periodically since the mid-1990s, after some initial measurements in the 1970s showed mixed views on the question.

Read it all.

Americans are the most pessimistic they have been about U.S. progress on the illegal drug problem. https://t.co/VuD58In42u

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) November 10, 2023

It was a phrase he repeated to himself several times each day when his patience started to wane and he could feel the frustration hardening in his chest: They were all doing their best. The police officers whose active patrol force had shrunk by 20 percent to crisis levels because of attrition, recruiting challenges and the impact of calls to defund the police. The people sleeping on sidewalks as rents soared to record highs and shelters filled to capacity. The addicts who could either wait in line at 6 a.m. for the outside chance of a spot in rehab or numb their pain with another fentanyl pill for the going price of 50 cents. They were all suffering together through the morass of a damaged society.

“Our entire first responder system in this city, according to the people who run it, is 20 years behind the ball and critically understaffed,” the mayor said last year at a City Council meeting. The city itself had increasingly turned to the same Band-Aid fix as everyone else, spending more than $4 million a year on private security guards to help protect parks, water treatment facilities, parking garages and city hall.

The booming industry was nobody’s idea of a perfect or comprehensive solution. More than a dozen security guards in Portland had been accused of assault or harassment, and one was convicted of murder earlier this year after fatally shooting a customer outside of a Lowe’s store. Guards in Oregon were sometimes trained and certified in as little as 16 hours, and more than 100 companies operated in downtown Portland on any given night under different policies and company rules.

Echelon was one of the most proactive, with more than 75 guards who patrolled the city 24 hours a day. At least 400 fed-up local businesses paid Echelon a monthly fee to run interference with homeless people by building relationships, offering resources to people with addictions and mental illness, buying their breakfasts, replacing their shoes, reversing their overdoses and de-escalating their episodes of psychosis.

Bock’s previous security job had been at a company that stationed him outside a grocery store as a deterrent to shoplifting and told him to avoid interacting with customers. “A human scarecrow,” was how Bock described that role, so he chose to move to Echelon in 2021 despite the long hours and middle-class pay, because he wanted to be part of the glue that pieced his hometown back together.

Read it all.

"How can any of this be considered normal?" Another stunning @elisaslow story from the front lines of the urban unraveling, on one of the countless private security guards being hired to patrol American cities: https://t.co/kfYK1qGbNa

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) October 2, 2023

For the past two and a half years, Oregon has been trying an unusual experiment to stem soaring rates of addiction and overdose deaths. People caught with small amounts of illicit drugs for “personal use,” including fentanyl and methamphetamine, are fined just $100 — a sanction that can be waived if they participate in a drug screening and health assessment. The aim is to reserve prosecutions for large-scale dealers and address addiction primarily as a public health emergency.

When the proposal, known as Measure 110, was approved by nearly 60 percent of Oregon voters in November 2020, the pandemic had already emptied downtown Portland of workers and tourists. But its street population was growing, especially after the anti-police protests that had spread around the country that summer. Within months of the measure taking effect in February 2021, open-air drug use, long in the shadows, burst into full view, with people sitting in circles in parks or leaning against street signs, smoking fentanyl crushed on tinfoil.

Since then, Oregon’s overdose rates have only grown. Now, tents of unhoused people line many sidewalks in Portland. Monthslong waiting lists for treatment continue to lengthen. Some politicians and community groups are calling for Measure 110 to be replaced with tough fentanyl possession laws. Others are pleading to give it more time and resources.

Read it all.

Oregon’s experiment to curb overdoses by decriminalizing small amounts of illicit drugs is in its third year, and life has changed for most everyone in the city of Portland: “At four in the afternoon the streets can feel like dealer central” https://t.co/K6ziIxzbBV

— Jim Russell (@ProducerCities) August 1, 2023

Several studies have shown that chronic cannabis use is linked to a higher incidence of schizophrenia among men in their early 20s, the age when the disease is usually diagnosed. The first paper on the topic, a Swedish study published in 1997, found that heavy cannabis use was associated with a sixfold increase in schizophrenia risk. In the decades since, social scientists have unearthed a strong link between heavy cannabis use and other severe psychological illnesses, including clinical depression and bipolar disorder.

Now a new longitudinal study has examined the medical records of all citizens of Denmark over the age of 16, some 6.5 million people in all, for patterns of diagnosis, hospitalization and treatment for substance use between 1995 and 2021. In the paper, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry in May, Dr. Oskar Hougaard Jefsen of Aarhus University and colleagues showed that people who had previously been diagnosed with cannabis use disorder were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed later with clinical depression. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cannabis use disorder is characterized by craving marijuana, using it more often than intended, spending a lot of time using it, and having it interfere with friends, family and work.

Even more dramatically, the paper also found that people with cannabis use disorder were up to four times as likely to be diagnosed later with bipolar disorder with psychotic symptoms.

Read it all.

Reefer madness, literally: A new study involving the entire adult population of Denmark found a clear link between cannabis abuse and mental illness, writes Susan Pinker. https://t.co/AdnvFvGN8Y via @WSJ

— Gary Rosen (@garyrosenWSJ) July 6, 2023

It was the dead of winter in February 2022 when I first met Marwa, a 38-year-old opium addict, sitting huddled under a blanket in the women’s drug rehabilitation center in Kabul with two of her children. Mina, age 2, had just woken up and was writhing in pain, lifting her small head to see her new visitors.

Marwa’s other daughter, Zahra, age 15, was sitting by the edge of the bed. I first mistook her for a boy as she was dressed in boys’ clothing. Her mother said dressing as a boy made it easier for her to buy drugs. Zahra had been wearing the outfit when she was picked up by the hospital’s field team from under Pul-e-Sukhta, a bridge in western Kabul that has transformed into a gathering place for drug users and sellers.

Dr. Shaista Hakeem, director of the 150-bed National Center for the Treatment of Addiction for Women and Children in Kabul, introduced me to her patients that day, telling me the family had been at the hospital for more than a week. They were seeking treatment for opium addiction, which consisted of 15 days of medication and 15 days of counseling, awareness, and skill training. It was an ordeal, especially for the children, who suffered withdrawal symptoms despite regular doses of medication. The effectiveness of treatment varies from patient to patient, Hakeem added.

Marwa had been taking opium and heroin, a more refined opioid, for 10 years, and had passed on her addiction to her youngest child, Mina, through breast milk.

Read it all.

'The % of women reporting drug addiction rose to 9.5% in 2015 from 3% in 2009. Furthermore, 9.2% of children up to 14 years old tested positive for drugs and were likely to be engaged in active drug use' '#Afghanistan's #opium tragedy' https://t.co/fvRJYb7pAX via @NikkeiAsia

— Kenneth Maxwell (@Kenny_Maxwell) June 21, 2023

We are engaged in a massive national experiment, making all schoolchildren fit one behavioral mold; the results speak for themselves. Reading and math scores have not risen, but mindless acceptance of orthodoxy certainly has. The dream of certain educational reformers for centuries, it is only in the past couple decades that factory education has become reality, thanks to the power of Big Pharma. When students of the past did not fit, there was not that much even the most authoritarian teacher could do about it. Today, however, the choice is starker: Conform or be drugged. We used to make dystopian movies about it; now we make our children live it.

The medicine is the message. The nature of your discourse depends upon the popularity of your prescriptions. Once we have obedience in a tablet—a drug that makes students sit still and attend to whatever faddish nonsense their teacher may be spouting—society can be independent no longer. By making pharmaceuticals an integral part of the modern educational project, it is not simply the stimulant-taking students who become docile and obedient, but the unmedicated ones as well.

Read it all.

If Ritalin did not exist, neither would ADHD; the treatment conjures the disease. https://t.co/Rl4h992jxz

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) March 17, 2023

I came to Manhattan in 1990 because I was young and ambitious. To my good fortune, a humming economy and effective policing techniques based on the broken-windows theory made it relatively easy for me to start a family and a business here. Today, however, it feels as if the conditions that made New York a destination for businesses and families in the 1990s are no more.

There may be no greater symbol of decay than the ubiquitous stench of marijuana. I smell it when I leave my apartment building at 6:45 a.m. and when I come home at night. As the health of public finance declines in societies, so does private virtue. This is often because enterprising politicians find it easier to use vice as a source of public funding instead of making sober fiscal choices.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

There may be no greater symbol of decay in New York City than the ubiquitous stench of marijuana, writes Jason De Sena Trennerthttps://t.co/eJT4sJfZ7g

— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) March 8, 2023

At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, “Paul” appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usual cancer killers were not doing their job.

With nothing to lose, Paul’s doctors enrolled him in a trial set up by the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, where he lives. The university was testing a new matchmaking technology developed by a UK-based company called Exscientia that pairs individual patients with the precise drugs they need, taking into account the subtle biological differences between people.

The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul (his real name is not known because his identity was obscured in the trial). They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. Then, using robotic automation and computer vision (machine-learning models trained to identify small changes in cells), they watched to see what would happen.

In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.

The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. Some of the medicines didn’t kill Paul’s cancer cells. Others harmed his healthy cells. Paul was too frail to take the drug that came out on top. So he was given the runner-up in the matchmaking process: a cancer drug marketed by the pharma giant Johnson & Johnson that Paul’s doctors had not tried because previous trials had suggested it was not effective at treating his type of cancer.

It worked. Two years on, Paul was in complete remission—his cancer was gone.

Read it all.

On average, it takes more than 10 years and billions of dollars to develop a new drug.

Incorporating AI into the drug development pipeline could help create cheaper pharmaceuticals faster. https://t.co/xYVZFyA5fY

— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) February 15, 2023

Fentanyl’s catastrophic surge came after the Drug Enforcement Administration cracked down on the excesses of the U.S. opioid industry. Millions of Americans who had become addicted to prescription pain pills suddenly found them difficult or impossible to get.

Mexican cartels stepped in to fill the vacuum. Traffickers, who relied for decades on plant-based drugs such as heroin, cocaine and marijuana, are now using chemicals in clandestine laboratories to manufacture fentanyl powder and pills to meet the ever-increasing demand in the United States.

Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin, and its compactness makes it far easier to smuggle. The synthetic opioid is so powerful that a year’s supply of pure fentanyl powder for the U.S. market would fit in the beds of two pickup trucks.

Read it all.

Fentanyl’s recent surge came after the DEA cracked down on the U.S. opioid industry.

Millions of Americans who had become addicted to prescription pain pills then found them difficult or impossible to get.

Mexican cartels stepped in to fill the vacuum. https://t.co/UnPmsHY5Z2

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 12, 2022

Almost 35 years ago American drug regulators approved Prozac, the first in a series of blockbuster antidepressants known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (ssris). Prozac and its cousins were lauded by patients and doctors as miracle drugs. They lifted low moods quickly and seemed to have no drawbacks. Divorce, bereavement, problems at work—a daily pill was there to help with that, and anything else which made you sad. Many people have stayed on these drugs for life. In Western countries today between one person in seven and one in ten takes antidepressants.

The shine of ssris has worn off. A growing number of studies show that they are less effective than thought. Drug companies often publish the results of clinical trials selectively, withholding those in which the drugs turn out not to work well. When the results of all trials submitted to America’s medicines regulator between 1979 and 2016 were scrutinised by independent scientists, it turned out that antidepressants had a substantial benefit beyond a placebo effect in only 15% of patients.

Clinical guidelines have been revised accordingly in recent years. No longer are drugs the recommended first line of treatment for less severe cases of depression. For these, self-help guidance, behavioural therapy and recommendations for things like exercise and sleep are preferable. For work burnout, a sick note for time off may suffice. The drugs are to be reserved only for more severe depression, where they can be truly life-saving.

Read it all.

Lots of people who do not need antidepressants are already on them, refilling prescriptions written years or even decades ago. They should be helped to get off the drugs https://t.co/Rbz8cN9ogl

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 20, 2022

Adm. Craig Faller, a senior U.S. military leader, told Congress last year that Chinese launderers had emerged as the “No. 1 underwriter” of drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. The Chinese government is “at least tacitly supporting” the laundering activity, testified Faller, who led the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military activity in Latin America.

In an interview with ProPublica, the now-retired Faller elaborated on his little-noticed testimony. He said China has “the world’s largest and most sophisticated state security apparatus. So there’s no doubt that they have the ability to stop things if they want to. They don’t have any desire to stop this. There’s a lot of theories as to why they don’t. But it is certainly aided and abetted by the attitude and way that the People’s Republic of China views the globe.”

Some U.S. officials go further, arguing that Chinese authorities have decided as a matter of policy to foster the drug trade in the Americas in order to destabilize the region and spread corruption, addiction and death here.

“We suspected a Chinese ideological and strategic motivation behind the drug and money activity,” said former senior FBI official Frank Montoya Jr., who served as a top counterintelligence official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “To fan the flames of hate and division. The Chinese have seen the advantages of the drug trade. If fentanyl helps them and hurts this country, why not?”

Read it all.

This story is about the convergence of two of the top security threats to the United States: Latin American drug cartels and the authoritarian regime in China. https://t.co/BYk0iZkI5L

— ProPublica (@propublica) October 12, 2022

Americans are evenly split in their views about marijuana’s effect on society, with 49% considering it positive and 50% negative. They are slightly more positive about the drug’s effect on people who use it, with 53% saying it’s positive and 45% negative.

People’s own experience with marijuana is highly related to their views on both questions.

Large majorities of adults who say they have ever tried marijuana — which is nearly half of Americans — think marijuana’s effects on users (70%) and society at large (66%) are positive.
Conversely, the majority of those who have never tried marijuana think its effects are negative: 72% say this about its effect on society and 62% about its effect on users.

Read it all.

Americans Not Convinced Marijuana Benefits Society https://t.co/4zwuZA6yb4

— Riccardo C. Gatti (@RiccardoGatti) August 17, 2022

After a catastrophic increase in 2020, deaths from drug overdoses rose again to record-breaking levels in 2021, nearing 108,000, the result of an ever-worsening fentanyl crisis, according to preliminary new data published on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The increase of nearly 15 percent followed a much steeper rise of almost 30 percent in 2020, an unrelenting crisis that has consumed federal and state drug policy officials. Since the 1970s, the number of drug overdose deaths has increased every year except 2018.

A growing share of deaths continue to come from overdoses involving fentanyl, a class of potent synthetic opioids that are often mixed with other drugs, and methamphetamine, a synthetic stimulant. State health officials battling an influx of both drugs said many of the deaths appeared to be the result of combining the two.

Drug overdoses, which long ago surged above the country’s peak deaths from AIDS, car crashes and guns, killed about a quarter as many Americans last year as Covid-19.

Read it all.

Breaking News: U.S. deaths from drug overdoses again rose to record-breaking levels in 2021, nearing 108,000, according to preliminary data from the CDC.

The increase of nearly 15% followed a much steeper rise of almost 30% in 2020.https://t.co/GX3AR3TlR0

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 11, 2022

Treatment for opioid use disorder (oud) is woefully inadequate across the country, but African-Americans often face extra barriers. Studies have found that medications for treating oud, as well as naloxone (a life-saving medication that reverses opioid overdoses), are doled out unevenly. A study of data from Medicaid, the government insurance programme for the poor, across several states with some of the highest opioid-overdose rates found that between 2014 and 2018 black people with oud were 28% less likely to use oud medications.

Studies in various cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, suggest that African-Americans have less access to naloxone, too. In Detroit between 2019 and 2020, white addicts received 28% of naloxone administrations, though they accounted for 17% of the city’s opioid overdoses; although 80% of overdoses were among black people, they received only 67% of naloxone administrations. This does not necessarily mean black addicts are being denied naloxone. Those who use opioids alone, are homeless or live in communities with little trust in first responders might be less likely to call for help.

Such disparities strengthen the case for local interventions that deal with the unique hurdles certain communities face. Other solutions are more sweeping, like expanding access to Medicaid and reducing red tape around oud medications. But underlying all these is a straightforward calculus that applies to all Americans, black or white: “It has to be easier to get treated than it is to continue using,” says Dr Kolodny. “You have to flip it.”

Read it all.

African-Americans used to be far less affected. But that has changed https://t.co/lyAbakVt5M

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) April 9, 2022

The story began in 2021, when Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, which uses computers to help its customers identify molecules that look like potential drugs, was invited to present a paper on how such drug-discovery technologies might be misused. The venue was a conference organised by the Spiez Laboratory, in Switzerland. This is a government-funded outfit that studies risks posed by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. To prepare for the presentation some of Collaborations’ researchers carried out what they describe as a “thought exercise” that turned into a computational proof of concept for making biochemical weapons.

Their method was disturbingly simple. They took a piece of drug-discovery software, called MegaSyn (a piece of artificial intelligence, ai, which the company has developed for the purpose of putting virtual molecules together and then assessing their potential as medicines), and turned one of its functions upside down. Instead of penalising probable toxicity, as makes sense if a molecule is to be used medically, the modified version of MegaSyn prized it.

The result was terrifying. Trained on the chemical structures of a set of drug-like molecules (defined as substances easily synthesised and likely to be absorbed by the body) taken from a publicly available database, together with those molecules’ known toxicities, the modified software required a mere six hours to generate 40,000 virtual molecules that fell within the researchers’ predefined parameters for possible use as chemical weapons.

The list included many known nerve agents, notably vx, one of the most toxic. But the software also came up with not-yet-synthesised substances predicted to be deadlier still.

Read it all.

How to tweak drug-design software to create chemical weapons https://t.co/g3B5UcUBW1 #strategy #competitiveintelligence #marketing #pharma #productmarketing #biotech #pharmaceutical #healthcare pic.twitter.com/46VyMIRsKE

— Dr Timos Papagatsias (@_timos_) March 16, 2022

The BBC has heard reports of young people killing themselves or harming themselves and others.

Medical staff in the capital Freetown say that 90% of the male admissions to the central psychiatric ward are due to Kush use.

Police are battling to win the war against the drug.

Read it all.

Kush: Sierra Leone's new illegal drug https://t.co/JEfuTP7fUl pic.twitter.com/qtzw2hcazM

— World News (@Worldnews_Media) February 7, 2022

Twice last year, Margaret Schulte and her husband, Jason Abercrombie, traveled 11 hours round-trip to Louisiana from their home in Tulsa, Okla., in the hopes of vaccinating their children, who were 2 and 4, against the coronavirus.

The only way they could get shots for their children — among the more than 19 million Americans under 5 years old who are not yet eligible for vaccinations — was to take part in a clinical trial. So they signed up, hoping a successful vaccine would mean that by now, or at least sometime very soon, a semblance of prepandemic life would be on the horizon.

It has not worked out that way.

The Pfizer trial that their children participated in did not produce promising results, the company said last month. Nor have vaccines emerged from other corners. Moderna has yet to release results of its pediatric trials.

Now Ms. Schulte and Mr. Abercrombie are among the millions of parents stuck in an excruciating limbo during a surge of Omicron cases, forced to wrestle with day care closures and child care crises as the rest of the world appears eager to move on.

Read it all.

Millions of parents of unvaccinated children under 5 are stuck in limbo during a rise of Omicron cases in the U.S., forced to wrestle with day care closures and child care crises as the rest of the world appears eager to move on.https://t.co/MO0kCtq2rE

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 14, 2022

Built on the ashes of 10 years of war in Syria, an illegal drug industry run by powerful associates and relatives of President Bashar al-Assad has grown into a multibillion-dollar operation, eclipsing Syria’s legal exports and turning the country into the world’s newest narcostate.

Its flagship product is captagon, an illegal, addictive amphetamine popular in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Its operations stretch across Syria, including workshops that manufacture the pills, packing plants where they are concealed for export and smuggling networks to spirit them to markets abroad.

An investigation by The New York Times found that much of the production and distribution is overseen by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and one of Syria’s most powerful men.

Major players also include businessmen with close ties to the government, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and other members of the president’s extended family, whose last name ensures protection for illegal activities, according to The Times investigation, which is based on information from law enforcement officials in 10 countries and dozens of interviews with international and regional drug experts, Syrians with knowledge of the drug trade and current and former United States officials.

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Powerful allies of Syria’s president are making and selling amphetamines, turning the country into the world’s newest narcostate, a New York Times investigation found. The drug trade has emerged in the ruins of a decade of war. https://t.co/JcaKroiC5S

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) December 6, 2021

Google owner Alphabet has launched an artificial intelligence company to discover new drugs.

UK-registered Isomorphic Labs will use technology from its sister company DeepMind “to accelerate drug discovery, and ultimately, find cures for some of humanity’s most devastating diseases,” said Demis Hassabis, the head of DeepMind, in a blog post. He added that he would also become the chief executive of Isomorphic Labs.

Scientists around the world were awed in July when DeepMind unveiled how its AlphaFold2 technology could be used to predict the shape of every protein in the human body with almost perfect accuracy.

DeepMind’s model can solve one of the trickiest problems in biology by taking a sequence of amino acids and mapping the twists and turns of its shape. The algorithm could help replace or enhance painstaking laboratory work to identify the structures of proteins, which dictate how they behave.

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Alphabet launches AI company to discover new drugs https://t.co/DCdq8DOHCO "DeepMind said it would use the technology to try to find treatments for Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis, two of the most deadly diseases in the world."

— Kristof Decoster (@KristofDecoste1) November 4, 2021

The first results from the highly anticipated trial studying the effectiveness and safety of the Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 showed promising results.

The pharmaceutical companies said early results of their trial indicate the vaccine is safe for children and establishes a strong antibody response against the virus.

Giving a two-dose regimen of 10 μg (micrograms) administered 21 days apart for children between 5 and 11 years old was well tolerated, according to Pfizer and BioNTech. Side effects were also generally comparable to those of people between the ages of 16 and 25 years old who received the vaccine.

This trial used a smaller vaccine dosage, 10 micrograms, rather than the 30 microgram dose used for people 12 and older. The dosage was selected as the preferred dose for safety and effectiveness in young children.

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NEW: Pfizer says early results of its trials show that its COVID vaccine is safe and effective for children ages 5 to 11.https://t.co/BSyj9TY9VP

— NPR (@NPR) September 20, 2021

Read it all.

U.S. drug overdose deaths surged nearly 30 percent in 2020, reflecting toll of pandemic https://t.co/VUc3GdPmAN

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 14, 2021

Americans sure love their coffee. Even last spring when the pandemic shut down New York, nearly every neighborhood shop that sold takeout coffee managed to stay open, and I was amazed at how many people ventured forth to start their stay-at-home days with a favorite store-made brew.

One elderly friend who prepandemic had traveled from Brooklyn to Manhattan by subway to buy her preferred blend of ground coffee arranged to have it delivered. “Well worth the added cost,” she told me. I use machine-brewed coffee from pods, and last summer when it seemed reasonably safe for me to shop I stocked up on a year’s supply of the blends I like. (Happily, the pods are now recyclable.)

All of us should be happy to know that whatever it took to secure that favorite cup of Joe may actually have helped to keep us healthy. The latest assessments of the health effects of coffee and caffeine, its main active ingredient, are reassuring indeed. Their consumption has been linked to a reduced risk of all kinds of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, gallstones, depression, suicide, cirrhosis, liver cancer, melanoma and prostate cancer.

In fact, in numerous studies conducted throughout the world, consuming four or five eight-ounce cups of coffee (or about 400 milligrams of caffeine) a day has been associated with reduced death rates. In a study of more than 200,000 participants followed for up to 30 years, those who drank three to five cups of coffee a day, with or without caffeine, were 15 percent less likely to die early from all causes than were people who shunned coffee. Perhaps most dramatic was a 50 percent reduction in the risk of suicide among both men and women who were moderate coffee drinkers, perhaps by boosting production of brain chemicals that have antidepressant effects.

Read it all.

Consuming four or five eight-ounce cups of coffee (or about 400 milligrams of caffeine) a day has been associated with reduced death rates, numerous studies suggest. https://t.co/NpiYNUicRU

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 14, 2021