What Is Drug Addiction?
Addiction is a chronic, often relapsing brain disease that causes compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences to the addicted individual and to those around him or her. Although the initial decision to take drugs...
Caffeine, Energy Drinks, and Everything Else
It's the everything else that adds up.A couple of years ago, coffee drinkers were buoyed by the release of a massive study in the New England Journal of Medicine that “did not support a positive association between coffee drinking and mortality.” In fact, the...
Marijuana Deconstructed
What's In Your Weed?Australia has one of the highest rates of marijuana use in the world, but until recently, nobody could say for certain what, exactly, Australians were smoking. Researchers at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales recently...
Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On: Marijuana and Sleeping
Study sheds potential light on indica vs. sativa debate.[Thanks to Ivan Oransky (@ivanoransky) for alerting me to this study.]Anyone who has smoked marijuana more than a couple of times knows that cannabis can alter how you sleep. The effect of cannabis on sleep...
Jack London and his Alcoholic Memoirs
Meet John Barleycorn.In the early years of the 20th Century, writer Jack London was the equivalent of a rock star. A ruggedly good-looking sportswriter, globetrotting war correspondent, successful novelist and short story writer, London came up the hard way on...
Alcohol Industry Turns Moderation Into a Sales Message
A warning or an advertisement?You almost have to admire the tenacity shown by the liquor industry in its passive aggressive method of turning a warning label into additional advertising. Perhaps it was foolish to suppose that forcing the liquor industry to brand...
Moderate Drinking Doesn’t Help Your Heart
Mendelian meta-analysis and the alcohol “flush” allele.Less than a year after the massive Mendelian randomization meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal, a group of researchers recently wrote an editorial in the journal Addiction, which would seem...
