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About Addiction: School, prescriptions, heroin and morality
It’s Monday and you get another great summary of news and research about addiction that have been making noise this week. If you care about addiction and about recovery, you know you want to stay abreast of what’s important and A3 wants to give you just that! So read on.. Recovery High: A new kind…
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U.S. Drug overdose deaths are increasing
The second leading cause of accidental death in the US is drug overdose (JAMA 2007). Prescription painkiller overdose deaths (opioid analgesics like OxyContin, Vicodin and methadone) account for nearly half of the 36,450 total fatal overdoses with 15,000 deaths that have claimed a number of celebrity lives including famous actor Heath Ledger (CDC 2011). With…
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Saving lives made easy – Treating opiate overdose with intranasal naloxone
Contributing co-author: Andrew Chen Imagine that you and your friend have been using heroin (or another opiate). A few hours go by and you notice your friend is progressively becoming more and more unresponsive. You check on him and find that his breathing is shallow, his skin is cold, and his pupils are constricted. You…
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Amy Winehouse dead at 27 – Drug/alcohol overdose?
Amy Winehouse, the soulful singer with the amazing voice and the troubled drug and alcohol use history is dead at 27, according to London Police. Sadly, Amy Winehouse’s celebrity has for the past few years been tied more to her drug and alcohol use than to her music. No one has reported on whether her…
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Black tar heroin – Pure Death
Back in the 70s, heroin was mostly filler, and the good stuff was 5% pure or so. Nowadays a new, more potent, version of the stuff is killing people all around the country with widely varying purities as high as 90%. What makes black tar dangerous When heroin was weak, shooting it was the best…
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80s style is back, cocaine use included!
Everyone knows that trends come back around, and with the resurgent popularity of gigantic sunglasses, eye-bleeding neon, electronic music and metallic spandex (or so we at A3 are told), it seems that the 1980’s have firmly replanted their flag in the public consciousness, down to a sequel to that seminal testament to 80’s excess, Wall…
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Brittany Murphy dead at 32 – Anemia, pneumonia, and yes, drugs…
Toxicology update Well, it seems the toxicology reports are in and Brittany’s death was, at least partially, caused by her taking of multiple prescription drugs. Still, it seems that she was trying to medicate a host of conditions brought on by her underlying anemia and pneumonia. It’s sad to think that this death could have…