Posted by utopizen on September 9, 2003, at 15:22:16
In reply to Re: amphetamine/brain damage? » utopizen, posted by Shawn. T. on September 8, 2003, at 22:12:12
> I wouldn't consider amphetamines to be the safest drugs in existence. Amphetamine is not naturally produced by the brain. I don't know of any evidence that shows that oral methamphetamine lacks neurotoxic effects; I would agree that more could be known about this issue. The U.S. government does not only fund drug abuse studies.
There is no question more abuse studies have been done on meth than ADD studies on Desoxyn. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of abuse studies, over decades.
Abbott patented Desoxyn in 1944. I called Ovation Pharma last year after they paid Abbott $40 million for the rights to it, and the doctor at the company said he has yet to find a SINGLE study over the 60 year period it has been out on the market for ADD.
Fewer than 1% of the Nat'l Institute of Mental Health's $1.4 billion dollar budget is allocated for the research of the three most severe mental illnesses-- Bipolar, schitzophrenia, and depression. (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/2004budget.cfm)
The tradition has always been to leave such research to drug co.'s, and have this philosophy that having random tests unrelated to severe mental illnesses will eventually help us find something novel in the long-run. Unfortunately, they've been around for half a century, and their entire existence over this period has done little to relieve the suffering mental illnesses create.
Drug research spending is like war spending. It's a drug war, after all-- ask for money, it'll come. Ask the gov't for money so that people don't live in terror for their entire existence, that requires congressional reviews...
As far as neurotoxic effects, the only doctor I'm aware of who cites such an example-- using an animal model, of course-- is Dr. Breggin. No one else outside of abuse research, or even within abuse research, would ever suggest methamphetamine induces neurotoxic effects at therapeutic doses taken orally. We have fMRIs, that's not some vague area we can't prove. It does not have neurotoxic effects. Neurotoxicity is a measurable science.
Many of the drugs mentioned here will induce neurotoxic effects if taken at great levels, if no sleep occurs for more than three days to restore the damaging effects of such an overdose, and if this drug is taken by injection. That's just common sense. Of course methamphetamine is neurotoxic if you take it at a recreational level like this, the chronic insomnia it creates is neurotoxic to the brain, much less the drug itself!
poster:utopizen
thread:257934
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030907/msgs/258465.html