Posts by Russell Brown
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If you're wondering about what I've said about the standard and health risks, I wrote it up in more detail last October when the 1.5mcg standard was proposed.
Key paragraph from an ESR analysis commissioned by MoH as part of the standards process:
The highest calculated exposures to MA are those experienced by children under 2 years of age, due to their frequent contact with household surfaces, their low body weight, and their hand-to-mouth behaviour. However, even these exposures, using conservative exposure assumptions, fall several orders of magnitude below prescribed therapeutic daily MA doses for children as young as 3 years of age.
In other words, the possible dose to the most vulnerable infant from touching the walls of a house “contaminated” with meth is vastly lower than the daily therapeutic dose of methamphetamine (sold as Desoxyn) given to a three year-old to treat ADHD.
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Hard News: Drug policy: women lead the way, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Will do.
and even LSD.
Redmer Yska has covered that. It sounds like some programmes were with consenting subjects and well-run – and others may not have been:
By 1964, ‘acid tests’ in therapeutic settings were commonplace in New Zealand. Records show psychiatrists were administering ampoules of Delysid, provided free by Swiss manufacturer Sandoz, to scores of consenting patients. The drug appears to have been in common use across Dunedin – at Cherry Farm, in the psychiatric department at Waikari Hospital and at Ashburn Hall.
The global criminalisation of LSD both demonised the drug and ended this research phase. In May 1966, Sandoz announced it would no longer supply the drug globally because of “misuse by teenagers and beatniks”. The local branch of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists complained that “the drug had been found useful and that it was desirable that supplies be continued”.
But only under therapeutic supervision. An unnamed Dunedin psychiatrist, said to have been using LSD in conjunction with psychotherapy, commented, “It would be deplorable if the availability of drugs is dictated by delinquents and hooligans.”
In October 1966, the New Zealand Medical Journal issued the first dispatch from the frontlines of the legal Kiwi ‘acid tests’. Dr David Livingstone’s article ‘Some Observations on the Usefulness of Lysergic Acid in Psychiatry’ showed that, over two years, this Christchurch psychiatrist had administered LSD to 55 consenting patients in 131 closely supervised sessions, each lasting up to eight hours.
In colourful language, Livingstone noted how LSD had attracted “fascinated curiosity, fearful repugnance, reasonable healthy scepticism, and the tender hope of acclaiming an instrument which may make for a major breakthrough in understanding and treating mental and personality disorders”.
He praised “the penetratively healing properties of this psychedelic drug ... an agent of major therapeutic capability, facilitating personality change, and of help in resolving those disorders of the mind and personality which are deep rooted in the life experience of the human being”.
At the same time, he underlined the need to restrict its use to therapeutic settings, warning of the “life threatening personality disintegrating propensities in the hands of unskilled experimenters”, likening it to “making hand grenades available to delinquent youths”.
The article indicates that Livingstone’s sessions at Calvary Private Hospital in Christchurch chiefly involved 100 micrograms of LSD, a relatively small dose. He was prepared for panic attacks, with a cocktail of barbiturates and even methamphetamine on hand to calm participants down.
Within a few months of the government’s decision to ban LSD, a local psychiatrist said the drug was still available for limited study, but its use in therapeutic settings was tailing off. By this time, headlines were telling of suicides, murders and all kinds of dangerous activity linked to the substance.
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And meanwhile, Sina Brown-Davis is on fire responding to Hone Harawira's grotesque call for capital punishment and Singapore-style beatings.
The men really have some fixing up to do.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to Mike Skelton,
Oh dear, I'm sorry I didn't credit you correctly Alex
As noted above, my fault there.
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Hard News: How journalism looks now, in reply to David Cohen,
Giving equal time to thoroughly discredited anti-vax quackery is therefore NOT the 'other side' of the epidemiological story, as any reputable source would attest.
Exactly. If you want to talk about autism, talk about support or people's experiences, or research on autism. If you want to talk about vaccination, talk about vaccination. The connection between the two is entirely a matter of quackery.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to linger,
(I’m hoping the answer may be there’s a new tech column coming :)
The answer is that I put it in the wrong place and by the time I realised there were links out and comments posted and it was too late :-)
But I am thinking about a rearrangement of the site to focus on categories (like Access) rather than personal blogs.
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It seems it's Blockchain day! A new Richard MacManus column on the topic on Newsroom, which complement's Alex's quite nicely.
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Richard Bilton talking about the Panorama report hours before it was broadcast, on The One Show.
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allowing secure uncorruptible electronic voting
Hmmm. I'm unclear on this, having heard Nat Torkington explain at our last Orcon IRL event that Blockchain wasn't a starter for electronic voting because it involves a public ledger and is therefore not private.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Digging ASMR, in reply to Hebe,
Lorde does give me ASMR. And so does a whole lot of my favourite music.
Like I said, I'm not quite clear on the relationship between ASMR and spine-angling music, but she seems to do both.