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May 31, 2010
How Logical Assumptions evolve into Major Mistakes
The question asked near the beginning of an article in The Scientist caught my attention: “Was it possible that stress affected young brains and older brains differently, in ways that researchers and clinicians had overlooked? ... Do adolescents and adults undergo a similar neuroendocrine response when stressed?”The reason I’d been searching for information on Dr. Russell Romeo was the youthful researcher's growing reputation for investigating the impact of emotional stress on young animals, in his case, rat pups. Also, we had arrived at a similar key understanding, albeit by very different routes: namely that the amygdala and limbic system are critical loci for sensing, integrating, and responding to emotional stress. Finally; I had become interested in learning more about whatever neuroendocrine mechanisms he might be proposing as explanations.
What I soon learned was (typically) equivocal. I knew, of course, that because his research is further into the academic mainstream than mine, it had also to be more compliant with the official (but ludicrous) NIDA position on “addiction." Nevertheless, Romeo's focus on youth gave me some reason to believe his studies might be congruent enough with my clinical data from humans to be seen as supporting similar conclusions.
The reasons are more complicated than complex; my interest in Romeo had originally been piqued after encountering his name in a search for material on Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, another ex-Rockefeller University fellow who had also worked and published with Bruce McEwen while in New York.
That all three investigators had become focused on stress in youthful animal models simply added to the hope their work would lend support to my most obvious, yet controversial, finding: namely, that the large scale initiation of cannabis by American adolescents in the Sixties had clearly been the key to its paradoxical (and never questioned) commercial success thirty years after being banned for obviously spurious reasons.
All that's necessary to explain that success is a realization that the safety and efficacy of inhaled cannabis in relieving the adolescent angst of baby boomers was why "marijuana" had, over time, become the most valuable crop harvested in the US and is now, also paradoxically, the most valuable and frequently intercepted illegal drug along our border with Mexico.
Another key to the increasingly complicated puzzle is yet another simple understanding: the drug war's only major success has been its placement of human populations of illegal drug users off limits as "legitimate" research subjects by continuing to insist that such use can't possibly be "medical."
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at May 31, 2010 10:28 PM