It’s well known that drunk driving can have fatal consequences, but a new study suggests that alcohol is not the only drug that’s a danger on the road.  It might make sense that drugs like marijuana or amphetamines would impair drivers and lead to crashes. But few studies have actually looked specifically at the impact of other drugs on traffic deaths — even as there is an increasing push to pass “drugged driving” laws nationally. In the new study, reported in the July issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, researchers found that of U.S. drivers who died in a crash, about 25% tested positive for...

A study by University of Washington psychologists shows some people continue to drink heavily because of perceived positive effects, despite experiencing negative effects such as hangovers, fights and regrettable sexual situations.  According to participants in the study, boosts of courage, chattiness and other social benefits of drinking outweigh its harms, which they generally did not consider as strong deterrents. The findings offer a new direction for programs targeting binge drinking, which tend to limit their focus to avoiding alcohol’s ill effects rather than considering its rewards. “This study suggest why some people...

In the United States, the blood-alcohol limit may be 0.08 percent, but no amount of alcohol seems to be safe for driving, according to a University of California, San Diego sociologist. A study led by David Phillips and published in the journal Addiction finds that blood-alcohol levels well below the U.S. legal limit are associated with incapacitating injury and death. Phillips, with coauthor Kimberly M. Brewer, also of UC San Diego, examined official data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). This dataset includes information on all persons in the U.S. who were involved in fatal car accidents — 1,495,667 people in the...

Adults drank too much and got behind the wheel about 112 million times in 2010—that is almost 300,000 incidents of drinking and driving each day—according to a CDC Vital Signs study released recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.   “The four million adults who drink and drive each year put everyone on the road at risk,” said CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “In fact, nearly 11,000 people are killed every year in crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver.”   For the study, CDC analyzed data from the 2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey.   The study also...

He was the first patient of the day, dropped off at the emergency room by the police or a family member — a man in his 50s, unshaved, stumbling, engulfed in the pungent aroma of alcohol. When he blew into the breathalyzer’s strawlike tube, the readout was 0.18, more than twice the legal limit. “I get seizures,” he said, referring to the dangerous reaction some people experience when they abruptly stop drinking. Then, as if to prove it, he held out trembling hands. Each bore the nicks and scars of a hard-lived life. I looked at the beads of sweat on his brow, then down at his vital signs. Heart rate 120;blood pressure pushing...

A study of the 5.3 million men and women seen in Department of Veterans Affairs outpatient clinics in a one-year period found that use of cocaine is predictive of open-angle glaucoma, the most common type of glaucoma.   The study revealed that after adjustments for race and age, current and former cocaine users had a 45 percent increased risk of glaucoma. Men with open-angle glaucoma also had significant exposures to amphetamines and marijuana, although less than cocaine.   Patients with open-angle glaucoma and history of exposure to illegal drugs were nearly 20 years younger than glaucoma patients without a drug exposure history...

Ecstasy — the illegal “rave” drug that produces feelings of euphoria and emotional warmth — has been in the news recently as a potential therapeutic. Clinical trials are testing Ecstasy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. But headlines like one in Time magazine’s health section in February — “Ecstasy as therapy: have some of its negative effects been overblown?” — concern Ronald Cowan, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Psychiatry. His team reports in the May issue of Neuropsychopharmacology that recreational Ecstasy use is associated with a chronic change in brain...

Researchers already know that chronic misuse of alcohol can cause widespread damage to the brain. While previous studies examined cortical atrophy in individuals with alcoholism, none examined alcohol-associated atrophy using cortical thickness measurements to obtain a regional mapping of tissue loss across the full cortical surface. This study does so, finding that alcohol damage occurs in gradations: the more alcohol consumed, the greater the damage.   Results will be published in the December 2011 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.   “Before advances in...

ScienceDaily Drinking excess alcohol during pregnancy can cause fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) due to the damaging effects of alcohol on a developing baby’s brain. Despite its harmful effects, pregnant mothers continue to drink alcohol — up to 3 in every 1000 babies are born with FAS, which causes intellectual disabilities, behavioural problems, growth defects and abnormal facial features. How alcohol causes these effects is unclear, but researching the problem is difficult because of ethical barriers to studying human fetuses. Ulrike Heberlein and colleagues from the University of California San Francisco decided to study...

Cannabis use during adolescence and young adulthood increases the risk of psychotic symptoms, while continued cannabis use may increase the risk for psychotic disorder in later life, concludes a new study published online in the British Medical Journal. Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit drug in the world, particularly among adolescents, and is consistently linked with an increased risk for mental illness. However, it is not clear whether the link between cannabis and psychosis is causal, or whether it is because people with psychosis use cannabis to self medicate their symptoms. So a team of researchers, led by Professor Jim van...