Drug Markets and the State: A Perspective from Political Economy

The paper introduces a classification scheme for state approaches to regulation of drug markets. The concept of the \u27drug regulation state\u27 is developed to include policies and agencies concerned with all drugs, including legal examples such as tobacco, alcohol, and oxycodone. Approaches to regulation are classified broadly as drug war, harm reduction, decriminalization, and legalization. The approaches and rationales used by various state agents, especially in the United States and Europe, are summarized and analyzed. The history of modern pharmacology and drug regulation is expanded with a focus on the American case. The role of industry in state regulation is analyzed. The history of regulation for common drugs of abuse is broken down by class (opioids, cannabis, and stimulants). The paper concludes that while reform of drug war policies is increasingly popular, developing effective new strategies to mitigate drug harms will be difficult and has powerful opponents

Drug Markets and the State: A Perspective from Political Economy

The paper introduces a classification scheme for state approaches to regulation of drug markets. The concept of the \u27drug regulation state\u27 is developed to include policies and agencies concerned with all drugs, including legal examples such as tobacco, alcohol, and oxycodone. Approaches to regulation are classified broadly as drug war, harm reduction, decriminalization, and legalization. The approaches and rationales used by various state agents, especially in the United States and Europe, are summarized and analyzed. The history of modern pharmacology and drug regulation is expanded with a focus on the American case. The role of industry in state regulation is analyzed. The history of regulation for common drugs of abuse is broken down by class (opioids, cannabis, and stimulants). The paper concludes that while reform of drug war policies is increasingly popular, developing effective new strategies to mitigate drug harms will be difficult and has powerful opponents

The PD-(D/E)XK superfamily revisited: identification of new members among proteins involved in DNA metabolism and functional predictions for domains of (hitherto) unknown function

BACKGROUND: The PD-(D/E)XK nuclease superfamily, initially identified in type II restriction endonucleases and later in many enzymes involved in DNA recombination and repair, is one of the most challenging targets for protein sequence analysis and structure prediction. Typically, the sequence similarity between these proteins is so low, that most of the relationships between known members of the PD-(D/E)XK superfamily were identified only after the corresponding structures were determined experimentally. Thus, it is tempting to speculate that among the uncharacterized protein families, there are potential nucleases that remain to be discovered, but their identification requires more sensitive tools than traditional PSI-BLAST searches. RESULTS: The low degree of amino acid conservation hampers the possibility of identification of new members of the PD-(D/E)XK superfamily based solely on sequence comparisons to known members. Therefore, we used a recently developed method HHsearch for sensitive detection of remote similarities between protein families represented as profile Hidden Markov Models enhanced by secondary structure. We carried out a comparison of known families of PD-(D/E)XK nucleases to the database comprising the COG and PFAM profiles corresponding to both functionally characterized as well as uncharacterized protein families to detect significant similarities. The initial candidates for new nucleases were subsequently verified by sequence-structure threading, comparative modeling, and identification of potential active site residues. CONCLUSION: In this article, we report identification of the PD-(D/E)XK nuclease domain in numerous proteins implicated in interactions with DNA but with unknown structure and mechanism of action (such as putative recombinase RmuC, DNA competence factor CoiA, a DNA-binding protein SfsA, a large human protein predicted to be a DNA repair enzyme, predicted archaeal transcription regulators, and the head completion protein of phage T4) and in proteins for which no function was assigned to date (such as YhcG, various phage proteins, novel candidates for restriction enzymes). Our results contributes to the reduction of "white spaces" on the sequence-structure-function map of the protein universe and will help to jump-start the experimental characterization of new nucleases, of which many may be of importance for the complete understanding of mechanisms that govern the evolution and stability of the genome

Using item response theory to develop measures of acquisitive and protective self-monitoring from the original self-monitoring scale

For the past 40 years, the conventional univariate model of self-monitoring has reigned as the dominant interpretative paradigm in the literature. However, recent findings associated with an alternative bivariate model challenge the conventional paradigm. In this study, item response theory is used to develop measures of the bivariate model of acquisitive and protective self-monitoring using original Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS) items, and data from two large, nonstudent samples (Ns = 13,563 and 709). Results indicate that the new acquisitive (six-item) and protective (seven-item) self-monitoring scales are reliable, unbiased in terms of gender and age, and demonstrate theoretically consistent relations to measures of personality traits and cognitive ability. Additionally, by virtue of using original SMS items, previously collected responses can be reanalyzed in accordance with the alternative bivariate model. Recommendations for the reanalysis of archival SMS data, as well as directions for future research, are provided

A decade into Facebook: where is psychiatry in the digital age?

Social networking sites are a part of everyday life for over a billion people worldwide. They show no sign of declining popularity, with social media use increasing at 3 times the rate of other Internet use. Despite this proliferation, mental healthcare has yet to embrace this unprecedented resource. We argue that social networking site data should become a high priority for psychiatry research and mental healthcare delivery. We illustrate our views using the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, which currently has over 1 billion daily users (1 in 7 people worldwide). Facebook users can create personal profiles, socialize, express feelings, and share content, which Facebook stores as time-stamped digital records dating back to when the user first joined. Evidence suggests that 92% of adolescents go online daily and disclose considerably more about themselves online than offline. Thus, working with Facebook data could further our understanding of the onset and early years of mental illness, a crucial period of interpersonal development. Furthermore, a diminishing ‘digital divide’ has allowed for a broader sociodemographic to access Facebook, including homeless youth, young veterans, immigrants, patients with mental health problems, and seniors, enabling greater contact with traditionally harder-to-reach populations