Prescribing Heroin for Addiction: Some Untapped Potentials and Unanswered Questions

The prescription of heroin to dependent users has been a distinctive feature of British drug policy for almost a century now, and in recent years the policy’s evidence-base has grown significantly. However, while the evidence for heroin assisted treatment’s effectiveness is strong it is somewhat limited by the clinical setting of the randomized control trial and thus leaves a number of important areas unexplored. This article investigates some of these through a sociological lens informed by both developments in regulatory theory and ethnographic research with a heroin-using population in north-west England. It is argued that heroin prescription has currently ‘untapped potential’ as a means of regulating heroin markets, but also that it presents a number of ‘unanswered questions’ regarding heroin’s socio-economic roles in marginalized communities and the importance of heroin-using identities

“No One Wins. One Side Just Loses More Slowly”: The Wire and Drug Policy.

This article presents a cultural analysis of HBO’s drama series, The Wire. It is argued here that, as a cultural text, The Wire forms a site of both containment and resistance, of hegemony and change with recourse to the regulation of illicit drug markets. In this sense The Wire constitutes an important cultural paradigm of drug policy debates, one that has significant heuristic implications regarding both the present consequences and future directions of illicit drug policy. Ultimately, it is demonstrated below that through its representations of the tensions and antagonisms characteristic of drug control systems, The Wire reveals larger predicaments of governance faced by neoliberal democracies today

Effects of nicotine and streptozotocin on the cardiovascular system

Our study investigated the potential for a combination of diabetes and nicotine treatment to affect blood pressure in the rat. We used streptozotocin injection and oral nicotine feeding as models of type-1 diabetes and smoking respectively. Blood pressure was assessed using the indirect tail-cuff technique. In an attempt to further characterize our experimental model, we also observed body weight, plasma glucose and the contractility of aortic segments in various treatment groups. Our data was expressed as mean ± SEM, and significance was regarded as P < 0.05. We found that a combination of streptozotocin and nicotine treatment resulted in a significant elevation of systolic blood pressure compared with either treatment alone, or control. Furthermore, assessment of aortic contractility showed alteration of reactivity to both phenylephrine and sodium nitroprusside as a result of the combination treatment. We also observed a trend for our combination treatment to exacerbate the elevation of plasma glucose level seen in streptozotocin induced diabetic rat models. This study serves as an experimental basis to underline the importance of cessation of tobacco use for individuals with diabetes mellitus

Dangerous Expectations: Breaking Rules to Resolve Cognitive Dissonance

When entering task performance contexts we generally have expectations about both the task and how well we will perform on it. When those expectations go unmet, we experience psychological discomfort (cognitive dissonance), which we are then motivated to resolve. Prior research on expectancy disconfirmation in task performance contexts has focused on the dysfunctional consequences of disconfirming low performance expectations (i.e., stereotype threat). In this paper we focus on the dysfunctional consequences of disconfirming high performance expectations. In three studies, we find that individuals are more likely to break rules if they have been led to expect that achieving high levels of performance will be easy rather than difficult, even if breaking rules means behaving unethically. We show that this willingness to break rules is not due to differences in legitimate performance as a function of how easy people expect the task to be, or whether their expectations are set explicitly (by referring to others’ performance) or implicitly (as implied by their own prior performance). Instead, using a misattribution paradigm, we show that cognitive dissonance triggered by unmet expectations drives our effects

Fieldwork, Biography and Emotion: doing criminological autoethnography

This article presents an introductory yet critical overview of autoethnographic research in criminological contexts. Drawing on experiences of participant observation with heroin and crack cocaine users and dealers, as a former user and dealer of these drugs myself, the article demonstrates how the domains of fieldwork, biography and the emotions intersect to render clear a progressive account of heroin addiction. However, this is offset against some negative occurrences directly reducible to doing ethnography where biographical congruence exists between the researcher and the researched. Ultimately, it is argued here that an increased consideration of the self—biographically and emotionally—both permits and facilitates the presentation of analytic yet stylized data in the form of what is termed below, ‘lyrical criminology’

Aberrant migration and surgical removal of a heartworm (Dirofilaria immitis) from the femoral artery of a cat.

A cat was evaluated for an acute-onset of right pelvic limb paresis. Thoracic radiographs revealed normal cardiac size and tortuous pulmonary arteries. Abdominal ultrasound identified a heartworm (HW) extending from the caudal abdominal aorta into the right external iliac artery and right femoral artery. The cat was HW-antigen positive. Echocardiography revealed a HW within the right branch of the main pulmonary artery and evidence of pulmonary hypertension. An agitated-saline contrast echocardiogram revealed a small right to left intracardiac shunt at the level of the atria. Surgical removal of the HW was performed with no substantial postoperative complications. There was return of blood flow and improved motor function to the limb. The cat remains mildly paretic on the affected limb with no other clinical signs

The Intracellular Consequences of the Interaction between Epstein-Barr Virus Protein BZLF1 and the Human Protein Pax5

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a human herpes virus that is the cause of infectious mononucleosis and is associated with several types of cancers. These cancers include Burkitt's lymphoma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, Hodgkin's disease, and a variety of leukemias. EBV is found in two states; latent (dormant state) and lytic (the replicating state). A protein essential for the switch and establishment of the lytic state is the immediate-early protein BZLF1. BZLF1 is known to physically associate with a variety of host cellular proteins leading to changes in cellular environment. One such association is with the human B cell protein Pax5. Pax5 plays an important role in determining B cell differentiation as well as promoting the latent state in EBV infected cells through the activation of the EBV latent promoter Wp. The BZLF1/Pax5 complex was examined to determine if this interaction produces specific cellular changes. Pax5 protein levels in B cells before, during and after EBV infection were established. I also examined the effect the BZLF1/Pax5 complex has on the histone methylation state of chromatin during EBV infection. My final goal was to determine if the BZLF1/Pax5 complex affects Pax5 ability to transcriptionally activate two of its target genes, CD19 and CD79a. My results show that during lytic replication the expression of the EBV protein BZLF1 results in increased levels of Pax5. These increased levels of Pax5 result in increased levels of Pax5 transcriptional targets CD19 and CD79a. Also the increased levels of Pax5 and the BZLF1/Pax5 complex resulted in hypermethylation of histone 3 lysine 9

The Moral Economy of Heroin in ‘Austerity Britain’

This article presents the findings of an ethnographic exploration of heroin use in a disadvantaged area of the United Kingdom. Drawing on developments in continental philosophy as well as debates around the nature of social exclusion in the late-modern west, the core claim made here is that the cultural systems of exchange and mutual support which have come to underpin heroin use in this locale—that, taken together, form a ‘moral economy of heroin’—need to be understood as an exercise in reconstituting a meaningful social realm by, and specifically for, this highly marginalised group. The implications of this claim are discussed as they pertain to the fields of drug policy, addiction treatment, and critical criminological understandings of disenfranchised groups

Stigma as a fundamental hindrance to the United States opioid overdose crisis response.

Alexander Tsai and co-authors discuss the role of stigma in responses to the US opioid crisis