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Another Poppy Tea Death

Damn. A Twitt from @abelpharmboy alerted me to this article in the Denver Post.

A 19-year-old man was found dead in Boulder on Tuesday morning, and authorities suspect poppy tea as the cause.

If so, it would be the second death in five months of a young person in Boulder who drank opium tea, police said.

Jeffrey Joseph Bohan, a 2008 graduate of Fairview High School in Boulder, drank the powerful psychoactive brew with his older brother about midnight, authorities said.

His brother found him unresponsive at 6 a.m. in a home

Abel Pharmboy had written some comments about that first death of a young man in Boulder. In the first post, Able overviewed a bit of the history of the medicinal  (and recreational) preparation of products from the opium poppy.

The sad fact is that we’ve known for over 200 years that this is a bad idea: based upon growing conditions, harvest time, and extraction method, the resulting concoction can provide an extremely variable dose of these compounds. Used medicinally as one of the strongest analgesics (“painkillers”) we know, in higher doses the opiates can impart a warming sense of euphoria but, at even higher doses, suppresses the respiratory control center of the brain stem, resulting in death.

Abel also mentioned a website created by a father of yet another kid who overdosed on poppy tea. The point of Poppy Seed Tea Can Kill is, quite obviously, to educate people on the risks of home-brewed poppy tea. It includes a redacted version of the drug panels run on his son postmortem which is a great thing. I wish all the parents / closest relative of the folks who die from “Ecstasy” would do similar- this kind of information goes a long way toward addressing controversy over what did and did not kill the individual.

At any rate, it is very sad that this seeming fad in recreational drug use is resulting in fatalities. It seems that it is doing so almost entirely because the dose is so hard to control / appreciate under the typical use circumstances. Perhaps publicizing this hypothesis widely would go a long way toward harm reduction by inducing a bit of caution in the user population. I can hope, anyway.

Wiiiiiiiiilllddd Horses

see more Funny Graphs

[h/t: laelaps]

Science Fest!!!

All about the science. One park chock full of geeks.

Mmmmm…braaayynnns!

SuperBloggerz2.0!!!11!!!!

That’s what it stands for, right?

Cite Canadian!!

An off-hand comment placed elsewhere (hmm, major drawback with the iPhone wordpress app is the usual Achilles heel of no cut, copy or paste features; update, here it is) has me thinking about citation practices. Everybody slants the old cites, right? Tell me you at least prioritize your own? But also those of your homies…wait. Which “homies”? Friends, department-mates, Univ. Colleagues? How about good old jingoistic nationalism?

Cite Canadian!!!!

Just a job?

A question arose in another venue.

Is graduate school attractive simply as a job? Without any particular motivation based on training or credentialling for a future job that uses the PhD?

Minimum wage is what, $21K or less depending on the state. I’ve seen grad stipends in the $25-28K zone. Job conditions are damn attractive compared to some minimum wage jobs, opportunities for slacking and even moonlighting abound.

Hmm.

Caffeine

The 2007 WADA list has caffeine in the “2007 Monitoring Program” but it is not a “Prohibited Substance”. The 2007 US AntiDopingAgency (USADA) list seems to directly quote the WADA list on stimulants, so ditto. It used to be one of the threshold substances (under 12 micrograms/ml of urine and you were OK) but was delisted as of Jan 1, 2004.

HA! I just noticed this draft from 11/30/07! Dang if I can remember where I was going with it, just a stub and all. Reminded me about something over at Zuska’s diggity dogs. Caffeine really is a drug. Gee ya think?

no longer quite the n00b scicurious recently had something about adenosine and caffeine so I’ll just point you there for the science.

one of PalMD’s podcasts ( I think it was #2 or #4 but I could be wrong) talked about the wonders of coffee and how medicine can’t really find much to worry about. Sure, save the addiction part.

Anyway, I’ll just snap this up in case it jogs my memory of what I was thinking about. Probably some papers on cycling performance I guess….

The Great Sb Freeze Out

As noted all over Teh ScienceBlogs, there will be a little technical difficulty starting, oh, in a minute or two. Actually, I think the comments are borked already. So consider this a welcome to the old blog for my newer readers, poke around in the archives because there is some stuff that I haven’t bothered to repost.

Go back to the early days and see how unbelievably polite PhysioProf was as a commenter. What a sneaky bastard!

Check out the original fight with Ms. Phd and her disgruntle-minions!

Watch me piss off a subGlamour Editor!

Even more grant geekery!

Fun with Wordle

drugmonkey.wordpress.com

physioprof.wordpress.com

sundappledforest.wordpress.com

juniorprof.wordpress.com

The content of the typical NIH R01 Grant application revealed

moar funny pictures

Science Blogging San Diego

Are you a scientist in San Diego who blogs or (duh) reads blogs?

Time to tribe up my friends.

Why let all those nutballs in the North Carolina Research Triangle area have all the fun? Are we really lamer than the Minny-soooooootans?

email bikemonk at the google mail or drop a comment. let’s plan some stuff…on blog and IRL.

Crosspost: California’s Proposition 8 Means H8

[ This entry is cross-posted from DrugMonkey on Scienceblogs.com ]

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Apologies for my regular readers. This one will be almost entirely political with very little connection to my usual topics, although personal bigotry sometimes comes up in tenure cases.

I debated putting this up over on A Vote for Science but the overlords begged us to stick to science politics and not turn that into a generalized political ranting blog.

Consideration of California’s Proposition 8 and the arguments for and against does not encourage your humble narrator to rational discourse.

From the California voter guide site linked above, here’s what we’re talking about:

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME-SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

* Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.
* Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Now, you all are big kids and I’m sure know all of the context here. If not, you can google it up in a trice.

What I’m concerned about here is the logic. It sucks. Completely and totally. I am waiting, begging someone, anyone, to explain to me how these efforts are not just about hatred for our fellow citizens.

I’ve been listening. Really, I have. So far, I have this.

Traditional Marriage. Hah! This argument betrays a woeful and perhaps intentional misunderstanding of the history of marriage and marriage-like social relationships.

Ruinzed Marriage. Really. I’m racking my brain trying to sort out all the threats to my marriage. In terms of things that affect my relationship with my spouse, gays also being able to marry is like eleventyfuckinggazillion, eightquadrillion and seventy six. Seriously. How exactly is this supposed to work? How does it compare to other marriage threatening events like money woes for the poor and working classes, mortgage threats, healthcare crises, stress of childrearing in our modern world, the “me” generation, etc, etc, et cetera ad nauseaum.

“Against Nature”. Please. A woeful misunderstanding of animal “nature”, the history and present status of human behavior, recent biological, sociological and psychological evidence on what it means to be “gay”. Also, I have a REALLY hard time getting past the comparison to the Loving v. Virginia US Supreme Court decision. You know, the one that struck down laws against marriage between individuals of different apparent races? In 1967? Do you remember your history? Did you live through that era? Are not the current arguments hauntingly familiar? Trust me, they are. Did inter-racial marriages RUINZ marriage, society and children? Hell no. We academics and scientists know this as well as anyone- I don’t know that I have stats but at a big research U community it becomes hard to find kids running around who do NOT have parents of different apparent races…. Go visit this blog for more expanded thoughts on the mixed-Americans and of course razib is always posting some mixed-race hottie or other who contributes positively to many people’s lives.

Child Rearing. Nope. First of all, any social stigma is….wait for it….caused by the anti-gay forces themselves! So score that one for the antis not for the supporters of civil rights for Gay-Americans. The science, meaning the child development specialists, trends toward “no problem”. Those of us who have children out and about in the child’s social world in a decent sized city also have our anecdotes. And from my limited anecdotes, no problem. Nice well adjusted children of Gay-American families. Gay-Americans who are also going out and fostering, adopting and caring for children who need parents. I have no problem there either- kids need parents and adoption is a VeryGoodThing in my book. Single parents, divorced parents, need-to-be-divorced-but-aren’t parents, jerk-parents, reluctant-parents….the list goes on and on of potentially adverse circumstances for children, many with actual evidence of harm. So why should a state be singling out one unsupported theoretical threat for a constitutional amendment?

I’m sure there are other classes of arguments and I’d like to hear something that sounds halfway rational. Have any of you Californians heard anything that makes any kind of sense?

Because from where I sit, all I hear that makes any consistent sense in any of this is the following:

“I just don’t like gay people, in fact I fear and hate them.”

Honestly. And here’s the thing. In our USian secular society we don’t have a policy of taking away rights of our fellow citizens just because we can or because we don’t like them. It is not the American way. Even if we have stumbled in our past or failed to live up to the great promises at present, we don’t do this.

You will recall from your history books that even slavery and women’s suffrage issues were surrounded by (crap) rationalizations. The argument was not “just because”. And now, most Americans find the argument that other people should be chattel because of the shade of their skin or their place of origin wrong. Most Americans think that women are quite capable of voting in a way that will not RUINZ! our country. We have, as a population, shed many, many of our bigotries and mis-beliefs in the name of equality, democracy and civil rights. We look back and often sneer at those wrongheaded and ignorant views of past generations.

Well, I’m sneering at the H8rs right about now. What on earth is wrong with you people?

Feel free to blog this issue, even if you aren’t a Californian and heck, even if you support Prop 8 (tell me where I’m wrong here, please). If you think this is wrongheaded you might even donate to the No on 8 effort.

Experimental Biology 2008

Any of y’all blogonauts attending EB 2008 ? If we get quorum we can schedule a little social or something. drop me a line

drugmnky-ATAZ-gmail-DOTTYDOT-com

Live-blogging a Vasectomy: PSA from Abel Pharmboy

Everyone is already all over this but Abel Pharmboy liveblogged his vasectomy yesterday. As the DM noted at the new digs, this was a Public Service Announcement:

But the very serious part of this post is to educate men on how mild a vasectomy is relative to tubal ligation in their female partner. As I said, this is the least I could do in return for my wife’s true suffering in bringing our lovely daughter into this world.

What some people will do for the greater good…