SciAm bloggers get pizzaid!

A tweet from one @robinlloyd99 indicates that the pay structure worked out for the Scientific American blogs runs a fixed $200 per month.

.@BoraZ: some networks pay more to those who bring more traffic. @sciam network doesn’t. same monthly pay for every blogger. $200

Not too shabby. I may have reached that in one or two big months at Scienceblogs.com but for the most part the paystructure there was running maybe $100-$150 per month for the DM blog, which was right around 20% or so down the traffic list. So the vast majority of Sb bloggers were not making anything near what SciAm blogs is paying. Including Sb escapees such as Myrmecos, SciCurious and Aunt Janet.

 

This is fantastic.

Medical Examiner confirms a death due to MDPV (aka "bath salts") use

The case is from Bangor, ME. The initial report quoted an emergency room doctor as saying at least three people in the Bangor area had died from “bath salts”. As per the DEA emergency scheduling action in September, there are at least three synthetic cathinone derivative drugs of concern:

The Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is issuing this notice of intent to temporarily schedule three synthetic cathinones under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) pursuant to the temporary scheduling provisions of 21 U.S.C. 811(h). The substances are 4-methyl-N-methylcathinone (mephedrone), 3,4- methylenedioxy-N-methylcathinone (methylone), and 3,4- methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV). This action is based on a finding by the Administrator that the placement of these synthetic cathinones into schedule I of the CSA is necessary to avoid an imminent hazard to the public safety.

I had a prior post (lost in the Sb hole, reposted) discussing a bit of frustration with the conflation of two different drug molecules under one street name. Particularly when it comes to the sensationalized media reports.

This is why I’m happy the most recent report is a confirmation from the medical examiner that MDPV was involved in this case in Maine.

The state medical examiner’s office has determined that a man who took bath salts and died at Eastern Maine Medical Center last July overdosed on the synthetic street drug.

Ralph E. Willis, 32, had consumed “a toxic level” of methylenedioxypyrovalerone, or MDPV, a key ingredient of bath salts, Mark Belserene, administrator of the medical examiner’s office, said Wednesday.

I am even more happy that the journalist, Nok-Noi Ricker, requested even more information:

Willis had 150 nanograms per milliliter of MDPV in his bloodstream, a body temperature of 103 degrees and an erratic heartbeat when he got to the emergency room — all side effects of the hallucinogenic stimulant — the report states.

This is great. Usually we have to comb through a very slowly developing and erratic Case Report literature to determine anything at all about real-world, in situ, drug levels, combinations and identities that lead to medical emergency and death. Nice to see a reporter tenacious enough to do the followup beyond the original (and sadly typical) level of “Person dead, Cops say it was [insert drug name here]”.

I am also happy that the journalist includes the caveats. This guy was combative and agitated, from the reporting. So, as another quoted expert mentions, we can’t necessarily conclude that this is all down to a simple equation between plasma levels of the drug and the resulting cardiac complications.

“There are so many factors that go into [a bath salts] death that have nothing to do with the level” of drugs ingested, Karen Simone, a toxicologist and director of the Northern New England Poison Control Center in Portland, said Tuesday. “Maybe it killed him, and maybe it didn’t.”

Physically restraining bath salts users who are severely agitated and in a state of excited delirium can be harmful and even life-threatening because they usually have increased heart rates and high blood pressure, Simone and Dr. Jonnathan Busko, an emergency room doctor at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, have said.

As I have been mentioning in the case of mephedrone/4-methylmethcathinone, the academic literature has been slow to develop. There are now three pretty interesting papers which take a look at neurochemical, toxicological and behavioral effects of 4-MMC including Kehr et al 2011, Baumann et al, 2012 and Hadlock et al, 2011.

All I’ve been able to drum up* with respect to MDPV is Fuwa et al (PDF). The abstract is in English and the Figures are pretty easy to work out but…any of my readers fluent in Japanese and want to give translation a go?

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*generally available. There were two adjacent posters at the recent ACNP meeting although I couldn’t really get a feel for whether they are close to publication or not. Stay tuned, there will eventually be some more data I would think.

Repost: "News on substituted cathinone stimulants, aka "bath salts"

This originally appeared on the Scienceblogs.com version of DrugMonkey and fell into the gap when we closed up shop over there.

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The New York Times had a piece up Sunday that was entitled “An Alarming New Stimulant, Legal in Many States“. I was alerted to this by David Kroll who reposted some prior comments at his Take as Directed blog. I’ve been getting some traffic from a BoingBoing linker from Maggie Koerth-Baker to an older post from me so I thought I’d better address a couple of points that jump out at me.
First and foremost, the reader should be extremely cautious whenever there is conflation of two different drugs under one purported street name. Even if they are structurally quite similar and some human reports have overlapping properties. In the case of “bath salts”, there is quite a bit of confusion over whether a news account is referring to 4-methylmethcathinone (4-MMC), methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), sees no difference between them* or doesn’t know if there is any difference.