A whole new world of stupidity

New Scientist News - Abuse of prescription drugs fuelled by online recipes

It seems that abuse of prescription drugs is a big issue in the States (and no doubt it happens here too.) The internet allows users to quickly pass on information on how to abuse the drugs:

For instance, some sites suggest ways of tampering with skin patches designed to slowly release the opioid painkiller fentanyl. Users sometimes extract the drug from a patch to eat, inject or smoke. Yet a single patch can contain enough fentanyl to kill several people, according to toxicologist Bruce Goldberger from the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's like Russian roulette - you just don't know how much drug you're going to get," he says....

Surveys by the US Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) suggest the number of emergency hospital visits involving oxycodone misuse increased about 10-fold between 1996 and 2004. Estimates suggest that in 2004 there were more than 36,000 admissions involving misuse of the drug, now nicknamed "hillbilly heroin".

Drug companies have to go out of their way to make the medicine harder to abuse:

The good news is that some barriers to tampering seem to be genuinely effective. Disgruntled recreational users report online that one methylphenidate drug called Concerta, a stimulant used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is very difficult to crush and snort. One user's verdict reads: "No effects to very minimal with an irritated nose full of chunks."

While we are talking about abuse of things intended for other puproses, here's my semi-obscure piece of drug lore (found in some time ago in a Fortean Times article). If you eat enough nutmeg, you'll trip out.

Actually, this site claims its effects were relatively well known, with its users including Charlie Parker and Malcolm X (!)

This interested me particularly, as I recalled an old Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge comic that I read as a child about Uncle Scrooge's addiction to nutmeg tea. (It didn't make him trip out, though.) I remembered asking my father if he knew about nutmeg tea; he just laughed.

You can see some extracts of this comic here and here.

I presume that the hallucinogenic effects were unknown to Carl Barks. Why he would chose nutmeg tea is something of a mystery, though. (I am sure I read someone on the internet who suggested that maybe it meant that all of Uncle Scrooge's riches were just a hallucination caused by his drug habit.)

Of course, it goes without saying that I am against all forms of drug induced mood alteration, except for alcohol in moderation. My readership is so small that I think I can safely assume I am not spreading harmful ideas too widely.