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Scientists Find New Painkiller From Saliva
dptalia writes "Scientists have found a new pain killer based on human saliva. Apparently 1 gram of the new drug provides as much pain blocking as 3 grams of morphine. The drug blocks the breakdown of the body's natural pain killing mechanism. Scientists say the molecule is simple and synthesis is expected to be simple."
When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats' paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine.
Well wouldn't you say anything to make them stop spitting on you?
"No more, yes alright it works I'm not in pain anymore."
Moving out of cuckoo land, I have a twisted ankle after a fall yesterday should I hock a loogie onto it?
liqbase
Just when I'd kicked my morphine habit, now I'm going to get jailed for posession of saliva.
'cos morphine rules !!
I was in hospital one time after an operation and I was on a self administered morhine drip. But it would only give 1mg every 2 minutes (or whatever is the appropriate dose). But the machine also logs how many times you press the button so the staff can see how much pain you think you're in.
So I wouldn't have to count, I pressed the button every time the track changed on my mp3 player. Best hospital visit evar!!!1
I was lying there one time, opened my eyes and the Everquest HUD was there. In the chat window I was being spammed with :
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
Eventually I went and everybody who spoke on the journey, their chat came up in the window.
It was ace.
When they checked the machine they asked me if I was in a lot of pain, I ust said "no I like the morphine" and we all had a laugh. Until they took it off me.
Then they gave me these awful morphine based tablets and they gave me a bad trip so I stopped taking them.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The scientists never think these things through, do they? This is going to create huge problems for school discipline. Now whenever students are caught shooting spit balls at other students they can claim they were just implanting an airborne pain killer delivery system.
"But I was just helping Anne's neck pain..."
[X] I am willing to test mankinds new potent pain killer.
I have.. migraines... on occasion...
Saliva is a painkiller? How come I have toothache then?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Just when society figured that people can be hurt psychologically and kept in control with never ending bad news on TV they found a great physiological painkiller.
(Yes, I hate this reality.)
So, the behaviour observed in animals where they lick wounds, and even in humans, that 'kiss it better' (introduce saliva to the wound), or suck on a sore wound to make it feel better, by instinct, hasn't given the clue that there's something in saliva that helps?
There's a whole store of herb and animal lore that's been systematically quashed for decades (well, since the great witch hunts really), and science is only just getting round to looking at it now.
There's a lot to be said for 'complimentary' medicine for lesser ailments (although the modern pharmaceutical treatments are definitely magnitudes more effective for front line serious treatment). Rather than just decrying it, perhaps it should be investigated more thoroughly?
how many people thought that said salvia?
I know I've been gone for awhile and I know this chap's nae is BadAnalogyGuy, but a score of 2 for questioning the pluralization of "anus", assuming that aliens sodomize humans, and being a general dumbass? What has Slashdot become?
Sorry, it had to be said.
>airborne pain killer delivery system.
I can imagine Bush demanding that whatever ordnance is being dropped on civilians in is renamed to this rather inspired description.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The rats? What about those poor bacteria in the saliva, just being sacrificed so the scientists could make the painkiller? There were probably more bacteria in there, eradicated, than there were humans that ever lived!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I am going to claim saliva addiction and start snogging every good looking girl I see for the rest of the afternoon.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I bet morphine is a lot more fun than saliva, whatever the pain blocking abilities.
Why is an old Oliver Stone film on Slashdot?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I hate rats. I'll buy a product based on how many more rats they killed during testing then the nearest competitor.
Next up, little rat-like dogs. Can we require medical testing on those?
I'm completely against animal testing on cute little fuzzy bunnies and cool dogs, like golden retrievers. I'm against testing on some monkeys, but others you can go for it - like that little brown bastard that threw feces on me at the zoo. Give him monkey-AIDS.
Also, I never buy bug repellent that has been tested on mosquitoes. The slaughter must stop!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Easy to synthesize.
Made from saliva.
Well, the "War on Drugs" is about to get interesting. Have you had you mouth drained by a government-approved suction center yet today? "Today the police knocked over another spit house..."
(I know, I know, synthesize means they don't need actual saliva... just trying to be funny.)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Around here, yes.
Blah, blah, blah, my comment does not have too few characters per line.
"Scientists say the molecule is simple and synthesis is expected to be simple."
If it weren't for that students of the world could rejoice with a much less embarrassing way to pay for their university fees than sperm donation, they could've spat their way through uni!
Spit painkiller?
Nifty thriller.
Better still,
The no-blood spiller.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I understand they might be comparing relative potency, but comparing to THREE GRAMS of morphine is kinda excessive.
300 mg morphine will render just about any human being unconscious and apnoeic pretty quickly.
3000 mg will knock you out cold, stop you breathing, and drop your blood pressure precipitously, more or less instantaneously.
In which sense, numerous things have have the same pain-killing effect as three grams of morphine.
Being hit by a freight train, for instance.
They isolated a peptide which inhibits two enzymes that chew up enkephalins, the body's natural pain killers. Inhibiting these makes the naturally-released enkephalins hang around longer. The problem is that peptide drugs have a checkered history. See the article linked below.
0 3v1
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/06058651
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
No, you got that wrong. Now you can get that bully slugging spitballs at you impounded for drug dealing.
Ya know, lemons and lemonade...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, one thing's for sure. As soon as this stuff is researched, someone will patent it. Let's see how far the patenting idiocy has grown by now. Are they gonna get the patent for the procedure or the patent on saliva?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You know it's just wrong for a post that starts with "When we complain about how aliens probe our anuses" to be modded insightful.
However I think you will find that man's inhumanity to animals is usually pretty unimaginitive compared with mans inhumanity to man.
Generally you don't have people getting really emotional about hurting animals, not like the way they get all involved in hurting other people.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
3 grams of morphine is about 100 times the maximum daily dose for a 70kg adult. The article even mentions that it was per kilo of body weight. Now that would be a huge dose. But nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if this actually makes it into anything useful for human use.
So mothers who kiss their child's wounds may be performing a biologically active pain-killer and not just an emotional placebo?
All other rights can be derived from freedom of speech.
When we hurt ourselves there is a natural instinct to lick the wound so I'm not that surprised that there is a pain killer in saliva. The primary reason for licking a wound is to clean it but if there was a pain killer included as well that would increase the reason for licking the wound and, thus, probably increase the chance of survival of the animal. Natural selection would quickly select those animals that produced the pain killer.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
i think its not so black and white. if you were about to die of cancer and some scientists said they could synthesise a cure by torturing a cage full of rabbits would you want them to? Even though its a horrible choice i cant see that i would choose to die.
on the other hand, testing something so trivial as make up on an animal doesnt have any ethical justification that i can discern. then there's the sliding scale in between.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
More than the idea of reducing the quantity required, the question is whether this substance can block pain without having addictive qualities. That's a very important question, I think, and one that it seems they don't have the info on yet, because I can't imagine them leaving it out if they knew.
I thought there was significant evidence that many of those who go on to become anger-excitation rapists and other serial killers of the sort who enjoy torturing their victims usually start off torturing animals then move up to humans when animals no longer provide the same thrill. I certainly once attended a lecture by a forensic psychologist who made this claim and argued that adolescent torture of animals was the clearest indicator of future sociopathy in a person that he was aware of and that courts should take it more seriously as a sign of future violent potential.
"Come on, baby. I got a real bad groin injury today. Can't you help me with the pain?"
I kind of do this stuff for a living so I don't need to RTFA to know that 3 grams of morphine/kg of body weight is way past a lethal dose.
-William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Saliva-medicine turns into addictive drug sold illegally on the streets in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ......
the troll may have a point.
BBC got it right: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6142842.stm
grrr... must resist urge to feed troll... grr- No, I can't. Ok, you go live in you inconvenient world. I can't wait to hear from you again when some of those scientific advances of medicine has healed your cancer or whatever...
Sometimes it's a matter of them telling you to think about your tongue in your mouth.
Or worse, to think about your breathing.
God, I hate when they do that.
I have a friend who is a neuro-oncology researcher. A very large part of her job is: causing cancer in rats, killing those rats, and sectioning their brains. Horror may be in the eye of the beholder, but she does not practice cruelty. The rats are killed by being placed into a box with CO2 (from a dry-ice chamber). That's probably a more peaceful death than I can expect.
Granted, when you are researching pain meds, there's probably going to be pain involved. But that doesn't mean than the researchers get any pleasure out of causing this pain, or that they cause any more pain than necessary.
If you truly feel that a rat life is worth as much as a human life, or that an hour of rat pain is as bad as an hour of human pain, then it is hard to justify your continued existence. Even if you are as green as you can get, and a hard-core vegan, your ecological footprint is very large (certainly compared to a rat), and responsible for the deaths of many small animals. The fact that you use a computer means that your carbon footprint is not that of a primitive hunter-gatherer. If you eat vegetables and/or grains, you are responsible for the deaths of several small mammals (such as fieldmice) and thousands of insects every week, just from the mechanical harvesting process (even assuming that your food is 'organic' and thus pesticide-free.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Sweet! Now I can write-off hooker BJ's as a medical expense.
I agree you're absolutely totally right. Evil science experiments torturing poor defenceless animals is just totally evil and we should all stop right now for the good of our souls.
On the other hand though science does need to progress, just not so evilly, so I suggest that in future we use nasty, evil or criminal animals for experiments.
Crocodiles for example are pretty evil just lurking in rivers waiting for lovely, amazing, wildebeeste or hapless tourists in Australia to gobble up.
Many lions and, unbeliveably, household cats are implacable serial killers so those who don't have their claws removed and their teeth filed blunt could be used.
Woodlouse, eeriewigs, spiders and worms are all pretty horrible so we can use them.
Many vegetarians don't believe chickens and fish are animals so there's no harm in using them.
Most animal rights campaigners are in fact evil terrorists who hack up the bodies of old ladies and should be used in preference to all the above.
Oh, come on! Don't "scientists" have anything better to do than state things that are already known?* It's been known that saliva in animals has antiseptic and pain-killing properties for ages. That's why they (and we) have the instint to lick our wounds.
* in the works next, a t-shirt that'll let you air-drum!
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
Has the definition of 'troll' changed while I was at work?
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
But what if more rat kills means its not as safe for you?
saliva kills YOU !!
no, man's preservation of animal life is second only to man's preservation of human life.
significant evidence that many of those who go on to become [...]
That's why the parent post said "generally". Most people do not go on to become sado-masochistic sexual offenders. That most of this small segment of the population do engage in animal cruelty would not invalidate his statement that, generally, this is not the case.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
Try inhaling some CO2 yourself, it's very painful. I don't oppose killing rats, but it would be better to suffocate them with pure nitrogen or something. Lack of oxygen is not painful.
Why yes we can advance science in other ways!
:)
Just sign these release papers and we'll get the 'advancement' started.
...some scientific news to really drool about
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
"no one seems to care about the horrible experiments made on animals or ridicule those who do"
Its the anonymous nature of the internet and the disconnection from the suffering.
Im sure that 99% of the people behind the cruel or uncaring posts whould have a completly different viewpoint when shown a box of kittens and told "there ya go start, snapping necks" or "watch me while I kill this box full of kittens"
I would be willing to bet that the majority or cruel posters havent had to watch or participate in an inhumane act upon an animal or a person.
So making out with a significant other helps you ignore some pain and keeps you from being depressed? I could have told you that!
But why is the rum gone?
But what am I going to do with all of this iodine and red phosphorus?
.. so the next time my wife says she has a headache, I will have the perfect cure for it!!!
They didn't inject 3g of morphine in a human.
They didn't even inject 3g of morphine in a rat.
What they found was that 3 grams of morphine per kg body weight is about as potent as 1 gram of morphine per kg body weight of the new saliva substance.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Hello? I don't think any scientific finding is worth it if we have to pay with such horror and cruelty for it" Such horror and cruelty. Puncturing some bloody rats. Go to a hospital, see HUMANS there. Rethink argument. Maybe I overdid when I said "troll", but... ah, forget it.
I see a lot of slaps coming at your face if you try that. But on the bright side, you can actually claim you need painkillers after that.
Your sacrifice in the name of science will not be forgotten.
First, look up 'inhumane.' Second, do you feel you are being disingenuous by comparing snapping kittens necks to using animals as research subjects for human diseases?
That's a straw man argument. You're contending that people who think you have jacked up priorities are actually pro-cruelty. Bollocks.
...injured animals lick their wounds?
Just when they were about to loosen their restrictions on bringing fluids onto a plain...
I can see it now:
TSA gate-thug: "Sir, please spit into the garbage bag."
Me: "I... haff... no.. mo... thaliva..."
TSA gate-thug: "Don't get sassy with me! Spit!"
Me: "I'll try... Thee? Nothing!"
TSA gate-thug: "Supervisor! We've got a wet one! CODE RED!!!"
It was also determined that saliva (esp that of women who have borne children) can also be used as hair gel, facial cleanser and stain remover.
"I kind of do this stuff for a living"
You french girls all day?
I'm selling 1 liter of my own homemade saliva.
:)
Bids starting at $0.99.
Auction ends at 10 am EST
Of course we can...look at all the great inventions we made during the 2 World Wars...Medicine, Aviation, Rocket Science, Nuclear Science,Industrial processes (both military and civil...We all know that good military inventions become good civil inventions after the war ends)... We own theses 2 wars so much.
War has always been a good way to promote scientific research...When you ve got 1 million wounded soldiers to try a new drug/new surgery, 1 million valid soldiers to try your new shields, 1 million ennemies to "try" your new weapons, and 1 million prisoners to try whatever you want, you make a lot of progress pretty fast.
But now it seems people prefer horrible experiments on rats. That's disgusting. I agree with you, we should stop theses horrors and start a third WW right now, so that scientists can make their experiments without harming theses poor little creatures.
Ok i stop being ironic here to make my point : You always need something/someone to try your prototype. If your product affect living organisms only (which is the case for a drug but not a bomb) you need a living being. So you dont have the choice...You need to pick one. It might be a rat/a bunny/a dog/a cat or a human. Since no living being is willing to give his life for nothing, you have to take someone against his will. The problem is we ve got quite a lot of law forbidding torture/killing of a human. So you only have animals left. Or start a war, people tends to forget the laws during wars...
Now your employer can justify spitting on the employees as a workforce motivation tool.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Or suffocate them with nitrous oxide. Let them go out laughing...
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Seriously, what follows isn't meant to start a flame war at all. I'm just curious...
I notice a lot of times that when people see a behavior or physical feature in an organism, they begin stating the evolutionary reason it came about.
Isn't this a case of stating some pretty big conjecture with a tone of voice normally reserved for more certain beliefs? I mean, sure licking wounds COULD have been evolutionarily preferred because of either of the two biological reasons stated (anti-germ vs. anti-pain), but how do you go from a certain cause being plausible to believing that the cause was the actual one?
I realize that we all try to understand how new observations fit into the world views we hold, but it just seems a little strange to me to state such conjectures with the same tone of confidence as we do, say, when talking about the clear continuum of forms that exist in the fossil record.
Any thoughts?
Potentially explosive. OH&S issues.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
If you're going to kill through suffocation, there are few more cruel ways than using CO2.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
please lick it!
aliens probe our anuses (anii?) with large metallic rods
That would be ani, or at least I think it's masculine; I guess it could be ana if it's neuter. In any case it's not anii, that'd be the plural of anius (think 'radius -ii').
There's apparently also an entirely unrelated fourth declension feminine anus (plural: anus).
I guess the on-topic police are gonna get me for this one.
inhumanity to animals
Statements like that always make me chuckle. Look, either we accept animals as members of our society and stop making bacon out of them (I would vote 'Nay' on that one), in which case they would have to follow our laws and in turn receive the appropriate rights. Or, we stop whining about how horrible it is that we make bacon, couches, medicines, etc out of them.
Where I work we give mice cancer for a living. We jump through all sorts of hoops to make it more "humane", but at the end of the day, we still purposefully give them cancer just so we can study it - I am sure the "humane" treatment makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, though (well, most of them are inbred to the point that they don't know where they are, but that's beside the point).
And yet, how many mice dying of cancer are worth one human dying of cancer? Or, more accurately at this point, living 3 months longer. Personally, I think it's a very large number... YMMV.
sic transit gloria mundi
So when my mom kissed the boo-boo better, it actually worked?
Cool, I always thought so....
...when spitting on her when we try to do it dirty
As for the small rat-like dogs, I'm afraid they're pretty much worthless even for cruel and inhumane experiments. However, you can still feed them to coyotes. Coyotes are cool dogs like golden retrievers and they eat small rat-like dogs! They go through poodles like I go through popcorn. Yay coyotes! Alligators are no good though. Sure they eat small rat-like dogs and the occasional resident from Florida but they're cold blooded and you know they're trying to bring back the dominance of the dinosaur. I suggest we genetically engineer crocodiles to have warm blood and fur. That'd show them!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Though many people would seem to be of the opinion that animal life is more important than human life... to them I would suggest that they put "their money where their mouth is" and feed themselves to the nearest pit-bull.
If you (not you eighty4) revere animal life as being so sacred, and consider human life to be as base as it gets, then perhaps you should attempt to remedy that situation by, as I said, feeding yourself to an animal... or is animal life only more important than human life when that human life is not your own?
These are not labs full of megalomaniacs remaniscent of the Joker from Batman, methodically torturing poor kittens and other small furry animals. They're performing scientific tests with as much humanity as they can. The fact that these tests, if performed upon a human, would still be cause for riots and lynching is an unfortunate by-product of the world we live in and the diseases these researchers are trying to cure.
If suddenly it were determined that rats were actually sentient on more than a simple stimulus-response with limited memory, then I'm sure you'd have a LARGE number of researchers who would repent and find another animal whose self-awareness is more in doubt. If you think that this is cruel and calculating, well... in a way... you're right. Welcome to the real world, it's not all rainbows and songbirds.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
I find it doubtful that you could have an effective painkiller that wasn't usable recreationally.
The human body's pain regulatory system is tightly bound up with a behaviour-rewarding system. Certain actions which are evolutionarily beneficial (to the species or the tribe, even if not to the individual) trigger a release of endorphins, the body's own homebrew morphine analogues which are also produced in response to pain. When an individual is not in pain, stimulation of the endorphin receptors produces a highly pleasurable sensation.
Opiates such as morphine or heroin are chemically similar enough to endorphins to bind to the same receptors. This makes them good painkillers. It also makes them good ways to induce pleasurable sensations for recreational purposes.
Beside any psychological effect (which may well be habit-forming in its own right), continued over-use of opiates can cause a reduction in the body's endorphin production. When the artificial painkillers wear off, the body is not ready with natural painkillers and so normal bodily functions produce heightened sensations -- the blood can be felt flowing through arteries, the ends of bones can be felt moving past one another, and so on. The exact manifestation of symptoms is a person-to-person variable. Most people find this state unbearable and so seek out more opiates rather than wait for the body's endorphin production to stabilise. This is physical dependence (the body cannot function normally without drugs). At £1 a breath, a heroin habit is not a cheap habit unless you are a rich rock star.
Some people have found that they can naturally produce endorphins in more than sufficient quantities to mask pain, and actually deliberately harm themselves to trigger an endorphin release. (Gripping ice cubes tightly in the hands is one of the least-dangerous ways to cause temporary pain sensations and so trigger endorphin production, and is recommended by some agencies for persistent self-harm practitioners). Others have found that by deliberately performing (what they perceive to be) altruistic acts (such as helping an old lady across the road, whether or not she actually wants to cross the road), they can stimulate endorphin production.
Unless the pain-relieving and pleasure-inducing properties of endorphins are separable, any painkiller that attempts to mimic their action will be both usable recreationally and doubly habit-forming.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I can't get the picture out of my mind of a rat being tortured with make up. I picture researchers putting some gastly shade of eye makeup on a female rat and watching to see if she can get a date with a male rat.
I suspect alcohol is involved, which would explain the current ghastly shades of eye makeup available for human women. Don't the researchers realize that after a few cold ones, the male rats could care less about the eye makeup?
Inconvenient? Like polio or pertussis or plague?
Having worked in both the biotechnology and computer programming fields, I can tell you that there is not going to be a computer simulation that is good enough to obviate the need for all animal testing anytime soon. Biological systems are way too complex to accurately model. Also, there are almost always unexpected synergistic effects with new drugs. Of course, it is ridiculous to test a new hairspray on a rabbits eyes - we pretty much know what's going to happen there.
Most people who work in biotechnology are not the sadistic torturers you might think. One time in the lab I worked in, an animal tech didn't check all the mouse cages before a rack of cages went through the autoclave. There was a mouse left in one of the cages. The mouse most likely died a horrible and painful death. The tech was devestated about the mouse, and resigned even before she could be fired (which was the lab's policy if anyone was shown to have committed any animal cruelty).
Most reputable laboratories go to great lengths to ensure the comfort of the animals being tested. But the hard fact is that it is more ethical to test new drugs and procedures on animals than it is on humans.
Another thing that nobody on the Animal Rights side of the issue seems to mention is that a lot of this kind of testing furthers veterinary science. I have a 14-year-old dog that we rescued from a shelter when she was a pup. She is currently sporting two TPLO operations: one on each knee and is taking an antiinflammetory drug for arthritis. Both this surgery and the drug were experimental at one time, but thanks to science my dog is living out her final days in relative comfort rather than having to be put to sleep several years ago.
It has been discussed for some time that tolerance to pain is increased by having an orgasm. Therefore, any migraine or headache complaints by your wife actually should be a reason to get jiggy.
Seriously, though, I can sympathize with your view. I understand that many people (I don't know if this includes you) put animals on the same level as humans as we are all "fellow creatures" on this planet. From that point of view, harming animals for research is certainly barbarous. I expect the scientists who did this experiment thought nothing of it, having routinely done much worse things to rats (I mean, none of them even died here).
I believe man is worth more than animals, but I do not think they are worthless. At one time in my life, I would have made some of the same arguments I've seen in this thread that try to reduce your concerns to irrational sentimentality. They claim that you only care because of the "cuteness" of the animal, or that you are hypocritical because you kill thousands of microorganisms every time you bathe or brush your teeth. To trivialize our feelings of compassion toward animals is to deny part of our humanity. Aren't we all concerned about a child who is cruel to animals or tortures insects? Don't the experts tell us such behavior may be a warning sign? Whether one thinks it's rational or not, there may be some value in compassion for animals.
I believe there is a line that needs to be drawn on what we can do in the name of scientific research, but we are pushing the line all the time, and I think most people aren't outraged because they just don't really realize what's going on, or because they've been convinced to ignore those feelings. Fetal stem cell research is (IMO) about as bad as it gets. We're not even talking about animals anymore, they actually create (presumably unsustainable) human embryos for the sole purpose of harvesting stem cells from them. Think about this, you can argue about whether such an embryo is a human life, but it's getting close. It was from such an embryo that they cloned "Dolly" the sheep. How long before our world starts looking like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel?
I don't agree that the ends justifies the means. We can not arbitrarily allow everything in the name of science on the grounds that it may benefit humanity someday. So where do we draw the line? You might be okay with where the line is today, but what if tomorrow they move it past your point of comfort? Will you be outraged and take action? Or will you move your line?
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
At first, I thought they said "Scientists Find New Painkiller from Salvia"
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
I'm finding this hard to swallow.
Finally, science to back up the art of "kiss it to make it better".
Love is the drug for me!
--
make install -not war
I, for one, welcome our saliva-junky, impervious to pain, rat overlords.
that spitting on the sidewalk will now be prosecuted as "distribution of a controlled substance"....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
.. its that they didn't even BOTHER to call me after that.
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
i must alert my girlfriend there is pain in my lap!
who am i kidding this is slashdot
"Lick ones wounds" actually works! Who would have thought!
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While I agree that it is true most posters have not had to participate in an inhumane act, I think it is wishful thinking to believe that the potential for sadism is not an inherent part of human nature. I would also claim that worrying about animal suffering is a luxury that we are just now (within the last 50 years) able to begin to enjoy, and even then only in the very richest parts of the world. But when you are sick, and need treatment, you lose the luxury of being able to refrain from the sadistic option. You choose to (indirectly) make animals suffer to save yourself or your loved one because you have to. If we had lived 100 (or especially 1000) years ago, or in a different part of the country, we wouldn't even consider the luxury of sparing animals- it would be sort of like asking someone who has been dying of thirst in the desert who has just gotten a bottle of water whether he would have preferred a different brand- ludicrous. He isn't even thinking of that issue. It is the remains of this mentality that I think you pick up on by your post. So I think it is the disconnect with suffering that allows your opinion. Now the ridiculing of people who hold an opinion like yours- I agree, that is due to the disconnect of the internet. Its anonymity seems to breed little virtual psychopaths :-(
Have you tried Tai Chi? I know first-hand that if you take the time to learn Tai Chi, your pain will disappear. It is NOT an instant process, but if you spend a couple years with Tai Chi, it will pay off. From what it sounds like, there is nothing you can lose.
Aside: I'm not against animal research, but as a former animal researcher who euthanized rodents I have to say that this is a rotten way to kill animals. CO2 euthanasia is not quick, the animals are clearly in distress (they die gasping for air, clawing at the container edges, rolling in their urine and feces). I can only imagine that CO2 has become popular because it sounds nice--you know, you put the animals to sleep with some gas that they breath all the time anyway.
Better by far is cervical dislocation--a quick snap of the neck and the animal falls senseless. Unfortunately, that practice is increasingly viewed as barbaric and is discouraged in many places. It's a strange world we live in where we care less about the actual suffering of the animal than how humane we appear to be.
Ouch, I hadn't thought that through.
It still might be worth it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Morphine tested mostly on humans? Where do you get this stuff? It may have been discovered in humans but a simple and quick pubmed search will show thousands upon thousands of morphine studies in animals.
I hate to break it to you but normal OTC pain relievers (acetaminophen, ibuprofen, etc) are all tested on animals as well. I guess you better stick with the crystals and acupuncture.
Think Torchwood and rat jam.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I'm gonna hate myself.
We should use stingrays. Kill all the bastards.
You mad
Mod parent up!
Usually when someone finds out something like this, they'll patent it. Due to the strange way patents work in the US, does this mean I'll have to get a licensing agreement now before I spit?
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
If doing so would cure cancer so many would line up to do so you could sell tickets.
Practically speaking, several billion people will do the equivalent just to eat lunch today - much less do something as helpful to the human condition as find a cheap safe alternative to morphine
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
It is actually a little simpler than that. Imagine you are dying of starvation but there is a rabbit available that you could kill and eat. Historically, people pick eating the rabbit.
We are fundamentally built to consider ourselves above animals for basic survival reasons. And yes, humans are naturally omnivores, so leave off about the vegetarian options.
If you read about what CO2 does, it sounds horrible for euthanasia, but if you ever saw it in action you'd see there isn't any struggle involved and no *apparent* pain. I've used CO2 to kill literally thousands and thousands of rats for mine and other people's snake collections (I processed 4,000 or so adults in two afternoons for a few months feed for a few large collections of snakes).
The animals literally slow down, lay down, and pass out and don't wake up. There isn't any vocalization or any struggle etc. You might get leg twitches etc as they finally die, but you get those nervous reflexes regardless of method of killing.
What I don't kill by this method I used the good ole whap them on the head method... hold firmly onto the tail, hit them HARD on a metal/concrete/etc surface (especially the edge of something such as the edge of a table) and it kills them very quickly. If you don't hit the animal hard enough you don't kill it and just make it suffer. Sounds brutal, but much better than death due to some of the very painful envenomations from animals in my collection, and a lot better than being squeezed to death.
...but let me assure you that mother nature doesn't.
Can you imagine the pain of being eaten by a large predator? Remember that man's evolutionary ancestors were not always at the top of the food chain; predation has certainly touched you.
Also, the venoms of poisonous animals have evolved to increase pain, allowing the predator to more effectively incapacitate the victim.
Just because mankind removes itself from the sadistic slaughter of the world does not mean that the slaughter itself abates. No matter how violent and predatory we may imagine ourselves to be, we are amateurs compared to what nature has produced.
You do realize that your own cited source states that overabundance of CO2 causes loss of consciousness without the person even knowing what's happening?
How is it that this is cruel?
When someone knocks you down and spits on you it's just love...
Onda Technology Institute
Animals are innocent. YOU are not.
In that case expect it to be prohibited by the moral police the moment it becomes available outside of the lab. With a name like "opiorphin", the drug war overlords probably have their eye on it this very moment. What a terrible choice of name - it sounds like a combination of "opium" and "morphine" that just screams, "prohibit me and throw the users in jail!" They should have called it something like vitamin N or freeze-dried saliva extract.
Beside any psychological effect (which may well be habit-forming in its own right), continued over-use of opiates can cause a reduction in the body's endorphin production.
Yes, but chronic pain users can adapt themselves to very large doses with no apparent ill effects, and have a very high quality of life and normal life span, provided they have continued access and don't have to put up with unpredictable and irregular supplies from doctors who are afraid to have their DEA/(UK equiv) license pulled.
At £1 a breath, a heroin habit is not a cheap habit unless you are a rich rock star.
The substance itself is quite cheap. The problem is the prohibition and its enforcement, which makes it extremely expensive (and hugely profitable for the dealers).
A few of things that I wonder about.
1) Who cares how much you have to take? 1g of this stuff vs 3g of morphine? 500 mg of Tylenol vs 200mg of Ibuprofen. Really, we should care about the effects of the drug, not how much you have to take.
2) So, all this does is prevent the breakdown/re-uptake of our the chemicals that bind to the same receptors that morphine does. So, the effects should be pretty much identical to those of morphine. It's kind of neat, but not all that surprising.
3) What is all this talk about it being "natural" Who cares? They're going to synthesize it anyway. Morphine is "natural" in the same way. "Natural" is a buzzword that makes people feel good about themselves, but really means nearly nothing.
4) I like the band Morphine.
Makeup testing on animals includes feeding the makeup to the animal, placing the makeup in the animal's eyes (rabbits are used for this, since their eyes don't tear).
The rats are killed by being placed into a box with CO2 (from a dry-ice chamber).
All of the rat researchers I know (one) kills them with a mini rat guillotine.
Salvinorin A, found in the psychoactive plant Salvia Divinorum, seems to have fairly strong pain-relieving properties via opioid action, but is absolutely not addictive. Unfortunately it also makes you hallucinate your balls off, making it pretty unmarketable as a pain medication :)
If it's so darn simple, why has it taken them this long to find and synthesize it? After all, it's right in front of your teeth.
And how long before you're arrested for possessing saliva?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Or am I thinking of the 'black goo' on an old Star Trek episode.
They steered well away from the planet after discovering that.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"Apparently 1 gram of the new drug provides as much pain blocking as 3 grams of morphine."
Yeah...
As someone who spent a night last week in a relatively large hospital, hearing the complaints of other patients in the emergency room and later the complaints of my roommate, I think I can safely say that, unless this stuff is also three time as addictive as morphine, it won't catch on. Within hours of the first hospital dispensing this stuff to patients, at least one will start to complain that they've "built up a tolerance" to the new drug and that they need their precious, precious opiate for their phantom ailments.
Pain killers have already come a long way since morphine; there are other reasons why it hasn't gone away.
When I was a kid I put a mouse in a coke can with a smoke bomb, marched around like a Nazi and lit the fuse. Crazy thing was the mouse lived and I learned I was not cut out to be a Nazi, changed my life.
Spit on me, Brian.
Ah, that's good. Now tell me I'm dirty.
Scientists finally figured out why the first thing we do when we hurt out finger is put it in our mouths.
As my great-grandfather used to never tell me as he didn't bounce me on his knee since he died 2 years before I was born,
"Sure, you put your finger in your mouth to stop infection. The spit gets in the eyes of the germs and they blindly bump into each other. Since they're so small, this usually delivers a fatal blow and they die off very quickly."
thats it, a nice sloppy wet kiss.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Read the article again.
High CO2 is what causes the "oh crap I can't breathe!" effect. Therefore, "euthanizing" an animal with CO2 gives the "choking/drowning" effect, whereas using something else to displace oxygen results in the "I think I'll take a nap now" scenario.
It didn't work!
300 mg morphine will render just about any human being unconscious and apnoeic pretty quickly.
3000 mg will knock you out cold, stop you breathing, and drop your blood pressure precipitously, more or less instantaneously.
What the article actually said was
Given the rats only weigh a few grams themselves, they were not given 3 grams of morphine.Also, I have to call shenanigans on your claim that 3 grams of morphine will stop one's breathing. Did you just pull that number out of your ass? Here's some real info from the MSDS for morphine sulfate, which says
For a lightweight human (say, 50 kg) and an LD50 of 300 mg/kg (being conservative) that means it would take 15 g of morphine to stop someone from breathing. That's 5 times more than you claim, meaning that 3 grams is probably closer to a therapeutic dose, not some coma-inducing overdose. However, the MSDS does make it seem that the mice were given what should have been lethal ODs. I can't access the PNAS article right now (abstract here) to verify what the researchers actually did.In other news, I wonder why I haven't been hearing more about tetrodotoxin (from pufferfish) which is a highly effective pain killer in basically homeopathic doses. Maybe the small dose is the reason we haven't heard anything--hard to make a profit on microgram quantities of an easily obtained natural product.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
So now the song is.... valium vicodin ecstasy & extract of spit!
Kill your TV
"Honey, I have a headache"
"No problem, we'll do some deep-throat kissing first"
I mean, WTF? Aren't animals our equals according to you people? Then why are they supposedly innocent and I'm (by way of being human) not?
If I'm responsible for my actions but animals supposedly aren't, you are acknowledging that humans have a superior moral sense. The capacity to do evil (rather than merely "damage" in the case of a wild animal) implies the ability to consciously choose good, which animals couldn't do either. You've actually pointed to one reason for valuing humans more highly than animals.
I never liked small dogs either until one came into my life and stole my heart. Muffin, a Lhasa Apso, was eight months old when a neighbor gave her to us and was our friend and companion for nineteen years. To put an old saying another way, it isn't the size of the dog in your life but the size of the life in your dog. I will miss her the rest of my life.
Is a highly effective painkiller that works by blocking sodium channels. Not all pain killers work on the principle of endorphin release, and not all pain killers are addictive.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Aside from the fact that THC got blackballed long before there was science showing that it actually had practical medical uses its got that naturally occurring thing going on, which makes it pretty unattractive to institutions with *finances* (drug cartels don't help or count).
Likewise, poppy tea can be considered an effective home remedy for moderate pain, but make it and risk prosecution.
Quack, quack.
In an ethics class, I once challenged my (very left-leaning, [random pet cause] rights) professor that vegetarianism sometimes doesn't make sense since there are so vastly many different human physiologies. Eskimos, for example, can live entirely on a diet of fish protein, and have little need for vegetables, while other cultural groups do not handle any kind of meat protein well at all. In short, people need food (sometimes meat food) so it's a fact of life that we kill animals to live.
His response was "well we have other options now, people don't need to kill an animal to eat." Of course, that response ALREADY ASSUMES that it is wrong to eat animals and is not itself an argument for vegetarianism.. but I have never seen an animal rights activist actually understand that.
Now, I myself eat an almost exclusively vegetarian diet, simply because I have serious digestive problems that prohibit me from digesting most meats.
In fact, the only good argument in favor of vegetarianism I have ever seen is people who refuse to eat meat because of how the animals are treated before they're killed. That's very simply voting with your dollars and not something I have a problem with.
But I do not buy any moral arguments that killing animals to eat is somehow bad; we're as much a part of the natural world as any lion and the fact that life consumes life is not something we can moralize out of existence.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
I used halothane anesthesia - they go to sleep, they don't wake up. Nitrogen would also be an excellent way to kill them, and painless.
I don't think any scientific finding is worth it if we have to pay with such horror and cruelty for it. Can't we advance science another way? Even if we couldn't I'd rather live in an inconvenient world.
Whenever a story like this is posted, there's always someone like you who posts about how horrible medical researchers are and how they should be ridiculed. It's just that the rest of us are smart enough to ignore you or tell you to STFU. The world you want to live in doesn't have a long life expectancy, but I certainly won't mind if you seek out cruelty-free medical treatment.
Cosmetics testing has certainly been gratuitously cruel to animals (I'm thinking of "Night of the Mary Kay Commandos," from Bloom County back in the day) but you obviously have no clue what you're talking about regarding medical research. Sure, all life is precious--to some degree--but the people who ought to be ridiculed are the PETA jackasses who compare cooped chickens with Jews in concentration camps, not the medical researchers who have very strict standards about animal treatment.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Can't we advance science another way?
No.
PETA gets much of their support from people who are opposed to gratuitous cruelty to animals, but the vast majority of people who support PETA are misguided (cynically and intentionally by PETA.) PETA's reason for being is "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." PETA truly equates animals with people. They're evil. Equating the life of a rat with that of a child is simply wrong. Understand this: PETA are fighting against all "exploitation" of animals. In fact, their behavior implies that humans are less valuable to them than animals. Their views are simply sociopathic.
CO2 sucks for euthanasia. There are lots of other things out there. My dad worked in a neuropsych lab. The chemical cocktail they used for Euthanasia included barbiturates and a local anaesthetic. He wanted some for himself in case he was ever terminal and in inescapable pain. That's as humane as it gets.
Still, the animal rights folks got lab animal medicine at that major research institution shut down. I know too many people who'd be dead if it weren't for the use of animals in medicine to have any respect for PETA.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
What if some little kid who doesn't know any better has a toothache, and this poor kid comes across this Slashdot post labeled "Informative" and subsequently thinks that drilling a hole in his aching tooth with his dad's powerdrill is the smartest idea ever? Did you think of this all-too-possible scenario, mods?
Please think of the children.
As long as Jack Bauer does the torture ("interrogation") and I get to watch, I'm cool with that.
You also said:
I could not disagree more. That is the very mindset that I am concerned about. From a purely scientific standpoint, there is no basis for calling anything evil or good! That doesn't mean good and evil do not exist. You claim that "evil" science is justified if it may possibly benefit someone down the road. I think I'm safe in saying that that does not fit in to most people's ideas of morality. Should the morals of the scientific community (or a radical subset thereof) outweigh the morals of society as a whole? Do you think that because you have technical knowledge in some area that you are better fit to make moral judgments than someone less educated? IMO, the scientific community, while possibly the most well informed, is arguably the most biased on these issues and therefore not in the best position to make these calls.Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Actually, CO2 is used because the folks that work in a lot of such places are usually pretty hapless and don't really understand stuff can kill them. (Talking production side breeding here, not researchers.)
CO2 is safe, as long as you don't replace all the O2 in the area too an extent too great. Plus, it's cheap too.
Pretty much everything else, you'd get dead mexicans and dead kenyans all the time. (Only white folk there for long are in management.)
CO2 is also easier to handle (liquid, common) than nigrogen.
So with a few tanks, a few boxes of garbage bags, and a couple hours you can kill 10,000 rats. Do that with any other gas and you're making regular deliveries to the county morgue as well.
(Yes, I worked at one too and I agree with the description of the CO2 killing.)
FTFA:Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 103, p 17979)
But going to the PNAS home page, the largest page number in the current issue (which is v.103) is 17063. Accessing the PNAS Early Edition page and searching for "pain" or "saliva" doesn't turn up anything which seems relevent. So where do I read the original article?
Maybe Newscientist should start using the DOI system so that we can easily resolve and find the original article.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
"Welcome to the real world, it's not all rainbows and songbirds."
Well, that's only because the rainbows were killed during cruel refraction experiments and the loss of abundant rainbows caused the songbirds to commit suicide.
First let me say I sympathize with you and hope you can find some alternative methods to improve your situation.
I have been lucky enough in my life to avoid any permanent chronic pain. But I've dealt with longer-term acute cases for various reasons over the years.
My problem is that I don't react well to opiates. a) They make me ill, at least at the dosage required for me to notice a lessening of pain, and b) I have a fairly high pain tolerance to begin with.
I recall after a knee surgery - ACL reconstruction amongst other damage - waking up and the doctors wanted to give me painkillers. This was back when they used patella tendon grafts. They saw a vertical strip from the middle of your patella tendon, including chunks of bone from your tibia and kneecap, and use that to replace the ACL. So my knee, and kneecap were sliced up pretty good. After I woke up from anesthesia, I said I was fine (it hurt a LOT, but I could put it out of my mind). They just looked at me as if I were an alien. I refused painkillers several more times before they relented. The pain continued for weeks but I took no opiates.
Years down the road, with another knee problem, they offered me a nerve block on my leg. This lasts about 24 hours I guess, but I really didn't want to lose feeling in my leg and trip over something and hurt it. But my point is that they can do very targeted pain management these days as opposed to systemic. So you may look into that as a possible option.
I've been blessed and trained to be able to put a lot of pain out of my mind. It's still there, it still hurts, but I can just go do other things. In some cases I've even aggravated injuries because I continued doing something when I should have stopped. But for chronic pain, I think as others have suggested, you could be trained by a psych professional, or possibly even hypnotized, to allow you better natural pain management.
I DO understand how you get to feeling like you just want to give up. How you would give anything for a 5 minute reprieve.
Natural methods / training will never be the same as living pain-free, but they can improve quality of life in a way that meds cannot.
Best of luck
- SEAL
In Chinese culture it's a delicacy that promotes good health. What they do is they take the nest of these birds (which is constructed and held together with their saliva), and make soup from them. I'm not surprised that good effects have been found from saliva because the Chinese already knew that :D.
The claim that sadism is in the human nature was separate from the following, rather long-winded, claim. ("I would also claim...") For the statement that sadism seems to be part of human nature, I would point to Abu Ghraib, Nazi Germany, many different kings throughout history- basically anybody with too much power seems to run the nasty risk of developing a good case of sadism. But I know you weren't necessarily disagreeing with me.
When will people learn? New Scientist is about as trustworthy as Nature as a scientific journal. Totally populist crap. Ivan disappoints me, but unfortunately the religion of capitalism results in the prostitution of even the finest scientific and journalistic minds.
No, I did not RTFA, I routinely ignore all links to that rag.
DAMN YOU!!!! Damn you and your prisms!!!111oneoneone *shakes fist*
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
From the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
0 3v1
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/06058651
Oh great, muggers are now gonna hit us over the head and cut our tungues off for drug extraction.
Table-ized A.I.
No wonder Bugs hung around Daffy so often: his slobber was Bug's drug.
Table-ized A.I.
So, I posted my original reply before I realized how many other people have these chronic pain issues on slashdot. Wow.
I've been incapacitated due to a mystery infection most of this year, which has given me time revert to my geek roots and begin programming, writing, recording, and interviewing patients and physicians on major healthcare issues. I'm still in the planning stages, unfortunately, but I'm trying to build some online community and develop a tool to help patients such as myself deal with a mess of doctors, prescriptions, procedures, hospitalizations, insurance information, and all the other data necessary to present oneself to a new doctor for treatment.
To these ends I've helped my local support community to start work on an initiative their calling "The Patient's Prescription". It is U.S.-centric for now, and barely off the ground yet. That said, I see an opportunity here, to contact a unique audience - geeks with chronic healthcare issues.
If you're interesting in seeing the beginnings of it all, feel free to visit http://www.patientsprescription.org/, though there's not much to look at just yet. Additionally, if you're interested in helping, please e-mail the group at volunteers@patientsprescription.org. If you can't volunteer, or don't have the ability or interest, but would like to be kept up to date on the community, please feel free to send a note to community@patientsprescription.org.
Please don't misinterpret my meaning in this post - the organization is right now incorporating as a non-profit. There will be no membership fees, nothing will ever cost any money, and all software will be free and open. We will never even ask for donations. I'm not posting this for any sort of personal gain, just to extend an invitation to participate. I wish the project was further along, but I wanted to strike while the iron was hot.
Thanks for once again humoring me. ^_^
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
Says who? Your opinion means nothing to me.
You're nothing; like me.
Actually, why don't you just give the companies money and not use their products? This way, they'd still experiment on the rats and rat-dogs, but you wouldn't have to suffer the agony of bad products?
testing out my trending skills
But I do not buy any moral arguments that killing animals to eat is somehow bad
ooo moral-relativism, follow that logic through and go and eat ya mum, ah but no you have serious digestive problems that prohibit you from digesting most meats and so you couldn't eat your mum, aha! but that argument ALREADY ASSUMES that pain is bad and so is not an argument as such against eating your mum.
now go eat your mum and leave us vegetarian's alone, we don't care for your dreary bletherings.
- There already are much stronger painkillers than Morphine. Ranging from let's say Oxycodone (opioid potency of 3.5) up to the Fentanyl group with a potency of 40 to 25.000 times the strength of Morphine. This is if you want painkillers comparable to Morphine.
- If you want painkillers to cure a headache up to a migraine, there are many known alternatives from Aspirine to Ergotamines or even LSD (yes, one of the most efficient migraine killers). That is where the described tests also lack fundamental understanding of how painkillers work. Needles in rat feet? Yeah, I bet Aspirine would beat Morphine at this. Ever tried Oxycotin for a headache? Didn't work? Aspirine is ten times stronger! 35 times stronger than Morphine!
- Getting high is a WANTED side effect in opioid analgetics. People that get Morphine or stronger opioids have cancer, autoimmune diseases and things like that. They suffer, are usually depressed and find themselves having a hard time sleeping. No caring, sane physician will prescribe a painkiller without mind-numbing effects to a terminally ill patient. Ever.
- The article contains almost no relevant data. I understand not releasing the whole synthesis, but... Some facts? Intrinsic potency, receptors agonised/antagonised, toxicity?
- One gram of morphine per kilogram? Are they kidding? Even half that dosage would lead every human being to die from respiratory arrest.
Wow. Dreary bletherings, indeed!
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Street heroin *is* cheaper than pharma heroin because street heroin is "cut" or diluted. That's why Pharma heroin would be like white gold on the street. It would be pure. The big unknown in street heroin is "how good is it." Is it 20% pure? 50%? more?
Pharma heroin would be a known quantity. In my opinion, it would be the most diverted prescription opiate. Bar none.
You either have reading comprehension issues or you're so intent on seeing what you WANT to see that you miss what's actually being said.
And I really think that at this point, you're just another slashdot troll.
You're being moronic about this. Go ask anyone in the pharma field (which is my particular background) or in healthcare. There is a *reason* that you won't find a single MD in the USA that thinks that heroin should be prescribed clinically. Do you think that they just want to keep you from a vaild medical treatment? Of course not.
The FDA looks objectively at carefully controlled studies done by independent groups and pharmaceutical companies. If a pharma company came out with a formulary that combined Heroin with an antagonist, as well as a micro-controlled CR system as opposed to a macro-controlled system like is abused so frequently with CR-OxyCodone, the FDA would look at it OBJECTIVELY.
You don't seem to understand that the FDA is an INDEPENDENT federal organization. The executive branch cannot even CALL THE FDA and SUGGEST anything. Doing that is against the law.
The FDA does not care about law enforcement. Or prohibition. Or anything else that you attribute to it. It has one objective and one objective only: Ensuring the safety of our food and our drugs.
If you think this has ANYTHING to do with Marijuana, you're COMPLETELY wrong.
And your dirt analogy was a joke. Go eat 2 ounces of dirt. You'll be fine. Dirt is not toxic. It's not tasty, and you'd probably be extremely constipated, but it's not toxic.
Now, go eat 2 ounces of heroin and walk around the block. Three right-turns and you'll be dead. You'll get hot and sweaty, disoriented, and adrenaline will shoot thru your body. Then you'll fall to the ground and probably slip into septic shock. You won't notice, though, because your CNS will be so far suppressed that you will no longer be conscience. Your breathing and heart rate will slow. You'll have a few minutes where an IV dose of Nalexone would bring you back to life, but after that, kiss your ass good-bye.
"the FDA shouldn't be banning any substances"
Are you serious? Then why do they even exist? The FDA has a *remarkable* record in consumer safety. Every American is *lucky* to have such a great watchdog.
And let me reiterate: There is *zero* medical need for prescription heroin. None. If there were, doctors would be for it. Once doctors are for it, a pharma company would work on a fomulary that met my above criteria. Once that happens, it would probably pass the FDA. There are a lot of illegal drugs (or variations thereof) that are legally prescribed. This has nothing to do with the war on drugs.
If you think it does, you're just a tinfoil-hatter and you're not exactly connected with reality.
Sorry man, but it's the truth.
The only valid point in your entire post is that some people have reactions to certain opioids. Considering that all of them have a very similar chemical composition, it's rare, but it's true. However, in my experience, of all the people that have a reaction, at least 50% of the time that reaction is just nauesea. In fact, Morphine is one of the worst offenders. Codeine also.
Past that, all opioids are the same. If someone has a tolerance to, say, dilaudid, they also have a tolerance to fentanyl, and to [insert opiate here].
You have to understand how opiates work. There is an enzyme in your liver, CPY2D6, that metabolizes EVERY OPIATE into morphine. This is why a heroin addict, when he doesn't have heroin, could take a few CR-OxyCodone tablets ("OxyContin") or even a handful of Hydrocodone or codeine tablets to ease the withdrawl symptoms.
Infact, the only question of potency is "How efficiently does the liver metabolize this opiate." Short-acting opiates like I listed before (dilaudid, fentanyl, demerol, OxyCodone, Hydrocodne) have subtle differences in their pharmacology. So, for example, 1mg of Fentanyl is metabolized by-and-large into 100MG of morphine in the liver. You'd need 1000MG of Codeine for the same analgesic effects.
In summary, please don't offer misinformation. There is nothing true in your post other than the fact that certain formulations cause adverse reaction in a very small percentage of the population. And there are about 15 different opiates currently in a doctors arsenal. The addition of one more wouldn't change anything.
Without a doubt if a pharma company decided to market heroin, they wouldn't just throw diamorphine into a pill with fillers and call it a day.
To even have a CHANCE that it would pass FDA approval, it would have to be a combo agonist/antagonist and it would probably also include, in pill form, a CR mechanism.
Therefore, they would be able to patent their drug in the same was as they could if they "invented" a brand new opiate.
Sorry... it's "CYP2D6" n/t
Sorry, it's true.
To reach toxic levels of caffeine, you'd have to drink more coffee than is humanly possible.
I have no emotion tied to Heroin, I have emotion tied to the quality of the American system for drug approval. It has the best record in the world. Drugs are made legal and illegal in many countries based only on the fact that of their status in the US.
You seem to think that every substance is made equal, and that there should be some consistency, which is not true. You're over simplifying things. And honestly, you're out of your depth.
The fact that you compare the toxicity of caffeine, dirt, alcohol, marijuana and enzyte to the toxicity of Heroin (or Cocaine, or Amphetamines, Steroids, etc) is indicative of your knowledge of the subject. Which, let me spell out, is painfully little.
And your arguments aren't even well thought out. I point that out, and you throw back other aguments that, again, aren't well thought out.
Like, for example, it didn't take a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. The lawmakers at the time just made the choice to use that method. They could've easily made it a federal law. And they could easily propose a constitutional amendment banning Marijuana.
You show very little knowlegde of the law, history, or the merits of the chemicals you throw around.
You use my sentence about the mandate of the FDA, then bring up Enzyte, to which your only complaint is that it doesn't do what is advertised. What does that have to do with safety?
And saying heroin "can be lethal" is like saying cyanide "can be lethal." You're right, as long as it's in a jar on a shelf, it's not lethal. You can give a pot of coffee, a handful of Enzyte pills, and a shovel full of Dirt to an average person on the street and tell them to consume it. They won't die. You give the average person on the street a single syringe of heroin--ESPECIALLY phrama grade heroin--and you will have committed murder. Just ask the woman to shot-up John Belushi.
I'm done with you know. You've made it past reality into a sea of hypotheses and conjecture. You're not interested in facts, common sense, or, apparently, common welfare.
I have a powerful feeling that there's a bridge somewhere that's missing it's troll.
Oh well. That's what happens when I run out of patience. I don't suffer fools very well. That, I suppose, is obvious now.
"Which is it? There's a difference between staving off withdrawl, and enjoying a rush."
These two are not mutually exclusive. Think, then write. You should've been able to figure that out.
"How many people do you know who are just waiting for heroin to be legalized so they can go crazy?"
This is where you don't get it. How many people do you think tried heroin so they would get addicted? Nobody PLANS addiction. It doesn't happen on purpose. It's people who think they can control the drug that become addicted. They do it on weekends. Then they do it on a couple weekdays. Then they do it every day one week "because they WANT to." Then, the next thing they know, they wake up and realize that they can't function without the drug.
Does that sound outrageous? It is. But it's true.
"People who are interested in heroin will do it anyway."
This is not true. If you want an excellent case study for this, look at CR-OxyCodone. Millions of brand new addicts all around the country. About 1/3 the people in our suboxone trial were there because of "OxyContin." These are housewives, honor students, you name it. The truth that CR-OxyCodone shows you is that there's a whole class of people that would never cook-up a bag full of powder that they purchased on the street, but when it's a government-sanctioned product, it's something altogether different. It gets a little stamp of approval from the FDA and people think that it's safe. That it's not as bad as the illegal drugs. This is so far from the truth that it's hyperbole.
Addiction is a lot more complicated than just drug + brain = addict. Even with something as addictive as heroin, most users just stay users."
Wow, you're wrong. There is no such thing as someone who uses heroin casually. It doesn't exist. You seem to think that addiction is some choice. It's not a choice. It's quicksand.
There are basically four classes of people when it comes to this subject:
1. Those that never will try the drug
2. Those that tried it ONCE and didn't like it and won't try it
3. Those that tried it and liked it. In other words, Future Addicts
4. Those that are addicted.
I encourage you to do some reading about the prescription painkiller epidemic that's currently ravishing our country. If you think that it's just in the margins, you're wrong. All clinical trials are usually confidential, and ours was as well. And these are people from every possible walk of life. I had a pilot, an officer in the Marines, two police men, etc. And, all in all, the trials only involved about 1000 people.
There is a serious danger to legalizing hard drugs. And I think the very best, most qualified person to answer this question is an addict himself.
The suboxone trial is long over so I can't ask this question directly, but many of these addicts have said to me that they wish it was never invented. Heroin, Prescription Painkillers, any of them. They would chose not to make them legal, but to wipe them from existence.
Go see the face of addiction. Talk to these people. If you want to know about the war in iraq, go talk to some native Iraqi's. If you want to know about the war on drugs, go talk to some drug addicts.
Then you'll see where I come from.
Effective immediately, anyone caught swallowing saliva will be held without bail until they are released from their addiction!
can you explain what is wrong with moral relativism?
also, could you explicitly enumerate the steps in following that logic through to the conclusion that it is ok to eat your own mother?
As far as i understand it, moral relativism is just the acceptance of the reality that human morality is a product of subjective sensibilities which are themselves a product of biology.
All the decrials i've heard against moral relativism are religious in basis, and consist entirely of the assertion that without an arbitrary absolute moral baseline, grounded purely in primitive religious dogma, it is impossible for morality to exist in any meaningful form. This then usually leads on to a lot of histrionics about moral relativism means that it is ok to kill people if you personally feel it is ok.
They never seem to notice the hypocrisy that deciding its ok to kill people for no real reason is a big part religious moral absolutism too.
the point of moral relativism isnt to say it is moral to do whatever you feel like, the point is to understand the reality of the origin and function of morality so that we can move on from arbitrarily making up rules that dont apply to everyone. It is so bitterly ironic that the very thing moral absolutists decry relativism for is everything such absolutism is guilty of - unjustifiable and arbitrary morals.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
yeah - the reason i picked the scenario where the animal has to be tormented rather than painlessly killed for food was to anticipate people who complain that animals are tortured (not just killed) in medical research facilities, which i dont doubt they often are (not tortured "for fun" but as part of the necessary process). the trouble is when push comes to shove, would you die rather than allow an animal to be tortured?
some zealous animal rights activists might say yes, but personally i think that if they were in the actual situation they might very well have second thoughts.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
can you explain what is wrong with moral relativism?
mate, i think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I never said moral relativism was bad, in fact im a bit of one myself, i was just trying to point out that using the parent's post's logic you can justify anything, such as eating your mum is not wrong, which you can, ie just assume parents are a valid source of nutrition.
The point i was (and am) trying to make is that you have to assume somethings otherwise you can't make rational arguments. And the point of that is to make clear that as soon as you make an assumption that, say, higher functioning social mammals quite likely feel pain and have an emotional component to their sentience that I as a human can empathise with then it becomes just as morally justifiable to choose not to eat animals as it does to choose not to eat your own mother.
I dont want to give you the impression that I'm a moral absolutist or religious at all, i am neither.
i see what you mean - yeah i dont go along with the "animals have no qualms about killing animals, so neither should we" kind of absolute attitude, because it isn't much of a logical leap from that to going completely wild west and deciding its every man for himself.
i know its a cliché, but its pretty universal to say it isnt black or white. i mean at some point life forms cross the line from being a complex chemical reaction to being a complex chemical reaction that has the ability to comprehend itself and be traumatised. i'm sure no one would have any rational reason to not eat mushrooms or yoghurt on moral grounds (although i'm sure some people would have some irrational ones). thats a no brainer. but what about fish? they have brains but do they comprehend themselves? is their reaction to detrimental circumstances an unconscious reflex or are they enduring auschwitz-level horrors day after day by their millions when they are dragged out of the sea?
and then the waters only get muddier as creatures get more complex. of course its worth pointing out that the only reason anyone gives a toss is because we have evolved a social sensibility and feeling of empathy. There is no absolute universal moral that says killing is wrong. Otherwise nature wouldn't spend so much of its time killing everything. Our biology has concocted this sensibility in us, and it is a totally subjective internal decision. Since we are all largely the same biologically speaking and we all soak up each other's psychological characteristics, there is a fairly pervasive human attitude that killing is wrong. And of course moral absolutists see this pervasive attitude and read it as some kind of universal absolute moral.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
seems we are largely in agreement(slashdot first!). It certainly is a fuzzy area and knowing where to draw the line is difficult, I personally dont eat fish but I do have similar questions with regards to insects, are they merely complicated biological incapable-of-suffering robots? Luckily, eating insects was something i didnt have to give up when i became a vege ;-). (Because I never ate them in the first place not because i think they are soul-less unfeeling robots and can therefore remain a staple of my diet!(Although my parents claim that as a toddler i used to sit on the path outside our house and eat slaters)).
i think the next big scientific renaissance is going to be the understanding of the brain/mind. it will completely revolutionise the world in a way probably more significant than the industrial revolution. Once we have an objective knowledge of conciousness and life then there are no more dark corners for superstition and arbitrary religious dogma to exploit. Also people can have more to go on than their own intuition when deciding if an animal is going to care if it is killed or not.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I'm less optimist about humans understanding consciouness, at least not in the short term. I think in the short term (at most 50 yrs) we'll be able to simulate a human brain and prob have human-capable robots but I dont think we'll actually understand how subjective consciousness, self aware-ness, sentience, existing, whatever you want to call it, sprouts out of purely material interactions. It's not that i dont think that there is an answer, more that i just cant even begin to fathom what form that answer might take. Of course if the likes of Ray Kurzweil are correct then we may know a lot sooner. Anyway, i hope im wrong becos it would be an incredible thing to know but at the moment i put it in the same basket as the one that holds questions like; "what caused the universe to come into existence?"
yeah i know what you mean. to be honest its kind of exciting to know there is a branch of nature that we know next to nothing about, and that is just waiting for one or two geniuses for a "golden age" style explosion of understanding like electromagnetism in the 19th century and subatomics in the early 20th century.
;)
when it happens its going to be a really exciting, fascinating time to live, scientifically and sociologically. certainly a lot more interesting than squabbling over DRM and software patents
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
awwh, being alive during the creation of the internet, thats gotta b pretty cool, right? ;-)
very true - i kind of take it for granted that i have the world's knowledge at my fingertips!
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Put your hands over your head, stick your tongue out, don't swallow! I SAID DON'T SWALLOW! BANG! Damn spit suckers!
On the other hand: Yea honey read this. See, it's just like I told you all along, this is why a nice sloppy wet BJ is better for your PMS & cramps than Tylenol PM.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew