Breakthroughs Today

“WHEN you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t,” described Luke Davies in Candy on how addiction feels like. It may be surprising, or even unbelievable, but the overall addiction potential for cannabis has been found less than for caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine or heroin. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), considers cannabis use disorder (CUD) as a condition requiring treatment. As of 2012, no medication has proven effective for treating CUD. The US Food and Drug Administration approved no medication for it. Unlike opiate or alcohol dependence, it has far fewer treatment options. The review of novel medications for CUD, the Balter, Cooper and Haney Review published in Current Addiction Reports (June 2014), noted treatments that had been confirmed ineffective... [ READ MORE ] This article appears on Sun. Star Cebu newspaper on 15 July 2014.

The first time I saw the word “oniomania,” I thought it referred to a compulsive disorder of excessively eating onions. With the advances in psychiatric science and the curious way head conditions are getting their names, who was to know that onion-eating would get named after a disorder? Oniomania, alright, is a psychological disorder. But it means a compulsive desire to buy or shop; that is, a continuous urge to buy things—any thing. It is the dream of retailers; the frustration of ... ( read more )

PUSHKAR CHHETRI Bhutan Observer Published as "The price of doing drugs" Getting high on drugs might seem like another part of the world with all that excitement initially, but when this fun turns to fear, one might as well wish for a time machine to go back and erase the past. Tenzin (name changed), 28 has been doing drugs since he was 14. He has experimented with everything from marijuana, tablets to injecting Proxyvon. “I started using correction fluid and dendrite in the beginning not only for a high but to prove I was a tough guy,” said Tenzin. After a few years of education in Bhutan, he continued his education in Kalimpong where Tenzin became addicted to tablets. “Kalimpong was a whole new environment and to stay away from home meant a lot of freedom in terms of what I could do,” he remembers. His experimentation with tablets soon manifested into addiction within a few weeks time. “It was cheaper and easily available and I started having two tablets of Nitrosun-10 and