Ketamine's Efficacy In So-called "Bipolar Depression."

REPLICATION OF KETAMINE'S ANTIDEPRESSANT EFFICACY IN BIPOLAR DEPRESSION: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED ADD-ON TRIAL

Background
Currently, no pharmacological treatments for bipolar depression exist that exert rapid (within hours) antidepressant or antisuicidal effects. We previously reported that intravenous administration of the N-methyl-D-aspartate antagonist ketamine produced rapid antidepressant effects in patients with treatment-resistant bipolar depression. The present study sought to replicate this finding in an independent sample.

Methods
In this double-blind, randomized, crossover, placebo-controlled study, 15 subjects with DSM-IV bipolar I or II depression maintained on therapeutic levels of lithium or valproate received a single intravenous infusion of either ketamine hydrochloride (.5 mg/kg) or placebo on 2 test days 2 weeks apart. The primary outcome measure was the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale, which was used to rate overall depressive symptoms at baseline; at 40, 80, 110, and 230 minutes postinfusion; and on days 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, and 14 postinfusion.

Results
Within 40 minutes, depressive symptoms, as well as suicidal ideation, significantly improved in subjects receiving ketamine compared with placebo (d = .89, 95% confidence interval = .61–1.16, and .98, 95% confidence interval = .64–1.33, respectively); this improvement remained significant through day 3. Seventy-nine percent of subjects responded to ketamine and 0% responded to placebo at some point during the trial. The most common side effect was dissociative symptoms, which occurred only at the 40-minute time point.

Conclusion
This study replicated our previous finding that patients with bipolar depression who received a single ketamine infusion experienced a rapid and robust antidepressant response. In addition, we found that ketamine rapidly improved suicidal ideation in these patients.

Zarate Jr. et al.; "Replication of Ketamine's Antidepressant Efficacy in Bipolar Depression: A Randomized Controlled Add-On Trial"; Biological Psychiatry Volume 71, Issue 11 , Pages 939-946, 1 June 2012. DOI:10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.010

Article courtesy of The OPEN Foundation, NL    http://www.stichtingopen.nl/en/psychedelics/publications/recent-publications/replication-of-ketamines-antidepressant-efficacy-in-bipolar-depression-a-randomized-controlled-add-on-trial

Draconian Police, Sherriff's Office and DA : The patients suffer

     As everyone, in the cannabis community, the patients and the co-ops and dispensaries knows, since October, the local cops in Sacramento and Sac County have been waging their OWN PERSONAL "war on marijuana."  
     Their latest tactic, apparently, has been sending threatening letters to the LANDLORDS of the pot dispensaries, threatening to prosecute the landlords and summarily confiscate the landlords' assets including bank accounts.  Cops and  DA's say they are doing it because the (Landlords) rent to people (cannabis clubs) who "sell marijuana to virtual anybody who wanted to get stoned. ^1


    What gave these DA's and the cops et. al., the power to ignore and disobey an order, persecuting people and going OVER AND OVERTLY against the announcement made by OUR president---he is in fact THEIR commander-in-chief!  No one!  They took it' on themselves, vigilante-style.  This is grossly illegal. 


     Folks of Sacramento,do you think police here have too much power?  That many of them act like nothing more than jackbooted thugs?  That, if you have the misfortune to get arrested for ANYTHING no matter how minor, IT IS A FACT that they ALWAYS pad on additional charges that are totally FAKE......["resisting arrest," is probably the most common lies the cops make, but nearly all or most of their testimony in court are lies/extreme exaggerations.] 




Cops busted about 100 cannabis dispensaries, collectives and clubs, in the area, in the course of 1-2 months, violating their means of support.  Without"official letters," from the Department Of "Just-Us" threatening the LANDLORDS with  confiscation of all their property.  The clubs just had to "disappear." This is nothing but bullying and extortion by the police and DA, telling them who they can lease to or not. .    Obama's appointment  of him to now this is going on!  The Outrage!  The miscarriage of "just-us!"  


     So, the very best cannabis collectives/co-ops made sure to "follow the law to the "T."  And that is State Law, formerly known as Proposition 215, passed in 1996!  And we fourteen years later in 2012, in our homes, face jackbooted thugs with a badge to kick in doors, guns pulled, for someone taking about pot?!  These are societally-condoned---these days--happens every day!  I say silently condoned because most people (adults) favor the use of marijuana as a medicine, but do not rise up and speak up en masse.  And most are ignorant of the bad penalties, having a record, being marginalized by gossipers. They  have no idea how many humans are incarcerated in the USA.  No, they somehow got their bud and as long as they have a connection (legal or illegal), they can give a rat's ass about what the state has done.  


Obama shortly after being elected said use of law enforcement against marijuana users and collectives should be the lowest national enforcement policy (I paraphrase President.)


Well back here in Sacramento area, some (unauthorized  person or persons.) musta never heard that statement.  It was barely reported in mainstream news.  People I am sick of this shit.
Join me in many and all fights against prohibition,
Andre S. Lange










^1source quotation from interview with US Attorney Benjamin Wagner, via David Downs

Excellent Guide For Using DMT

Thanks to Luke Griffin, a FB friend, for posting this scientifically correct and concise guide to how to safely prepare yourself for one of, if not the, most intense experiences of your life.

The Graphics are nice too.

If you can't hit "control +" a few times to make the tiny writing visible it is also at https://www.dmt-nexus.me/users/house/DMTDiagram.png

Popular Opinion In Kentucky Favors Permitting Medical Marijuana

Andre Lange

Medical Cannabis In Kentucky

There are, of course, centuries of use of cannabis in Kentucky or what became Kaintuck territory from Virginia. Stemming from Virginia (pun intended!), Thomas Jefferson kept detailed diaries of his hemp farming and encouraged, even made law, that others had to grow hemp (cannabis.) Jefferson was no rube. That is why we named the county after him in Louisville. He was educated and widely travelled. He had been to Paris with Ben Franklin and discovered hashish, the finer products of the "hemp plant." So, some smoking of the KY/VA crops HAD to have occurred...not just for making clothing and rope. And, the local Amerindians knew of many psychoactive plants and smokable mixtures, tobacco, above all, and these two crops, along with corn, were the most important products grown in Kentucky and Virginia for the next two hundred years. But racist assholes in the USA in the 1930's besmirched the reputation of cannabis and now most of the world has suffered along since. I am a physician from Kentucky. I did medicine at University of Louisville and then psychiatry and neurology in California. I wish to see a movement in Louisville, to start a push to get medical cannabis on the ballot in Kentucky. The way it has been most successfully done in states like California and Colorado, is to change the state's constitution to allow for PUBLIC BALLOT MEASURES. This is CRUCIAL. The Right-wing will always be able to block it otherwise in Kentucky as it has SINCE THE 1930'S. So, how do we amend the state of Kentucky's constitution? I can look that up, but i have a pretty good idea. If someone else would like to start with me as a thread, could you look that up and post? Then, we would have to get a coalition of the MOST liberal politicians who can put forth a bill stating such, combined with some 'moderates" that will get on board. maybe even a few "so-called" "radical" republicans on it too. Then the signatures must be gathered, easy. Then, the question has to be phrased simply and correctly on the ballot,------->NOT backwards and cryptic as is done routinely in CA by those trying to obfuscate the idea on the ballot. Then I am sure we/you/us/them will have medical cannabis in Louisville!

To Monkey geek writing to Nasa Goddard

@nasagoddard RE:is that a continent that births smaller landmasses, then.


This Is ALWAYS VERBOTTEN.

Overruled KPlah

(Results in HELL.  This only can be done in Holland on special occasions.)

Good News! New York Library Buys Dr. Tim Leary's Papers

From the New York Times, June 15th 2011.

New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary’s Papers

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Files from Timothy Leary's archive. More Photos »

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: June 15, 2011

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When the Harvard psychologist and psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary first met the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960, he welcomed Ginsberg’s participation in the drug experiments he was conducting at the university.

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Slide Show

Inside the Timothy Leary Archives

“The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then “Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man.”
Ginsberg’s “session record,” composed for Leary’s research, was in one of the 335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs and more that the New York Public Library is planning to announce that it has purchased from the Leary estate. The material documents the evolution of the tweedy middle-aged academic into a drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial candidate, computer software designer and progenitor of the Me Decade’s self-absorbed interest in self-help.
The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60, ’70s and ’80s.
Robert Greenfield, who combed through the archive when it was kept in California, for his 2007 biography of Leary, said: “It is a unique firsthand archive of the 1960s. Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.”
Leary, who died in 1996, coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and was labeled by Richard M. Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” He was present in Zelig-like fashion at some of the era’s epochal events. Thousands of letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.
“How about contributing to my next prose masterpiece by sending me (as you sent Burroughs) a bottle of SM pills,” Kerouac wrote Leary, referring to psilocybin. “Allen said I could knock off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a whole novel in a month.”
Denis Berry, a trustee of the Leary estate, said that the library paid $900,000 for the collection, some of which is being donated back to finance the processing of the material. The rest will pay the estate’s caretakers and then be divided among Leary’s surviving children and grandchildren. Ms. Berry said the estate had been looking for a buyer for the archive for years.
William Stingone, curator of manuscripts at the library, predicted that the collection would help researchers get beyond the “myth making” around ’60s figures. “Hopefully we’ll be able to get to some of the truth of it here,” he said.
The complete documentation of Leary’s early experiments with psychotropic drugs, for example, can allow scholars to assess the importance of that work in light of current clinical research on LSD, Mr. Stingone said. Ms. Berry called the Harvard data “the missing link.”
The meeting between Ginsberg and Leary marked an anchor point in the history of the 1960s drug-soaked counterculture. Leary, the credentialed purveyor of hallucinatory drugs, was suddenly invited into the center of the artistic, social and sexual avant-garde. It was Ginsberg who helped convince Leary that he should bring the psychedelic revolution to the masses, rather than keep it among an elite group. Filling out one of Leary’s research questionnaires in May 1962 the poet Charles Olson wrote that psilocybin “creates the love feast,” and “should be available to anyone.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 17, 2011

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the New York Public Library’s acquisition of the archive of Timothy Leary misstated the amount the library paid the Leary estate for the collection. It was $900,000, not “$900,00.”

Thomas Lannon, the library’s assistant curator for manuscripts and archives, explained that at the time these substances were not regulated by the government, and that Leary and his group did not consider them drugs but aids to reaching self-awareness.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Inside the Timothy Leary Archives

Leary kept meticulous records at many points during his life. There are comprehensive research files, legal briefs, and budgets and memos about the many institutes and organizations he founded, but there are also notes and documents from when he was on the run after escaping from a California prison with help from the Weather Underground. A folder labeled as notes from his “C.I.A. kidnapping” in 1973 is full of cryptic jottings recounting the details of his arrest in Afghanistan, at an airport in Kabul, after he fled the United States.
Among the papers are daily schedules and budgets from the estate in Millbrook, in Dutchess County, where Leary, his colleague Richard Alpert (who later changed his name to Ram Dass) and their followers stayed after Leary was fired by Harvard in 1963. They worked on keeping “people’s consciousness in ecstatic regions.”
Everyone kept a log of his “mood” and “collaboration.” One weekly tally showed Mr. Alpert consistently in the upper regions of the scale, and Leary’s moods swinging from “anguished” to “ecstatic,” and his collaborations from “hung-up” to “Buddha.”
In 1969 Leary joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Montreal for their weeklong Bed-In for Peace, where Lennon wrote a version of “Come Together” for Leary’s campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary wrote poems and songs on a stack of yellow legal notepaper that included:

We all started singing
Give Peace a Chance
John said can we help your campaign
And then he hummed a sweet refrain
Come together, come together right now.

On another sheet he wrote that the summer of ’69 “was the sexiest season in the long annals of the human race.”
In his later years Leary became a proponent of cybernetics and designed software. “He was always about 10 years ahead of his time,” Ms. Berry said. Among the videotapes is one from the early ’90s of him talking about how everyone is going to have a computer at home, she said.
Leary introduced many of his contemporaries to the psychedelic experience, but not everyone was as enamored as he was. After trying Leary’s magical pink pills Arthur Koestler told his host the next day that they were not for him: “I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.”

Dutch Website about LSD and psychedelics

The OPEN Foundation is an interdisciplinary initiative that wants to stimulate research regarding all facets of the psychedelic experience. By organizing lectures, conferences and other informative meetings at universities, we hope to awaken the interest of future researchers. We want to spread honest information on both the potential and the risks of psychedelics, and hope to lessen the stigma that is still part of researching psychedelics. We also want to create a virtual meeting place for all students that are interested in doing research. This way, they can come together in research teams and help each other with writing research proposals. In short: we want to lower the threshold for researching - and applying - the psychedelic potential.

The idea of a foundation came into being in january of 2006, in Basel (Switzerland). This is where the LSD symposium took place, organized in honor of the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. Enjoying the company of so many people that are involved with psychedelics in a serious, scientific matter was an inspiring experience for both Dorien and Joost. We were surprised that there were no Dutch people amongst the speakers, and this led Dorien to found the OPEN Foundation to give psychedelic research the attention and approachability it needs amongst academics.