{"id":28183,"date":"2012-10-01T11:48:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T15:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=28183"},"modified":"2012-10-01T21:15:21","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T01:15:21","slug":"from-the-land-of-monty-python","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2012\/10\/01\/from-the-land-of-monty-python\/","title":{"rendered":"from the land of Monty Python…"},"content":{"rendered":"
Back in the Spring, I was writing about the flurry of activity when the news of PHARMA’s exodus from CNS drug development hit, and I ran across a speech by British Neuropsychopharmacologist, Dr. David Nutt, at the Royal College of Psychiatry in June 2011 that antedated the more recent flurry of lamentations [No Psychiatry Without Psychopharmacology<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>]. Following up on Dr. Nutt, I found this [suddenly, last summer…<\/font><\/u><\/em><\/a><\/strong>]:<\/div>\n
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There is an irony in this story. Dr. Nutt himself was a truth-sayer. In 2008, he became Chairman of the  Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>. He was an outspoken advocate for basing the laws about street drugs on their true <\/em>evidence-based dangers – publishing this graph in The Lancet<\/strong>:<\/em><\/div>\n

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[click image for the link]<\/sup><\/p>\n

In 2009, Dr. Nutt was <\/em>fired<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a> from this appointment because of his own <\/em>truth-saying about Street Drugs [and one has to wonder where the prescription medications Nutt both promotes and defends would fall on his own graph].<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
That last bit of sarcasm came because at the time I was writing the above, I was becoming acutely aware of how difficult and intractable the withdrawal syndromes from <\/sup> some of the modern psychotherapeutic agents could be.<\/sup><\/div>\n

I’m sure I’m not the first person to wonder about the relationship between the sixties’ drug culture and the later preoccupation of psychiatry with psychopharmacology, so I found Nutt’s position interesting. He is a past president of the British Association of Psychopharmacology and of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He is the president of the British Neuroscience Association and vice-president of the European Brain Council. Dr. Nutt hardly has the look and feel of a latter-day hippie.<\/p>\n

That story occasionally occurs to me when I read about medical Marijuana or about the use of Ketamine in the treatment of depression – the interface between these drug cultures. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this – Dr. Nutt’s appearance on British television testing the drug Ecstasy [MDMA] in celebrity volunteers, complete with fMRI. One episode of a two part series has shown and the other is on soon. A few links:<\/div>\n