The president of Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., said the school will create new spaces for social activity as alternatives to Greek houses, give faculty members more of a role in residential life and provide students more extensive training on preventing sexual assault.CreditCheryl Senter for The New York Time
With colleges under growing pressure to reduce alcohol-soaked student misbehavior, Dartmouth College said Thursday that it would ban hard liquor on campus, going beyond the changes that all but a few of its peers have been willing to make.
Dartmouth has had a string of embarrassments involving binge drinking, and it has hardly been alone. The sexual assaults, fraternity hazing and hospitalizations that have rocked campuses around the nation have often involved extreme intoxication, like the case of the former Vanderbilt football players convicted this week of raping an unconscious woman, or that of a Stanford swimmer accused of rape this week.
But if Dartmouth is drawing a line in the sand, it will have little company on its side. Many campuses, most of them with religious affiliations, have long been completely dry, but only a handful of colleges and universities that once allowed hard liquor have tried to ban it. Despite Dartmouth’s prominence as a member of the Ivy League, experts say not to expect many institutions, if any, to follow its lead.
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“I loved the residential life proposals,” said Catherine Donahoe, the social chairwoman of Dartmouth’s Kappa Delta Epsilon sorority. But, like other students, she had conflicting views on hard alcohol, saying that it posed a problem but that she feared a ban would drive it underground.
“If I were to design the policy, it’d be pushing alcohol into the open so that it’s as visible as possible,” she said.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide a case on the constitutionality of the new combinations of drugs that some states are using to execute prisoners and that critics say cause intense suffering.
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In April, Oklahoma botched the execution of Clayton D. Lockett, who appeared to moan and struggle after the drugs were administered, then died in the execution chamber 43 minutes after the injections had begun.
That led the state to suspend lethal injections and try to improve its procedures. Oklahoma decided to continue using the sedative now under legal challenge, but at a higher dosage.
The case will provide the Supreme Court’s first evaluation of lethal injections during a time when the customary drugs have become scarce and states have tried new combinations and refused to identify the sources of the lethal chemicals.
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Richard GlossipCreditOklahoma Department of Corrections...
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The case the court agreed on Friday to hear, Glossip v. Gross, No. 14-7955, involves three inmates who said Oklahoma’s three-chemical procedure violated the Eighth Amendment because it posed a significant risk of terrible suffering.
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the denial of a stay for Mr. Warner, saying the case presented two questions worthy of the court’s consideration.
The first, she said, was whether the inmates should be required to specify an alternative method of execution, as courts have demanded in Oklahoma and elsewhere, before challenging the method to be used by the state.
“It would be odd if the constitutionality of being burned alive, for example, turned on a challenger’s ability to point to an available guillotine,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
The second issue, she wrote, was whether the state should be using midazolam, a sedative, as its first chemical. Medical experts testifying on behalf of the inmates at an evidentiary hearing said the effects of high doses of midazolam, which Oklahoma adopted, were too unpredictable to justify its use.
Midazolam was also involved in prolonged, possibly painful executions last year in Ohio and Arizona. The drug has also been used by Florida in a dozen executions at the start of a three-drug combination, similar to that used in Oklahoma. The sedative is intended to render the prisoner unconscious before injection of a paralytic and then a caustic heart-stopping agent. If it does not do so, medical experts say, the inmate will suffer excruciating pain, which could go undetected because the prisoner would be paralyzed and unable to communicate.
Those states have switched to midazolam because companies making the traditional barbiturates, which have a longer track record and deeper anesthetic properties, have refused to provide them for executions.
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An expert witness for the state had defended the chemical, but Justice Sotomayor wrote that his testimony was open to question. He “cited no studies,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “but instead appeared to rely primarily on the web site www.drugs.com.”
The authors analyzed data from five national surveillance programs and report that rates of abuse and diversion of opioid medications increased during 2002–2010 and flattened or decreased during 2011–2013. These findings suggest progress in reducing abuse of opioid analgesics.
The use of prescription opioid medications has increased greatly in the United States during the past two decades; in 2010, there were 16,651 opioid-related deaths. In response, hundreds of federal, state, and local interventions have been implemented. We describe trends in the diversion and abuse of prescription opioid analgesics using data through 2013.
RESULTS
Prescriptions for opioid analgesics increased substantially from 2002 through 2010 in the United States but then decreased slightly from 2011 through 2013. In general, RADARS System programs reported large increases in the rates of opioid diversion and abuse from 2002 to 2010, but then the rates flattened or decreased from 2011 through 2013. The rate of opioid-related deaths rose and fell in a similar pattern. Reported nonmedical use did not change significantly among college students.
CONCLUSIONS
Postmarketing surveillance indicates that the diversion and abuse of prescription opioid medications increased between 2002 and 2010 and plateaued or decreased between 2011 and 2013. These findings suggest that the United States may be making progress in controlling the abuse of opioid analgesics. (Funded by the Denver Health and Hospital Authority.)
Used clinically as an anaesthetic in animals and humans, ketamine has proved an extremely effective treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and suicidal behaviour. Credit: kzenon/Thinkstock
Ketamine, a psychoactive ‘party drug’ better known as Special K, has pharmaceutical companies riding high. Used clinically as an anaesthetic in animals and humans, it has proved an extremely effective treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and suicidal behaviour.
It also works incredibly fast. Unlike conventional antidepressants, which generally take weeks to start working, ketamine lifts depression in as little as two hours. “It blew the doors off what we thought we knew about depression treatment,” says psychiatrist James Murrough at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Companies are racing to develop patentable forms of the drug, and researchers are battling to understand how it affects the brain. An increasing number of clinicians are prescribing ketamine off-label for their patients, even as some of their colleagues worry that too little is known about its long-term effects.
The excitement over ketamine shows how badly new depression drugs are needed, says Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Many drug companies have closed their mental-health divisions in the past five years, and there have been no significant advances in medication for depression in decades.
Today’s most common antidepressants target the brain’s serotonin or noradrenaline pathways (some target both). Ketamine blocks the signalling molecule NMDA, a component of the glutamate pathway, which is involved in memory and cognition. Before ketamine was studied, no one even knew that the pathway was involved in depression, Murrough says.
In 2013, his group published the largest trial of off-label ketamine carried out so far, with 73 participants. The trial found that the drug reduced depression 24 hours after treatment in 64% of patients who had tried three or more other medications with unsuccessful results. A second group received the sedative midazolam; in that case, the reduction was 28% (J. W. Murroughet al.Am. J. Psychiatry170, 1134–1142; 2013). Murrough’s group is now imaging the brains of patients receiving ketamine treatment to try to dissect just how the drug works.
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He already prescribes ketamine off-label for some patients, and guesses that dozens of physicians across the country do the same. At therapeutic doses, it often produces a dissociative, out-of-body sensation that lasts less than an hour. At higher doses, recreational users report experiencing a ‘K-hole’, a deeply disoriented state accompanied by vivid hallucinations.
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Last month, a company called Naurex, based in Evanston, Illinois, released results from a 386-person trial showing that its own ketamine-like drug, GLYX-13, successfully treated depression in about half of patients, without hallucinatory side effects. Roche of Basel, Switzerland, is also expected to release results early this year from a 357-person trial of a drug called decoglurant, which targets the glutamate pathway.
It is unclear why ketamine’s psychoactive effects are considered a drawback, Sisti says. He questions the ethics of making patients pay more for a patented, non-dissociative drug if unmodified ketamine works just as well.
Six Americans die from alcohol poisoning daily on average, and mortality rates are highest among middle-aged men, federal health authorities reported on Tuesday.
The report is the first in a decade by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to tally alcohol poisonings for the entire American population. Most previous analyses looked at certain groups, in particular young people.
The agency found that an average of 2,221 people died of alcohol poisoning annually between 2010 and 2012. Three-quarters of the deaths occurred among 35- to 64-year-olds, the report found, and about three-quarters were men. The death rate was highest among men ages 45 to 54.
“Most previous studies have looked at college kids and young people, but the problem is bigger than that,” said Dr. Robert Brewer, who heads the alcohol program at the C.D.C. “It was surprising that the number of deaths was so concentrated among middle-age adults.”
The C.D.C. described death from alcohol poisoning as “a bigger problem than previously thought,” but said it was impossible to tell whether the death rate had risen because researchers had changed how they track the data in recent years.
When large amounts of alcohol are consumed in a short period of time, blood-alcohol levels rise sharply, overwhelming the body’s ability to respond. Excessive alcohol intake can shut down parts of the brain that control breathing, body temperature and heart rate.
Such deaths are typically the result of binge drinking at high intensity, the report said. It defined binge drinking as four or more drinks in one “occasion” for women, and five or more drinks for men.
About 38 million adults report binge drinking an average of four times a month, according to the report, but the vast majority of binge drinkers — about 90 percent — are not alcoholics.
Alcohol dependence was a contributing cause in just one-third of the deaths, the report found.
An unusual method for producing antibioticsmay help to solve an urgent global problem: the rise in infections that resist treatment with commonly used drugs, and the lack of new antibiotics to replace ones that no longer work.
The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects.
Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer — molecules that were previously beyond scientists’ reach because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory.
