The amounts of hits will give me some indication.
A gadget to change your mood
It might come as a real shock.
With a jolt, Thync’s mood-enhancing gadget brings calm or focus to your brain
Thync shares science behind its brain-zapping wearable
What kind of a mood do you think I am in as the Globe suggests electroshock as a cure for anxiety and other ills?
Good thing they have a drug for such a thing:
"Drug may give those leaving jail a better shot at recovery; Authorities turn to Vivitrol to cut rates of addiction, incarceration" by Felice J. Freyer Globe Staff December 09, 2015
Three days before his release from the Barnstable County Correctional Facility, Ryan Lonergan received a powerful injection, intended to change his life.
He took the shot willingly, because he knew that for 28 days afterward, the drug, Vivitrol, would make it impossible to get high on the Percocet that had been his life’s downfall. Now, Lonergan would not have to decide each day whether to use drugs. Vivitrol made the decision for him, and cleared a path to recovery.
One drug replacing another (and who is the $upplier?).
Barnstable County started offering Vivitrol to inmates in 2012, among the first jail operators in the country to do so. Since then, jails and prisons throughout Massachusetts, and about 100 others nationally, have embraced Vivitrol as a new tool to keep people off of drugs and out of prison.
The adoption of Vivitrol for departing inmates illustrates the intensity of concern about an epidemic of opioid use that resulted in more than 1,200 fatal overdoses in Massachusetts last year. Although private doctors have been slow to adopt the medication, criminal justice authorities view it as a powerful weapon to combat both opioid abuse and high incarceration rates.
The war has been lost (even the US government admits it), and once again mouthpiece media minimizes the the double-dealing and double-crossing government drug smuggling and gang involvement that ultimately benefits the bottom lines of money laundering banks.
What I'm thinking, however, is how sick I am of every single issue being framed with war terminology when I read through the propaganda pre$$ on a daily basis.
Unlike other drugs to treat addiction, Vivitrol is long-acting, shielding newly released inmates from their own impulses during the critical first days of freedom. Unlike methadone and buprenorphine (often referred to by its brand name, Suboxone), Vivitrol doesn’t produce a high and can’t be diverted to street use.
It's a no-buzz buzz.
And the requirement to be opioid-free for seven to 10 days before starting Vivitrol, a difficulty for some outside prison, isn’t an issue for those who have had to detox behind bars.
Vivitrol blockades the receptors in the brain where opioids and alcohol attach, preventing the pleasure that addicts seek.
I couldn't tell; I'm not having any fun anyway.
But the drug itself may not be the real game-changer, said Dr. Barbara Herbert, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. More crucial, she said, are efforts by the manufacturer, Waltham drug maker Alkermes, to push prisons to link departing inmates with services on the outside, measures often lacking in the past.
Ah. Some pharmaceutical is benefiting from a problem caused by a pharmaceutical.
“Its reputation on the street is that it’s a silver bullet,” Herbert said of Vivitrol. “But there is no way to heal from addiction without doing the psychological work of recovery.”
Another $ection of the indu$try.
Alkermes provides all prisons and jails in Massachusetts with free samples for the first Vivitrol injection before release, and Medicaid or other health insurance typically covers most or all of the $1,000-a-dose monthly shot outside prison.
Free samples, huh? That's how dirty drug dealers get there... never mind.
The company emphasizes that Vivitrol’s effects must be bolstered by counseling and other behavioral interventions, forcing prisons and jails to forge relationships with treatment centers.
What we see here -- as with the schools looking more like prisons -- is cover for the further integration of society into a totalitarian $y$tem. Now the hospitals shall be incorporated into the security structure.
Vivitrol has a different purpose than Narcan, a widely mentioned medication for addicts. Narcan is used on an emergency basis to reverse the effects of an overdose.
After Lonergan received his Vivitrol shot in 2013, he left prison with an appointment at a treatment center near his home, a religious mentor in the community, and plans to return each month for Vivitrol.
The son of a nurse and a police detective, Lonergan started taking OxyContin after graduating from Sandwich High School. He was introduced to the opioid painkiller by his roommates before switching to another opioid, Percocet.
How (and from where) did he get that stuff (another unsolved crime)?
At the time, he said, he was lost; he’d rejected college but had no idea what to do with his life. Pills quieted his turmoil. “I wanted to feel that extreme nothing,” said Lonergan, now 30 and living in Walpole. “I liked not having to worry.”
Caught stealing from a house where he was doing carpentry, Lonergan was sentenced to a year at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility. There, he joined a Bible study group, and today he attributes his sobriety to God.
Not Vivitrol?
Good thing he didn't turn to Islam in there or was caught stealing in Saudi Arabia. Lose a hand over there for that. Maybe then people would think twice about drugs.
But Vivitrol, he said, provided an insurance policy. “If ever I was weak, or I bumped into the wrong people, I could say no,” he said.
Whatever happened to pure, old-fashioned willpower, or are the America people so drugged and dumbed-down that they are incapable of it? Anybody pushing poison on you is not your friend.
He took Vivitrol 11 months. By the time he stopped, he was working as an electrical apprentice and had become engaged.
And now he has a daughter, Ashtyn, born Nov. 13. In a recent interview, he cradled the infant with gentle expertise, feeding her from a bottle as he described his new life.
Oh, it's a success story! I hope he doesn't relapse!
“I’ve been offered opiates since I stopped,” he said. “There’s not a second I even contemplate taking them.”
Off the Vivitrol?
Lonergan was among 178 Barnstable inmates who have agreed to a Vivitrol shot, but those 178 who volunteered to take the initial Vivitrol shot represent only about 9 percent of inmates released from the Barnstable jail, and the statistics, while encouraging, don’t prove Vivitrol made the difference. Perhaps those who took it were a highly motivated minority already more likely to succeed. Or they could have benefited chiefly from better links to services in the community.
Could be, if, maybe....
The active ingredient in Vivitrol, naltrexone, has been available in pill form for two decades, originally used to treat alcoholism. But for the drug to work, the patient has to take the pill every day.
In Vivitrol, naltrexone is encased in microscopic beads that slowly dissolve, releasing the medication gradually over a month. Vivitrol was approved to treat alcoholism in 2006. When it won FDA approval for opioid addiction in 2010, it became only the third drug available to treat an affliction affecting millions. Nationwide, some 15,000 people take Vivitrol.
“We had so many people telling us to abandon it, it’s for a stigmatized population, it would never be commercially feasible,” said Richard F. Pops, the CEO of Alkermes.
I'm glad someone is benefiting.
Vivitrol can damage the liver. But possibly the biggest hazard is that someone could try to override the drug by taking huge quantities of opioids, which could lead to death.
Ah! Who needs a liver anyway?
Dr. Kelly Clark, chief medical officer of CleanSlate Addiction Treatment Centers, a chain of office-based practices in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and Herbert, of the addiction medicine society, said their patients feel normal on buprenorphine, but many don’t like the way Vivitrol affects their brains. The drug blocks nearly all the opioid receptors, which means the brain’s natural opioids, which induce feelings of pleasure from life experiences, can’t latch on, either.
Also makes you constipated according to the commercials. No wonder so many patsy gunmen (and women) are going off. They are all bunged up!
But people on Vivitrol can still experience pleasure through other pathways in the brain, said Dr. David R. Gastfriend, a former Alkermes executive now with the Treatment Research Institute in Philadelphia. Gastfriend coauthored a study showing that long-term Vivitrol users were still enjoying music, sex, reading, and food.
OMG!
Forget the $elf-$erving study, Vivitrol turns you into an unfeeling zombie! It takes away the very sensations that make life worth living!
Then I got to thinking....
Ten years ago I would have been excited by the articles presented by the Globe today, accepting the framing narrative even knowing its bias and propaganda quality. I would have thrown myself into the paper as if I were learning something!
Now I'm finding that I can barely stomach the cho$en elite $upremaci$m (complete with condescending insults) and endless Jewi$h war propaganda. It's all shallow and superficial obfuscation if not outright omission, and this idea of hunting around for paragraphs of inside-out, upside-down half-truths amidst all the contradictions and mixed messages (a.k.a. lies) has become aged.
What I'm trying to say, I guess, is after ten years I no longer enjoying typing the same things day after day while the $tatus quo agenda is advanced by the jew$paper. All the pleasure is gone!
What got me thinking about all this was an attempt this morning to complete a few projects. As I began gathering the material I realized the enormous task it would be to coordinate the relevant drafts and clips, and by the end began to wonder why bother? Why waste my time (and yours)? I know it defeats the stated purpose of the blog, but perhaps the blog has outlived its usefulness. Does anyone really care what slop the Bo$ton Globe is shoveling anymore? Or has someone injected only me with Vivitrol?
Clark said there is still more to learn about Vivitrol. There is no guidance, for example, on how long a person should take the drug. “The data we have on how well buprenorphine works is excellent. Same for methadone,” Clark said. “Vivitrol is promising but not proven at that level.”
I wonder if it could help me with my accursed addiction.
--more--"
Nope.
Today's final thoughts:
US court overturns SEC on State Street executives
This is one in a series of such rulings lately, and can anyone claim this is not a corporate government in all its forms?
GM orders another recall, citing fires
The fix for a prior recall is what is causing the fires requiring this recall, can you believe it?
Is there not one car company these days that isn't making a piece of sh**?
Volkswagen says its latest emission woes not as severe
Look, VW on a PR offensive!
That brings today's post to an end, and all I'm thinking is Yahoo!
NDUs:
Heroin overdoses in Middlesex County reach record highs
Baker to use HBO opioid documentary to lobby for legislation
I wasn't going to find pleasure in reading them, so....
As Charlestown opioid crisis deepens, a new clinic opens
Doctors in training gain access to prescription database
They need to know if they are breaking the law.
