Underground In Las Vegas

There are people living in the flood tunnel system under Las Vegas.

Further into the maze are Amy and Junior who married in the Shalimar Chapel – one of Vegas’s most popular venues - before returning to the tunnels for their honeymoon.

They lost their home when they became addicted to drugs after the death of their son Brady at four months old.

‘I heard Las Vegas was a good place for jobs,’ Amy said. ‘But it was tough and we started living under the staircase outside the MGM casino.

‘Then we met a guy who lived in the tunnels. We’ve been down here ever since.’

Matthew O’Brien, a reporter who stumbled across the tunnel people when he was researching a murder case, has set up The Shine A Light foundation to help.

‘These are normal people of all ages who’ve lost their way, generally after a traumatic event,’ he said.

‘Many are war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress.

It is really shameful the way we treat people with personal problems in the US. If they take drugs for relief we hound them into jail if we can find them. But that is not the only problem.

PTSD treatment for returned soldiers is haphazard at best.

In his last months alive, Senior Airman Anthony Mena rarely left home without a backpack filled with medications.

He returned from his second deployment to Iraq complaining of back pain, insomnia, anxiety and nightmares. Doctors diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed powerful cocktails of psychiatric drugs and narcotics.

Yet his pain only deepened, as did his depression. “I have almost given up hope,” he told a doctor in 2008, medical records show. “I should have died in Iraq.”

Airman Mena died instead in his Albuquerque apartment, on July 21, 2009, five months after leaving the Air Force on a medical discharge. A toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood, including three antidepressants, a sedative, a sleeping pill and two potent painkillers.

Yet his death was no suicide, the medical examiner concluded. What killed Airman Mena was not an overdose of any one drug, but the interaction of many. He was 23.

It breaks my heart to see this. But that is not the only such story.

...the military came under criticism a decade ago for not prescribing enough medications, particularly for pain. In its willingness to prescribe more readily, the Pentagon was trying to meet standards similar to civilian medicine, General Chiarelli said.

But the response of modern psychiatry to modern warfare has not always been perfect. Psychiatrists still do not have good medications for the social withdrawal, nightmares and irritability that often accompany post-traumatic stress, so they mix and match drugs, trying to relieve symptoms.

“These decisions about medication are difficult enough in civilian psychiatry, but unfortunately in this very-high-stress population, there is almost no data to guide you,” said Dr. Ranga R. Krishnan, a psychiatrist at Duke University. “The psychiatrist is trying everything and to some extent is flying blind."

They are all flying blind - civilian and military doctors alike.

Worse - our government actively hampers the use of one of the safest drugs known to man for relief of PTSD symptoms. I have written about it at length. Here are some of the articles:

PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System

The Soldiers Disease

Is Addiction Real?

Police and PTSD

PTSD Pot Alcohol & Substance Abuse

PTSD is not just a problem for combat vets: Heroin.

And where opiate use is necessary marijuana can reduce the required dose.

Medical marijuana can help pain patients in many ways. Using cannabis as an adjunct medicine can help opiate pain meds work better. Medical marijuana can successfully treat pain and help lower the overall dose of narcotics, something that is healthy for the patient.

It would be very useful if military doctors could use marijuana to reduce the required opiate dose. Unfortunately military doctors are not allowed to have anything to do with medical marijuana. There are Federal Laws against pot dontcha know.

I would love it if the Government wised up about all this. But first the people are going to have to demand it. We are not quite there yet. And that is very sad.

Here are a few books on the subject:

Marijuana Medical Handbook: Practical Guide to Therapeutic Uses of Marijuana

Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible

Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence

Medical Marijuana 101: Everything They Told You Is Wrong

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Childhood Trauma Leads To Depression

Anxiety Insights has a post up about childhood trauma and its relation to depression.

Childhood trauma, but not adult trauma, is strongly associated with depression and coronary heart disease in adulthood, say Emory University researchers and colleagues presenting at the American Psychosomatic Society Annual Meeting, being held March 7-10 in Budapest, Hungary.

"Little is known about the long-term emotional and physical consequences of childhood trauma and whether it poses greater long-term health risks than other types of stressors," says study leader Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, professor of medicine (cardiology) at Emory University School of Medicine and professor of epidemiology at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health.

"Trauma occurring earlier in life is particularly harmful because it may disrupt the development of adaptive responses to stress. Future research on stress and disease should focus on early life stress," says Dr. Vaccarino.

Child abuse is one of the most pressing problems we have in the world because it leads to all kinds of maladaptive behavior and can also lead to illegal drug use as a form of self medication.

According to the study results, twins in the highest quartile of the Early Trauma Inventory were twice as likely to have major depressive disorder than other twins. Of the childhood traumas, emotional trauma was the most strongly associated with major depressive disorder.

Study participants with childhood trauma were also more likely to be exposed to trauma as adults and to develop post traumatic stress disorder. After adjusting for smoking, twins in the highest group on the inventory were two to three times more likely to have a previous diagnosis of coronary heart disease, including previous myocardial infarction, coronary revascularization and hospitalizations for coronary heart disease.

In contrast, no significant associations were found for adult general trauma and combat trauma with either major depressive disorder or coronary heart disease, notes Dr. Vaccarino.

Tobacco is an anti-depressant. So is cannabis.

We are wasting untold billions every year fighting drugs when we should be dealing with the root cause - child abuse.

PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System

An interesting interview with Organic Chemist Dr. Raphael Mechoulam about cannibinoids and the brain. Dr. Mechoulam was the first to synthesize THC.

There's something called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is due to upsetting memories that stay around too long. Normally, when there is trauma people slowly forget it. This is true for humans and it's true for animals. But if the animals do not have an endocannabinoid system, they do not forget bad memories, and this was shown in a paper by a German-Italian group. In collaboration with the Canadian group, we have done some work on that, and in a different model we have seen the same thing. So I expect that the endocannabinoid system is not in good shape in those post-traumatic patients, and chances are that it will work in treating them. We are just about to develop a treatment. People that have PTSD claim that the only thing that helps them is smoking marijuana, so chances are that cannabinoid treatment may help them.

Which is something I've been saying for the last four years. In case you missed it here is my journey. Here is a study on mice lacking the CB1 system in at least part of the brain and how that affects the decay of fear memories.

There are lots more medical uses for marijuana and its extracts than PTSD. Read the whole interview to learn more.

Update 18 Feb 2011 0628z:

The "mice" link is now no longer functional try this one.

Also the Dr. Raphael Mechoulam link is dead try this one.

A personalreport with medical evidence by some one tortured in a Turkish prison.

Child Abuse and Military Trauma

Japan Times report

New Scientist report

Medical News Today report

Cannabis and PTSD - a discussion of the medical literature with extracts from the literature.

Drug War, Endocannabinoid, Cannabinoid, Marijuana, Raphael Mechoulam, Addiction, PTSD, CB1, Trauma