Drug laws, they are a changin’

Every drug-legalization initiative up for vote this year passed.

• Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota, voted to legalize recreational marijuana.
• Mississippi and South Dakota voted to legalize medical marijuana.
• Oregon voters decriminalized (i.e., you get the equivalent of a traffic ticket, not a full arrest) possession of small amounts cocaine and heroin.
• Oregon also voted to legalize psilocybin (i.e., magic mushrooms).
• Washington, D.C., voters decriminalized psychedelic plants (it didn’t go so far as to legalize recreational psilocybin itself.

Speaking of psilocybin

A trial out of Johns Hopkins University found that psilocybin plus psychotherapy yielded “large, rapid, and sustained antidepressant effects in patients with major depressive disorder.”

Even better:

The drug also doesn’t require taking a pill every single day, nor does it come with nearly as many side effects as antidepressants or ketamine. Apart from occasional mild to moderate headaches and a few emotional moments, volunteers in the study tolerated psilocybin quite well and there were no serious dangers.

The gut as training ground

Sure, the antibodies that guard the brain’s perimeter are all in your head (literally), but they got their training elsewhere. In the gut, of course.

American and British researchers found that IgA antibodies, normally associated with the gut (where they “learn to defend against infections that may enter our stomach and intestine”) were also present in in the outer meninges — the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord.

The team was able to confirm that the gut microbiome influenced brain IgA by testing mice that had no gut bacteria. These mice did not have cells that produced IgA near the brain, potentially because the gut IgA cells could not learn how to recognise harmful gut bacteria.

Stay asleep, little Suzie

Kids who have to wake up earlier [are more likely to be a bit chubbier when they’re adolescents](https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20201105/earlier-wake-time-may-lead-to-increased-body-fat-mass-in-adolescents

). So found researchers at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland. They looked at all sorts of sleep data — “including sleep duration, sleep duration variability, weekend catch-up sleep, wake time and sleep midpoint time” and found that…

…children who had an earlier mean wakeup time, an earlier average wakeup time on the weekends, and a greater waketime shift between the weekend and weekday, were more likely to have larger fat mass gains at follow-up.

Interesting twist: It didn’t matter how long they slept, when they went to bed, or if those times shifted. Just the wakeup time.

Tell us what you want, what you really really want

We want you to want us … and we will give you $100! (Well … at least one of you.)

We want to deliver top-quality content, and we’ll definitely give one of you a $100 Visa gift card just for telling us what’s important to you so we can offer GPhA members the most current and very best CPE on the planet: topics vital to your practice, engaging formats, led by the state’s most important speakers.

Help us help you!

Take just a few minutes (literally three) to complete a survey about the CPE you want us to offer in 2021. Do it by Friday, December 4, 2020 and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a $100 Visa gift card.

Even if you don’t win, you win. Your feedback will shape the CPE we offer during the year and at the 2021 Georgia Pharmacy Convention.

We’re counting on you to help us help you. CLICK HERE to get started.

Danes slaughter minks to prevent pandemic

Those shifty Danes are culling 15 million of the country’s minks out of fear of a viral mutation that could turn into the next coronavirus pandemic. They’re also considering shutting down the northern part of the country, as 12 people are already infected with the new strain.

“This variant can develop further, so that it becomes completely resistant, and then a vaccine does not matter. Therefore, we need to take [the mutation] out of the equation. So it’s serious.”

How serious? Danes don’t have a sense of humor, you know.

“The worst-case scenario is that we would start off a new pandemic in Denmark. There’s a risk that this mutated virus is so different from the others that we’d have to put new things in a vaccine and therefore [the mutation] would slam us all in the whole world back to the start,” said Denmark’s equivalent of Anthony Fauci (Kåre Mølbak, of Denmark’s State Serum Institute).

Pharmacist-friendly winners

Congrats to compounding pharmacist Diana Harshbarger (TN-1), who will become the first compounder in Congress with her victory Tuesday. Our own Buddy Carter, of course, currently the only pharmacist in Congress (but not for long!), was reelected as well. And congrats to Alabama pharmacy owner Jerry Carl on winning Alabama’s 1st district seat.