Day: 11/07/2010

Alcohol More Harmful Than Crack or Heroin

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Nov. 1, 2010 — Alcohol abuse is more harmful than crack or heroin abuse, according to a new study by a former British government drug advisor and other experts.

Neuropharmacologist David Nutt, MD, of Imperial College London, and colleagues rated 20 different drugs on a scale that takes into account the various harms caused by a drug. Drugs are rated on nine harms a drug causes an individual and seven harms a drug causes society.

The scale, developed by a panel of experts called the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ICSD), ranges from 0 (no harm) to 100 (greatest possible harm). It is weighted so that a drug that scores 50 is half as harmful as a drug that scores 100.

“The highest and lowest overall harm scores … are 72 for alcohol and 5 for mushrooms,” Nutt and colleagues calculate. “The ICSD scores lend support to the widely accepted view that alcohol is an extremely harmful drug both to users and to society.”

Alcohol was found to be the most harmful drug to society and the fourth most harmful drug to users.

The findings should come as no surprise: Alcohol has been linked to more than 60 diseases.

“Alcohol does all kinds of things in the body, and we’re not fully aware of all its effects,” alcohol researcher James C. Garbutt, MD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently told WebMD. “It’s a pretty complicated little molecule.”

Alcohol vs. Heroin, Other Drugs

Using the ICSD ratings, Nutt and colleagues rated 20 substances in terms of the overall harm they do. Their results:

 

Alcohol 72
Heroin 55
Crack 54
Crystal meth 33
Cocaine 27
Tobacco 26
Amphetamine/speed 23
Cannabis (marijuana) 20
GHB 18
Benzodiazepines (e.g. valium) 15
Ketamine 15
Methadone 14
Mephedrone (aka drone, MCAT) 13
Butane 10
Khat 9
Ecstacy 9
Anabolic steroids 9
LSD 7
Buprenorphine 6
Mushrooms 5

 

Heroin, crack, and crystal meth were the most harmful drugs to the individual, while alcohol, heroin and crack were the most harmful to others.

According to this “multicriteria decision analysis approach,” alcohol is almost three times as harmful as cocaine or tobacco.

Nutt and colleagues conclude that aggressively targeting alcohol harm is “a valid and necessary public health strategy.”

In an editorial accompanying the Nutt team’s report, Jan van Amsterdam of the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and Wim van den Brink of the Amsterdam Institute for Addiction research note that the legal penalties prescribed by various nations’ drug policies are out of synch with the actual harms caused by different drugs.

“It is intriguing to note that the two legal drugs assessed — alcohol and tobacco — score in the upper segment of the ranking scale, indicating that legal drugs cause at least as much harm as do illegal substances,” van Amsterdam and van den Brink write.

Hair Loss from Hair Straightening

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Hair rebonding, the latest hair trend among women, can lead to hair loss. It gives you a silky, super straight hair, the way the girls in hair commercials look, and the way Jennifer Lopez used to look, but it can also leave you bald.

In Singapore, a 14 year-old girl had big clumps of hair falling off in the shower a year after the process. Her hair started breaking 2 months after being rebounded.

In Manila, a woman is suing her hairdresser for bald patches on her head after a similar treatment. Her scalp started stinging during the process itself and hair fell off in clumps shortly after.

Hair rebonding is a process where the chemical bonds in your hair are broken, rearranged and bonded back again permanently using very strong chemicals. It is one of the most damaging things that you can do to your hair.

During rebonding, perming lotion is added to soften the hair and breakdown its bonds. After this is washed off, hair is placed between 2 metal plates of an electric styling device, which uses heat to pull the hair rod straight. A neutralizer is applied to reset the bonds and stabilize the hair.

Hair is irreversibly altered after the perming process. Chemically treated hair shafts are weaker and fracture more easily. This can lead to hair loss.

Hair becomes fragile and has to be handled with extreme care after treatment. A natural reflex, like tucking your hair behind your ears or tying your hair in the first month can be disastrous.

The process can also cause damage and burns to the skin and scalp. For example, hair can be damaged if the various chemicals are left on the hair for too long, or if ironing is done with an iron at higher than 180C.

Conventional methods of straightening hair use hair straightening lotions (like the relaxer, straightening cream and temporary straightening gel), which result in dry, brittle, and split ends prone hair.

Rebonding gives you softer hair and higher risks because it uses more toxic chemicals like sodium hydroxide, guanidine hydroxide. ammonium thioglycolate.

Sodium hydroxide is a caustic chemical that can burn the skin, and break or damage hair. The stronger the solution used (for better effects), the more potential damage can occur to the hair.

Guanidine hydroxide is less damaging than sodium hydroxide, but it may still damage hair and it can definitely de-fat the scalp. The treatment can cost up to over US $ 500, and lasts only 4-6 months.

Ammonium Thioglycolate is a known cause of irritant contact dermatitis in hairdressers and their clients.

Maintaining the rebonded look means continual touch-ups, at the least, every 6 months. This puts you at further risks of hair loss, eventually, and prematurely leaving your full head of hair nothing but a memory.