Optimise your caffeination

Just seen a great article on using caffeine optimally - good one for all programmers out there, lol.

$42 billion thrown away every year

Well, turns out that the USA spends $42billion on enforcing its pot laws.

Why $42 billion? Because that's what our current marijuana laws cost American taxpayers each year, according to a new study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D. -- $10.7 billion in direct law enforcement costs, and $31.1 billion in lost tax revenues. And that may be an underestimate, at least on the law enforcement side, since Gettman made his calculations before the FBI released its latest arrest statistics in late September. The new FBI stats show an all-time record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006, 43,000 more than in 2005.

That's like arresting every man, woman and child in the state of North Dakota plus every man, woman, and child in Des Moines, Iowa on marijuana charges ... every year. Arrests for marijuana possession -- not sales or trafficking, just possession -- totaled 738,916. By comparison, there were 611,523 arrests last year for all violent crimes combined.

Unbelievable. And why do we keep it illegal? The Dutch don't seem to have a problem. In fact, the problem in Holland is drug tourists being totally irresponsible - these are the poeple that would cause its use to be restricted. Alcohol is worse for "the people" - think of how many people have drinking problems, liver disease, and so on.

The alternative is clear: Regulate marijuana just as we do beer, wine, and liquor. The only thing lacking is the political will.

Yep. I'm a firm believer in giving people free will to do as they will as long as they don't act to the detriment of others. Let people make their own decisions - I doubt it'll be any worse than it is now. One final thought - prohibition didn't work.

Better than Provigil?

Check it out: you may be able to make yourself temporarily autistic soon. Whether this will actually make you more productive or not with your numbers is another question. Not all autistic people are rain men. Still, interesting research...

What are drugs really?

Can you define a drug?

According to dictionary.com a drug is:

"a chemical substance used in the treatment, cure, prevention, or diagnosis of disease or used to otherwise enhance physical or mental well-being."

I personally think that this definition does not go far enough. I prefer wikipedia's broader definition:

"A drug ... is any substance that alters normal bodily function."

This misses one point though: a drug is put into your body artificially. A good example is insulin, a chemical made famous by diabetes. Insulin is called a hormone when it is produced by your body (endogenously), but it is termed a drug when it is injected by diabetics (exogenously).
You can see it is easy to get lost in the semantics of definitions for something as fuzzy as "drugs". It probably makes more sense to look at the biology of chemicals such as insulin, then we can think in real terms.

Your body

Your body is made up of lots of cells. You remember then from biology, right? They're like a little machine that has a specific function - for example, you have nerve cells, muscle cells, and the famous stem cells - and all these little machines joined together and interacting physically form you. When I say little, I mean little. You have about

100,000,000,000,000

cells in your body. Pretty big number, eh? So day to day these cells go about their work....

• repairing themselves using the protein you eat, e.g. in meat or beans;
• metabolising organic molecules into energy - much like a car burns fuel to get energy, you can burn different nutrients into energy, for example sugar;
• responding to stimuli such as temperature, acidity, hormones, nutrient levels;
• splitting themselves into two cells!

So the part we are interested in here is the responding to chemical stimuli, so let's look a bit deeper...

Cell receptors

Your body tells its cells what to do by pumping chemicals around itself that get detected by your cells. Adrenaline being produced and pumped round your body can be thought of as the message "Get ready to fight or run!" being sent to every cell in your body. If you've ever been in such a position, you can actually feel every part of your body prepare itself for running or fighting. (Normally running in my case!) So these "chemical messengers" carry these unconcious messages to your whole body. How does your body detect these messages? Cells detect what chemicals are floating around them using receptors on their edge. You can think of a receptor like a lock, and a chemical like a key. Some keys might open the lock, some keys might partially open the lock, some keys might not work at all, and some keys might get stuck and stop you trying other keys. We call chemical "keys" ligands. We can define them a little better:

• (Full) Agonist ligands open the lock fully;
• Partial agonist ligands open the lock partially;
• Antagonist ligands block the lock being used.

There are different types of ligand, such as hormones like insulin and adrenaline, steroids, and neurotransmitters. A naturally produced ligand will normally be a "full agonist". That is, the key will be designed to open just one lock. The chemical has been designed, by evolution, to convey a specific message. Insulin's message is "I am well fed". Other chemicals, such as nicotine, are shaped like one or more natural ligands. This means that they end up partially opening some of the locks, that would normally be opened fully by natural ligands. Such ligands carry a potentially confused mixture of different messages of different strengths around your body. The message could be "I am a little scared and nearly very hot." One of the biggest challenges with medical drugs is making them as specific as possible to minimise side effects. This leads us to a very important point - drugs are really just acting like mixtures of "natural drugs" that your body produces itself, in much higher quantities. You are in effect forcing certain messages to be carried around your body. And these message might be a bit confused!

Summing up

So we see that the basic picture is that the cells in your body respond to certain chemicals (ligands) that float around them. Normally, these chemicals are produced by your body, but they can be introduced artifically - such as injecting insulin or eating some kinds of mushrooms. When such ligands are introduced artifically they are termed drugs.

Your starbucks is a drug

Yes folks, that means your Starbucks is technically a drug. You drink the coffee, the caffeine gets absorbed into your bloodstream, and acts as a ligand to cells all around your body - including your brain. People should stop deluding themselves about the differences between legal drugs (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine) and illegal drugs. They all work in the same way, as we have seen.

"Coffee is the most widely used psychotropic beverage in the world. In 1999 the average consumption of coffee was 3.5 cups per day per U.S. citizen."

A Big Mac is a drug....?

Well, food is definitely addictive. It all depends on your definition of drugs are the end of the day. Does food count as a drug because it affects the working of a cell? Remember, cells respond to stimuli other than just ligands - temperature, acidity and nutrient levels are all good examples. The complexities of how nutrition feeds back into cell behaviour are immense, but maybe these will be tackled in future posts!

Thanks for reading!

I hope you have enjoyed this post and found it eye opening,

Oliver