Time Capsule Music Gets Flushed The team putting together The New York Times Capsule, being buried for our descendants in the year 3000, has had to scrap its plans to include representative late-20th century pop music because of its inability to get copyright permission from the music industry. Wired

Happy May Day!

Ethel the Blog has been watching these stories recently:

insights from J. R. McNeill’s Something New Under the
Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World;

a remembrance of Harvard’s renowned ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes; I’m only just learning of, and diminished by, his death on April 10 at the age of 86. Schultes, from whom I was privileged to take a seminar as an undergraduate (he gave the class at 6:00 a.m., as I recall, to screen out the frivolous and undisciplined [yes, I attended every meeting]), was the mentor of Wade Davis, Marc Plotkin and (Ethel fails to note) Andrew Weil, and arguably one of the West’s experts on indigenous mind-altering and medicinal plant use in the Amazon. He was a swashbuckling Indiana Jones figure who “went native” with indigenous peoples in search of their botanical knowledge and a conservationist raising the hue and cry about the preservation of the rainforests decades before it was fashionable. From the New York Times’ obituary:

Dr. Schultes’s research into plants that produced hallucinogens like peyote and
ayahuasca made some of his books cult favorites among youthful drug
experimenters in the 1960’s. His findings also influenced cultural icons like Aldous
Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda, writers who considered
hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery.

Dr. Schultes disdained these self- appointed prophets of an inner reality. He
scathingly dismissed Timothy Leary, the drug guru of the 1960’s who also taught
at Harvard, for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled
the Latin names of the plants.

According to a 1996 article in The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Burroughs once
described a psychedelic trip as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Dr.
Schultes’s response was, “That’s funny, Bill, all I saw was colors.”

coverage of James Bamford’s claim, in his new book Body of Secrets about the National Security Agency [it’s on my list…] , that the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, fatal for 34 American sailors, was not as Israel has always claimed an accident, but carried out for counterintelligence purposes;

Orrin Hatch’s pivotal and hypocritical role in the brewing storm over Shrub’s judicial appointments; and

an interesting, head-turning followup to the Lockerbie trial suggesting it may not have been the Libyans after all who were responsible for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

Several webloggers’ links to this exciting medical news show how relieved they are.

Here She Comes to Save the Day! Was This Man a Genius?, Julie Hecht’s relentless, obsessional portrait of Andy Kaufman gets “as close to answering the Kaufman question as any book, movie or REM song”, says the New York Times reviewer. I missed the whole Kaufman phenomenon since I never watched TV in those days and had a particular commitment to avoiding Saturday Night Live. I caught the Milos Forman film more recently on TV late one aimless, sleepless night, and it sounds like Hecht’s book gets at the same frustrating love-hate relationship Kaufman provoked according to the film — was he a genius? an obnoxious fool? or both? (Liked the REM song, though…)

Lunch at the White House Proves No Big Draw: ‘President Bush marked his first 100
days in office with a White House luncheon
today to which all 535 members of
Congress were invited. But only about a
third of them showed up, and the political
parties ended up squabbling over the value
of what had been billed as a bipartisan
outing.’ Dick Armey commented, “A romance has got to be reciprocal. If I were the president, I’d be starting to get courtship fatigue. How
much can you pursue these guys and have them continue to complain that you’re
not pursuing them?” The dessert was described by one guest — a Republican, no less — as “nasty.” Sorry to crow. New York Times

Pepsi Looks to a New Drink to Jolt Soda Sales. Essentially a wild cherry Mountain Dew, Pepsi engineers the new drink to add the urban minority market to other niches — Rocket Power white youth, computer programmers — it has addicted to its original high-caffeine soft drink. In so doing, it breaks ranks with stonewalllling beverage companies by acknowledging for the first time that caffeine is in soft drinks for the physiological effect, not the flavor. New York Times

Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News. Intelligent filtering software [and webloggers, i.e. “intelligent filtering wetware”??] making focused information delivery possible but, argues University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein in Republic.com, can narrow minds and souls.

The last part of Sunstein’s book contains some modest proposals. He’d like to see
a large Web site that was “privately-created, and that operated as a
deliberative domain,” he said, where curious people could go to encounter a mix
of viewpoints on various topics, like abortion, gun control and politics.

He’d also encourage Web sites to offer links to opposing viewpoints as a matter
of course. “Liberal publications to conservative ones, and vice versa,” he said,
adding that government regulation of links to promote democratic values was
“worth considering.”

Wood s lot points to this essay from The Globe and Mail: When depression turns deadly, which asks “Can antidepressants transform despair into suicide?” Although there’s no love lost between me as a psychopharmacologist and the rapacious pharmaceutical manufacturers, the article is misleading. It’s no surprise that the manufacturer of Prozac, Eli Lilly, settles lawsuits out of court and tries to minimize negative evidence, but that doesn’t damn the drug, only the corporation. The research studies that purported to show a link between SSRIs and suicide are largely discredited, methodologically flawed and inconclusive. I’m familiar with several of the Boston-area psychiatrists featured prominently as critics of the SSRIs, and know them to be sensationalistic media hounds. Anecdotal reports of suicide on Prozac and other SSRIs come from a number of factors:

Early on, when these observations were first made, Prozac was being tried on the most desperately ill patients who had failed most existing antidepressant treatment. Many of us think the suicidal despair that arose in a subset of these early users was not due to a pharmacological effect of the drug but subjects’ added disappointment at its failure to live up to its miracle ‘hype’ in such recalcitrant cases. Many of the most chronically, treatment-resistant depressed cases do not represent classical ‘major depressive episodes’ which have a good prognosis for medication response, but rather the entrenched,lifelong and atypical depression of patients with personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorder. These patients are prone to both suggestibility and self-destructiveness. Suicidality is always a risk factor in unresponsive depression.

Suicidality is a risk factor in improving depression too. All antidepressants can promote suicidality in that, paradoxically, as depression responds, the first thing to change — before the despair and hopelessness that make the sufferer conclude she should end her life — may be her energy, motivation and confidence to carry out a suicide plan. It is an old chestnut in psychiatric training to watch for this problem, a skill that has fallen by the wayside with modern prescribing practices (see below).

Prozac and several other SSRIs can cause as a side effect a particularly uncomfortable kind of restlessness technically known as akathisia, which can make a person feel like jumping out of their skin — or jumping out of a window. But which can be managed and reversed.

The real culprit here regarding suicide risk is that the SSRIs were such a real advance over previous generations of antidepressants in ease of use (except for the akathisia and sexual dysfunction they cause, which were not appreciated at the outset) absence of severe side effects and nonlethality in overdose, that the prevalence of antidepressant treatment in the population exploded when they caught on. This was largely achieved by an as-yet-unheard-of marketing strategy — the manufacturers targeted not psychiatrists but internists and other primary practitioners to be their major prescribers. Very appealing to the target practitioners — they could handle their patients’ emotional complaints themselves without referrals to psychiatrists, and could offer these endlessly complaining patients (who some estimates suggest make up as much as 50% of the traffic in many primary care practices) something more than time-consuming talk in their office visits. The upshot, of course, was that depression — and, worse yet, difficult personality disorders — began to be treated without adequate time, sufficient skill in the subtle art of suicide assessment, or expertise in management of psychopharmacological side effects.

Finally, let us recall that the anti-Prozac movement was spearheaded by S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*i*s*t*s, and that is not just an ad hominem argument! [The asterisks, of course, are because I am paranoid about persecutory lawsuits or denial-of-service attacks…]