The boss of the French company which made defective breast implants fitted in up to 500,000 women across 65 countries has been jailed after failing to pay his bail.
A French judge ordered the arrest of Jean-Claude Mas after he failed to hand over the ˆ100,000 (?83,000 bail imposed when he was accused of "involuntary wounding" in January. Mr Mas, 72, founder of Poly Implant Protheses (PIP , is at the centre of one of the largest, fraud-related, health scandals of all time.
Between 300,000 and 500,000 women around the world, including 40,000 in Britain, are believed to have been given PIP breast implants made with a sub-standard and possibly dangerous silicon gel. In January, he was arrested and formally accused of voluntary wounding and warned of a possible future accusation of manslaughter.
Telegraph. The supervisors of one trial noted, “It was rather common for patients to claim significant insights into their problems, to feel that they had been given a new lease on life, and to make a strong resolution to discontinue their drinking.” In the 70s, governments began crackdowns on any aspect of LSD being clinically studied and research was left incomplete and shelved. None of the experiments that were begun featured enough patients to draw any firm conclusions, however a reanalysis of all the data taken together suggests the compound could have potential after all. A study, presented in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, looked at data from six trials with 536 patients and it said there was a “significant beneficial effect” on alcohol abuse, which lasted several months after as little as one dose was taken. LSD is one of the most powerful hallucinogens ever identified. It appears to work by blocking serotonin in the brain, which controls functions including perception, behavior, hunger and mood, reports
BBC News. For the group of patients taking LSD, 59 percent showed reduced levels of alcohol misuse compared with 38 percent in the other group. This effect was maintained for up to six months after taking the hallucinogen, but it disappeared after a year. The report’s authors, Teri Krebs and Pal-Orjan Johansen, told BBC News: “A single dose of LSD has a significant beneficial effect on alcohol misuse,” and suggested that more regular doses might lead to a sustained benefit. Norwegian researcher and fellow of Harvard Medical School, who led the research, Pal-Orjan Johansen said in a recent press statement: “Given the evidence for a beneficial effect of LSD on alcoholism, it is puzzling why this treatment approach has been largely overlooked.” Dr. David Nutt, former advisor on drugs to the government, told The Telegraph: “I think this study is very interesting and it is a shame the last of these studies were done in the 1960s.” “I think these drugs might help people switch out of a mindset which is locked into addiction or depression and be a way of helping the brain switch back to where it should be, in a similar way that Alcoholics Anonymous programs do.” For the moment, studying human behavioral responses rather than brain chemistry may be more helpful in understanding how the drugs work, writes Arran Frood for
Nature. Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychopharmacologist at Imperial College London who has researched how psilocybin could treat depression, told Frood that psychedelics must work at both biological and psychological levels. “Psychedelics probably work in addiction by making the brain function more chaotically for a period — a bit like shaking up a snow globe — weakening reinforced brain connections and dynamics,” he said. --- On the Net:
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