by Elizabeth Pennisi Ever since the human genome was sequenced a decade ago, researchers have dreamed about deciphering DNA from our three great ape cousins as well. Now the final remaining genome, that of the gorilla, is in hand, and it reveals interesting connections between us and them. Surprisingly, parts of our genome are more similar to the gorilla's than they are to the chimp's, and a few of the same genes previously thought key to our unique evolution are key to theirs, too. Today there are four groups of great apes: chimps and bonobos, humans, gorillas, and orangutans. The genome of the chimp—our closest relative—was published in 2005; the orangutan sequence came out in early 2011. Now researchers have analyzed the DNA of a western lowland gorilla named Kamilah, who lives at the San Diego Zoo. In addition, they sequenced DNA from three other gorillas, including one eastern lowland gorilla, a rare species estimated at only 20,000 individuals. "It's essential to have all of the great ape genomes in order to understand the features of our own genome that make humans unique," says Gregory Wray, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. Adds paleoanthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto in Canada: "It will allow us to begin to identify genetic changes specific to humans since our divergence from chimps." Humans and apes are nearly identical in the vast majority of base pairs, or letters of the genetic code: The human genome is 1.37% different from the chimp's; 1.75% different from the gorilla's; and 3.4% different from the orangutan's, researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., and their colleagues report today in Nature. Although chimps and humans are indeed closest kin, 15% of the human genome more closely matches the gorilla's. Those genes' activity patterns are similar too, says Sanger evolutionary genomicist and lead author of the study Aylwyn Scally: "Some of our functional biology is more gorillalike than chimplike." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16491 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By DENISE GRADY MORE and more retired people are heading back to the nearest classroom — as students and, in some cases, teachers — and they are finding out that school can be lovelier the second time around. Some may be thinking of second careers, but most just want to keep their minds stimulated, learn something new or catch up with a subject they were always curious about but never had time for. For many, at least part of the motivation is based on widespread reports that exercising the brain may preserve it, forestalling mental decline and maybe even Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia. Is there any truth to it? And if there is, what type of learning is best suited to the older brain? Many studies do find that being mentally active is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease. But the standard caveat applies: association does not prove cause and effect, and there is always the chance that the mentally active people who never got Alzheimer’s simply had healthier brains to begin with. Even, so, researchers say, there is no harm in telling people to try to stay engaged. “When you and I are having this conversation, you’re taking notes, thinking, remembering pieces of it, trying to relate it to other things,” said Arthur Toga, a professor of neurology and director of the laboratory of neuroimaging at the University of California, Los Angeles. “You’re changing the circuitry in your brain. That is because you have changed something in your brain to retain that memory.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16490 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Jane Dreaper Health correspondent, BBC News Thousands of patients with advanced Alzheimer's disease could benefit from drugs, research suggests. A study in the the New England Journal of Medicine found that patients who stayed on the dementia drug Aricept had a slower decline in their memory. The drug tends not to be prescribed once sufferers progress beyond moderate symptoms. Medicines regulator NICE said its guidelines supported continuing treatment where there were benefits. The patent for the medicine Aricept, which is used to treat Alzheimer's disease, expired recently. Much cheaper versions under the generic name donepezil are already available for about £12 a month. The researchers say their new evidence could lead to twice as many Alzheimer's sufferers worldwide being given medication. The trial involved 295 Alzheimer's patients in England and Scotland who had been taking Aricept. One set were given placebo tablets while another set stayed on Aricept. A third set were given another drug, Ebixa, or memantine, which is usually prescribed only in the later stages of Alzheimer's. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16489 - Posted: 03.08.2012

Andrew Purcell, online producer “If you’ve known one person with Alzheimer’s disease… you’ve known one person with Alzheimer’s disease,” asserts sociologist Cathy Greenblat. Greenblat, professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, has spent years taking photographs of people with Alzheimer’s and their families around the world, visiting homes, memory clinics and residential centres on three continents. This week, she launched her second photographic compendium illustrating the diversity of Alzheimer’s, Love, Loss and Laughter: Seeing Alzheimer’s differently, alongside an accompanying global exhibition tour. According to Greenblat, the different ways Alzheimer’s disease manifests itself is key to people with the condition being helped to live full and rich lives. This diversity comes across in her photographs, some of which emphasise the importance of art and music in helping Alzheimer’s patients stay active and mentally stimulated. Greenblat argues that art therapy can be useful for those with both early and advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She says that music in particular can be a great tool for improving concentration, bonding and releasing pent-up emotions: “Because music is processed in many areas of the brain, people with Alzheimer’s disease are often able to engage meaningfully with live music even when they have severe cognitive impairment.” She also says that the term “art” should be interpreted as broadly as possible to include things like creative storytelling and visits to cultural venues. For example, an art therapy session may include a visit to the local art gallery or natural history museum, followed by discussion and interpretation of what the group has seen. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16488 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Robin Marantz Henig In “Lifting the Black Cloud,” Robin Henig surveys the search for new, improved antidepressants. Much research in the area involves laboratory mice and rats. Here, Henig explains how scientists determine whether a rodent is depressed. It’s hard to develop an animal model for depression. As Michael Kaplitt of Cornell Medical College puts it, “A mouse can’t tell you how it’s feeling.” Scientists have had to come up with proxy behaviors, actions that they interpret as “depressionlike,” to measure whether particular drugs or therapies are having an effect. To identify depression in laboratory animals, investigators rely on the following: Forced swimming test. The rat or mouse is placed into a cylinder partially filled with water from which escape is difficult. The longer it swims, the more actively it is trying to escape; if it stops swimming, this cessation is interpreted as depressionlike behavior, a kind of animal fatalism. Tail suspension test. A mouse (it does not work in rats) is hung upside down from its tail, and the sooner it stops wiggling, the greater its depressionlike behavior is said to be. Administering an antidepressant usually increases the length of time that a mouse will struggle when suspended by the tail. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16487 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Ricki Rusting Antidepressants restore well-being to many people, but sometimes at the cost of such side effects as weight gain or loss of interest in sex. And these side effects can be just part of the frustration. As Robin Marantz Henig wrote in "Lifting the Black Cloud," in the March issue of Scientific American, the drugs that have long dominated the market—the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—"do not help everyone and eventually fail in more than a third of users. A pill that seems to be working today might well stop helping tomorrow. And the drugs can take several weeks to start having a marked effect." Equally disturbing, some major pharmaceutical houses, such as GlaxoSmithKline, are pulling back from developing psychiatric medicines. But not everyone is abandoning the effort, she noted. Researchers in government and small biotech firms are trying to pick up some of the slack and are searching for agents that work in new ways. For instance, some investigators, such as Ronald Duman of Yale University, are focusing on finding compounds that will kick in more quickly in our bodies. Duman and his colleagues are trying to learn lessons from ketamine, an anesthetic and painkiller that is also sold illicitly under the name "Special K." The group has shown in rats that ketamine rapidly causes neurons to make new contacts with one another and, apparently by so doing, produces antidepressant effects. Based on an understanding of the molecular basis of those changes, the researchers are now looking for safer agents that operate in a similar way. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16486 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Laura Sanders As anyone who has typed an outdated e-mail password before finally dredging up the new one knows, it’s easy to remember the wrong thing. Now, by capturing the battle between right and wrong memories in the brain, scientists have found that the struggle can get messy. The results, published March 7 in the Journal of Neuroscience, bring scientists closer to understanding how people usually manage to pull up the right memory, and what goes wrong when this process fails. “To me, one of the most remarkable things isn’t how much we store in memory, but how well we’re able to find a memory,” says study coauthor Brice Kuhl of Yale University. To study this battle of new versus old memories in the brain, Kuhl and his team had 24 undergraduates learn a picture-word pair, then learn a different one and finally describe the more recent pair. To create the original memory, participants were twice shown a word above an unrelated picture of a face, an object or a scene. For instance, the word “swim” would appear over a picture of Al Gore. The researchers then shuffled the association, replacing Gore with an image of the Grand Canyon, and showed the participants the new pair. While in a brain scanner, participants were then shown the word “swim” and asked what kind of picture went underneath it in the newer memory. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16485 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff Parents may want to pay a bit more attention to how their toddlers sleep -- whether they snore, gasp for breath, or breathe with their mouth open -- since a new study published today in Pediatrics links these disordered breathing behaviors to a higher likelihood of behavioral problems all the way through second grade. Examining surveys filled out by more than 8,000 British parents, researchers from New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that those who reported that their children snored or had other breathing abnormalities while sleeping from the age of 6 months to 7 years were 50 percent more likely than their peers who breathed normally to exhibit some sort of behavioral problem such as hyperactivity, frequent temper tantrums, or anxiety. Children who fell into the “worst case” group, where snoring and other breathing issues started early, occurred frequently, and lasted into elementary school, were more than twice as likely to wind up with behavior issues. Nearly 18 percent of them had some sort of behavioral problem by age 7 compared with slightly more than 8 percent of those who didn’t snore. (The researchers took into account differences between the groups on characteristics including body mass index, premature birth, and whether their mothers smoked during pregnancy.) © 2012 NY Times Co

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16484 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Jonah Lehrer In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I argued that, even in this age of glittering science, we still have a deep need for the musings and mysteries of art: We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art. I went on to (grandiosely) propose the formation of a fourth culture, which would “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.” There are many wonderful examples of such works, from the novels of Richard Powers to the mathematical essays of David Foster Wallace. And this brings me to Charles Fernyhough, a science writer, novelist and academic psychologist. His most recent project is A Box of Birds, a novel that explicitly attempts to explore the impact of neuroscience on our self-conception. Here’s how Charles summarizes his goals for the fictional work: © 2012 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 16483 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By JANE E. BRODY Clea Howard is hardly a tuned-out, disinterested high school student. She likes to be busy: In addition to maintaining an excellent scholastic record at a demanding high school an hour from her Brooklyn home, she studies art, takes dance classes and plays soccer. Yet during her freshman and sophomore years, she was always tired, no matter how much she slept at night. She often fell asleep in class, on the subway, while doing homework or talking to her boyfriend. Even on vacation, when she logged 10 or 11 hours of sleep at night, Clea said, “I was still very tired during the day. I made excuses for myself — maybe I just need more sleep than other teenagers, or maybe I don’t feel any more tired than other people.” Her pediatrician unearthed no medical reason or aberrant sleep habits to explain her extreme fatigue and tendency to doze off at the drop of a hat. An endocrinologist could not find any hormonal or diet-related abnormality. Perhaps, her pediatrician said, a sleep study might show if Clea was getting the kind of rest at night that restores body and mind. At the Sleep Disorders Institute in New York, Clea met with a sleep specialist. It did not take long for Dr. Maha Ahmad to zero in on a possible diagnosis: narcolepsy. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Narcolepsy
Link ID: 16482 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS At 82, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Eric R. Kandel is still constantly coming up with new ideas for research. This winter, he has been working on a project that he hopes will lead to a new class of drugs for treating schizophrenia. Last year he collaborated, for the first time, with Denise B. Kandel — his fellow Columbia University research scientist and wife of 55 years — investigating the biological links between cigarette and cocaine addiction. And this month his newest book, “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present,” is to be released by Random House. A condensed and edited version of our two interviews follows. As in his new book, the conversation begins with memories of Vienna, his birthplace. How old were you when the Nazis marched into Vienna? I was 8 ½. Immediately, we saw that our lives were in danger. We were completely abandoned by our non-Jewish friends and neighbors. No one spoke to me in school. One boy walked up to me and said, “My father said I’m not to speak to you anymore.” When we went to the park, we were roughed up. Then, on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, we were booted out of our apartment, which was looted. We knew we had to get out. Fortunately, my mother had the foresight to apply for visas to the United States earlier. For more than a year, we waited in the terror of Vienna for our immigration quota number to come up. When it finally did, my older brother, Ludwig, and I made the Atlantic crossing alone. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16481 - Posted: 03.06.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR The use of statin drugs to lower cholesterol in people with stable coronary artery disease is associated with a significantly reduced risk for depression, a new study reports. It has been well established in many studies that coronary artery disease increases the risk for symptoms of major depression — feelings of hopelessness and despair so severe that they interfere with daily routines and activities. Researchers recruited 965 people with stable coronary artery disease at outpatient clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracking their statin use and depressive symptoms over six years. The study was published online Feb. 21 in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Statin users had fewer symptoms of depression at the start of the study. And among the 776 people free of depression at the beginning, those who took statins were significantly less likely than those who did not to develop depression over the course of the study. Even after adjusting for age, sex, smoking, education, income, social support, baseline depression symptoms, medication use and other factors, statin use was associated with a decrease of 38 percent in the odds of developing depressive symptoms during the follow-up period. “We’re not sure that this association is causal,” said Dr. Mary A. Whooley, the senior author and a professor of medicine at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “This is an observational study and not a randomized trial.” Still, she said, “the findings are very intriguing.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16480 - Posted: 03.06.2012

By TARA PARKER-POPE After a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 2010, Steve Colburn of Portland, Ore., began taking a cholesterol-lowering statin at the maximum dose. Soon, he began experiencing memory problems. “Thinking and remembering became so laborious that I could not even recall my three-digit telephone extension or computer password at work,” said Mr. Colburn, 62, a sales representative and product developer. “All day, every day, I felt like my brain was mush.” His doctor suggested a “drug vacation,” and when Mr. Colburn stopped taking the statin for six weeks, the problems disappeared. Then he tried a different statin at a high dose, but the cognitive difficulties returned. His doctor has since lowered his dose by more than half, and while the memory lapses have not disappeared, he has learned to cope. “I felt like I didn’t have a choice to give up the drug,” Mr. Colburn said. “But I wanted to work with a dose that kept my numbers in an acceptable range and at the same time hopefully provided enough clarity of thinking that I could live with it.” Statins are the most prescribed drugs in the world, and there is no doubt that for people at high risk of cardiovascular problems, the drugs lower not only cholesterol but also the risk of heart attack and stroke. But for years doctors have been fielding reports from patients that the drugs leave them feeling “fuzzy,” and unable to remember small and big things, like where they left the car, a favorite poem or a recently memorized presentation. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration finally acknowledged what many patients and doctors have believed for a long time: Statin drugs carry a risk of cognitive side effects. The agency also warned users about diabetes risk and muscle pain. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16479 - Posted: 03.06.2012

By Linda Searing, THE QUESTION Prescription sleep medications, also called hypnotics, rank among the most-advertised and most-prescribed drugs in the United States. Might these pills be doing more than helping people get a good night’s sleep? THIS STUDY analyzed data on 34,205 adults (average age, 54), including 10,531 people prescribed such sleeping pills as Ambien, Lunesta, Restoril and Sonata. Compared with people who took no sleeping pills, those taking the drugs were more likely to have died in a 21 / 2-year span, with the risk rising along with the amount of medication. People who were prescribed 18 or fewer sleeping pills a year were 3.6 times as likely to die as those who took none of the drugs; risk was 4.3 times as high for those prescribed 18 to 132 doses and 5.3 times as high for those taking more than 132 pills a year. Also, people taking the highest doses were 35 percent more likely to have developed a major cancer, not including melanoma, during that period. The increased risks for death and cancer were found to be not attributable to preexisting diseases. WHO MAY BE AFFECTED? Adults who take sleeping pills. Studies have found that more than a fourth of U.S. residents do not get enough sleep, and about 10 percent of the population has chronic insomnia. The study authors wrote that an estimated 6 to 10 percent of Americans take sleeping pills. CAVEATS The results suggest an association, but the study was not designed to prove absolute cause and effect. The data did not include information on social and psychological disorders because that information was protected by law in the state where participants lived. The data were based on the number of doses prescribed in a year, not the actual number taken. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16478 - Posted: 03.06.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Just like an X-ray reveals fractured bones, a new imaging technique can now pinpoint broken connections in the brain resulting from injuries for the first time. Developed by Walter Schneider and a team from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, the technology, called high definition fibre tracking (HDFT), allows doctors to visualise breaks in bundles of fibres, called fibre tracts, that connect different parts of the brain and control functions like language and limb movement. "Until now, there was no objective way of identifying how the injury damaged the patient's brain tissue, predicting how the patient would fare or planning rehabilitation to maximise the recovery," says neurosurgeon David Okonkwo, a member of the team. To generate the vivid brain images, computer algorithms process data captured from a sophisticated MRI scan. The pictures reveal forty major cables in the brain which can be dissected virtually to pinpoint a damaged area. The injured region can then be compared to the healthy side of the brain to quantify the proportion of severed fibres and thus the degree of connection that has been lost. This detail can help predict how a patient will recover from an injury. The technique is already being used to supplement conventional imaging, helping to plan the removal of tumours or vascular abnormalities in the brain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16477 - Posted: 03.06.2012

By Larry Greenemeier A popular school of thought, dramatized in the recent TV drama Lie to Me, is that a careful study of facial expressions—especially eye movements—tells investigators if a perp is dissembling. Reality is neither as dramatic nor as decisive. Even experienced investigators average only about a 65 percent success rate, according to researchers. Could computers do a better job? Researchers at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (U.B.), claim their video-analysis software can analyze eye movement successfully to identify whether or not a subject is fibbing 82.5 percent of the time. The researchers, who first presented their (still unpublished) results at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition a year ago, believe they have laid the foundation for a more extensive study that will include a larger sample and take into account body language in addition to eye movement to determine whether new technologies can help interrogators in their search for the truth. The 40 interviews were conducted by Mark Frank, a U.B. professor of communication and a study co-author, and included a diversity in age, gender and ethnicity. Prior to the interview, each subject was given the opportunity to "steal" a check made out to a political party or cause that the volunteer strongly opposed. Afterward, subjects sat down with a retired law-enforcement interrogator. The interviewer first posed conversational questions unrelated to the possible theft, to establish a baseline of normal eye movement, and then asked whether the interviewee had taken the check. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16476 - Posted: 03.06.2012

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News The spectacular snouts of sawfish are revealed as complete hunting weapons, sensing prey and killing them. The saws, which can grow more than a metre long in some species, have previously been identified as able to sense prey by their electric fields. Now, researchers have filmed the fish impaling prey on the teeth of the saws. They suggest in Current Biology that sawfish are more active hunters than previously thought, which could help in their much-needed conservation. All seven species are listed as Critically Endangered on the internationally-recognised Red List. The researchers, mainly based in Australia, suggest sawfish may be unique among their peers in possessing a snout, or rostrum, that works both as a sensory organ and a hunting weapon. "I like to call it an antenna and a weapon, because that's what it is - it helps them to find the prey, but then also to kill it," said Barbara Wueringer from the University of Queensland, who led the research team. The research was done using captive sawfish. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 16475 - Posted: 03.06.2012

by Carl Zimmer Eric Courchesne managed to find a positive thing about getting polio: It gave him a clear idea of what he would do when he grew up. Courchesne was stricken in 1953, when he was 4. The infection left his legs so wasted that he couldn’t stand or walk. “My mother had to carry me everywhere,” he says. His parents helped him learn how to move his toes again. They took him to a pool to learn to swim. When he was 6, they took him to a doctor who gave him metal braces, and then they helped him learn to hobble around on them. Doctors performed half a dozen surgeries on his legs, grafting muscles to give him more strength. Courchesne was 11 when the braces finally came off, and his parents patiently helped him practice walking on his own. “Through their encouragement, I went on to have dreams beyond what you’d expect,” he says. He went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. One day he stopped to watch the gymnastics team practicing, and the coach asked him to try out. Before long Courchesne was on the team, where he won the western U.S. championship in still rings. When Courchesne wasn’t competing at gymnastics, he was studying neuroscience. “I understood a neurological disorder firsthand, and I wanted to help other children,” he says. Fortunately, the polio outbreak that snared him in 1953 was the last major one in the United States; a vaccine largely eliminated the disease in this country. But in the mid-1980s, as a newly minted assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, Courchesne encountered a 15-year-old with another kind of devastating neurological disorder: autism. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16474 - Posted: 03.06.2012

Barry Smith Human beings are part of nature. They are made of flesh and blood, brain and bone; but for much of the time they are also conscious. The puzzling thing is how the intricate sequences of nerve cells and tissue that make up a person's brain and body can generate the special subjective feel of conscious experience. Consciousness creates, in each of us, an inner life where we think and feel; a realm where we experience the sights, sounds, feels, tastes and smells that inform us of the world around us. To many philosophers the central problem of consciousness is, how can the facts of conscious mental life be part of the world of facts described by the natural sciences? The 17th-century philosopher, René Descartes, thought they couldn't and argued that, in addition to our physical makeup, creatures like us had a non-material mind, or soul, in which thinking took place. For Descartes, only humans were subjects of experience. Animals were mere mechanisms. When they squealed with what we mistakenly took to be pain, it was just air escaping from their lungs. Today we take other animals to be conscious; although we are not sure how far down the phylogenetic scale consciousness extends. Most problematically of all, if consciousness was immaterial, how could the immaterial soul move the physical body, or feel pain in response to physical injury? © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 16473 - Posted: 03.06.2012

A new street drug has Ottawa police on alert and working hard to learn more. Police say an illegal powder known as bath salts, is a new drug trend that could soon be seen in Ottawa, even though no seizures have been made in the capital. The powerful hallucinogenic is also known by the name mephedrone and is reported to cause anxiety, delusions and dangerously high blood pressure, as well as occasionally violent behaviour. Earlier this week, Ontario Provincial Police officers seized the drug in Arnprior, about 50 kilometres west of Ottawa. Staff Sgt. Mike Laviolette said the drug is not yet under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act because it is new. The drug is being tested and investigated, however. "It comes in various forms, various colours, it's sold commercially under a myriad of different names," Laviolette said, "It's certainly all chemical, so it's a synthetic drug that's ingested by various means. You can either smoke it or snort it or inject it." Bath salts are popular in England and the U.S. and are now starting to show up in Canada. The drug is among several new synthetic designer drugs sold online or in small shops as actual bath salts or plant food. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16472 - Posted: 03.05.2012