“Designer drugs” — A current perspective

Since the late 1970s, in an effort to quench the ever burgeoning appetite for pharmacological substances of abuse and to satiate their own need for profit, unscrupulous chemists have set up clandestine laboratories to produce and market new drugs for street sale. Using fairly common industrial chemicals, they have altered or modified preexisting controlled substances such as fentanyl, meperidine, mescaline, amphetamine, and phencyclidine, producing derivatives of these parent compounds that, up until 1986, were able to temporarily elude the guidelines of the Federal Controlled Substances Act due to their new and unique chemical structures. Unsuspecting users continue to use the drugs recreationally. This article will present a comprehensive review of these “Designer Drugs” looking at historical data, pharmacokinetics, treatment, abuse trends, and some of the more recent additions to the social pharmacopoeia.     

Refractory Migraine in a “Just World”

The “just world hypothesis” is the belief that a poor outcome to treatment always implies patient noncompliance. However, all disease states have a spectrum of severity, with the most severe end representing treatment failures despite compliant patients and excellent care. Some refractory headache patients represent this group of compliant patients, who had excellent care but who have bad disease.     

“A picture is worth a thousand words”: A strategy for grief education

This article outlines a strategy for grief education that makes undergraduate college students active participants rather than passive spectators an the barning process. The first section outlines the pedagogical procedure as a spiral of repeated steps in gathering data and constructing visual models describing the grief process. The second section describes far representative models that students have developed.