According to a recent article, Wechsler says drug trafficking organizations have diversified their behaviors and this has caused the United States military to rapidly find ways to catch up with their activities. Criminal organizations have taking great advantage of the open borders which has allowed rapid increases in the amount and speed of global trading. Open borders have further allowed these organizations to ship huge quantities of supplies, such as drugs and small arms, through an expanding array of transportation routes, said Wechsler. Criminal organizations have also enjoyed increased profits and operational flexibilities due to the broader range these drug trafficking activities have provided them.

There has been a fundamental shift in the structure coming from these enemy groups of criminal traffickers. They have evolved from centralized organizations to a more highly adaptable network system that is decentralized. While there are still top leaders, they are now leaders of networks rather than leaders of hierarchies.

Wechsler says the bottom line is that these newer, modern criminal organizations are now transnational which allows them to be more agile and flexible than the military combatants that are in place to degrade them. The military is responding by quickly pushing through new policy ideas that are also more adaptable, networked and encompass the whole-of-government approach. The defense official says the best example of these new organized crime outlets is the Taliban in Afghanistan where these fighters continue to get a huge percentage of revenues from heroin trading.

The Haqqani criminal network in Afghanistan is one of the most significant threats the U.S. and our allied troops face in Afghanistan because they are on foot and have the means for improvising explosive devices.

However, the tiny nation is certainly like its more progressive neighbors in one way –it is a nation with an increasing substance abuse problem.

Czech newspapers report that last year just over 7,000 of its citizens sought out help for their addiction at a drug detox facility. There are currently 29 such facilities in the country and estimates say there are approximately 30,000 Czech citizens who are addicted to either drugs or alcohol and who need to get help.

By far the largest addiction problem in the country is alcoholism with over 40 percent of addictions being connected to alcohol. Public statistics say that 1.3 million Czechs over age 18 (about 20 percent of the adult population) would qualify as problem drinkers.

About 55 percent of the 7,000 who sought help at a drug detox center did so because of abuse of alcohol and 75 percent of that number was men. In other words, over-drinking is the nation’s chief substance abuse issue and it is largely happening among the men in the country.

This does not mean that Czechs aren’t also abusing drugs. Many are and the list of drugs being abused is pretty wide and includes marijuana but excludes cocaine.

Perhaps the saddest figure to come out of that was that of the 592 kids and teens that were treated in drug detox centers last year, eight percent were underage and mostly boys (55 percent). News reports say that most (nearly 40 percent) sought out help in the capital of Prague but Southern Bohemian centers treated around 18 percent and South Moravian facilities helped another 9 percent.

While there has been extensive research conducted to explore the effects in adulthood realized from childhood maltreatment, there has been little investigation into childhood emotional maltreatment specifically. Studies examining childhood maltreatment have shown that there is a high risk of depression, substance misuse and anxiety, as well as additional emotional problems.

For some who have a history of childhood emotional maltreatment, their problems extend beyond disorders like depression and anxiety and extend to other people. One especially difficult challenge for those who have been maltreated as a child is seeking and developing romantic ties.

The problems stemming from childhood emotional maltreatment cause a person’s self-esteem to decrease and can make it difficult for the victim to trust other people or allow close relationships.

Some problems with self-esteem can result in body image distortion, a severe form of body image dissatisfaction, which is a sign that an eating disorder may be developing. Eating disorders result in both physical and mental symptoms that affect everyday life and cause long-term health problems.

To explore the relationship between childhood emotional maltreatment and problems in adulthood, Dana Lassri of the Stress Risk and Resilience Research Lab, located in the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, looked at levels of stability and satisfaction in intimate relationships. The participants were all college students who reported a history of childhood emotional maltreatment.

The researchers found that childhood emotional maltreatment resulted in a direct impact on the relationships through the avenue of self-criticism. Lassri discovered that the patients with a history of maltreatment had unusually low self-value, struggled to deal with stress and had a negative outlook when it came to life events.

The association was intensified when the patient exhibited symptoms of posttraumatic stress related to the incidents experienced in childhood. They had a harder time establishing a sense of self-worth and had great difficulty with relationship satisfaction. The researchers believe that this may be due to an inability of children to correctly perceive circumstances.

Lassri notes that though the study was conducted with participants enrolled in college, the effects potentially worsen as individuals proceed through adulthood. Lassri says that the anxiety and self-worth problems could become a central part of the person’s personality, making relationships and especially romantic relationships difficult.

The study’s findings are published in a recent issue of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

The investigation discovered that certain pharmacies would sell prescription drugs to their wholesalers who then turn around and sell the drugs for another hefty markup. It is not enough that they are making incredible profits on the resale of the drugs, but many of them are medications desperately needed for cancer or surgery patients forcing them to go untreated or have to tolerate more pain than necessary.

It is currently not illegal for pharmacies to sell to distributors at an increased price, but the markup is causing undue expenses for hospitals and additional problems for patients who need the drugs and lawmakers hope that legislation can cause change to help alleviate some of these problems.

These fake pharmacies are driving the prices up and those that need the drugs are at their mercy to either pay the price or go without. Sometimes going without is a terminal decision. Hospitals cannot even obtain the drugs to give patients an option to be treated with the medication.

It is disheartening to know how much these types of pharmacies can really control the costs of prescription drugs. Controlled medications are expensive enough, but adding an unneeded expense with the increased demand should be recognized as a criminal offense. If certain lawmakers have their way, it soon will be. Until then it will be the patients who have to suffer the consequences of greedy people’s actions.

The main purpose of the visit was to meet with candidates for Mexico’s July presidential elections in order to get a feel for the future of relations between the two countries. According to a recent news article, the United States has had an extraordinary relationship and tremendous cooperation with Calderon.

The Calderon administration has been waging a heavy military battle against their drug cartels due to millions of dollars received after the drug related homicides that killed over 47,000 Mexicans from December 2006 to the present after launching their first anti-drug cartel offense plan six years ago.

Calderon is not allowed to run for President again in Mexico so Biden met with other candidates from both parties who are running for office. There is concern that the some parties may have ties with drug traffickers and may want to relent in the battle against these vicious cartels.

Another contender believes both countries need to improve in the fight against such money laundering issues. Earlier in the same visit, Calderon requested that Biden call on Washington to ask for more help to stop the flow of drug money and weapons into Mexico.

Calderon reiterated the urgency of the battle against weapons trafficking and money laundering in his country. Biden assured Calderon that the Obama administration was doing all it could to halt the arms flow by continuing with border checkpoints and requirements that report repeated large weapons sales.

Biden’s trip came after enormous pressure from business and political leaders to continue talks about decriminalizing drugs. He reiterated that legalization is not an option.

Researchers at the School of Medicinal Sciences connected to the University of Adelaide have recently presented study findings which begin to lift some of the cloak of uncertainty. Their study suggests that our immune system is responsible for far more than simply combating flu bugs and the common cold. The brain’s immune system may directly impact how the body responds to alcohol.

The Immune System Responsible For Common Alcohol-Related Behaviors

Scientists have long established alcohol’s influence on the brain’s nerve cells and the central nervous system as a whole. How alcohol actually impacts brain processes is less clear. The University of Adelaide study joins an increasing store of evidence pointing to alcohol’s ability to initiate changes in the brain’s immune system. According to the study, the brain’s immune cells have significant influence over how your body responds to alcohol. The immune response, they say, underlies common alcohol-connected symptoms that have to do with muscular control. In other words, it is the body’s immune system which triggers behaviors like difficulty walking and slurred speech.

The Immune System-Alcohol Study

Researchers in Adelaide used two sets of mice to conduct their study. One set of mice was given drugs which essentially blocked toll-like receptors (known as TLR4) in the brain’s immune system. These drugs are called TLR4 antagonists. Another group of mice were genetically altered so that their TLR4 function was inhibited. Both sets of mice were then given a shot of alcohol and monitored for responses. The team observed the mice’s degree of muscular impairment, their level of sedation, and how long it took them to recover from the effects of alcohol.

Blocking The Brain’s Immune System Can Reduce Symptoms of Alcohol Consumption

What the team discovered was that regardless of whether the mice had received the TLR4 antagonist or had been genetically redesigned to inhibit its function, suppressing the brain’s immune response resulted in a reduced level of impairment from alcohol consumption. When the mice’s immune response was inhibited, the length of intoxication was reduced, the degree of motor impairment was reduced and the mice recovered more quickly from the effects of alcohol overall.

The scientists involved in the study say that although the research involved only mice, they are convinced that similar results would occur in humans. Their research suggests that administering medications which inhibit TLR4 in the immune system could prove beneficial in treating alcohol abuse and perhaps in saving persons with severe alcohol overdoses. The study appears in a 2011 edition of the British Journal of Pharmacology.

According to the FBI, women who received DUI’s in 2010 increased by 36 percent and the men’s numbers decreased 10 percent. The increase may be due to the social acceptance of women drinking more due to increasing social venues or work functions and also the amount of drinking establishments now catering to happy hours for women. Nearly, four in five consumers believe it’s more acceptable in society for women to have a drink now than it was 2 decades ago.

However, women may become drunk faster than men due to higher concentrations of body fat or fluctuations in hormone levels. While amounts vary, typically just one frozen 16 ounce margarita or a couple of cocktails can cause the average woman to reach .08 blood alcohol in just two hours, which is faster than their male counterpart.

Since amounts do vary from person to person, it is imperative to fully understand it might not take as much alcohol as you think to become legally drunk. AAA spokeswoman, Joanna Newton, says going over the legal limit is so easy to do that many don’t realize just how little it takes to reach it. Newton adds that all it takes to be responsible is some simple planning before you go out such as finding a designated driver.

Please practice safe drinking habits and plan for times when you are celebrating so everyone with you and around can make it home safely to family and friends, adds Newton.

The 3 Main Classes of Anger Management Techniques

Anger management techniques come in three basic flavors, if you will: replacements, stress reduction, and distracters. The replacement techniques are the ones people are most familiar with: instead of punching your boss or breaking something valuable, you punch something that won’t break and won’t hurt you (and won’t get you arrested!). Punching a pillow or punching bag, screaming, shredding old phone books, or hitting inert objects such as a bed or chair with a rolled up newspaper are all types of replacement behaviors, where the angry action (to hit or punch or destroy something) is replaced by a benign but similar action.

Stress reduction techniques are designed to calm you down or chill you out. The idea here is that you "self soothe" to radically change your emotional state. Techniques in this category include deep breathing, counting to ten, performing self massage, using yoga postures or breathing exercises to relax, or doing progressive relaxation.

Distracter techniques are designed to shift your attention away form your emotions and focus on something else. Some of these techniques include listening to music, watching TV, or doing something like housework or yard work (pretty much anything!) to distract yourself.

Each of these techniques has some pros and cons. Replacement techniques work well if you are already extremely angry and teetering on the verge of losing control. It can be extremely difficult to do some self soothing or yogic breathing when you are already steaming mad and your adrenaline is pumping. However, using yoga or regular exercise on a daily basis can help prevent you from accelerating from zero to sixty so quickly. And distraction techniques can help when you are angry but not furious and need to just get some time away from the source of your anger to cool off and think things through with a cool head.

Cognitive Techniques

Another approach to anger management involves a course in self study: noticing what you think about and what words you use when you are thinking things that make you angry. If you are like most people, you might bristle at this idea. You might think: other people make me angry. Traffic makes me angry. Injustice makes me angry. But the words I use when I’m thinking? Why should that make me angry?

Start by noticing just how you "narrate" your thoughts when you are starting to get just a little bit angry. For example, notice if you think to yourself in "shoulds": "That shouldn’t have happened. That guy shouldn’t drive like that. He’s a jerk. He’s going to cause an accident. He should be more careful." Or "my best friend shouldn’t go out with that guy. She should know that I liked him first. She should be more loyal to me. After all, we were friends first." Shoulds are phrases or thoughts about what should or should not happen. In general, if you think in these terms, you will get angry. If something should be happening and it isn’t, that is by nature very annoying. But thinking about it in those terms is like pouring gasoline on the fire. It isn’t helping, it’s making it worse.

Maybe you don’t "should" in your thoughts. Maybe you have other thinking habits that increase your likelihood of getting angry. Notice if you tend to think in "all or nothing" terms, such as "I ruined everything when I sent that email. Now I’ll never get a job." All or nothing thinking, also known as black and white thinking can lead to increase stress and tension, because the world always seems worse than it might really be.

The first step is to notice your thoughts. Write them down. Start a journal with two columns: title one "What I thought" and title the other "How I felt." Keep track of thoughts and feelings for a week or so, and notice the correlation: when you think in "shoulds" you are likely to feel angry. When you think in all or nothing phrases, you are likely to feel angry too. When you assign blame and organize your thinking around concepts like blame and overly rigid notions of right and wrong, you may also feel increasingly angry. After about a week of doing this exercise, you probably have gotten the hang of it: thoughts clearly have an impact on emotions, and especially anger.

Now you can get creative. Each time you catch yourself thinking in one of your patterns that tend to make you angrier, stop. Notice what’s happening, and take a long slow deep breath. Remind yourself that you can change what you think. And then do it. Think something different. In traffic, when you see someone driving quickly and erratically, consider alternative explanations as to why that’s happening. Maybe that person has a sick relative in the hospital or maybe they are a doctor on call trying to get to the hospital. Consider alternative explanations and tell yourself alternative stories about things you may have been making assumptions about. Maybe your best friend thought you had gotten over that guy since you did say that last week. Maybe your best friend just wants to be happy, and isn’t that what you want too? There is always room to try thinking about things in a different way, a way that is more neutral, more even-tempered and more generous than the old habitual ways that were making you angry.

Remember, you can change the way you think, and if you do, you will change the way you feel.

A higher number of teenage girls are being taken to the hospital with symptoms of binge drinking than are boys. Nearly 550 girls are ending up in the hospital, due to binge drinking, on a monthly basis compared to 450 boys, reported the Department of Health. And according to the UK’s public health minister, in the first eight months of last year, an estimated 8,000 young adults were treated by physicians for problems relating to alcohol.

The country is currently considering changes to the cost of alcohol in pubs, clubs and shops. This fierce approach to curb binge drinking will cost drinkers about $700 million a year. Who knows if that will stop the tragic statistics that show more than 25-percent of girls, aged 16 to 17, in the UK admitted to drinking to make themselves happy. In 15-year-old girls, the numbers show at least half have been drunk twice which is almost twice the average compared to other developed countries.

UK is a part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This organization, which includes Europe and North America, showed that Britain had the highest percentage of 13-year-old girls to have been intoxicated at least two times in their lives(one in three).

Studies compared past users of injection-type drugs to non-injection users of drugs who use and included the drugs cocaine, heroin and meth. They found that those living in rural areas were the highest users of injection-type drugs. Scott Novak, the lead author of the study, found that drug use by injection users poses much higher problems with abuse than those who do not inject.

Novak states that drug dependence is more prevalent, as well as re-occurring disorders of a mental or physical nature. Unemployment problems were a factor with these types of injectors also. Novak says these people represent a part of the population in need of treatments that are of a specialty-nature, according to research available in Medical News Today. RTI conducted a nationwide poll of about 70,000 adults and youth in the U.S. annually and found that the most preferred means of administration was through injection among this demographic. Those in the rural areas were higher than those in suburban areas and the study showed that injection users were typically over 35 years old, with less than a high school diploma and were unemployed.

Novak found the study confirmed long held beliefs that users who inject their drugs are in fact unique to the drug population with specific needs for treatment, regardless of the drugs they infuse. He hopes to continuing learning more about their means of administering these drugs and the individualities of the users, in order to better tailor treatment programs and strategies to help them.