'Don't do drugs!' Man with half a head explains how he got bizarre injury after crashing car while stoned

·         Carlos 'Halfy' Rodriguez lost a large portion of his brain and skull after flying through his car's windscreen and landing on his head

·         Speaking out for the first time, many thought that his appearance was fake - until now

·         'That is why it is not good drinking and driving, or drugs and driving. It is no good kids,' he warns.

·         But despite his anti-drugs stance it appears he still continues to smoke cannabis every day

By Martin Robinson

Last updated at 12:41 PM on 17th February 2012

A bad boy who was left with half a head following a dramatic accident has spoken out for the first time - blaming his astonishing appearance on a drink and drugs binge.

Carlos 'Halfy' Rodriguez, who also goes by the name Sosa, lost a large portion of his brain and skull in a crash after flying through his car's windscreen and landing head-first on the road.

In a new video he has used his appearance and story to warn others not to drink and take drugs.

Doctors were forced to cut away large amounts of flesh and bone to help him survive and he has since been able to continue his life in Miami, Florida.

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

Incredible: From side on the damage caused by his crash is obvious

Both sides: 'Halfy' as he is now known, shows his skull to camera in this new video

Warning: Carlos admits that he was on drink and drugs while driving and warns others not to do the same

From the front: Carlos speaks to camera for the first time and from this angle the damage to his head is not clear

'I was barred out on drugs. I was driving and I hit a pole and flew out the front window and landed on my head,' he said in a new warning message on You Tube.

Showing his head to camera he added: 'And this is how the old boy has come out. That is why it is not good drinking and driving or drugness (sic) and driving. It is no good kids.'

According to the German tabloid Bild he had the accident aged 14.

'I was with a cousin and a friend stole the car, there was a near-fatal car accident. As the speed was too fast we lost control of the car and crashed,' he said.

Mr Rodriguez shot to fame two years ago after he was was arrested for allegedly soliciting prostitution.

Miami Police had problems with their paperwork and his forms contained no name and simply the description 'half a head'.  

Infamous: Police released these mind-bending mugshots 18 months ago, and many believed them fake

His mugshots, showing his missing forehead and battered skull, spread across the world online but many thought that it was a hoax.

However this new video has proved that he and his extreme injuries exist.

Bad boy: 'Halfy' still smokes drugs, despite his warning to others

But despite his serious message to stay away from narcotics, it appears that he is yet to change his ways after admitting he still smokes a lot of drugs.

Survivor: British teenager Ben Maycock was lucky to be alive after a brutal hammer attack left him a huge dent in his skull

In a bizarre tirade he also accuses American President Barrack Obama of doing the same.

'This is what I do daily: burn a stake,' which is slang for a joint.

'Obama is the President of ya'll United States and he smokes. (Expletive) has the whole White House growing.

'Then why can't I smoke me a blunt?'.

'Halfy' is not the only person to survive with half a head, as several other Britons have done the same.

Teenager Ben Maycock was lucky to be alive after a brutal hammer attack left him a huge dent in his skull in 2010.

The vicious assault left Ben's head shattered - and doctors had to hack away huge chunks in a battle to save his life.

Medics at Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham, doubted Ben would survive his horrific injuries, and told his grief-stricken mum to prepare for the worst, but incredibly, he survived.

Video at the website
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102461/Man-half-head-Carlos-Halfy-Rodriguez-explains-got-bizarre-injury.html#ixzz1msTTvNo0

Scientists find anticonvulsant drug helps marijuana smokers kick the habit

April 24th, 2012 in Addiction 

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have found clinical evidence that the drug gabapentin, currently on the market to treat neuropathic pain and epilepsy, helps people to quit smoking marijuana (cannabis). Unlike traditional addiction treatments, gabapentin targets stress systems in the brain that are activated by drug withdrawal.

In a 12-week trial of 50 treatment-seeking cannabis users, those who took gabapentin used less cannabis, experienced fewer withdrawal symptoms such as sleeplessness, and scored higher on tests of attention, impulse-control, and other cognitive skills, compared to patients who received a placebo. If these results are confirmed by ongoing larger trials, gabapentin could become the first FDA-approved pharmaceutical treatment for cannabis dependence. "A lot of other drugs have been tested for their ability to decrease cannabis use and withdrawal, but this is the first to show these key effects in a controlled treatment study," said Barbara J. Mason, the Pearson Family Chair and Co-Director of the Pearson Center for Alcoholism and Addiction Research at Scripps Research. "The other nice thing about gabapentin is that it is already widely prescribed, so its safety is less likely to be an issue." Mason led the new gabapentin study, recently published online ahead of print by the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Stress Circuits

Addiction researchers have long known that recreational drugs hook users by disrupting the normal tuning of their brains' reward and motivation circuitry. But as scientists at Scripps Research and other institutions have shown in animal studies, cannabis withdrawal after prolonged heavy use also leads to the long-term activation of basic stress circuits. "In human cannabis users who try to quit, this stress response is reflected in reports of drug craving, sleep disturbances, anxiety, irritability, and dysphoria, any one of which can motivate a person to return to using, because cannabis will quiet these symptoms," said Mason.

A 2008 study by Pearson Center Co-Director George Koob and his colleagues found that gabapentin, an FDA-approved anticonvulsant drug that resembles the neurotransmitter GABA, can quiet this withdrawal-related activation in stress circuitry in alcohol-dependent rats. That finding motivated Mason to set up a pilot trial of gabapentin in cannabis-dependent individuals, whose withdrawal syndrome features a similar over-activation of stress circuits. She and her colleagues recruited cannabis users with local newspaper and web ads headlined: "Smoking too much pot? We want to help you stop." "We needed only 50 subjects, but we quickly got more than 700 queries from cannabis users who were eager to quit," Mason said. "Some people deny that cannabis can be addictive, but surveys show that between 16 and 25 percent of substance use treatment admissions around the world every year involve people with primary cannabis dependence."

Twice as Many Abstinent from Cannabis Use

The trial was based at Mason's laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute. Half of the 50 recruits were randomly assigned to take 1,200 mg/day of gabapentin; the rest were given identical-looking placebo capsules. Over 12 weeks, Mason and her colleagues, including a medical team from the nearby Scripps Clinic, monitored the subjects with tests. Using standard behavioral therapy techniques, they also counseled the patients to stay off cannabis. The subjects' self-reports and more objective urine tests revealed that gabapentin, compared to placebo, significantly reduced their continuing cannabis use. "Urine metabolite readings indicate about twice as many of the gabapentin subjects had no new cannabis use during the entire study, and, in the last four weeks of the study, all of the gabapentin subjects who completed the study stayed abstinent," Mason said. Gabapentin also clearly reduced the reported symptoms of withdrawal such as sleep disturbances, drug cravings, and dysphoria. And even though gabapentin normally is thought of as a brain-quieting drug that can cause sleepiness as a side effect, there was some evidence that it sharpened cognition among the cannabis users. Seven gabapentin and ten placebo patients sat for tests of attention, impulse-control, and other executive functions just before the start of the trial and at week four. While the placebo patients tended to score lower after four weeks of attempted abstinence, the gabapentin patients generally scored higher.

Help Resisting Cravings

Addiction researchers now recognize that one of the effects of repeated drug use is the weakening of executive functions—which can happen through the over-activation of reward circuitry as well as by withdrawal-related stress. "That weakening of self-control-related circuits makes it even harder for people to resist drug cravings when they're trying to quit, but gabapentin may help restore those circuits, by reducing stress and enabling patients to sleep better, so that they function better while awake," Mason said. She is now conducting a larger, confirmatory study of gabapentin in cannabis users, as well as a new study of a novel drug that targets the same stress circuitry. "People in the treatment community have told me that they're eager for these trial results to come out, because until now nothing has been shown to work against both relapse and withdrawal symptoms," Mason said. More information: "A Proof-of-Concept Randomized Controlled Study of Gabapentin: Effects on Cannabis Use, Withdrawal and Executive Function Deficits in Cannabis-Dependent Adults", Neuropsychopharmacology.

Provided by The Scripps Research Institute "Scientists find anticonvulsant drug helps marijuana smokers kick the habit." April 24th, 

2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-scientists-anticonvulsant-drug-marijuana-smokers.html

Study shows how cannabis use during adolescence affects brain regions associated with schizophrenia - May 8th, 2012 in Neuroscience

New research from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) published in Nature's Neuropsychopharmacology has shown physical changes to exist in specific brain areas implicated in schizophrenia following the use of cannabis during adolescence. The research has shown how cannabis use during adolescence can interact with a gene, called the COMT gene, to cause physical changes in the brain.

The COMT gene provides instructions for making enzymes which breakdown a specific chemical messenger called dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps conduct signals from one nerve cell to another, particularly in the brains reward and pleasure centres. Adolescent cannabis use and its interaction with particular forms of the COMT gene have been shown to cause physical changes in the brain as well as increasing the risk of developing schizophrenia.

Dr Áine Behan, Department of Physiology, RCSI and lead author on the study said 'This is the first study to show that the combined effects of the COMT gene with adolescent cannabis use cause physical changes in the brain regions associated with schizophrenia. It demonstrates how genetic, developmental and environmental factors interact to modulate brain function in schizophrenia and supports previous behavioural research which has shown the COMT gene to influence the effects of adolescent cannabis use on schizophrenia-related behaviour's.

The three areas of the brain assessed in this study were found to show changes in cell size, density and protein levels.

'Increased knowledge on the effects of cannabis on the brain is critical to understanding youth mental health both in terms of psychological and psychiatric well-being,' Dr Behan continued.

The research was funded by the Health Research Board and Science Foundation Ireland.

Provided by Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland

"Study shows how cannabis use during adolescence affects brain regions associated with schizophrenia." May 8th, 2012. 
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Study: Adolescent marijuana use leaves lasting mental deficits

August 27th, 2012 in Psychology & Psychiatry 

The persistent, dependent use of marijuana before age 18 has been shown to cause lasting harm to a person's intelligence, attention and memory, according to an international research team.

Among a long-range study cohort of more than 1,000 New Zealanders, individuals who started using cannabis in adolescence and used it for years afterward showed an average decline in IQ of 8 points when their age 13 and age 38 IQ tests were compared. Quitting pot did not appear to reverse the loss either, said lead researcher Madeline Meier, a post-doctoral researcher at Duke University. The results appear online Aug. 27 in PNAS. The key variable in this is the age of onset for marijuana use and the brain's development, Meier said. Study subjects who didn't take up pot until they were adults with fully-formed brains did not show similar mental declines. Before age 18, however, the brain is still being organized and remodeled to become more efficient, she said, and may be more vulnerable to damage from drugs.

"Marijuana is not harmless, particularly for adolescents," said Meier, who produced this finding from the long term Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. The study has followed a group of 1,037 children born in 1972-73 in Dunedin, New Zealand from birth to age 38 and is led by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, psychologists who hold dual appointments at Duke and the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. About 5 percent of the study group were considered marijuana-dependent, or were using more than once a week before age 18. A dependent user is one who keeps using despite significant health, social or family problems.

At age 38, all of the study participants were given a battery of psychological tests to assess memory, processing speed, reasoning and visual processing. The people who used pot persistently as teens scored significantly worse on most of the tests. Friends and relatives routinely interviewed as part of the study were more likely to report that the persistent cannabis users had attention and memory problems such as losing focus and forgetting to do tasks. The decline in IQ among persistent cannabis users could not be explained by alcohol or other drug use or by having less education, Moffitt said.

While 8 IQ points may not sound like a lot on a scale where 100 is the mean, a loss from an IQ of 100 to 92 represents a drop from being in the 50th percentile to being in the 29th, Meier said. Higher IQ correlates with higher education and income, better health and a longer life, she said. "Somebody who loses 8 IQ points as an adolescent may be disadvantaged compared to their same-age peers for years to come," Meier said.

Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychologist who was not involved in the research, said this study is among the first to distinguish between cognitive problems the person might have had before taking up marijuana, and those that were apparently caused by the drug. This is consistent with what has been found in animal studies, Steinberg added, but it has been difficult to measure in humans.

Animal studies involving nicotine, alcohol and cocaine have shown that chronic exposures before the brain is fully developed can lead to more dependence and long-term changes in the brain. "This study points to adolescence as a time of heightened vulnerability," Steinberg said. "The findings are pretty clear that it is not simply chronic use that causes deficits, but chronic use with adolescent onset."

What isn't possible to know from this study is what a safer age for persistent use might be, or what dosage level causes the damage, Meier said. After many years of decline among US teens, daily marijuana use has been seen to increase slightly in the last few years, she added. Last year, for the first time, US teens were more likely to be smoking pot than tobacco. "The simple message is that substance use is not healthy for kids," Avshalom Caspi said via email from London. "That's true for tobacco, alcohol, and apparently for cannabis."

More information: "Persistent Cannabis Users Show Neuropsychological Decline From Childhood to Midlife," Madeline H. Meier, Avshalom Caspi, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Online Early Edition, Monday, Aug. 27, 2012.

Provided by Duke University

"Study: Adolescent marijuana use leaves lasting mental deficits." August 27th, 2012. 
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Heavy teenage cannabis use linked with anxiety disorders

August 8th, 2012 in Addiction 

(Medical Xpress) -- Teenagers who smoke cannabis weekly or more are twice as likely as non-users to have an anxiety disorder in their late 20s, even if they stop using, a study of 2000 Victorian teenagers has found.

Those who used frequently in their teens and continued to use on a daily basis at the age of 29 were three times as likely to have an anxiety disorder compared with non- or infrequent users. Those who used minimally in their teens but became daily users in their late 20s were two and a half times as likely to have an anxiety disorder.

But the really striking finding say the authors is the persistent association between frequent teenage cannabis use and adult anxiety disorders up to a decade after cannabis use has ceased.

The relationship between cannabis use and anxiety disorders was present even after the researchers took into account other possible explanations such as mental health problems in their teens or other drug use in their twenties.

The findings, published online in Addiction are based on secondary analyses of a landmark study of nearly 2000 Victorian secondary school students - the 2000 stories cohort, led by Professor George Patton of the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne. The students have been followed up and interviewed over 13 years, starting in 1992. They were interviewed at six six-monthly intervals during their teens and then again when they were aged 20-21, 24-25, and 29. Lead author of the analysis, Professor Louisa Degenhardt from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, said that most studies looking at cannabis use and mental health outcomes focus on adolescence and early adulthood. “What we are seeing is a persistent association with anxiety disorders over a much longer period.

“Given that anxiety is the most prevalent mental health disorder in the Australian population, affecting over 14 per cent of adults in any 12 month period, we need to investigate the findings further because it is highly possible that early cannabis use causes enduring mental health risks.”

Professor Patton, lead investigator of the 2000 stories cohort, said that the findings could be explained by lasting changes to brain function caused by introducing cannabis at a time when the brain is developing rapidly. Equally it could be that the very factors which predispose people to use cannabis early also predispose them to common mental health problems.

“We know from animal studies that introducing cannabis during puberty brings about long lasting changes in behaviour which persist even after administration of cannabis is stopped. These findings suggest that a similar thing may be happening,” said Professor Patton.  “During the teen years the parts of the brain that are involved in managing emotions are still developing rapidly and it is highly possible that heavy cannabis use at this sensitive point could have long lasting effects.”

However the authors write that they cannot rule out the possibility that the factors that predispose people to use cannabis early also put them at risk for common mental disorders.  “These common factors might include biological, personality, social and environmental factors, or a combination of these factors. This is a plausible hypothesis because social disadvantage is more common among persons who are problematic substance users and who meet criteria for common mental disorders,” they write.

More information: onlinelibrary.wile… .04015.x/pdf

Provided by University of New South Wales

"Heavy teenage cannabis use linked with anxiety disorders." August 8th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-heavy-teenage-cannabis-linked-anxiety.html

Cannabis use mimics cognitive weakness that can lead to schizophrenia

November 2nd, 2012 in Psychology & Psychiatry 

Researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway have found new support for their theory that cannabis use causes a temporary cognitive breakdown in non-psychotic individuals, leading to long-term psychosis. In an fMRI study published this week in Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers found a different brain activity pattern in schizophrenia patients with previous cannabis use than in schizophrenic patients without prior cannabis use.

The results reinforce the researchers' model where cannabis users suffering from schizophrenia actually may have higher cognitive abilities than non-cannabis using schizophrenics. This difference may indicate that the cannabis-user group did not have the same mental propensity for psychosis.

"While brain activity for both groups was similar, there are subtle differences between schizophrenia sufferers with a history of cannabis use and those who have never used cannabis. These differences lead us to believe that the cognitive weakness leading to schizophrenia is imitated by the effects of cannabis in otherwise non-psychotic people," explains Else-Marie Loeberg, lead author on the article and associate professor of Psychology at the University of Bergen, Norway.

The 26 patients involved in the study attempted difficult cognitive tasks while in the fMRI machine. They were asked to listen to different syllables in each ear and try to say which syllable was spoken when instructed to concentrate on either the left or right ear—a difficult task for anyone but particularly difficult for schizophrenia patients who often have impaired attention, limited executive functioning and difficulty in processing verbal cues.

The study shows that schizophrenia sufferers with previous cannabis use had consistently higher levels of brain activity while undergoing these tests as well as a higher number of correct answers. These results are in line with previous conclusions from the Bergen researchers who support the idea that cannabis users with schizophrenic characteristics do not appear to suffer from the same neuro-cognitive weaknesses as other patients with schizophrenia.

This implies that it is the cannabis use itself that leads otherwise non-psychotic individuals down the nightmarish path towards schizophrenia by imitating the cognitive weakness that is the main risk factor for developing the psychological condition.

More information: An fMRI study of neuronal activation in schizophrenia patients with and without previous cannabis use. Authors: Loeberg Else-Marie, Nygard Merethe, Helle Siri, Berle Jan ÿystein, Johnsen Erik, Kroken Rune, Jørgensen Hugo, Hugdahl Kenneth. Frontiers in Psychiatry, www.frontiersin.or… t.2012.00094

Provided by Frontiers

"Cannabis use mimics cognitive weakness that can lead to schizophrenia." November 2nd, 2012. 
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 By Andrew M. Seaman | Reuters – 19 hrs ago

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - 

Marijuana (cannabis) use may be linked to the development of psychotic symptoms in teens - but the reverse could also be true: psychosis in adolescents may be linked to later pot use, according to a new Dutch study.

 "We have focused mainly on temporal order; is it the chicken or the egg? As the study shows, it is a bidirectional relationship," wrote the study's lead author Merel Griffith-Lendering, a doctoral candidate at Leiden University in The Netherlands, in an email to Reuters Health.

Previous research established links between marijuana and psychosis, but scientists questioned whether pot use increased the risk of mental illness, or whether people were using pot to ease their psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions.

"What is interesting in this study is that both processes are going on at the same time," said Dr. Gregory Seeger, medical director for addiction services at Rochester General Hospital in upstate New York.

He told Reuters Health that researchers have been especially concerned about what tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active property in pot, could do to a teenager's growing brain.

"That's a very vulnerable period of time for brain development," and individuals with a family history of schizophrenia and psychosis seem to be more sensitive to the toxic effects of THC, he said.

 A 2010 study of 3,800 Australian teenagers found that those who used marijuana were twice as likely to develop psychosis compared to teens who never smoked pot (see Reuters Health article of March 1, 2010 here:).

But that study also found that those who suffered from hallucinations and delusions when they were younger were also more likely to use pot early on.

CHICKEN v. EGG

For the new study, published in the journal Addiction, the researchers wanted to see which came first: pot or psychosis.

Griffith-Lendering and her colleagues used information on 2,120 Dutch teenagers, who were surveyed about their pot use when they were about 14, 16 and 19 years old.

 The teens also took psychosis vulnerability tests that asked - among other things - about their ability to concentrate, their feelings of loneliness and whether they see things other people don't.

Overall, the researchers found 940 teens, or about 44 percent, reported smoking pot, and there was a bidirectional link between pot use and psychosis.  For example, using pot at 16 years old was linked to psychotic symptoms three years later, and psychotic symptoms at age 16 were linked to pot use at age 19.

This was true even when the researchers accounted for mental illness in the kids' families, alcohol use and tobacco use.Griffith-Lendering said she could not say how much more likely young pot users were to exhibit psychotic symptoms later on.

Also, the new study cannot prove one causes the other. Genetics may also explain the link between pot use and psychosis, said Griffith-Lendering.

 "We can say for some people that cannabis comes first and psychosis comes second, but for some people they have some (undiagnosed) psychosis (and) perhaps cannabis makes them feel better," said Dr. Marta Di Forti, of King's College, London, who was not involved with the new research.

 Di Forti, who has studied the link between pot and psychosis, told Reuters Health she considers pot a risk factor for psychosis - not a cause.

Seeger, who was also not involved with the new study, said that there needs to be more public awareness of the connection.

 "I think the marijuana is not a harmless substance. Especially for teenagers, there should be more of a public health message out there that marijuana has a public health risk," he said.

Griffith-Lendering agrees. "Given the severity and impact of psychotic disorders, prevention programs should take this information into consideration," she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Rr63N8 Addiction, online December 7, 2012.