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SPIRITSCOPE
AUGUST 2017
conjunction with psychotherapy, could help patients overcome addiction more effectively than conventional treatments. Ben Sessa, a clinical psychiatrist on the trial and senior research fellow at Imperial College London said: “We know that MDMA works really well in helping people who have suffered trauma and it helps to build empathy. Many of my patients who are alcoholics have suffered some sort of trauma in their past and this plays a role in their addiction.”
Twenty patients, recruited through the recreational drug and alcohol services in Bristol, will be given the drug in capsule form during two supervised treatment sessions. The participants will be heavy drinkers - typically consuming the equivalent of five bottles of wine a day - who have relapsed into alcoholism repeatedly after trying other forms of treatment.
“After 100 years of modern psychiatry our treatments are really poor,” said Sessa, speaking at the Breaking Convention conference in London. “The chances of relapse for these patients are really high - 90% at three years. No one has ever given MDMA to treat alcoholism before.”
Sessa said a misconception is that the treatment is “all about the drug”. “It’s using drugs to enhance the relationship between the therapist and the patient, and it allows us to dig down and get to the heart of the problems that drive long-term mental illness,” he said.
LOST ... The nation’s retailers lost nearly $50 billion in 2016 due to shoplifting, organized crime, internal theft and other types of inventory shrink.
Inventory shrink totaled $48.9 billion in 2016, up from $45.2 billion the year before, as budget constraints left retail security budgets flat or declining, according to the annual National Retail Security Survey by the National Retail Federation and the University of Florida. The thefts amounted to 1.44% of sales, up from1.38%.
Shoplifting and organized retail crime accounted for 36.5% of shrink, followed by employee theft/ internal (30%), administrative paperwork error (21.3%) and vendor fraud or error (5.4%).
THE ANSWER?... Friends and enemies of alcohol have long wished for a truly definitive answer (or two) about the health effects of moderate drinking, especially regarding the heart. Is alcohol REALLY good for you? Are benefits outweighed by risks? A seemingly endless assortment of small and medium size studies seems to tip the evidence scale first one way and then the next. Now the National Institutes of Health is starting a $100 million clinical trial to test for the first time whether a drink a day really does prevent heart attacks. And guess who is picking up most of the tab?
Five of the world’s largest alcohol beverage manufacturers have so
far pledged $67.7 million to a foundation that raises money for the National Institutes of Health, said Margaret Murray, the director of the Global Alcohol Research Program at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which will oversee the study. All the companies insist they will have no influence over the study, which will involve nearly 8,000 volunteers age 50 or older at 16 sites around the world, starting at medical centers in the United States, Europe, Africa and South America. Participants will be randomly assigned to quit alcohol altogether or to drink a single alcoholic beverage of their choice every day. The trial will follow them for six years to see which group - the moderate drinkers or the abstainers - has more heart attacks, strokes and deaths. The study organizers conceded that it would be a challenge to recruit volunteers, who will not know in advance whether they will be assigned to abstain or be required to drink. Those in the drinking group will be partly reimbursed for the cost of the alcohol. It is not clear how anyone can police 8,000 people for 6 years to be sure they don’t drink too much or too little. But hopefully the experts will figure that out! Stay tuned! ■
Duncan H. Cameron has been writing for and about the spirits industry since 1971. Send questions or comments to 4211 Oakhill Road, Fredericksburg, VA 22408.
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AUGUST 2017 HAWAII BEVERAGE GUIDE A-11