Prison, treatment

The treatment of acute PCP toxicity depends on the pattern of intoxication and the physical findings. On the prison wards of the LAC/USC Medical Center, approximately 60 percent of patients are treated and released within 24 hours. Most of these patients have minor patterns of intoxication and no medical complications. Another 10 percent of patients have minor problems with medical complications, usually trauma. 

Yes — there were many dangers to the rate of production. Except the foolish and those in great pain, the injured and sick failed to seek medical treatment until they were routed out of bed (or from hiding places if they couldn t work) and ordered to the hospital. It had taken Duke Minskoff a long time to connect the Farben directors with the prisoners reluctance to go to the hospital. He had talked to Dr. Vetter before Vetter was executed for conducting criminal medical experiments, but by that time Dr. Vetter... 

During the early 1960s, Timothy Leary conducted the Concord Prison Experiment to study the psychotherapeutic use of hallucinogenic drugs in prison inmates. Treatment involved administration of psilocybin and group psychotherapy in 32 prisoners. A follow-up study of recidivism in these prisonsers concluded that there was no long-term treatment effect and emphasized the value of postrelease social support (Doblin 1998). 

Fortunately, new treatments have greatly improved the plight of the patient with schizophrenia. Thanks in large part to the introduction of newer antipsychotic medications, few patients with this disease spend their lives in long-term psychiatric hospitals anymore. However, we have a long way to go. Individuals with schizophrenia are currently a sizeable proportion of both the homeless population and the prison population in the United States. Even with the great advances in schizophrenia treatment in the last 50 years, this illness still takes a tremendous toll on the lives of its sufferers and their families. 

As noted in Section II of this report, people serving time in prison — especially for drug offenses — would appear to be prime candidates for coercive pharmacotherapy. Prisoners are politically weak and generally regarded unsympathetically by the general populace. Further, prisoners appear to be one of the express targets for compassionate coercion, which uses the criminal justice system to get people into treatment. " ... 

Although prisoners do not enjoy the same rights as nonincarcerated Americans, prisoners retain their right to give informed consent before being the subject of a medical procedure or treatment. Thus, unless a court has determined that a prisoner is mentally incompetent, the informed consent requirements discussed in the previous section retain their validity within the prison context. 

A prisoner can be compelled to take psychiatric medication in only two circumstances. First if he suffers from a serious mental illness that renders him mentally incompetent to make his own medical decisions, prison medical authorities are permitted to forcibly treat the prisoner, so long as the treatment is in the best interests of the prisoner and complies with due process. Second, a prisoner whose mental illness leads him or her to engage in dangerous behavior that threatens to harm other prisoners or prison staff, may be forcibly treated with psychotropic medication.This ruling is based on the unique safety and security issues within prisons. 

O ur own use of prisoners, the institutionalized retarded, and the mentally ill to test malaria treatments during World War II was generally hailed as positive, making the war everyone s war. Likewise, in the late 1940 s and early 1950 s, the testing of new polio vaccines on institutionalized mentally retarded children was considered appropriate. Utilitarianism was the ethic of the day. ... 

Many of the serious effects on these prisoners were caused or exacerbated by a delay in treatment. It is likely that the initial spraying would have produced serious casualties even if they had not been kept in wet clothes impregnated with CN. The immediate effects... 

Drug treatment programs are proven to work. In one specific example, a therapeutic approach to treating people arrested for drug-related offenses involved community based care following prison release and reduced the probability of rearrest by 57 percent. 

When Hannah first got to the Survivors Treatment Clinic, it was like prison. She swore that she d rather die than be at this place with these people. What business did the judge have in sending her here There were crackheads here, junkies, people who looked like absolute hell. It was insane. 

It is known, however, that drugs are readily available in many prisons, and the rate of adverse incidents and the time and effort spent in detecting smuggling of drugs in has been enough to persuade some authorities that at least the basics of treatment should be available. The most routine option has become to provide a detoxification for opiate misusers, with for instance lofexidine or dihydrocodeine, and also benzodiazepines will often be issued if there is a history of abuse of these and it is intended to avoid the possibility of fits with a short withdrawal course. The adverse incidents in custody and prisons have included some deaths in users of crack cocaine, with physical explanations postulated but no very satisfactory treatment for cocaine withdrawal indicated. Prison services have typically been wary of methadone, and in favouring lofexidine use it was encouraging that a randomized double-blind trial carried out by prison specialists found lofexidine to be as effective as methadone in relief of withdrawal symptoms (Howells et al. 2002). 

One of the studies of the greatly increased death rate of recently released addict prisoners (Farrell Marsden 2008) had as a conclusion that there must be planned referral to community-based treatment services . Coming full circle, in our main service we offer first-day appointments for released prisoners from our area to continue their substitution treatment, or naltrexone in cases where that has already been selected by a user and started. 

Lithuania ARQ 2005 80.3% 0.1% 2.5%. 0.2% 0.5% 1.5% 3.1% 3,301 Centres providing medical treatment to addicts. Exd psycho-social services offered to drua users prison medical units... 

Romania ARQ 2004/05 54.2% 0.4% 0.2% 0.9% 2.6% - 23.2% 1,364 Centres providing medical treatment to addicts Excl. psycho-social services offered to drug users prison medical units, solvents 2004. 

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