Today I was going to blog this paper, which says that you can predict which kids will grow up and be criminals by measuring their Pavlovian fear conditioning at age 8. In Mauritius. But The Last Psychiatristalready said everything I was going to.
Luckily, there's another article in the American Journal of Psychiatry about crime in a tropical country for me to write about - Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Vigabatrin for the Treatment of Cocaine Dependence in Mexican Parolees.
The study found that a drug called vigabatrin helped Mexican cocaine users to stay clean. The addicts were all on parole from jail. They "were poor and unemployed or underemployed, and none had permanent telephone numbers", had a mean age of 30, and had been using cocaine, including crack, for 9 years on average. A difficult population, then.
They were given either vigabatrin, or placebo, every morning for 7 weeks, ...
