CPR Turns 50
1960 was a groovy year for some. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was seeping into the U.S. national consciousness because of Dr. Timothy Leary, who had joined the Harvard faculty in 1959. But 1960 should be recognized as the year CPR -- cardiopulmonary resuscitation -- was invented, according to the American Heart Association, which has promised to celebrate CPR throughout 2010 by telling the stories of people saved by the procedure.
2010 will also see the introduction of updated CPR guidelines from AHA. ECCU2010, a conference taking place Dec. 8-11, 2010, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, will give the emergency medical community the chance to discuss the new elements in these guidelines and prepare to train others on them.
You might think LSD has disappeared, but it's still around. The Drug Enforcement Administration proposed Wednesday to control all transactions of chemical mixtures containing any quantity of the LSD precursor ergocristine, which is "readily available" from at least three commercial chemical suppliers, one located in the United States and the other two located in Germany and the Czech Republic, according to the proposal, which was published in the Federal Register. And while seizures of LSD fell dramatically in 2002 after a large lab was seized in 2000 near Wamego, Kansas -- the largest clandestine LSD lab ever seized by DEA, yielding 90.6 pounds of the hallucinogenic drug, according to the proposal -- the numbers rose in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.
Once the proposal is finalized, ergocristine will be regulated just as two other LSD precursors, ergotamine and ergonovine, are. LSD itself is in schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.
Posted by Jerry Laws on Feb 25, 2010