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Their findings are available online in the journal  Drug and Alcohol Dependence . "Medical education needs to catch up to marijuana legislation," said senior author Laura Jean Bierut, MD, the Alumni Endowed Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University and a member of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse. "Physicians in training need to know the benefits and drawbacks associated with medical marijuana so they know when or if, and to whom, to prescribe the drug." Doctors are being asked to guide patients through areas in which most have no training, she explained. The research team, led by first author Anastasia B. Evanoff, sent surveys to medical school curriculum deans at 172 medical schools in North America, including 31 that specialize in osteopathic medicine, and received 101 replies. Two-thirds (66.7 percent) reported that their graduates were not prepared to prescribe medical marijuana. A quarter of deans said their trainees weren't eve...

In laboratory studies using mice, researchers have been able to switch off the impulse to drink alcohol by giving mice a drug that blocks a specific response from the immune system in the brain. Now published in the journal  Brain, Behavior and Immunity , this research is one of the first of its kind to show a link between the brain's immunity and the motivation to drink alcohol at night. "Alcohol is the world's most commonly consumed drug, and there is a greater need than ever to understand the biological mechanisms that drive our need to drink alcohol," says lead author Jon Jacobsen, PhD student in the University of Adelaide's Discipline of Pharmacology. "Our body's circadian rhythms affect the 'reward' signals we receive in the brain from drug-related behavior, and the peak time for this reward typically occurs during the evening, or dark phase. We wanted to test what the role of the brain's immune system might have on that reward,...