Does Disconnected Modern Life Trigger Drug Addiction?

We tend to think of drugs like heroin as the cause of broken communities. But what if it's the other way around? What if bad communities, disconnected lives, and a lack of fulfillment are what drive people to addiction?

That would lead to another set of strange ideas. Think of all the money we currently spent on enforcing drug laws - police, prison, the Coast Guard, and military operations. What if we spent it instead on building stronger communities - better health care, improved transit, and public works projects?

More Evidence of Air Pollution's Impact on Health, This Time Our Brains

New research links air pollution from fossil fuels like coal and oil - particularly from diesel engines - to dementia, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, as Aaron Reuben reports for Mother Jones:

Controlling for things like ethnicity, gender, income, education, and other possible environmental exposures (including cigarette smoke), elderly individuals living in areas with polluted air appear to lose their mental abilities faster, show more predementia symptoms (also known as mild cognitive impairment), and develop Alzheimer's disease at greater rates. Six years ago, researchers in Germany assessed the cognitive abilities of 399 elderly women who lived in the same place for more than 20 years. Regardless of her socioeconomic status, the closer a woman lived to a busy road, the authors reported, the greater the chance that she would have mild cognitive impairment.

Four years ago, researchers from Harvard linked estimates of higher daily exposure to black carbon, a solid type of fine particulate matter, to lower cognitive ability in older men in Boston. In a larger, national study tracking the mental status of more than 19,000 retired nurses over several years, researchers connected the rate of mental decline in women 70 and older to their exposure to coarse- and fine-particle pollution and found that those exposed to more particles lost their mental abilities at a faster rate. In a group of 95,690 elderly Taiwanese, researchers this year found that a slight increase in fine-particle exposure over 10 years led to a 138 percent increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. A smaller, more recent study published in the Annals of Neurology followed 1,403 elderly women without dementia. Scientists found that exposure to air pollution over time to led to a major decrease in the subjects' white matter, a part of the brain essential for cognition. [...]

And there is growing evidence that particle pollution's assault on the mind is not limited to elderly brains. Researchers in Mexico City, which still has some of the worst urban air on the planet, have found signs of advanced brain damage in children as young as six and seven years old: overactive immune cells, degraded white matter, and damaged vasculature typically seen only in older brains. In one autopsy study comparing children raised in Mexico City with their counterparts in less polluted parts of the country, half the Mexico City children had notable aggregations of a protein called amyloid beta—which is strongly associated with Alzheimer's—grouped in clumps across their brains. In the children from less polluted areas, there were none.

If all costs remained the same, and global warming were not occuring, it would still be worth it strictly from a public health perspective to end our use of fossil fuels. From lead damaging our children's brains to air pollution's link to autism to mercury's link to ADHD, the toll of coal and oil pollution is incalculably immense.

But the climate crisis is already well underway and the costs of inaction are staggering, which makes the decision a complete slam dunk. That our elected officials aren't moving us away from polluting energy as quickly as possible shows that there are truly enormous amounts of money to be made from keeping us hooked on fossil fuels and maintaining our energy status quo.

Journalists Are Only Against Some Cancer

Countless "objective" journalists advocate for mammograms to stop breast cancer.

Katie Couric advocates for colonoscopies to stop colon cancer.

Air pollution from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil definitively & scientifically causes lung cancer. Where are the journalists advocating for Environmental Protection Agency limits on air pollution?

Why are the first two OK, but not the third? Or is advocacy for stopping cancer only OK if there's no big money starting the cancer?

UPDATE: A Facebook commenter points out that media's unwritten rules sometimes allow an advocacy exception when the journalist is personally affected, i.e. Megyn Kelly suddenly caring about maternity leave.

How Coal Power is Making Us Sick

Learn more in this new report from the Health and Environment Alliance.

Cutting Lead Exposure Even More Beneficial to Kids Than We Thought

As fears of childhood lead poisoning swept Boston in the 1980s, The Green Miles distinctly remembers being dragged to the doctor by The Green Mom to have his blood tested for lead poisoning, despite my protestations that no kid so wicked smahht could've been impaired by lead.

Now Slate's Matt Yglesias flags new research adding to the growing mountain of evidence that those fears about lead exposure were not only justified, but understated. The research by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes published in the National Bureau of Economic Research finds cutting lead exposure has made Massachusetts children measurably smarter:

Childhood exposure to even low levels of lead can adversely affect neurodevelopment, behavior, and cognitive performance. This paper investigates the link between lead exposure and student achievement in Massachusetts. Panel data analysis is conducted at the school-cohort level for children born between 1991 and 2000 and attending 3rd and 4th grades between 2000 and 2009 at more than 1,000 public elementary schools in the state. Massachusetts is well-suited for this analysis both because it has been a leader in the reduction of childhood lead levels and also because it has mandated standardized achievement tests in public elementary schools for almost two decades. The paper finds that elevated levels of blood lead in early childhood adversely impact standardized test performance, even when controlling for community and school characteristics. The results imply that public health policy that reduced childhood lead levels in the 1990s was responsible for modest but statistically significant improvements in test performance in the 2000s, lowering the share of children scoring unsatisfactory on standardized tests by 1 to 2 percentage points. Public health policy targeting lead thus has clear potential to improve academic performance, with particular promise for children in low income communities.

When we talk about environmental regulations, the public debate centers almost entirely on cost - higher taxes, higher prices, etc. But as David Roberts has detailed, limits on lead have had massively higher benefits than anyone predicted.

It's a lesson worth remembering whenever industries or their allies scream bloody murder about efforts to limit pollutants like mercury, carbon - or even, after all these years and all this research about the massive return on investment, lead.

Don't Be a Menace While Drinking Your Juice

Regular readers of The Green Miles know I'm not big on pushing lifestyle changes - I mostly stick to things that make it greener, more fun, lower energy-consumptive & less stuff-intensive to do the things you already do. Switch to wind power, eat local organic meat, drive a Prius, give Christmas cookies instead of sweaters, etc. But given that my experiment with green deodorant remains one of my all-time most popular posts, I know there's a great thirst out there for tales of trying out more radical change.

My friend Lauren Dunn, a producer with NBC4 here in Washington, recently tried a juice cleanse diet. Health was her motivation, but given her past vegetarianism, how many questions I get about diets like this & how entertaining her posts are, I thought I'd link them up for The Green Miles readers:

• Part I: "My juice arrives Tuesday, July 26, and I'll will report back in three days. For now, wish me luck -- and if you happen to see me passed out on the floor, don't steal my wallet."
• Part II: "Feeling pretty energetic, I went to my boxing class that night. But when the instructor commented on my technique, I full on bit his head off. (Note to self, do not snip at professional boxers.) I wanted to scream: 'I've only been drinking juice for three days!! Leave me the hell alone!'"
• Part III: "The whole process was truly a lesson in discipline. No, I didn’t always feel so fabulous. Yes, my sanity was put into question multiple times. But as I come out on the other side of this, I truly have reaped the benefits."

Lauren's early posts reminded me of a quote from baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, who struggled with his weight as he transitioned from everyday player to bench-warming manager. One year he tried the grapefruit diet and said, "It's OK for the first few days. Then you get a little tired of grapefruit. And after about a week, you want to go find a grapefruit farmer and blow his head off." 

But the short duration seemed to keep any homicidal tendencies from growing within Lauren. And the juice seemed to convince her it would be easy to keep doing the things she liked while making them even healthier (say, replacing cheese with anything plant-based). So, #winning.

What Lauren doesn't mention: It was The Green Miles' influence that got her to try meat again after 10 years of vegetarianism! That's right! FEEL THE BURN, VEGAN TREEHUGGERS. Don't you feel betrayed for having read my posts all these years? I feel like Vince McMahon revealing himself to be "The Higher Power" who'd been screwing over Stone Cold Steve Austin. 

(OK, so I don't care if my friends are vegetarians & it was actually the delicious smell of my Dinosaur BBQ Sauce that got Lauren to want to try meat. But let me enjoy acting like a villain for once.)