Chinese Meditation For Cocaine Addicts
And guess who’s paying for it.
In case there wasn’t enough evidence that the federal government has completely gone off the rails of fiscal sanity, let’s toss spending nearly a half-million dollars to study the effects of teaching Chinese meditation to cocaine addicts into the mix.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of the National Institutes of Health, awarded grants of $225,000 last year and $185,625 this year (a total of $410,625 for anybody keeping track) to the University of Maryland to launch a program that’s formally entitled “Treatment of Cocaine Addiction with Integrative Meditation.” This from the abstract provided on the program’s parameters and desired outcomes:
“Cocaine addiction continues to be a major public health problem in the U.S. With no FDA- approved pharmaceutical therapy, treatment often relies on psychosocial interventions, known as behavior therapy … Our clinical experience and pilot studies suggest that Integrative Meditation (IM) from Chinese medicine may help clients engage in treatment, reduce cravings/ withdrawal symptoms, and increase treatment retention, which appear missed by a typical behavior therapy. IM is an adaptation or simplified form of mindfulness meditation. It may enhance existing therapies to help reduce withdrawal symptoms, increase treatment engagement, and prevent relapse through step-by-step therapist facilitation.”
The study program was launched in April 2009 and is budgeted to run through March 2011.
“The specific aims include: (1) To conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial of 66 outpatient cocaine users with 12 weekly facilitation meetings to assess feasibility of recruiting and retaining cocaine addicts, and to determine effect size of IM-augmented treatment in comparison with Non-directive therapy (NT) control, with both groups receiving standard treatment as usual (TAU), (2) To examine the changes in attention networks and negative mood as possible mediators of treatment outcomes between the two groups.”
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