No consensus on fighting the drug war: differences between state policy elites and the mass public.

This article explores implications for the implementation of drug policy in the United States, based on the findings from a 1990 survey of state drug policy coordinators in all 50 states and the responses to a national mass public survey. State drug policy elites' perceptions of the relative seriousness of nine different specific drugs are assessed, together with their evaluations of federal drug policy. Significant differences in state elites' attitudes are found for certain regional effects, for the relative degree of state urbanism, and for relative state income levels. These results are compared against the findings from a 1989 CBS News/New York Times mass opinion survey measuring citizen perceptions on drug misuse and the efficacy of Bush administration policy initiatives. This comparison reveals a wide disparity between elite and mass attitudes regarding appropriate funding of the drug war, the rating of federal drug policy initiatives, and federal drug policy strategies. Such mass/elite perceptual disparities accentuate the difficulties inherent in pursuing a "drug war" strategy.

Linkage to the Huntington's disease locus in a family with unusual clinical and pathological features.

We used the anonymous DNA probe, D4S10 (G8), known to be linked to the Huntington's disease (HD) locus, to confirm inheritance at that locus in a family in whom most affected individuals had atypical clinical and pathological features. Their clinical features were similar to the Westphal variant (usually seen in juvenile-onset HD) but they had onset in adult life, and in contrast to juvenile-onset HD, their course of illness was prolonged. Most family members had been repeatedly misdiagnosed during life because of the absence of chorea and prominence of long-tract signs. In 2 patients who died, neuropathological examination at autopsy revealed prominent involvement of brainstem and spinal cord structures, and in 1, mild neostriatal atrophy relative to duration of the disease. The study demonstrates the usefulness of genetic linkage analysis as a diagnostic tool in families with atypical forms of HD. This method allows study of phenotypic variations that can be inherited at or near the HD locus and implies either multiple alleles at the locus gene, modifiers of a single allele, or another locus in the same region causing a dominantly inherited neurodegenerative disease.

High fatality rates of late-life depression associated with cardiovascular disease.

Sixty-two elderly depressives were located one year after discharge. Eight patients (13%) had died, 2.6 times higher than the expected mortality rate. Patients dying were more likely to have had a diagnosis of cardiovascular disease (P less than 0.001).