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From increasing my knowledge to maybe a career?

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AlexxRed

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Joined
Apr 2, 2002
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293
Hi,

Currently I have an increasing interest in drugs, their applications and how they work. Can anyone suggest how I can go about improving my knowledge?

Would pharmacology and organic chemistry be the two best areas to focus on? Does a particular stream of maths also come into play?

Can anyone recommend any literature, that I could use to self teach?

Lastly, if I find that this is something that truely interests me, I would consider a career change.

Other than doctors, and say pharmacists who else can work with schedualed substances in the realms of legality?

FYI - I'm in Australia
 
Well my personal recommendation would be to learn as much as you can about Chemistry, Pharmacology, and Psychopharmacology. Learning about general Anatomy &/or Neuroanatomy will also likely come in handy. My personal ‘must read’ list is HERE. It is by no means inclusive, and is really ‘the least you need to know’ so to speak. 'Essential Psychopharmacology' by Stahl is really highly recommended by me for people of most all levels of education.

As for who works with drugs? It will vary from country to country… but generally speaking: Research Chemists, Pharmacists, & Medical Doctors. Depending on the country, some Psychologists may be licensed to work with drugs and some Advanced Practice Nurses may be able to Rx drugs. Certainly general practice Nurses do most of the actual administration of drugs. Also Dentists, Podiatrists, etc. may have the ability to write Rx / administer drugs legally as well. Also, lets not forget the DVMs (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine).

Hope this helps.

I B
 
Yeah, if you want to learn, you're really going to have to pick either chemistry or pharmacology/neuroscience (i.e. neuropharmacology).

You can try and learn them both, but it's hard to be great at both...

I reccomend

Principles of Neural Science by Kandel, Jessel and Schwartz
Pharmacology by Rang Dale & Ritter

I don't think there is a really good neuropharmacology textbook; none of them are written by electrophysiologists, and the brain is an electrical organ so treating it as a biochemical soup (i.e. how the texts The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology or Molecular Basis of Neuropharmacology do it) doesn't really help understanding... that's why there is the BlueLight Neuropharmacology text.

Another excellent read (that is thankfully available online) is Psychopharmacology the 4th generation of Progress
http://www.acnp.org/Default.aspx?Page=4thGenerationChapters
 
Thanks for the replies...really great advice.

Just a question regarding what sort of 'basics' I should gain a comprehensive understanding of to tackle all this.

Reason I ask, I'm a English and History teacher & don't have a science background so its really a whole new area of learning for me, so before I embark on getting into the complex I figured it would be wise to begin with the basics.

Chemistry (then organic?) and biology as basics? any stream of maths that would be useful or required as well?

And lastly in terms of texts or learning for someone without a science background in the areas that I have mentioned is stuff like "chemistry for dummies" etc a good starting point? If anyone can suggest other (better) ways to self learn so that I can then tackle more difficult areas i'd really appreciate it.

Cheers

Alex
 
I'd start with the basics, drug groups..Stimulants, depressants, psycadelics and their physical and psycological effects.
Look at counselling techniques- breif interventions, solution focused, motivational interviewing as well as CBT behavioural stuff. some NLP is always usefull.
then you will need to get some experience of the client group, voluntary work prehaps.

You could simply do a diploma or basic degree in substance misuse, in the Uk though experience is more usefull than qualifications and anywhere decent will train you I would imagine its similar in Aus.

Basic raport skills will do you more good than a ream of chemical knowelage when it come to working with people.

PS I'm a senior drug worker. studying for a BSc degree currently but I have been delivering training and mentoring new workers for years.
 
^^^^^^^^^^^

Cliffcuff I'm really not really interested in counselling in the field of drug misuse.

I appreciate that undertanding in many of the areas you suggest would be helpfull and worthwhile but thats not direction I'm talking about.
 
Well, you have to ask yourself what kind of science you'd rather do. There are many different aspects you could work on.

"Currently I have an increasing interest in drugs, their applications and how they work"

Sounds like you could enjoy pharmacology and medicinal chemistry. But you could also interpret that sentence in several ways (for example, how drugs work psychologically), so it's really up to you.
 
I'd start with a solid grounding in chemistry. Get your year of organic chemistry (pay particular attention to inter-molecular interactions like hydrogen bonds and non-polar interactions.) Then get a full year of biochemistry. THEN you'll be ready to start looking at things like pharmacology from a reasonably informed perspective. IMO advanced math can largely be ignored for the biological sciences unless you want to get into specialized fields like computer modeling of molecules. You WILL need a decent grasp of basic algebraic manipulations (getting variables in and out of basic equations) and should have a basic familiarity with integrals and derivatives (you may never use them, but they're useful concepts to understand.) A statistics course is also invaluable for many sciences because it forms the backbone of evaluating many forms of experimental data.

If you just want to understand things (but not actually go into it as a line of work), you could spend a few hundred dollars on textbooks and teach yourself.
 
TheDEA.org said:
IMO advanced math can largely be ignored for the biological sciences unless you want to get into specialized fields like computer modeling of molecules…and should have a basic familiarity with integrals and derivatives (you may never use them, but they're useful concepts to understand.) A statistics course is also invaluable for many sciences because it forms the backbone of evaluating many forms of experimental data.
Click to expand...

I disagree. You should have a solid grounding in math through linear algebra, multivariable calculus, and differential equations. Biology, and especially subfields like biophysics, electrophysiology, structural biology, etc., are becoming more and more quantitatively oriented as we get to know more about the brain and develope more powerful methods of analysis. I rue not applying myself in the previously mentioned areas of mathematics during my first year of college. Also I would not stop at basic stats, but also take an advanced statistics course because many of the statistical methods now used in neuroscience research are not taught in introductory stats classes.
 
^ Bah... if you're interested in how drugs work, you don't need to know about maths stuff... sure if you're wanting to publish articles in the journal of neurophysiology being a maths geek might help.... but otherwise... it's not as important as "what is a cell"
 
I would take a little more moderate view of the math requirements...Diff Eq is definitely required if you want to know anything about pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics, but other than that, a general understanding of college algebra and a tiny bit of calculus will be all you'll ever really need in your first three years of bio, biochem, gen chem, and organic chem.
But definitely, take a year of gen chem, a year of organic chem, a year of bio sometime, and a year of biochem. Then you'll be good to go and know what else you want to or don't want to take. What most people won't tell you is that doing gen bio concurrently with organic chem can be a good idea; you'll likely understand the bio a lot better.
 
^^^^

Thanks all for the replies lots of intresting info to start with.

Cheers to BilZ0r and illuminati boy. Thats the stuff I'm interesting in.

Still looking at some basics though to help along.

Dare I ask are texts like chem, bio and algebra for dummies any good for grounding skills/knowledge??

Any website worth looking at? Also all suggestions for books simple and advanced welcome.

Cheers Again.

Alex
 
I've found most of the dummies books to be pretty crappy. Go to http://www.ochemforfree.com and download the book that's available for free there. It's a bit simplistic, and you will need to know a lot more than that book tells you to pass a real o chem course, but it'll give you some good fundamentals. I think they still have some kind of a pole up about how many people use what other o chem text, so you could check that. I use Solomons and Fryhle 8th ed, which is reasonable.
 
^^^^^

Cheers hussness. Going to ask a dumb question now. Is that all just organic chem, or a general chem intro as well.
 
That's all organic chem. I don't much care for gen chem, so I don't have a whole bunch of references off the top of my head, but you'll need to slave through it because it's foundational. Who knows? Maybe you'll like it. Don't use the Zumdahl honors Chemical Principles, cause it sucks. Hopefully someone else can help on this.
 
^^^^^^^

What I'm asking is do I have to get a grounding in general chem first in order to understand organic chem?

Or is that something I can just start reading straight away?
 
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