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MEGA - Courses and Careers related to Drugs

fastandbulbous said:
"it's not proper fucking science, they're just training to be glorified shopkeepers that happen to dish out drugs"!

he way some of them behaved, you'd think they were traing to be gods on earth as opposed to 'glorified shopkeepers"...
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haha exactly! i know a few of those. I think pharmacists should be replaced by computers. that'd teach them.
 
Psychopharmacology is the clinical application of neuropharmacology. Most people who could be considered psychopharmacologists would be psychiatrists or doctors, and they would either be actively clinical, or doing clinical research; that is to say, treating people, or researching how to treat people.

99 times out of 100, this would be directly clinically applicable drugs, from antipsychotics to antidepressants. There are only a very few who are giving recreational drugs to people.

If you want to be a true psychopharmacologist, you have to study medicine, and get an MD. However, you could be a neuropharmacologist, and study the effects of drugs in animals, tissues and molecules, and then you just need a PhD.
 
rat tat tat tat said:
Pharmacist.

My dad's becoming a pharmacist assistant. I saw his flashcards with various chemical names and the drug they are in and the schedule they are. I already knew almost all the drugs and there schedules. Would be a decent job but I'd be afraid of wanting to steal pills or being caught with pills and losing my job.
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Don't do pharmacy unless talking to old people about the side effects of Lipitor seems exciting to you.

Pharmacy is a good career if you are interested in health care in general, but if you are solely into psychoactive drugs you will not enjoy pharmacy very much. Only a small % of pharmaceuticals are psychoactive, and pretty much all you'll learn about those drugs in pharmacy school are side effects, therapeutic applications, basic mechanisms of action, etc. You generally won't learn details about their effects on brain chemistry.

And as rat tat tat tat already been pointed out, if you are into using drugs yourself, keep in mind that as a pharmacist you will constantly be around mass quantities of them, which I'm sure after a while would become quite tormenting. If you start stealing you will eventually get caught and probably lose your license, which means years of college education down the drain.

One graduate program other than the ones already mentioned that might interest you is Medicinal Chemistry. It deals more with the development of new drugs but you can specialize in the study of CNS drugs/psychoactives. I personally know one of the professors at my college that is the CNS specialist of the Medicinal Chemistry department, and he is currently doing some interesting research on the effects of salvia divinorum on the brain.

One more piece of advice - I'd say definitely think twice before choosing a career or college major based on an interest in psychoactive drugs. You have to specialize and do quite a bit of background work to actually get to do the research you want to do (which means grad school, possibly getting a PhD, etc.), and by that time you might have lost all interest in psychoactive drugs.
 
I could never, ever work in a pharmacy. Of course I have thought about it and drooled at the possibilities(as I'm sure most have), but I had to wait a half-hour while I was picking up my bupe at the local Walgreens, and I realized that me working in a pharmacy would pretty much be a plan for failure. It would almost definitely end up with me in jail. As hard as I tried, I know for sure that being around all those drugs all day I would never be able to completely ward off the temptation. For a really good and well written but terribly, terribly sad(at times bitterly depressing, at times uplifting) blog of this guy's experience being a nurse that got addicted to opiates and is now in recovery, check out soma's blog at junkylife.

As far as being a vet tech goes, I have personal experience with that. My gf was one for years, and yes lots of drugs did go missing all the time. None of the places she worked at did the log books ever actually match the dea log, and nothing ever really happened. It's pretty funny, they have all the same drugs(pretty much anything you'd want to abuse) there, mainly in a more abusable form than humans usually receive it(mainly iV solutions), yet for some reason it's not close to as strictly watched. One time though, at the last animal hospital she worked at, her boss started tweaking out about some ridiculously small amount of iv valium that was suppposedly missing, while the books for the harder drugs were way more off(She suspected her and her husband dipped into the M, it specifically was almost always short and they would sometimes "accidentally" write down a larger count). She actually hadn't taken it though. After that her boss started to lock the drugs up in a safe in her office and we moved anyways so she didn't stay there long and hasn't worked at another one since, but it was good while it lasted

NOTE: I am not advocating or suggesting someone should get a job as a vet tech simply so they could steal drugs, just sharing experience.

Anyways, unless you are as committed to them as Shulgin is, I wouldn't suggest drugs being the major motivating factor in career choice. It's true with anything, but you may not be quite so interested in drugs in ten years as you are now(I really hope I'm not). But if you are as committed as him, then fucking go for it he has done some amazing things. Maybe you'll make the next great drug, we can only hope.

jr0k
 
Now, is there any psychopharms out there? If so, what's the job entail, how is it, etc. I'm interested in perhaps studying in this field, just because I'm fascinated by the effects of a substance to temporarily or permanently affects one's mind and set.
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Hmm.....do you fucking LOVE chemistry and biology? I mean really really really? Are you the kind of person that walks out of a biology or chemistry lecture thinking "Damn, that was awesome"?

If so, you should definately go for it.
 
take biochemistry


thats that im majoring in and i'm going to be working for a major pharm. company in the spring. you get a good background of bio and chem so this should be perfect
 
That's my goal career too, and I'm getting an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry. I'm then moving on (hopefully) to the Pharmaceutical Sciences program at my school for a master's degree - it's one of the best in the country.
 
Wow, ya'll are really making me second-guess my current career plans of getting a Pharm.D. Say, I find drugs and their applications to be a truly fascinating subject, everything about their actions in the body and specifically the brain, would I be better off with pharmacology/pharmaceutical sciences?
 
Chaos Butterfly said:
I'd maybe suggest a combined science/engineering degree.

Majoring in Organic Chemistry/Pharmacology combined with Chemical Engineering. The Chem Eng isn't specifically what you are looking for, but will give you a much wider knowledge of problem solving and industrial systems. A lot of Chem Eng graduates go and work for pharmaceutical companies in manufacture or R&D.

Organic Chem and Pharmacology will definitely help as posted above :)

CB :)
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Ok, so right now i'm in Chem Eng and my advisor says that you can go the pharm path but you will likely look over processes and not do any real research or design. However I am currently doing the biomolecular(biochemistry) engineering part of chem e.
My advisor said that maybe do a biochem degreee with the chem eng would set up a good path for the research and design of pharms but that either way to go to grad school. You mentioned O Chem as being a good set up but i thought biochem was more about how chemicals work in biology... So would biochem be good to know how they work and O Chem in how to design?

I am very interested in doing something with pyschopharmacology too but i dont really want to go through years of school to have a narrow career path. Plus I may want to do something like genetic engineering, in which case i dont want to lock myself into a pharmacology degree.

The funny thing is my advisor didnt mention pharmacology when i said i wanted to research pharms until i brought it up... so is a degree in pharmacology even necessary?
 
Doing the biomolecular/biochem part of Chem Eng will definitely set you on the right path. O Chem is always useful just because it forms the basis for almsot anything you are working with. You don't to major in O Chem, just do enough of it that you understand all the major useful bits.

I'm not personally that up to speed on what biochem actually covers as I never did it, but the one piece of advice I can give you is to stick out the Chem Eng part of your degree :) A degree in Chem Eng can take you just about anywhere.

At this stage, I'd just continue with the Chem Eng and the Biochem... and if you decide that you really want to create lots of beer and become a brewer, then do lots of microbiology as well :)

CB :)
 
I feel your desire is a bit misguided.. just sounds odd.. "i want to engineer psychiatric medications".. wtf? i mean, if it were really your life plan, drug forum is a really odd place to ask for advice for grad school.. i dunno, just made me wonder.. But to answer your question: Biomedical Engineering / Macromolecular engineering + P-Chem, Biochem, O-Chem.. just organic chemistry alone as is biochemistry is utterly not enough.. All that would be true if there was any concrete demand for people "Engineering" medications, or if you just wanted to know the theory, the truth is that these days active compounds are essentially bruteforced++ using computers, of course, these programs are operated, controlled and to a certain degree programmed by knowledgeable people with some chem background.. but there is no designing or engineering work there, the computer goes through billions of compounds testing them for +match with certain receptor, when they found such a compound they test it further, thats all. If you're really serious about this you may want to look into so called metabolic engineering for pharmaceuticals (aka genetic), it basically has to do with finding more efficient ways of synthesizing chems in tissues


skjalff
 
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^There is still a TON of hand-researched medicine done at universities, and you are completely off base about what majors are needed to get into the field. At UW-Madison (ranked number 1 in research science), students with degrees in Biochemistry, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Genetics, Materials Science, Molecular Biology, Pharmaceutics, Pharmacology, Toxicology, or other related fields are all encouraged to apply to the pharmaceutical sciences graduate program. That program leads straight to pharmaceuticals research and development (if you desire, as it can be molded in three different directions).
 
^^ i'm not sure where i'm off base about the majors required.. as for the pharmacology grad program.. is it 2 years for MA? I'd imagine it would take more to give someone enough background to manually match compounds to respective receptors.. still dont understand why someone would want to, seeing as this process is fully computerized these days.. CWRU doesnt even offer that i dont think, and there is a shit-ton of research done here in this area.. About undergrad majors who would pursue this program, you must be confused about chemical engineering, you do realize that it has nothing to do with engineering chemicals, right??


skjalff
 
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