MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - A Mexican priest briefly ended up behind bars after punching a policemen who caught him driving drunkenly through the streets of the northern city of Monterrey.  

Priest Manuel Raul Ortega, who was not wearing clerical dress but was clutching a prayer book when captured, launched himself at the traffic cop who pulled him over earlier this week.

"The individual became very violent because they were going to tow away his car. He attacked a policeman and was taken away," said transit department spokesman Hector Lozano on Thursday.

Ortega's papers identified him as a priest. He was released a few hours after his arrest after paying the fines for his offenses.

Monterrey and Mexico City are in the midst of a tough new drive to clamp down on widespread drunken driving after tequila and beer-fueled lunches and parties.

An 11-year-old girl was charged with drunken driving after leading police on a chase at speeds of up to 100 mph that ended when she flipped the car in an Alabama beach town.

A video camera in the police car captured the look of surprise on the officer's face when he approached the wrecked car and got a look at the motorist.

The Mobile Press-Register newspaper said the patrolman saw the Chevrolet Monte Carlo speeding and flashed his lights to signal the driver to stop. Instead, the car sped faster, travelling at up to 100 mph before sideswiping another vehicle and flipping over in the Gulf Coast town of Orange Beach Alabama, on Tuesday night.

The young driver, who lived nearby in Perdido Key Florida, was treated at a hospital for scrapes and bruises and released to relatives. Police also charged her with speeding, leaving the scene of an accident and reckless endangerment.

The car belonged to a relative and police were still trying to find out where she got the alcohol. There was none in the vehicle but her blood alcohol level was over the limit for adult motorists, police told the newspaper.

 

You are hooked on alcohol and you want help getting off the booze.

You go to your doctor, and he or she says, "Drop some acid."

That's right. LSD, the infamous drug of choice for many hippies in the 1960s and '70s.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, the drug that caused hallucinations or "tripping," was, of course, outlawed, giving it immeasurable street cred in its time, before fading away as flower-painted bodies grew into gray-flannel suits.

So, in the 21st century, why would a respected medical doctor even consider prescribing LSD as a wonder drug to help cure alcoholism?

And will it actually happen?

The answer, like an LSD trip, is elusive, but some in the scientific and medical community are beginning to discuss the possible merits of acid for this generation.

Erika Dyck, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, researches and teaches the history of medicine.

She raised the issue after studying a series of LSD tests of alcohol-addicted patients carried out in the 1960s in Saskatchewan. The tests were done by British psychiatrists Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies.

She tells ABC News that two-thirds of the alcoholics stopped drinking for at least 18 months after receiving one dose of LSD, compared to 25 percent who stopped after group therapy, and 12 percent after individual therapy.

According to Dyck, even Alcoholics Anonymous endorses the LSD research.

Alcoholics Anonymous "felt that one of the major obstacles to joining Alcoholics Anonymous was 'Step 2, admitting that there is a higher power.'"

Even the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Dyck said, "felt that LSD was the first intervention that helped many people to reach this step."

According to Rick W in the organization's New York office, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous "was supportive in a lot of ways in all kinds of research, so he might very well have written something in support. He also experimented with LSD himself."

Dyck told the Independent newspaper of London, "The LSD somehow gave these people experiences that psychologically took them outside of themselves and allowed them to see their own unhealthy [behavior] more objectively, and then determine to change it."

But those Canadian-based experiments in the '60s were widely criticized by others as either unwise or unreliable.

Amid the growing alarm over LSD abuse by large numbers of young people, the drug, and any potential good use, was locked outside of the establishment.

Now, some scientists around the world are planning to experiment once again with the effects of LSD on psychiatric disorders, possibly even revisiting the question of whether acid can help alcoholics.

"There's a lot of renewed interest in psychedelics in general," Robin Carhart-Harris, a researcher on LSD and psychotherapy at the University of Bristol, in England, said to ABC News.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain has been discussing the possibility, and Carhart-Harris tells ABC News that Swiss doctors are planning look into LSD for psychotherapy.

"I certainly think it's an interesting subject scientifically," he said. "I think I've heard the analogy of a knife before — you can use it for positive means, and for negative means."

Ironically, if LSD had stayed in the controlled environment of research labs in the '60s — and never hit the streets and mixed into the social cauldron that was swirling out of control in places like San Francisco — the drug might have evolved as a responsible medical treatment for alcoholism and psychiatric illnesses.

It is an intriguing medical issue that scientists can resume work on only if and when governments are ready to view acid as a potential solution, not just an old problem.

In an effort to better understand how red wine works, the scientists from Johns Hopkins University fed mice a moderate dose of a compound found in red grape skins and seeds before inducing stroke-like damage.

They discovered that the animals suffered less brain damage than similarly damaged mice who were not treated with the compound, which is called resveratrol.

"When we pre-treat the animals with the compound orally, then we observe that we have a significant decrease in the area of stroke damage by about 40 percent," said Sylvain Dore, the lead researcher for the study.

Dore and his research team presented their results from the study, which was funded in part by the U.S. government, at a Society for Neuroscience conference in Atlanta.

"What is unique about this study is we have somewhat identified what can be the specific mechanism," in the wine that is good for health, Dore said. "Here we are building cell resistance against free radical damage."

The study showed that resveratrol increases levels of an enzyme in the brain -- heme oxygenase -- that was already known to shield nerve cells from damage.

Dore said the beneficial effects associated with drinking a moderate amount of red wine could be explained by the fact the wine turns on the heme oxygenase anti-oxidant system.

"Red wine has been suggested for the heart. Here what we show is its special effect in stroke and pre-treatment," Dore said. "It suggests that prophylactic use of wine could work."

The fermentation process in wine-making boosts the concentration of resveratrol, Dore said.

But said more studies are needed to translate the findings from mice into humans.

The amount of wine that must be consumed in order to reap the benefits of the compound will vary depending on a person's weight and the concentration of resveratrol in the wine. But Dore said it will likely work out to about two glasses a day.

(HealthDay News) -- As a general rule of thumb, one alcoholic drink per day for women and two per day for men are considered moderate and safe amounts, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says.

But some people of legal age shouldn't drink at all, including pregnant women, people who use high-speed machinery, those who take certain medications, and recovering alcoholics, the institute says.Examples of a single alcoholic drink include a 12-ounce bottle of beer or wine cooler, a 5-ounce glass of wine, or one 1.5-ounce glass of distilled spirits, the agency says.

While this study of 110 alcoholic psychiatric patients found no link between cholesterol levels and suicide attempts, it did identify a "profile" of alcoholic patients at risk for suicide. The findings appear in the March issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

"Up to 7 percent of alcoholic patients die from suicide, and about one-third of these patients attempt suicide at least once in life," study corresponding author Eberhard A. Deisenhammer, an associate professor of psychiatry at Innsbruck Medical University in Austria, said in a prepared statement."However, since many alcoholics are reluctant to seek treatment for their problem, a significant portion of potentially suicidal alcoholic patients go undetected. We wanted to investigate if elevated serum cholesterol levels could serve to identify these individuals early enough to help them," he said.

While recent studies have found that individuals with lower cholesterol levels may be more likely to either attempt or complete suicide, there is no firm evidence linking cholesterol and suicide risk.For their study, Deisenhammer and his colleagues interviewed and took blood samples from the 110 study volunteers grouped according to whether or not they had attempted suicide during their lifetime. The blood samples were checked for total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides.

The researchers found no association between cholesterol levels and suicide attempts. However, they did identify a profile of alcoholics at risk for suicide. Those who had attempted suicide were younger, more often smokers, had more frequently co-abused benzodiazepines (used to relieve anxiety and insomnia), and scored higher on the two standard tests, the Montgomery and Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) and the MADRS "suicidal thoughts" item."Maybe future studies will show that there are subgroups of patients for which cholesterol may be useful as a biological suicide marker," Deisenhammer said. "Until that time, doctors and relatives of alcoholics should consider the possibility that their patient/husband/colleague may be, or become, suicidal. Until we have easily applicable biological risk markers at our disposal, they will need to assess suicide risk primarily through conversation."