News by Subject Social & Behavior

Social work professor Douglas C. Smith of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a mobile app called Harbor that assists young adults in talking with peers who are engaging in risky drug or alcohol use.

The drug buprenorphine is an effective treatment for opioid use disorder, but many who misuse opioids also take benzodiazepines -- drugs that treat anxiety and similar conditions. Many treatment centers hesitate to treat patients addicted to opioids who also take benzodiazepines. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis studied overdose risk in people taking buprenorphine and found that the drug lowered risk, even in people taking benzodiazepines.

Adolescents who vape cannabis are at greater risk for respiratory symptoms indicative of lung injury than teens who smoke cigarettes or marijuana, or vape nicotine, a new University of Michigan study suggests.

Law enforcement seizures of drugs, particularly marijuana and methamphetamine, dropped at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, then increased significantly in the following months--exceeding pre-pandemic seizure rates and providing clues about the impact of the crisis on substance use, according to a new study in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

New paper published in Psychopharmacology by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch shows frustration is additional factor that can lead to addiction escalation.

In a new study, researchers at the Penn Medicine evaluated the efficacy of the Opioid Hospital Quality Improvement Program, pioneered by Pennsylvania in 2019, revealing that financial incentives for hospitals are effective in producing rapid treatment innovations for opioid use disorder, including increasing the rate of follow-up treatment for Medicaid patients within seven days of an ED encounter.

Researchers looked at whether state legalization of recreational cannabis was associated with changes in use by women before, during and after pregnancy.

New evidence that opioid agonists such as methadone and buprenorphine could substantially reduce drug related deaths if more widely used in the community and prison, and for longer, has been published in Lancet Psychiatry today [25 February].

Although guidelines do not recommend use of opioids to manage pain for individuals with knee osteoarthritis, a recent study published early online in Arthritis Care & Research, an official journal of the American College of Rheumatology and the Association of Rheumatology Professionals, estimates that 858,000 Americans use opioids such as tramadol and oxycodone for their knee pain, equating to $14 billion in lifetime opioid-related societal costs, or nearly $0.5 billion annually.