Addiction Medicine: Science and Practice

Conditioning of Addiction

Introduction Addiction to drugs of abuse is a chronically relapsing disorder characterized by a compulsion to take the drug, loss of control of intake, and the development of a negative emotional state when drug access is withheld. Initiation of drug…

Drug Reinforcement in Animals

Introduction Early demonstrations that drugs could serve as reinforcers, maintaining operant behavior in laboratory animals, led to the development of a model of human substance use disorder ( Box 6.1 ). The traditional self-administration model was developed within a behavioral…

Historical Perspectives of Addiction

Acknowledgments The research and writing of this article were partially supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, entitled “Current Smokers: A Phenomenological Inquiry” (R01 DA015707–01A2) and a grant from the Engelhard Foundation,…

United States Federal Drug Policy

Introduction The United States federal government takes an active role in setting and implementing drug-control policy, directly and in concert with state and local authorities and with international partners—even as the other polities’ policies may be widely at variance with…

The Epidemiology of Alcohol and Drug Disorders

What Is Epidemiology? The field of epidemiology involves investigation of the distribution and determinants of health conditions in populations or population subgroups. Epidemiological investigations fall under two common domains: descriptive and analytic. Descriptive epidemiological studies provide estimates of the incidence…

Emerging Health Perspectives

Introduction This chapter addresses a few issues that are emerging as critical health issues with substance use perspectives. First, there is a brief review of the epidemiology of substance use; this is linked to the growing problem of prescription drug…