| In Rare Bipartisan Accord, House and Senate Reach Compromise on Opioid Bill |
| NEW YORK TIMES (09/26) – The House and Senate have reached agreement on a big package of measures to address the opioid epidemic. The legislation, backed by leaders of both parties, is a rare bipartisan achievement that lawmakers are eager to have in hand when they go home to campaign for the midterm elections.Read more |
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| FTC Staff Report Examines Ways to Improve Occupational License Portability Across State Lines |
| FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION (09/24) – The Federal Trade Commission today released a staff report examining ways to reduce the burden on licensed workers moving to new states or wishing to market services across state lines. The Report, entitled, Options to Enhance Occupational License Portability, is part of the FTC’s Economic Liberty Task Force initiative. This initiative, begun last year, aims to reduce hurdles to job growth and labor mobility by encouraging states to reduce unnecessary and overbroad occupational licensing regulation. Read more |
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| Number of New Heroin Users Drops Dramatically, but Meth, Marijuana Use Up, [SAMHSA] Survey Says |
USA TODAY (09/14) – Far fewer people started using heroin last year, but the decline among young new 18- to 25-year-old heroin users was almost imperceptible and this age group also saw a big jump in methamphetamine and marijuana use, according to a federal report out Friday. The 2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health emphasizes what it calls these “transitional aged youth” because they have higher rates of cigarette use, alcohol abuse, heroin use disorder and use more cocaine, meth and LSD than people both younger and older. Read more
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| Harmful Use of Alcohol Kills More Than 3 Million People Each Year, Most of Them Men |
| WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (09/21) – More than 3 million people died as a result of harmful use of alcohol in 2016, according a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) today. Read more |
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| Opioid Users Could Benefit From Meth-Relapse Prevention Strategy, Study Finds |
| SCIENCE DAILY (09/17) – New research raises the possibility that a wider group of people battling substance use disorders may benefit from a Scripps Research-developed relapse-prevention compound than previously thought. Read more |
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| Should Addiction Be Treated as a Spectrum Disorder Like Autism? (Opinion) |
| NEW YORK POST (09/26) – […] Most people tend to see addiction as fixed — someone is either an addict, or they’re not — but Thomas says the reality is a little fuzzier. “Your genetic vulnerabilities and your environmental stressors will move you along the spectrum of disease,” he says. Read more |
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| White House Provides $4 Million For Drug Courts to Fight Opioid Addiction |
| WASHINGTON EXAMINER (09/26) – The White House is providing $4 million in grants to go toward training officials on how to divert people with drug addictions into treatment programs, the Office of National Drug Control Policy announced Wednesday. Read more |
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| Addictive Behavior Could Trace Back to an Ancient Retrovirus in Our DNA |
| POPULAR SCIENCE (09/24) – Millions of Americans struggle with substance abuse and tens of thousands die each year, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Though treating addiction has become a vast (and at times abusive) industry, the underlying causes of drug or alcohol dependency—and how to successfully treat these debilitating conditions—are still poorly understood by science. Now, researchers think they’ve found the germ of an answer in our genetic past. Read more |
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| Changing Dynamics of the Drug Overdose Epidemic in the United States from 1979 Through 2016 (Abstract) |
| SCIENCE (09/21) – There is a developing drug epidemic in the United States. Jalal et al. analyzed nearly 600,000 unintentional drug overdoses over a 38-year period. Although the overall mortality rate closely followed an exponential growth curve, the pattern itself is a composite of several underlying subepidemics of different drugs. Read more |
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| Trump Admin Awards Over $1 Billion in Grants To Fight Opioid Epidemic |
| THE HILL (09/19) – The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Wednesday that it has awarded more than $1 billion in grants to states, communities and organizations fighting the opioid crisis. The vast majority of that funding — $930 million — is intended to support states' efforts to provide treatment and prevention services to combat opioid abuse. Read more |
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| LGB Youth at ‘Increased Risk’ of Substance Abuse. Blame Homophobia. |
| DAILY BEAST (09/24) – Researchers have long known that LGBT people are more likely to abuse substances than their straight and cisgender peers, often due to the same minority stress that many marginalized groups experience. Alcohol and drugs become a coping mechanism for daily discrimination. One might hope that a rising generation of youth—who tend to be more accepting of LGBT people—would be able to dodge this minority stress. Read more |
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| Daily Use of Marijuana Among Non-College Young Adults at All Time High |
| NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DRUG ABUSE (09/05) – The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) announced that the latest Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey results on substance use trends as teens transition to adulthood are now available online, comparing substance use patterns of full-time college students to their non-college peers. Read more |
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| Is the Ketamine Boom Getting out of Hand? |
| SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (09/26) – […] Dozens of free-standing clinics have opened across the U.S. in recent years to provide the drug to patients who are desperate for an effective therapy and hopeful ketamine can help. But the investigation found wide-ranging inconsistencies among clinics, from the screening of patients to the dose and frequency of infusions to the coordination with patients’ mental health providers. Read more |
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| The Crucial Link Between Drug Policy and HIV Rates |
| MD MAGAZINE (09/18) – The number of opioid treatment programs (OPTs) in the US didn’t change much in the early 2000s. There were between 1100 and 1200 OPTs operating at any given time from 2003-2012, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Read more |
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| Researchers Block Cocaine Craving and Addiction with a Special Skin Graft |
| CNBC (09/18) – […] Cocaine works by elevating dopamine levels in the brain which then result in feelings of reward and euphoria, which trigger a craving for more of the drug. The animals that received the engineered skin graft were able to clear injected quantities of cocaine faster than control animals. Their brains also had lower levels of dopamine. Read more |
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