Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly最新文献

If your goal is to tell those who make policy how angry you are with their policy, scream from the mountaintops — or post it on social media! If your goal is to make an impact, to change their thinking — climb down from the mountaintop, write the post, read it and then delete it, and then engage them and others, especially those who make you angry. If you cannot change their thinking, focus your energy on changing those who are doing the thinking!

An examination of national data on alcohol-related suicides has found a greater prevalence of alcohol involvement among lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) women than among heterosexual women. The research team was surprised to discover, however, that the same disparity based on sexual orientation did not exist among men.

In an advisory issued last month, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) called for integrating treatment for patients with co-occurring substance use disorders (SUDs) and eating disorders. The advisory is strongly weighted toward the eating disorders side, treating SUDs as a secondary issue.

A quality improvements study found that training primary care providers on screening and counseling for unhealthy alcohol use improved implementation of evidence-based practices. Study results, published January 22 in JAMA Network Open, suggested ways to increase adoption of screening and counseling.

Staying in treatment longer has been associated with improved outcomes for patients with opioid use disorder (OUD). Recently, researchers at Research Triangle Institute (RTI) have focused on opioid treatment programs (OTPs) in particular, stating that these retention rates need to be better. In “Opioid Treatment Programs' Medicaid Patient Retention Rates,” researchers wrote that OTPs need to improve patient retention rates. The goal of the study, published in JAMA Network Open January 23, was to develop a standardized measure for evaluating retention in OTPs.

The 36th annual national leadership forum of CADCA will be held February 2-5, 2026 in National Harbor, Maryland. For more information, go to https://www.cadca.org/signature-events/

As someone who worked for decades as a government regulator at the state and federal levels, I offer some lessons I learned to those who currently occupy those positions.

A newly published survey has found that a strong majority of U.S. adults consider opioid overdose deaths as a serious problem, though differences in their responses on which entities bear responsibility for solving the crisis complicate the effort to adopt publicly acceptable strategies.

A simulation study suggested that health outcomes and taxpayer savings can both be improved by hypothetical overdose prevention centers (OPCs). In “Health, Costs, and Injection-Related Infections at a Hypothetical Overdose Prevention Center,” researchers noted that increasing harm reduction service capacity amplifies these benefits.

If you want to decrease use, raise the price. Do it with taxes, and you also improve your state's revenue. It worked with cigarettes. Now, it's time to do it with nicotine. But there is a paradox. Cigarette tax revenues go down when cigarettes are smuggled in. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul's executive budget proposes making nicotine pouches subject to the same 75% excise tax on the wholesale price of tobacco products. This may be awkward, because in New York, cigarette smuggling has resulted in a 21% decline in tax collections. Smuggled cigarettes come via truck from lower-tax states. Nicotine, not tobacco, is addictive, but it is still somewhat amazing that a pack of 20 cigarettes is worth $15 to anybody. That's the price in New York, where excise taxes constitute just under $6 of that pack (in Missouri, the excise tax is 17 cents per pack).