Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly最新文献

The reality of opioid abatement funds is that they are “legally porous,” lawyers write in the January 15 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. They began by comparing the funds to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) for tobacco, which gave $9 billion to states for helping fight smoking, and instead wound up in state general funds. The opioid abatement funds also delegate authority to the states. This they write in “The Lifesaving Potential of Opioid Abatement Funds,” has not worked as well as it could have, because many states still have an “unmet need for medication-assisted treatment.” The corresponding author is Christopher Robertson, JD, Ph.D., of Boston University School of Law.

I have worked my whole professional career in and around politics and policymaking. Often, when folks ask what I do for a living, their reaction is to tell me how much their voice and their vote do not matter, which is why they do not take part in the process!

Despite huge cuts and changes proposed by the White House last year (see “HHS budget proposal: Merge block grants, institutes under ‘behavioral health,’” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.34546), Congressional Appropriations Committees released funding packages last week that keep funding level or better.

“What we decided to do is to give the money back.”

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/

Gambling addiction is not just due to sports anymore. The so-called “prediction market” is now open for bets on anything from the military operation in Venezuela leading to the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro, to guessing Google's most-searched terms. Whatever it is, the gambler loses and the industry — now more commonly a website and not a casino with distractions like entertainment and fine dining — wins. Sports betting still accounts for the majority of transactions on prediction websites Kalshi and Polymarket, according to a 2025 survey from Sacred Heart University, which found that 6 in 10 Americans are concerned about the rising prevalence of sports betting in particular, which accounts for most transactions on the prediction sites. That gambling is addictive is not a question. Just because some people gamble and don't become addicted doesn't prove anything, any more than the fact that some people drink without becoming addicted proves that alcohol is not addictive. As with alcohol, the vast majority of money spent on gambling comes from the minority of people who are addicted — and that minority is growing. Last year, the American Psychiatric Association found that 28% of people in the United States gamble at least once a day.

Despite huge cuts and changes proposed by the White House last year (see “HHS budget proposal: Merge block grants, institutes under ‘behavioral health,’” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.34546), Congressional Appropriations Committees released funding packages last week that keep funding level or better.

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/

The opening message in the newly revised federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025-2030 states that the Trump administration is “restoring common sense, scientific integrity and accountability to federal food and health policy,” but a number of health researchers and advocates argue that new guidance on alcohol consumption suggests the very opposite.

One of the things I am proudest of during my tenure at New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports (NYS OASAS) was our successful efforts to change the insurance laws to make it easier to access addiction treatment. Among our accomplishments is that we created one publicly available level of care tool to make decisions about whether someone needed addiction treatment and where they should receive it. We ended the constant and almost immediate interference by the insurers about whether the person needed to still be in that level of addiction treatment. We ended the need for prior approval to access treatment, including medications.