Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly最新文献

The Addiction Health Services Research Conference will be held October 16-18 in San Francisco. For more information, go to https://www.ahsrconference.org/2024/

On Sept. 12, U.S. Representatives Andrea Salinas (D-Oregon) and Marc Molinaro (R-New York) introduced the Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery (STAR) Plus Scholarship Act. This bill aims to establish a new scholarship program for students studying in the fields of mental health, behavioral health, or substance use disorder treatment. The STAR Loan Repayment Program, administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration, has consistently advocated for the creation of a scholarship program to accompany the loan repayment program. “NAADAC is excited and proud to support the STAR Plus Scholarship Act, as creation of these scholarship opportunities is an essential step towards building a more robust and well-trained addiction workforce,” said Terrence Walton, MSW, NAADAC's executive director. “NAADAC applauds Representatives Salinas and Molinaro for their leadership and recognition of the meaningful difference this policy solution will make in countless lives.”

When CODAC Behavioral Healthcare, the main provider of treatment services for corrections in Rhode Island, looks at its clientele with opioid use disorder (OUD), Vivitrol (depot naltrexone) is preferred by no one. The patients want either methadone or buprenorphine, CODAC CEO Linda Hurley explained in a webinar this month (for the first part of this two-part article, see ADAW (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.34254).

I watched the segment this past weekend on [CBS TV's] 60 Minutes about fentanyl and have some thoughts.

Most people have probably heard by now that alcohol is a major risk factor for cancer, one of the top preventable risk factors, in fact. According to the 2024 edition of the American Association for Cancer Research's Cancer Progress Report, while cancer has gone down, preventable causes such as excessive alcohol use will results in more than two million new cases being diagnosed in the U.S. this year. The tobacco lesson has been well-learned. Now it's time for alcohol — excessive use is now the top modifiable risk factor for cancer. In 2019, 5.4% of all cancer cases diagnosed in the U.S. in 2019 were attributable to alcohol use.

Speaking at last week's Summit of the Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats, part of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City last week, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised the gathering of foreign officials to take time to address this issue. Fentanyl is a synthetic drug which is causing a crisis internally, said Blinken. “Now, for years, the threat of synthetic drugs has been rising around the world: methamphetamines in the East, in Southeast Asia; Captagon in the Middle East, tramadol in Africa; and here in the United States fentanyl, the number-one killer of Americans aged 18-49,” said Blinken September 24, according to remarks released by the Department of Justice. “This is by definition a global challenge: people ship precursor chemicals, the ingredients that go into fentanyl from one country to another; criminals make them into synthetic drugs, and then sell them in a third country. Every country needs to take steps at home to address this challenge. But no single government can solve it alone.

Despite policy guidance suggesting the critical importance of making medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) widely available in correctional settings, newly published data suggest that uptake of these treatments in local jails continues to be slow.

Last month, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) published a document in the Federal Register announcing specifications for comments on a new document: the SAMHSA Unified Client-level Performance Reporting Tool (SUPRT). The Aug. 15 Federal Register notice, however, was missing the website to view the proposed draft tool. In a correction published last week, SAMHSA included the web address. Comments on the tool are due Oct. 15.

In a presentation by Antonello Bonci, M.D., at the Cape Cod Symposium on Addictive Disorders meeting in Massachusetts this month, work by Italian researchers on the use of noninvasive brain stimulation to treat addiction was a popular feature. “We studied it in rats first,” he said. The lab animals learned that if they self-administered cocaine, they would get a foot shock, and 70% of the rats stopped pressing the lever for cocaine. But 30% kept running around waiting for the lever to come out, and kept pressing it, getting the shock. These were the addicted rats.”

Exhibit halls at conferences are interesting things. At the Cape Cod Symposium on Addictive Disorders, for example, the booth from Indivior was promoting only Sublocade, a long-term version of buprenorphine. Nothing about OPVEE, the overdose reversal medication. In the next hallway over, the Hikma Pharmaceuticals booth was promoting only Kloxxado, the overdose reversal medication, but nothing about methadone. Indivior produced the first major buprenorphine product in the United States — Suboxone — and Hikma is one of the few major producers of methadone for opioid treatment programs. Hikma also makes buprenorphine.