The International journal of the addictions最新文献

A series of 414 chronic pain patients referred to Are Hospital, Are, Sweden, for evaluation and rehabilitation were administered a structured diagnostic interview to detect alcohol and drug misuse and dependence according to DSM-III-R criteria. A total of 97 (23.4%) met criteria for active alcohol, analgesic, or sedative misuse or dependency; an additional 39 (9.4%) met criteria for a remission diagnosis. Current dependency was most common for analgesics (12.6%) followed by alcohol (9.7%) and sedatives (7.0%).

The general public, police, service providers, and users/ex-users were asked their views about options for trial design and trial outcomes with regard to a proposal for experimental controlled heroin availability. There was substantial agreement between the samples on issues concerning trial design. In general, the samples from the community, service providers and users/ex-users were more likely to report that a trial would result in positive outcomes, whereas the police sample was more likely to report that a trial would result in negative outcomes. This study illustrates the value of systematic consultation of key groups in exploring the options for change, raising potential difficulties, and highlighting different interests.

By borrowing from the field of social marketing, the examination and execution of drug prevention strategies should be more rigorous and disciplined by the year 2000. This article briefly describes marketing strategies and techniques which can assist in the maximization of drug prevention communications and programs.

Although it is generally accepted that the spouses of excessive drinkers experience a range of problems as a result of their partner's alcohol consumption, there have been few attempts at measuring the hardship experienced. Previous attempts have counted only the number of categories of hardship experienced over the previous year and not taken into account the frequency with which these occur or the degree of inconvenience suffered. The Drinker's Partner Distress Scale (DPDS) is proposed as a measure which overcomes these limitations. Two dimensions of alcohol-induced problems are measured; depression and marital discord. Both subscales demonstrated internal consistency, and predictions of convergent and discriminant validity were supported in relation to both subscales.

Despite their pervasiveness in large American cities, homeless, mentally ill, chemical misusing (HMICM) people have rarely been studied as a sociological phenomenon. In this study, 518 HMICM men who sought community-based treatment were interviewed at length on their psychosocial characteristics, family background, and childhood history. The findings show these HMICM men to have severe psychiatric and substance misuse problems. Examination of their family background reveals a common pattern represented by the absence of their fathers and often of their mothers from very early age. Fatherlessness and social rootlessness are hypothesized as related to the HMICM syndrome.

The first general population mail survey of the prevalence of drug use in Finland was conducted in 1992. The data consisted of 3,457 responses with a response rate of 70.7%. The persons surveyed were from 18 to 74 years old. These data are supplemented with data about "problem use" of drugs in Finland, which is mostly characterized by the mixed use of medicines (also medicines containing opiates) and alcohol. There were clear signs of an increase in the mixed use during the last few years. During the last year cannabis was used by 1% of the population. The use of opiates and amphetamines was very limited, and there had not been any special changes in their use. According to the statistics of social and health welfare sources, the need for services caused by the use of drugs had been only about 1% of the whole intoxicant (mostly alcohol) problem during the past few years.

In this paper we assess participation in various forms of gambling activities and establish the prevalence of pathological gambling in a sample of patients (N = 117) enrolled in a large methadone maintenance treatment program in New York City. Respondents were interviewed with a protocol that incorporates the South Oaks Gambling Screen. We found that gambling was a common part of the regular activities of many patients, that 15% of the patients had some problem with gambling, and that an additional 16% were probable pathological gamblers. The implications of our findings are discussed.

Meta-analysis was used to assess the relative efficacy of various treatments in reducing alcohol consumption over the short-term, 6 months, and 12 months. All the treatments were administered in well-controlled studies. In the short-term and 1-year follow-up studies, patients in the experimental group drank much less than the control group. However, between group consumption differences were negligible in the 6-month studies. When the studies were pooled, regardless of the follow-up assessment periods, the experimental group drank significantly less than the control group. These results suggest that, in general, patients who received experimental treatments consumed much less alcohol than patients in the control groups.

Many survey questions on alcohol require complex cognitive tasks, such as long-term recall, shifting reference periods, and numeric calculation. Moreover, alcohol-related impairment is known to affect cognitive ability. To assess the quality of data on self-reported alcohol use, internal consistency analyses were conducted as part of a comprehensive multisite prospective study of drug user treatment outcome undertaken in 11 cities throughout the United States (DATOS). Contrary to expectation, analyses found high levels of internal consistency. For questions on age of initiation of different types of alcohol use, over 99% of respondents (N = 2,842) reported consistent answers for each pair of logically related questions. Reports of being drunk and of quantity of alcohol consumed were similarly consistent.

Analysis of Canadian data from the 1989 National Alcohol and Drugs Survey was used to identify profiles of alcohol and other drug-using behaviors among Canadian women of different ethnic or cultural groups. The profile considered 110 different substance use variables including alcohol or drug type used, quantity, frequency, drinking or drug-taking circumstances, beverage preference, reasons for drinking or not drinking, and opinions regarding appropriate drinking or drug-taking behavior of Canadian women who described themselves as belonging to the "Canadian," French, English, German/Dutch, Irish, Scottish, Ukrainian/Polish, Italian/Portuguese, and "Other" (Chinese, Jewish, and "Other") ethnic or cultural groups. Alcohol, tobacco, and drug use behavior was found to differ by ethnocultural group. Further, each ethnocultural group was found to differ from the national average. The amount of difference between the national average and each ethnocultural group was related to the period of arrival and the length of time that an ethnocultural group has been present in Canada. The degree of similarity or difference between each ethnocultural group and the mainstream national average for alcohol, tobacco, and drug use and drug-use behavior may be used to measure the degree of social integration of each ethnocultural group and the degree of acculturation of women of specific ethnocultural groups into mainstream Canadian society.