These products can spur self-destructive ‘highs’ but are legal in most states, experts warn An influx of highly hallucinogenic, potentially lethal but — in most states — fully legal drugs sold as “bath salts” has law enforcement and drug abuse experts very concerned. According to Mark Ryan, director of the Louisiana Poison Center, in the first month of 2011, there have already been 248 bath salts-linked calls nationwide from at least 25 states, compared to 234 calls during the whole of 2010. The $20 packets are available in corner stores, truck stops and on the Internet, and marketed as bath salts or...

For The NHS must wise up to the “growing problem” of drug and alcohol misuse among older people, according to a new report published today by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The report, written by the Older People’s Substance Misuse Working Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warns that not enough is being done to tackle substance misuse in our aging population – making them society’s “invisible addicts”. The report pulls together evidence to highlight the extent of the problem: - The number of older people in the UK population is increasing rapidly – between 2001 and 2031 there is...

Unlike alcohol problems and antisocial behavior, depression doesn't decline with age in addiction-prone women in their 30s and 40s

People who have used cocaine run a great risk of becoming addicted, even after long drug-free periods. Now researchers at Linköping University and their colleagues can point to a specific molecule in the brain as a possible target for treatment to prevent relapses. Drugs are addictive because they “hijack” the brain’s reward system, which is actually intended to make it pleasurable to eat and have sex, behaviors that are necessary for survival and reproduction. This “hijacking” is extremely long-lived and often leads to relapses into abuse, especially when the individual is exposed to stimuli in the...

Their numbers are rising, but their age is dropping: children and young adults who drink so much that they have to go to the hospital. Binge-drinking is sadly fashionable amongst the under 20-year-olds. But how can adolescents be effectively protected from alcohol and substance abuse? “Information alone is not good enough,” Dr Karina Weichold of the Jena University (Germany) knows. Because even children know that alcohol consumption and smoking can cause health damage. “Therefore prevention needs to start somewhere else.” This is what the developmental scientists, together with colleagues from the Institute of...

Forty percent of U.S. youth report seeing pictures of kids getting drunk, passed out, or using drugs on Facebook, Myspace, or other social networking sites, according to data from a 2011 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Of these youth, approximately 90% had first seen such pictures at age 15 or younger. While the majority reported that their first exposure was at age 12 or 13 (36%) and 14 or 15 (42%), more than one in ten reported that their first exposure was as young as 10 or 11. These findings corroborate those of another study that found that much of the alcohol-related content on...

The world is a dazzling array of people, objects, sounds, smells and events: far too much for us to fully experience at any moment. So our attention may automatically be snagged by something startling, such as a slamming door, or we may deliberately focus on something that is important to us right then, such as locating our child among the happily screaming hordes on the school playground. We also know that people are hard-wired to seek out and pay attention to things that are rewarding, such as food when we are hungry, or water when we are thirsty. So what happens when the things that signify a “reward” are actually not...

Patients with major depression do better by learning to create a more positive outlook about the future, rather than by focusing on negative thoughts about their past experiences, researchers at Cedars-Sinai say after developing a new treatment that helps patients do this.   While Major Depressive Disorder patients traditionally undergo cognitive-behavior therapy care that seeks to alter their irrational, negative thoughts about past experiences, patients who were treated with the newly-developed Future-Directed Therapy™ demonstrated significant improvement in depression and anxiety, as well as improvement in overall reported...

The number of alcohol-related hospital admissions in England has exceeded one million in a year for the first time, a report has found. Figures compiled by the NHS Information Centre for the year 2009-2010 revealed 1,057,000 hospital visits in relation to alcohol, a 12% increase on the previous year and more than double the amount recorded in 2002-2003. The statistics, which cover the period of April 2009 to the end of March 2010, were published today in the NHS IC’s annual report, Statistics on Alcohol: England 2011. A breakdown of the figures showed that 63% of the hospital admissions were for men and found that there were higher...