The mortality and morbidity from heroin overdose have increased in the United States and internationally in the last decade. The lipid solubility allows the rapid deposition of heroin and its metabolites into the central nervous system and accounts for the "rush" experienced by users and for the toxicity. Risk factors for fatal and nonfatal heroin overdoses such as recent abstinence, decreased ...

BACKGROUND Many opiate users require prescribed medication to help them achieve abstinence, commonly taking the form of a detoxification regime. In UK prisons, drug users are nearly universally treated for their opiate use by primary care clinicians, and once released access GP services where 40% of practices now treat drug users. There is a paucity of evidence evaluating methadone and bupreno...

Evidence of the misuse of dihydrocodeine preparations remains largely anecdotal,' 2consisting of case reports of dependence mainly among users of the proprietary form of dihydrocodeine tartrate DF 118. Recent estimates of the extent of dihydrocodeine misuse in the general population and among drug users are lacking. This paper reports the results of an investigation into the level of DF 118 mis...

Approximately 10% of new HIV infections worldwide are attributable to injecting drug use, often of an opiate such as heroin. 1 Opioid substitution therapy supplies illicit drug users with a replacement drug, a prescribed medicine such as methadone or buprenorphine, which is usually administered orally in a supervised clinical setting. The effectiveness of this therapy is recognized in developed...

Substance use disorder is conceptualized as a chronic relapsing condition where relapse is usually defined as the return to problematic substance use following treatment. An issue of great importance is the identification of the predictors of relapse and the development of treatments that may help prevent relapse. One of the strongest predictors of relapse is craving. The purpose of the present...

Using Bayesian capture-recapture analysis, we estimated the number of current injecting drug users (IDUs) in Scotland in 2006 from the cross-counts of 5670 IDUs listed on four data-sources: social enquiry reports (901 IDUs listed), hospital records (953), drug treatment agencies (3504), and recent Hepatitis C virus (HCV) diagnoses (827 listed as IDU-risk). Further, we accessed exact numbers of ...