In the past decade this society has witnessed a great increase in illicit drug use. This increase in drug use has not brought a concommittant increase in our knowledge about drugs. Instead many myths, fears, and beliefs exist which are often grounded in superstition rather than in fact. One common belief is that the use of marihuana leads to experimentation with more powerful drugs, which leads...

The aim of this study is to compare the features of two groups of cocaine dependent patients in treatment, one of them with co-morbid diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder and the other not. Cross-sectional design, with 143 cocaine-dependent patients attending a drug unit, distributed in two groups: patients with and without Antisocial Personality Disorder. As results, we found that the ...

Methamphetamine (METH) is a highly addictive psychostimulant with no therapeutics registered to assist addicts in discontinuing use. Glutamatergic dysfunction has been implicated in the development and maintenance of addiction. We sought to assess the involvement of the metabotropic glutamate 5 receptor (mGlu5) in behaviours relevant to METH addiction because this receptor has been implicated i...

Opiates have been commonly used for the management of pain for many years. Despite this, there is a surprising lack of research into the effects of opiates on cognition, with far more research having been carried out on other classes of psychotropic drugs. This paper will outline why it is important to understand the cognitive effects of opiates, in particular the short acting opiates morphine ...