Objective: To compare the risk of comorbid sexual addiction in a sample of individuals with a diagnosis of substance dependence, stratifying the sample by drug of choice as well as by mono versus polysubstance addiction. Method: All data were collected at Santa Casa de São Paulo, Brazil. The study sample comprised all alcohol or drug dependents admitted to the Addiction Treatment Unit between...

This article reports findings from a study that investigated treatment outcomes among crack/cocaine users over a 18-month period. From a cohort of 229 subjects, three groups emerged: (1) those who had reported ongoing, stable abstinence from crack/cocaine; (2) those who had consistently used during the period; and (3) those who reported cycling between abstinence and use during the follow-up pe...

Although Americans have experienced many drug epidemics, the majority of which have ended within ten years of onset, they nevertheless believed that the use of smokable cocaine, which took the popular form of crack cocaine in 1984, would grow exponentially throughout the 1990s unless it was vigorously combated. However, in 1991 it appears that crack use is in decline even in the inner-city neig...

BACKGROUND Contingency management (CM) has recently shown efficacy in promoting abstinence and retention in treatment among crack cocaine users in Brazil. However, partially because of unawareness and resistance among health care providers, CM has not been widely employed. The objective of this study was to conduct a secondary analysis in order to evaluate how CM participants perceive their tre...

BACKGROUND Proper assessment of the harms caused by the misuse of drugs can inform policy makers in health, policing, and social care. We aimed to apply multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) modelling to a range of drug harms in the UK. METHODS Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists, met in a 1-day interactive workshop to score 20 drugs on...

Drug dependence is a far-reaching problem that goes beyond the individual to society at large. While a myriad of substances have addictive properties, the scope of this review is limited to crack cocaine – how the brain, specifically the mesolimbic dopamine system, is compromised by administration of crack cocaine, physiological changes and the relevance of dopamine levels to susceptibility to ...

To evaluate the relation between illicit drug use, sexual practices, and socioeconomic status, we analyzed data from the baseline interview of a cohort of 675 men who have sex with men conducted from 1994 to 1999 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Bivariate analyses of factors associated with crack/cocaine use with sex revealed that men who reported crack/cocaine use were significantly ( p <.05) more l...

BACKGROUND Some habitual crack cocaine smokers who deny IV drug abuse show decreased pulmonary transfer of carbon monoxide (DCO). We speculated that repeated elevations in pulmonary artery pressure (PAP) might cause pulmonary capillary damage and result in a lowered DCO, or that the reduction could be due to anoxic lung injury secondary to repeated episodes of cocaine-induced pulmonary vascular...

Why babies of crack-cocaine mothers develop heart problems has always been a mystery. In this issue of Molecular Pharmacology, Zhang et al. (p. 1319) show that a specific methylation occurs at the protein kinase Cepsilon (PKCepsilon) promoter of the babies born of mother rats exposed to cocaine. This reduces the expression of PKCepsilon, a naturally cardioprotective enzyme, which provides a pla...

In this paper, we use data from the British Crime Survey (BCS) to examine the effect of illicit drug use on labour market outcomes. We find very little evidence to support any relationship between drug use, hard or soft, and occupational attainment. However, we find compelling evidence to suggest that drug use, particularly the use of opiates, cocaine and crack cocaine, is associated with an in...