Drawing on stress and life-course perspectives and using panel data from 1,286 south Florida young adults, we assess three critical questions regarding the role of marijuana in the "gateway hypothesis." First, does teen marijuana use independently (causally) affect subsequent use of more dangerous substances? Second, if so, does that effect apply to the abuse of other illicit substances, as def...

Psychostimulants are a diverse group of substances with their main psychomotor effects resembling those of amphetamine, methamphetamine, cocaine, or cathinone. Due to their potential as drugs of abuse, recreational use of most of these substances is illegal since 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. In recent years, new psychoactive substances have emerged mainly as synthetic cathinones ...

Drug abuse is prevalent in all countries across the world and  induces variety of adverse effects (1). Health problems arising from drug abuse commonly cause significant health challenges in the affected population and deteriorate many aspects of the patients’ performance and quality of life. Comorbidities are discovered in 60 to 75% of addict patients, suffering from various drug-related disor...

The emergence and use of synthetic cannabinoids have greatly increased in recent years. These substances are easily dispensed over the internet and on the streets. Some synthetic cannabinoids were shown to have abuse liability and were subsequently regulated by authorities. However, there are compounds that are still not regulated probably due to the lack of abuse liability studies. In the pres...

A great deal of research has focused on initiation into drug use and factors that increase the risk of initiation or protect against it. Initiation into the use of some drugs (such as alcohol) is extremely common, whereas initiation into use of other drugs (such as cocaine) is less frequent (Kandel 1975). Regardless of initiation rate, most individuals who try a particular drug do not continue ...

To examine patterns of mono- versus polydrug abuse, data were obtained from intake records of 69,891 admissions to publicly funded treatment programs in Tennessee between 1998 and 2004. While descriptive statistics were employed to report frequency and patterns of mono- and polydrug abuse by demographic variables and by study years, bivariate logistic regression was applied to assess the probab...

background: the pattern of drug abuse in iran has dramatically changed in recent years, turning from the traditional opioids [opium, opium dross, and refined opium dross (shireh)] into drugs with newer forms. the present study is aimed at investigating the frequency of pathological changes in the lungs of bodies with positive postmortem toxicology results for narcotics and psychotropic substanc...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate associations between four categories of maltreatment and substance use among adolescents. METHOD All 10th through 12th graders n = 2,187) at six public high schools in a rural Oregon county filled out an anonymous survey that included questions about their experience of emotional, sexual, and physical abuse and their use of a variety of subst...