Since the advent of HIV epidemic in the early 1980s, the medical care of illicit drug users has become central to national and local public health planning. Drug users are at high risk for acquiring and transmitting HIV to their social network via needle sharing, trading sex for drugs, sexual relations with steady partners, and perinatally. The association between alcohol abuse and high-risk be...

One possible explanation of the commonly reported associations between early onset cannabis use and elevated risks of other illicit drug use is that early onset cannabis use increases access and availability to other drugs. It was this argument that in part motivated policy changes in the Netherlands that led to the de facto legalization of cannabis there. This study examines, using a co-twin c...

OBJECTIVES We explored changing relations between substance use, welfare receipt, and substance-abuse treatment among low-income mothers before and after welfare reform. METHODS We examined annual data from mothers aged 18 to 49 years in the 1990-2001 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse and the 2002 National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Logistic regression was used to examine determinan...

Objective To inform addiction treatment in primary care with respect to psychosocial interventions to reduce drinking in concurrent problem alcohol and illicit drug users, by: exploring the experience of (and evidence for) psychosocial interventions, developing and evaluating a complex intervention to improve implementation. Evaluation of the intervention tested core feasibility and acceptabili...

Illicit drug use is a relevant public health issue in Thailand. The assessment of the prevalence of illicit drug use among adolescents may guide policies and programmes aimed at reducing illicit drug use among this age group. Using data from the Thailand Global School-Based Student Health Survey (GSHS) 2008, the researchers assessed the prevalence of illicit drug and its associated factors amon...

OBJECTIVE To examine the prevalence of illicit drug use among men who have sex with men (MSM) with HIV-1 infection in Japan, where the life-time prevalence of illicit drug use in the general population is only 2.9%. DESIGN A single-center cross-sectional study at a large HIV clinic in Tokyo, which treats approximately 15% of HIV-1 infected patients in Japan. METHODS The prevalence of illici...

Supervised drug consumption facilities, where illicit drugs can be used under the supervision of trained staff, have been operating in Europe for the last three decades. These facilities primarily aim to reduce the acute risks of disease transmission through unhygienic injecting, prevent drug-related overdose deaths and connect high-risk drug users with addiction treatment and other health and ...

Results from twin studies suggest that overlapping genetic factors influence alcohol dependence and illicit drug dependence. Using data from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), we examined the association between 69 SNPs in the GABAA receptor gene cluster on chromosome 4 and marijuana and illicit drug dependence, individually, and as co-occurring phenotypes with alcoho...

BACKGROUND Release from prison is associated with a markedly increased risk of both fatal and non-fatal drug overdose, yet the risk factors for overdose in recently released prisoners are poorly understood. The aim of this study was to identify risk and protective factors for non-fatal overdose (NFOD) among a cohort of illicit drug users in Vancouver, Canada, according to recent incarceration. ...

Supervised drug consumption facilities, where illicit drugs can be used under the supervision of trained staff, have been operating in Europe for the last three decades. These facilities primarily aim to reduce the acute risks of disease transmission through unhygienic injecting, prevent drug-related overdose deaths and connect high-risk drug users with addiction treatment and other health and ...