Urine toxicology screening testing is an important standard of care in the addiction and pain treatment setting, offering a reproducible, unbiased, and accurate laboratory test to monitor patients and provide objective support for clinical observations. It has been shown that physicians do not have proficiency in the ordering or interpretation of these tests. This article is an attempt to respo...

ABSTRACT Aim To synthesize the results of marijuana, cocaine and opiate drug toxicology studies of homicide victims and examine variation in results across person and setting characteristics. Methods A meta-analysis of 18 independent studies identified from an extensive review of 239 published articles that met the inclusion criteria of reporting marijuana, cocaine and/or opiate toxicology test...

OBJECTIVE To examine prevalence rates and psychosocial correlates of clonidine use in a sample of opiate-dependent pregnant women. METHODS Clonidine use was assessed in 90 treatment-seeking, pregnant, opiate-abusing women using both self-report and urinalysis toxicology. Clonidine-positive and -negative subjects were compared for selected demographic, substance use, and psychosocial measures....

BACKGROUND Substance abuse is associated with injuries, but these associations have not been well characterized by type of substance and injury type. METHODS A cross-sectional study of patients selected for toxicology screening compared those with positive and those with negative test results for drugs and alcohol. RESULTS Patients with positive alcohol toxicology results were more likely t...

Objective: This preliminary study was conducted to establish the minimal counseling requirements for buprenorphine maintenance in primary care settings. A brief, nurse-administered, medically focused counseling approach for buprenorphinemaintained patients, Medical Management (MM), was designed by the authors. To evaluate preliminary feasibility and efficacy of MM prior to using it in a primary...

BACKGROUND The measurement of morphine in biological samples has become a routine in many clinical and forensic toxicology laboratories. A high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was developed for the determination of morphine in plasma. METHODS Samples were extracted using Zeolite Y column followed by reversed phase HPLC with fluorescence detection. This method was based on an e...

A substantial literature describes the capacity of all addictive drugs to slow cell growth and potentiate apoptosis. Flow cytometry was used as a means to compare two lineages of circulating progenitor cells in addicted patients. Buprenorphine treated opiate addicts were compared with medical patients. Peripheral venous blood CD34(+) CD45(+) double positive cells were counted as haemopoietic st...

One limitation in the growing field of ambient or direct analysis methods is reduced selectivity caused by the elimination of chromatographic separations prior to mass spectrometric analysis. We explored the use of high-field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS), an ambient pressure ion mobility technique, to separate the closely related opiate isomers of morphine, hydromorphon...