The lead article in this issue of Addiction Science & Clinical Practice focuses on the blessing and curse of opioids. Drs. Savage, Kirsh, and Passik offer invaluable practical advice, useful to both substance abuse clinicians and pain specialists, on negotiating the difficult clinical issues that arise as a result of opioids’ gift of powerful analgesia and their bane of addiction. While support...

Substance use patterns are notorious for their ability to change over time. Both licit and illicit substance use cause serious public health problems and evidence for the same is now available in our country. National level prevalence has been calculated for many substances of abuse, but regional variations are quite evident. Rapid assessment surveys have facilitated the understanding of changi...

BACKGROUND Integrated treatment programs (those that include on-site pregnancy-, parenting-, or child-related services with addiction services) were developed to break the intergenerational cycle of addiction, dysfunctional parenting, and poor outcomes for mothers and children, yet there has been no systematic review of studies of parenting outcomes. OBJECTIVES As part of larger systematic re...

Parallels in biological, psychological, and behavioral systems have led to the hypothesis that an addictive process may contribute to problematic eating. The Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) was developed to provide a validated measure of addictive-like eating behavior based upon the diagnostic criteria for substance dependence. Recently, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder...

BACKGROUND Recent studies have identified reinforcing properties associated with tanning and suggest a possible physiologic mechanism and addiction driving tanning behavior. OBJECTIVE This article attempts to synthesize the existing literature on tanning and addiction to investigate possible associations. METHODS We investigated a variety of substance dependence models to define what consti...

abstract background: nowadays, prevalence of addictive behaviors among bipolar patients is considered to be a serious health threat by the world health organization. the aim of this study is to investigate the role of behavioral activation and inhibition systems in predicting addictive behaviors of male patients with bipolar disorder at the roozbeh psychiatric hospital. materials and methods: t...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Research suggests that excessive online gaming may lead to symptoms commonly experienced by substance addicts. Since games are particularly appealing to children and adolescents, these individuals may be more at risk than other groups of developing gaming addiction. METHODS Given these potential concerns, a literature review was undertaken in order (i) to present the class...

Pethidine is a synthetic opioid substance with high addiction potential. It is commonly used in medicine pre and postoperatively to relieve the pain. A Pethidine addiction generally starts as iatrogenic and may be a problem for the clinicians when there is a real pain. Its opioid analgesic usage is legal, yet it is possible that it can be abused by the health care workers and addiction may beco...

In other words, during development masturbation is normally replaced by adult sexual satisfaction, but where it is not it may be substituted by (another) addiction. These are quintessentially Freudian claims, museum-quality examples of the type. For that reason, perhaps, they are all too easily dismissed by addiction researchers today. If readers are willing to suspend judgment for a moment, th...