Dr. Pier Vincenzo Piazza: Addiction is a vague concept that is generally used to define a pathological drug taking. There are different levels of severity of this pathological behavior. The mild condition is mostly characterized by an escalation in drug intake that goes from a sporadic recreational drug use to a more sustained and regular drug intake. This behavior starts becoming a problem for...

Physicians and other health care professionals seem well placed to play a role in the monitoring and, perhaps, in the curtailment of the trafficking in human beings for the purpose of organ removal. They serve as important sources of information for patients and may have access to information that can be used to gain a greater understanding of organ trafficking networks. However, well-establish...

This paper concentrates on both the positive and normative effects of punishments that enforce laws to make production and consumption of particular goods illegal, with illegal drugs as the main example. Optimal public expenditures on apprehension and conviction of illegal suppliers obviously depend on the extent of the difference between the social and private value of consumption of illegal g...

Although illegal markets have considerable economic significance and are of theoretical importance, they have been largely ignored by economic sociology. In the first part of this article, we propose a categorization for illegal markets. In the second part, the structural characteristics of illegal markets are described along the three coordination problems of valuation, competition and coopera...

8 M a r c h 2 0 0 3 The Supreme Court did not “invent” legal abortion, much less abortion itself, when it handed down its historic Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Abortion, both legal and illegal, had long been part of life in America. Indeed, the legal status of abortion has passed through several distinct phases in American history. Generally permitted at the nation’s founding and for several d...

The present study investigated the event-related brain potential (ERP) correlates of word stress processing. Previous results showed that the violation of a legal stress pattern elicited two consecutive Mismatch Negativity (MMN) components synchronized to the changes on the first and second syllable. The aim of the present study was to test whether ERPs reflect only the detection of salient fea...