A 26-year-old American man was referred to our service for methadone replacement therapy and treatment of crack/cocaine addiction. His addiction history started with use of opioids in early adolescence. As his tolerance escalated, he began injecting cocaine with morphine, also known as ‘‘speedball.’’ Since he started methadone replacement therapy and discontinued morphine use, he reported a sub...

Crack cocaine addiction is a public health problem in Brazil. It is an endemic disease that affects rural and urban areas. The Ministry of Health has launched emergency programs for the treatment of dependents and to combat drug trafficking. Recognition of dermatological signs of this disease is important because through them the diagnosis can be suspected and early treatment of patients with c...

Smoking of crystalline cocaine, known as "crack" cocaine, has been associated with eosinophilic pneumonitis, but not with pleural effusions. We describe a patient with eosinophilic pneumonitis with an eosinophilic "empyema" after using "crack" cocaine. The illness resolved with corticosteroids. We hypothesised that his effusion would have increased levels of eosinophil cytokines that promote oe...

The relationship between deficits in affect regulation and Adult Antisocial Behavior (ASB) in primary crack/cocaine-using women was explored in a sample of 80 inner-city women. Narrative early memories were coded for two components of affect regulation, Affect Tolerance and Affect Expression, using the Epigenetic Assessment Rating Scale (EARS; Wilson, Passik, & Kuras, 1989). ASB was measured by...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate crack cocaine use practices, risk behaviors associated with HIV infection among drug users, and their involvement with violence. INTRODUCTION HIV infections are frequent among drug users due to risky sexual behavior. It is generally accepted that crack cocaine use is related to increased levels of violence. Several reports point to an increase in violence from those inv...

Studies of Alzheimer's disease patients show that individuals with larger premorbid brains have a later onset of disease, or a lessened severity of cognitive impairment, or both. This may be due to a "functional reserve" associated with the greater number of neurons and synapses available in larger brains. We used magnetic resonance imaging and the MicroCog Assessment of Cognitive Functioning t...

Iranian crack is a new form of narcotic substance that has found widespread prevalence in Iran in the past years. Crack only nominally resembles crack cocaine as it is widely different in its clinical signs. Thus the present study aims to quantify the chemical combination of this drug. The samples included 18 specimen of Crack collected from different zones of Tehran, Iran. All specimens were i...

BACKGROUND The main objectives of this study are to describe the smoked cocaine user's profile in socially-depressed areas and their needs from a harm-reduction perspective, to investigate their use of smoking crack and compare the acute effects between injecting and smoking consumption. METHODS The study took place in SAPS, Barcelona, Spain. Two focus group sessions were undertaken with a to...

BACKGROUND Five cases of severe neutropenia (neutrophil counts < 0.5 per 109 cells/L) associated with exposure to cocaine and levamisole, an antihelimithic agent no longer available in Canada, were identified in Alberta in 2008. Alberta and British Columbia (BC) public health officials issued an advisory and urged health care professionals to report cases to public health. This paper presents t...

The brain reward system is known to be the neuroanatomical basis of addictive behaviors. Systemic, cognitive and functional consequences of crack-cocaine addiction are clinically evident, but the neuroanatomical underpinnigs are not yet well understood. We aim to assess the neuroanatomical differences between crack-cocaine patients and paired healthy controls. Fifteen crack-cocaine patients rec...