This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" and the "Journal of the American Medical Association" between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the…

The progression from prescription opioid (RXO) abuse to RXO addiction is not well understood in adolescents, nor is the progression from RXO addiction to heroin abuse. The purpose of this pilot study was to characterize the development of RXO drug abuse, RXO drug addiction, and heroin abuse in a small cohort of adolescents recovering from opioid…

Introduction: Process research in psychotherapy is important to understand how treatment works. The National Institute of Clinical Excellence guidelines suggest that in methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) for opioid dependence, drug key-working should be based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) principles. This article reports the findings…

Introduction: Primary care physicians (PCPs) treat a high proportion of chronic pain patients but often lack training about how to assess and address issues associated with prescribing opioids when they are an appropriate component of therapy. The result may be that they may avoid treating these patients, which can lead to an undertreatment of…

This article aims to examine specific substance use profiles among former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrant and native-born women in Israeli therapeutic treatment facilities. Individuals were sampled at drug treatment facilities and assessed using the Addiction Severity Index. ASI scores suggest differences between the two groups. Among the findings…

The EU Action Plan on Drugs (2005-2008) calls for member states of the European Union to provide information on five key epidemiological indicators. These are: general population surveys, prevalence and patterns of problem drug use, drug related infectious diseases, drug related deaths and mortality of drug users, and demand for drug treatment.…

We compared two strategies of prize-based contingency management (CM) in methadone-maintained outpatients. Urine was tested thrice weekly for 5 weeks pre-CM, 12 weeks CM, and 8 weeks post-CM. Participants were randomly assigned to a cocaine contingency (four prize draws for each cocaine-negative urine, N = 29) or an opiate-cocaine contingency (one…

This paper critically examines methadone treatment from the perspective of adult and community education and questions the absence of rehabilitation. It identifies biomedicine and the methodology of evidence based medicine as the discourses that determine our understanding of addiction and treatment. It is especially critical of psychiatry for the…

The Boyle Heights Narcotics Prevention Project, located in a Mexican-American Community, attempted to answer the question: what happens when thirty ex-heroin addicts are hired at $600.00 per month to assist practicing addicts and potential drug users? The lengthy report discusses what the project was about, what it accomplished, and how it…

This multimodality approach is geared primarily to the goal of abstinence. For addicts who cannot achieve this goal, methadone maintenance is suggested as the next step. The modalities described range from low-dose maintenance for clinic outpatients to intensive rehabilitation in a methadone maintenance residential center facility. (Author)

The study investigated the life career of a sample of native Puerto Rican narcotic addicts who were treated at the Lexington, Kentucky Public Health Service Hospital. Specifically, it deals with the relationship between the addicts' involvement in a drug subculture and their subsequent drug use and abstinence. The hypothesis presented states that…

In May, 1974, Fresno County's Narcotic Abuse Treatment Program began a twenty-one-day outpatient methadone detoxification treatment modality. The results of the evaluation suggested an alternative treatment modality. The purpose of this paper is to examine this alternative treatment modality, its characteristics, its therapeutic outcomes and the…

Methadone has been defined as an agent to draw addicts out of the street life into "straight" society. However, the complementary perspective of the streets sees methadone as a new, widely available drug to be integrated into a subculture previously dominated by heroin. This article discusses the adaptation to methadone and its…