This book discusses the influences, treatment options and health effects of substance abuse. Chapter One examines the phenomenon of alcoholism and alcoholic psychoses in Russia from the late Soviet to post-Soviet period. Chapter Two studies the validity and reliability of alcohol use data collected via the Amazons Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a commonly used tool for social science research. Chapter Three assesses and compares certain parameters of sexual functioning in patients with alcohol dependence syndrome. Chapter Four summarizes the results of two double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot studies conducted in order to evaluate the efficacy of mirtazapine for the treatment of persons with comorbid major depressive disorder and alcohol use disorder (MDD/AUD). Chapter Five presents a re-offense prevention program which specifically addresses the participants social network composition. Chapter Six reviews the epidemiology of the hepatitis B virus infection among non-injecting drug users. Chapter Seven discusses the macro- and micro-level factors that influence the emergence and sustainability of recovery high schools (RHS) and conclude that both grassroots advocates and policy-makers must consider the myriad ecological forces and their influence on the development of particular recovery support programs.

Should marijuana be legalized? Since 2012 four US states have legalized commercial for-profit marijuana production and use, while Washington DC has legalized possession, growth and gifting of limited amounts of the plant. Other states, and even cities, have decriminalized possession, allowed for medical use, or reduced possession to a misdemeanor. While marijuana is forbidden by international treaties and by national and local laws across the globe, polls show that public support for legalization has continued to increase steadily over time. So why does the issue of marijuana legalization continue to be so controversial? One short answer is that it is an extremely complicated business, with approaches toward legalization just within the United States varying widely. What's more, not all supporters of "legalization " agree on what it is they want to legalize: Just using marijuana? Growing it? Selling it? Advertising it? If sales are to be legal, what regulations and taxes should apply? Different forms of legalization have demonstrated very different results. This second edition of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) provides readers with a non-partisan primer covering everything from the risks and benefits of using marijuana to what is happening with marijuana policy in the United States and abroad. The authors discuss the costs and benefits of legalization at the state and national levels and explore the "middle ground " of policy options between prohibition and commercialized production. The book also considers the personal impact of marijuana legalization on parents, heavy users, medical users, employers, and even drug traffickers.

This book provides the latest research in substance abuse research. The first chapter evaluates psychotropic drug overdoses in forensic practices. Unintentional overdose deaths involving opioid pain relievers are discussed in the second chapter. In the next section, the prevalence, trends and management strategies for alcohol withdrawal are reviewed. The prolonged heavy drinking of alcohol (ethanol) often creates brain disorder alcoholism. In the third chapter, the authors explore alcohol withdrawal from the perspective of oxidative stress. Additionally, the authors discuss the epidemiology of alcohol withdrawal, the pathophysiology, and the diagnostic criteria for the various manifestations of alcohol withdrawal and management. Recent findings and new treatment options are reviewed as well.

The 2015 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report is an annual report by the Department of State to Congress prepared in accordance with the Foreign Assistance Act. It describes the efforts of key countries to attack all aspects of the international drug trade in calendar year 2014. Volume I covers drug and chemical control activities. Volume II covers money laundering and financial crimes.

Addiction to illicit drugs is a pressing social concern across greater China, where there are likely several million drug addicts at present. This research breaks new ground by examining Chinese people's stories of drug addiction. Chinese Stories of Drug Addiction systematically evaluates how drug addiction is represented and constructed in a series of contemporary life stories and filmic stories from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These stories recount experiences leading up to and during drug addiction, as well as experiences during drug rehabilitation and recovery. Through analysis of these contemporary life stories and filmic stories, the book presents a comprehensive picture of how Chinese people from both inside the experience of drug addiction and outside of it make sense of a social practice that is deemed to be highly transgressive in Chinese culture. It employs a blended discourse analytic and narrative analytic approach to show how salient cultural, political and institutional discourses shape these Chinese stories and experiences. Complementing existing humanities research which documents the historical narrative of drug addiction in China at the expense of the contemporary narrative, the book also provides health and allied professionals with a rich insight into how Chinese people from different geographical locations and walks of life make sense of the experience of drug addiction. Moving beyond historical narrative to examine contemporary stories, Chinese Stories of Drug Addiction offers a valuable contribution to the fields of Chinese studies and personal health and wellbeing, as well as being of practical use to health professionals.

The issue of alcohol-impaired driving has received broad attention over the years, but drug-impaired driving also contributes to fatalities and injuries from traffic crashes. However, knowledge about the drug-impaired- driving problem is less advanced than for alcohol-impaired driving. This book discusses what is known about the extent of drug-impaired driving in the United States; challenges that exist for federal, state, and local agencies in addressing drug-impaired driving; and actions federal and state agencies have taken to address drug-impaired driving and what gaps exist in the federal response. This book also summarizes a series of studies undertaken by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to acquire the information needed to address the general problem of drug-impaired driving.

The first in a series of three recovery guides, First-Year Sobriety uses personal stories to show that despite their differing experiences, all are united in the process of living without alcohol or drugs. The first in a series of three recovery guides for the first three years of sobriety, First-Year Sobriety uses the voices of many women and men who are struggling in the often baffling territory of their first year of sobriety to show that despite their differing experiences, all are united in the process of giving life without alcohol or other drugs a chance. These are people who are alternately amazed, appalled, delighted, depressed, illuminated, disturbed, or simply thrown by their first days, weeks, and months of sobriety. Kettelhack explores the challenges all seem to face: learning to break through loneliness, isolation, and fear; finding ways to deal with anger, depression, and resentment; and learning how to deal with a new and sometimes overwhelming happiness.Guy Kettelhack has written seven books on recovery. He is completing a Master's degree in psychoanalysis, and is an analyst-in-training at the Boston and New York Centers for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. A graduate of Middlebury College, Kettelhack has also done graduate work in English literature at Bread Loaf School of English at Oxford University. He lives in New York City.

As entertaining as it is enlightening, "Dope Girls" vividly records the scandals and moral panics in Britain that followed the end of the First World War, as drug use--especially of morphine and cocaine--was transformed into a national menace. The cast of characters includes Billie Carleton, a West End musical actress, whose highly publicized death from an overdose in 1918 fueled public anxiety; Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor; and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica--identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menace. Around them swirled a raffish group of seedy and rebellious hedonists. Britain was horrified and enthralled--the drug problem was born, amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail. A cult classic in Britain, "Dope Girls" remains both timely and instructive.

Methamphetamine: A Love Story presents an insider's view of the world of methamphetamine based on the life stories of thirty-three adults formerly immersed in using, dealing, and manufacturing meth in rural Oklahoma. Using a respectful tone towards her subjects, Shukla illuminates their often decades-long love affair with the drug, the attractions of the lifestyle, the eventual unsustainability of it, and the challenges of exiting the life. These personal stories reveal how and why people with limited economic means and inadequate resources become entrapped in the drug epidemic, while challenging longstanding societal views about addiction, drugs, drug policy, and public health.

Substance abuse treatment in the U.S. is not a smooth continuum of services available to all those who seek them. This speaks to the importance of this comprehensive guide, which evaluates and summarizes all available substance abuse treatment settings and approaches, including in-patient, outpatient, 12-step programs, and more. It looks at the simplest of treatments (brief interventions) to the most intensive and expensive types of inpatient treatment programs. This text provides a clear and succinct review of different types of treatment, addresses controversies over "best practices," and examines their effectiveness with a variety of populations. It also closely examines research findings and their applicability for improving substance abuse treatment in the future.

Key Features: A comprehensive and practical guide to the field of substance abuse treatment Offers an overview of national, state, and local prevention efforts Includes chapters on substance abuse treatment with special populations including children/adolescents, women, the elderly, and criminal offenders Translates complex research findings into an easily understandable format

With debates surrounding the decriminalisation of certain illegal drugs raging in many countries around the world, this new book is a timely and sober reflection on one of the biggest social problems facing the world at large. Of interest not only to economists, but also to criminologists and those involved in policy-making, The Economics of Illegal Drugs is an accessible, comprehensive and international review of the topic and the usefulness of applying microeconomic analysis to drug production and distribution.

Narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens . . . these drugs have always affected far more than the perceptions, minds and moods of their users. Writing on Drugs explores the profound and pervasive nature of their influence on contemporary culture. It reads Coleridge on opium, Freud on cocaine, Michaux on mescaline and Burroughs on them all, and with such writers it begins to understand the many ways in which the modern world has found itself on drugs. Psychoactive substances have been integral to its economic history, its politics, media and technologies. They have influenced its poetry and stories, and shaped some of its most fundamental philosophies. They have even exposed the neurochemistry of a human brain which, like its cultures, has never been drug-free.

Adolescents in Public Housing incorporates data from multiple public-housing sites in large U.S. cities to shine much-needed light on African American youth living in non-HOPE VI public-housing neighborhoods. With findings grounded in research, the book gives practitioners and policy makers a solid grasp of the attitudes toward deviance, alcohol and drug abuse, and depressive symptoms characterizing these communities, and links them explicitly to gaps in policy and practice. A long-overdue study of a system affecting not just a minority of children but the American public at large, Adolescents in Public Housing initiates new, productive paths for research on this vulnerable population and contributes to preventive interventions that may improve the lives of affected youth.

Cannabis has never been a more controversial substance in Britain. Over the last decade it has been reclassified twice, has been the subject of a range of official investigations and scientific studies, and has provoked media campaigns and all manner of political gesturing. Cannabis Nation seeks to understand this period by placing it back into the historical context of the long-term story of cannabis and the British. It takes up where its predecessor, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800-1928 (2003) left off. James Mills traces the story back into the last days of the Empire, when Britain controlled cannabis-consuming societies in Asia and Africa even while there was little taste for the drug back home. He shows that cannabis was caught up in control regimes established to deal with opium and cocaine consumption, while it fell out of favour as a medicine. As such, when migration after the Second World War brought the Empire's cannabis-consumers to the UK, they faced hostile attitudes towards their favourite intoxicant. From that time on a growing number of groups and agencies took an interest in cannabis. Ambitious bureaucrats in the Home Office saw in it an opportunity to draw resources in to the Drugs Branch, while the police began to use laws related to it for a number of other purposes. Experts ranging from pharmacologists to sociologists formed committees on the subject, and its association with colonial migrants lent it an exotic aura to the politically-minded of the 1960s counter-culture and the working-class youth of Britain's inner cities. Since the 1970s governments were content to devolve responsibility to the police for working out the best legal approach to the substance, and efforts to wrestle this back from them proved difficult a decade ago. Cannabis Nation considers all of these trends, details the often eccentric characters that have shaped them, and concludes that current positions and arguments on cannabis can only be properly assessed if their historical origins are clearly understood.

Charles Monroe-Kane is a natural raconteur, and boy, does he have stories to tell. Born into an eccentric Ohio clan of modern hunter-gatherers, he grew up hearing voices in his head. Over a dizzying two decades, he was many things-teenage faith healer, world traveler, smuggler, liberation theologian, ladder-maker, squatter, halibut hanger, grifter, environmental warrior, and circus manager-all the while wrestling with schizophrenia and self-medication. From Baby Doc's Haiti to the Czech Velvet Revolution, and from sex, drugs, and a stabbing to public humiliation by the leader of the free world, Monroe-Kane burns through his twenties and several bridges of youthful idealism before finally saying: enough. In a memoir that blends engaging charm with unflinching frankness, Monroe-Kane gives his testimony of mental illness, drug abuse, faith, and love. By the end of Lithium Jesus there may be a voice in your head, too, saying "Do more, be more, live more. And fear less."

In recent years, British drug policy has undergone a transformation: tackling 'drug-driven' crime through criminal justice interventions has arguably become the central priority and focus. The 'criminal justice turn', as the authors refer to current UK drugs policy, is based on three simple and linked assumptions: drug-driven property crime is a major driver of local area crime rates, especially in deprived neighbourhoods; the criminal justice system can be used to target these drug-motivated offenders and direct them into treatment; and treatment can lead to significant reductions in their offending. Tough Choices: Risk, Security and the Criminalization of Drug Policy explores a series of questions about the 'criminal justice' turn in British drugs policy, from why it happened at all to what led policy to unfold in the way that it did, by analyzing policy documents and over 200 interviews conducted with key players in the policy development and implementation process. At the practice level, the authors explore how the strategic vision of the drug-crime 'problem' has shaped the ways in which drug-using offenders are identified, targeted and managed - in other words, why the implementation of the Drug Interventions Programme on the ground has taken the forms that it has. This is addressed through a detailed examination of practice in three local areas. Both the emergence of this new policy direction and its implementation in practice can best be understood as part of a wider transformation in governance in which risk-based thinking has become central to the ways in which we seek to address our contemporary insecurities. The book is based on a 30-month ESRC-funded research project on the Drug Interventions Programme and draws on the extensive empirical data generated during the project.

Tobacco, alcohol and other drug misuse accounts for a quarter of preventable death and disability in the developed world.

"Preventing Harmful Substance Use: The evidence base for policy and practice" offers a comprehensive summary of the best available scientific evidence for the prevention of harm from substance use. The editors provide a broad view of what constitutes prevention; including multiple approaches across various settings and levels of society. Each chapter provides important recommendations for supply, demand and harm reduction strategies that will improve the health of communities throughout the world.

A multidisciplinary team of leading international researchers and practitioners have worked together to provide authoritative accounts of their areas of expertise, which include the following: Updated concepts and theories of prevention including Community Systems Theory, Social Developmental Models, Deterrence, economics and more broad-based risk factor approaches. Overviews of the comparative health and economic costs associated with the use of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs. Worked examples of cost-benefit analyses and portfolio analyses to help policy makers decide how to invest available funds to achieve maximum population-level benefits. Up-to-date reviews of what works for a wide variety of policies and programs, including summary ratings of the strength of evidence for 70 specific strategies.

"Preventing Harmful Substance Use" will have international appeal to policy makers, educators, health professionals and researchers in psychology, psychiatry, sociology, criminology, economics, addiction, and health promotion.

While there have always been norms and customs around the use of drugs, explicit public policies--regulations, taxes, and prohibitions--designed to control drug abuse are a more recent phenomenon. Those policies sometimes have terrible side-effects: most prominently the development of criminal enterprises dealing in forbidden (or untaxed) drugs and the use of the profits of drug-dealing to finance insurgency and terrorism. Neither a drug-free world nor a world of free drugs seems to be on offer, leaving citizens and officials to face the age-old problem: What are we going to do about drugs?
In Drugs and Drug Policy, three noted authorities survey the subject with exceptional clarity, in this addition to the acclaimed series, What Everyone Needs to Know(r). They begin, by defining "drugs," examining how they work in the brain, discussing the nature of addiction, and exploring the damage they do to users. The book moves on to policy, answering questions about legalization, the role of criminal prohibitions, and the relative legal tolerance for alcohol and tobacco. The authors then dissect the illicit trade, from street dealers to the flow of money to the effect of catching kingpins, and show the precise nature of the relationship between drugs and crime. They examine treatment, both its effectiveness and the role of public policy, and discuss the beneficial effects of some abusable substances. Finally they move outward to look at the role of drugs in our foreign policy, their relationship to terrorism, and the ugly politics that surround the issue.
Crisp, clear, and comprehensive, this is a handy and up-to-date overview of one of the most pressing topics in today's world.
What Everyone Needs to Know(r) is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

Is opium a vile curse on society, a blessed medicine from God, or possibly both? This fresh history offers surprising new insights. Opium and its derivatives morphine and heroin have destroyed, corrupted, and killed individuals, families, communities, and even whole nations. And yet, for most of its long history, opium has also been humanity's most effective means of alleviating physical and mental pain. This extraordinary book encompasses the entire history of the world's most fascinating drug, from the first evidence of poppy cultivation by stone-age man to the present-day opium trade in Afghanistan. Dr. Thomas Dormandy tells the story with verve and insight, uncovering the strange power of opiates to motivate major conflicts yet also inspire great art and medical breakthroughs, to trigger the rise of global criminal networks yet also revolutionize attitudes toward well-being. Opium: Reality's Dark Dream traverses the globe and the centuries, exploring opium's role in colonialism, the Chinese Opium Wars, laudanum-inspired sublime Romantic poetry, American "Yellow Peril" fears, the rise of the Mafia and the black market, 1960s counterculture, and more. Dr. Dormandy also recounts exotic or sad stories of individual addiction. Throughout the book the author emphasizes opium's complex, valuable relationship with developments in medicine, health, and disease, highlighting the perplexing dual nature of the drug as both the cause and relief of great suffering in widely diverse civilizations.

"Julia" nervously emerges from her shabby tent in the suburban wastelands on the outskirts of Madrid to face another day of survival in one of Europe's most problematic ghettos: she is homeless, wanted by the police, and addicted to heroin and cocaine. She is also five months pregnant and rarely makes contact with support services. Welcome to the city shadows in Valdemingomez: a lawless landscape of drugs and violence where the third world meets the Wild West. Briggs and Monge entered this area with only their patience, some cigarettes and a mobile phone and collected vivid testimonies and images of Julia and others like her who live there. This important book documents what they found, locating these people's stories and situations in a political, economic and social context of spatial inequality and oppressive mechanisms of social control.

"The Smoking Book" is built on the foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern muses on these questions through intersecting stories and essays. Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The book begins with accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan and South America. Stern has written a book, at once personal and international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfilment and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters.

This textbook introduces students to the various arguments for and against the prohibition of recreational drugs. The arguments are carefully presented and analyzed, inviting students to consider the competing principles of liberty rights, paternalism, theories of punishment, legal moralism, and the social consequences of drug use and drug laws. Meyers extends this examination by presenting alternatives to the prohibition/legalization dichotomy, including harm reduction, decriminalization, and user licensing or on-premise use. The presentation invites readers to think clearly about the reasons and principles that should determine public policy and law, while also delving into the deeper philosophical questions underlying the drug prohibition debate. Is it morally wrong to use drugs? If so, would that be reason enough to make it illegal? Are there good reasons in favor of using illicit drugs? Do addicts lack free will, and if so, would it be unjust to punish them? What is (or ought to be) the purpose of punishment? Is the state justified in limiting the freedom of competent adults for their own good? What should be the goal of drug policy, reduced use or reduced harm? The purpose of the book is twofold. First, it is a review of the arguments for and against drug prohibition, a useful tool for policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens with an understanding of the relevant considerations for determining how we should reform our failing drug policy. Second, the book serves as a case study in the deeper issues of justice, the nature of law, rights and liberties, and the public good. Students studying applied ethics, political science, or public policy will benefit greatly from Meyers' approach.

The problems of substance abuse affect not only the abuser but the people involved in his or her life. Family members and significant others often confront therapists, requesting recommendations on how they can contribute to the abusers recovery. The traditional attitude of therapists has been that the substance abuser cannot be helped until he or she is motivated. Therefore, significant others have typically been given little advice or guidance. Family Recovery offers clinicians a structured, research-based approach to working with significant others involved with substance abusers. Unilateral family therapy offers methods for therapists to improve the well-being of concerned significant others of substance abusers and to teach them how to restructure their relationship to the abuser in ways that may enhance the substance abuser's motivation to change. Family Recovery will be useful to both experienced clinicians and those who are training to be clinical social workers, clinical psychologists, family therapists, and substance abuse counselors.

Responding to Drug Misuse provides a unique insight into the current shape of the drugs treatment system in England.

Reporting findings from research linked to the government's ten year drugs strategy Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain, the book places these in the context of policy, practice, and service development. It goes on to discuss the implications of these findings for the government s new strategy Drugs: Protecting Families and Communities. Throughout the book contributors reflect on current debates on drug strategies and social policy and consider the relevance of the findings for policy and practice. Topics discussed include:

• recent trends in drug policy and how these link to crime
• responses of dedicated drug treatment services
• service users' perceptions and suggestions for improvement
• the impact of drug misuse on children, families and communities.

This timely addition to the literature on drug misuse will be essential for substance use practitioners, including social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses. It will also supply helpful guidance for health and social care commissioners and policy providers.

Methamphetamine not only destroys the lives of those who become addicted to it, but affects all corners of society, including innocent children. This important book follows the case of rural Illinois, where in the mid-1990s methamphetamine production and misuse became a significant problem and, as a result, child welfare professionals saw an influx onto their caseloads of children whose parents were involved with the drug. The authors' account of the problems the children face, and of the efforts to help them, sheds useful light on possibilities for many other situations.
Applying a case-based, mixed-methods approach that capitalizes on rich qualitative data, the book examines parental methamphetamine misuse from a sociocultural perspective. Using extensive child welfare investigation data, participant observation, and in-depth interviews, the authors describe the perilous home lives of rural children whose parents misuse methamphetamine, where they are exposed to maltreatment, criminal behavior, and environmental danger. Many children end up with significant emotional and behavioral problems, especially posttraumatic symptoms, that will stay with them for years. Based on this descriptive information and the existing clinical literature, the authors designed a relationship- and narrative-based mental health program, "Life Story Intervention," that draws on rural communities' strengths, such as their storytelling traditions. Pilot data from the program, shared here, suggests some positive results of the intervention on children's psychological functioning.
Eradication of the problems caused by methamphetamine abuse will require years more of concerted effort and collaboration such as that described in this book. Social work and child welfare professors and students, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers will find inspiration in this account of the success that can result, with this issue and others, when practitioners and researchers join forces to understand complex social phenomena and design, implement, and assess effective interventions.