Addictive Substances

…just as repeal of Prohibition didn’t make alcohol any safer for popular use… neither will legalization remove the risks associated with cannabis.

Sometimes powerful business leaders sound like drunk drivers or corner drug dealers. Rationalizing, externalizing, minimizing…

In the absence of complaints, the prescriber can be tempted to assume things are going well, when in fact they aren’t.

That industry will do everything in its power to create and sustain the biggest possible population of chronic stoners.

After all, you can’t afford to stop selling it. That’s not how you get promoted. What you need is science that seems to confirm your biases.

They qualify for the diagnosis, but have not yet experienced the sort of problems that are usually required to motivate a serious attempt to abandon drug use.

Of course, if you work in addiction treatment, you probably see some of these same meds being abused by young adults, often beginning in college or grad school.

We may be stuck relying on the soft stuff– therapy, support, behavior change, even spiritual growth– all those icky-squicky things that neuroscientists struggle to quantify.

CDC gives cigarettes credit for more than 480,000 deaths a year, in the US alone.

Colleges know their students are drinking, often heavily.