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In France, the monitoring of drug abuse and dependence is based on the implementation of national surveys and the collection of spontaneous reports of health professionals. Medico-administrative information completes these data sources through the creation of pharmacoepidemiological tools to exploit them in the field of addictovigilance. This article purposes an overview of this contribution through the presentation of several studies and/or methods developed by the French addictovigilance network to assess the psychoactive drugs diversion and its consequences at the population level. These examples underline the value of these databases and confirm that they could become a systematic routine tool for addictovigilance, particularly in complementary multi-source approaches., (Copyright © 2019 Société française de pharmacologie et de thérapeutique. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.)

Monitoring the potential for abuse and dependence of psychoactive substances falls within the scope of international conventions on narcotic drugs. At the European level, this monitoring is based on activities controlled by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) for substance abuse in general and by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for marketed drugs, in the context of pharmacovigilance. If France has set up in the early 1990s an original system to assess potential for abuse of psychoactive substances, with specific tools combining both the evaluation of the use of these substances (illicit substances or diverted drugs), and the consequences of that use in terms of morbidity and mortality, there is no equivalent in other European countries. Indeed, unlike the USA, who, for several decades, organized this type of surveillance, with a multisource approach (sentinel systems, databases, medical and administrative data, databases for seeking care in relation abuse), we have not found in other European countries integrated system for identifying a signal of drug abuse, or to assess the impact of measures for minimizing the risk of abuse. However, some recent examples show a growing concern about drug addiction, based on a pharmacoepidemiological approach using pharmacovigilance databases or medical administrative data. These examples illustrate the interest of these approaches in the field of drug of abuse., (© 2015 Société Française de Pharmacologie et de Thérapeutique.)