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This study examines the knowledge individuals use to make judgments about persons with substance use disorder. First, we show that there is a cultural model of addiction causality that is both shared and contested. Second, we examine how individuals' understanding of that model is associated with stigma attribution. Research was conducted among undergraduate students at the University of Alabama. College students in the 18-25 age range are especially at risk for developing substance use disorder, and they are, perhaps more than any other population group, intensely targeted by drug education. The elicited cultural model includes different types of causes distributed across five distinct themes: Biological, Self-Medication, Familial, Social, and Hedonistic. Though there was cultural consensus among respondents overall, residual agreement analysis showed that the cultural model of addiction causality is a multicentric domain. Two centers of the model, the moral and the medical, were discovered. Differing adherence to these centers is associated with the level of stigma attributed towards individuals with substance use disorder. The results suggest that current approaches to substance use education could contribute to stigma attribution, which may or may not be inadvertent. The significance of these results for both theory and the treatment of addiction are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with research of Russian university student attitudes toward drug use. Research was conducted in 2015; and, 150 students from Smolensk universities took part. The sample consists of three age groups of students: 17-18, 19, and 20 years and older. Study results show students view people with addiction in a negative context - weak, stupid, unreliable, and unhappy. Also, attitudes reflect support for extreme punishment of drug traffickers for drug distribution blaming Roma 'Gypsies.' Age of the student respondents was a significant factor affecting attitudes - older students have a more negative attitude about people with addiction and are more inclined to call for harsh punishment. Study results provide usable information for drug policy, education and prevention efforts in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the trajectories over time of classroom teachers’ fidelity to drug prevention curricula. Using the “Concerns-Based Adoption Model” (C-BAM) as a theoretical framework, we hypothesized that teachers’ fidelity would improve with repetition. Participants comprised 23 middle school teachers who videotaped their administration of three entire iterations of the All Stars curriculum. Investigators coded two key curriculum lessons, specifically assessing the proportion of activities of each lesson teachers attempted and whether they omitted, added, or changed prescribed content, or delivered it using new methods. Study findings provided only partial support for the C-BAM model. Considerable variability in teachers’ performance over time was noted, suggesting that their progression over time may be nonlinear and dynamic, and quite possibly a function of their classroom and school contexts. There was also evidence that, by their third iteration of All Stars, teachers tended to regress toward the baseline mean. That is, the implementation quality of those that started out with high levels of fidelity tended to degrade, while those that started out with very low fidelity to the curriculum tended to improve. Study findings suggest the need for ongoing training and technical assistance, as well as “just in time” messages delivered electronically; but it is also possible that some prevention curricula may impose unrealistic expectations or burdens on teachers’ abilities and classroom time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focuses on the serious issue related to the adolescents’ and adults’ behavior and health. It aims to identify the risk factors for drug abuse from samples taken from a town of Eastern Nepal. This is a matched case-control study. The conditional logistic regression method was adopted for data analysis. The diagnosis cut off was determined by Receiver Operating Characteristic curve. A representative sample of 150 matched pairs was recruited from Dharan in 2006. The final model after adjusting 17 possible variables each other, detected some factors like education, occupation, short temper, depression, etc that were significantly associated with drug abuse, but shy behavior was not a significant predictor for drug abuse among the study sample. The level of education, occupation and depression were the strong predictors as identified by the model. The findings of the study may have implications to aware families and schools in developing countries like Nepal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluations of school-based substance abuse prevention programs with schools or school districts randomly assigned to either the treatment or control condition have demonstrated effective strategies over the past 30 years. Although control schools were never considered “pure” (i.e., no other interventions were being offered), school-based programming in the 1980s did not include evidence-based interventions. Since the late 1990s, funding agencies have required schools either to select programming from approved lists of prevention strategies or to demonstrate the efficacy of the strategies that would be used. This has increased the number of schools delivering evidence-based programs to their students. As a result, “treatment as usual” is more challenging to researchers. This paper describes exposure to prevention programming as reported by 204 school administrators from 83 districts and their 19,200 students who are participating in the Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention Study, a national randomized evaluation trial of the program, Take Charge of Your Life. In order to determine the extent of student exposure to prevention programming in both the control and treatment schools, data were collected in each of the 5 years of the study from two sources: principals and prevention coordinators and from students. The data provided by the principals and prevention coordinators indicate that the vast majority of schools assigned to the control condition offered students drug prevention programming. This finding has implications for the evaluation of Take Charge of Your Life but also for other evaluation studies. The students were asked questions regarding participation in drug education posed on annual surveys. When their responses were compared to the reports from their school principals and prevention coordinators, it was found that the students underreported exposure to drug education. A follow-up qualitative study of a sample of students suggests the need for rewording of the questions for students in future studies. The implications of our findings for evaluation studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim of the study was to evaluate whether endothelial dysfunction is a marker of erectile dysfunction (ED) in recreational drug abuse. Sixty-four non-consecutive men complaining of ED from at least 3 months were included. All patients underwent detailed history about recreational drug abuse and were then submitted to dynamic penile duplex ultrasound (PDU). According to pharmaco-stimulated peak systolic velocity (PSV) cutoff at 35 cm s−1, patients were divided into two groups: organic (O; n=30) and non-organic (NO; n=34) ED. All subjects and 7 healthy age-matched subjects as controls, underwent veno-occlusive plethysmography (VOP) for the evaluation of endothelium-dependent dilatation of brachial arteries. Blood pressure, total and free testosterone, prolactin, estradiol, low-density lipoprotein and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol were also evaluated; patients were classified with regard to insulin resistance through the HOMA-IR index. Cannabis smoking was more frequent in O-ED vs NO-ED (78% vs 3%, P<0.001) in the absence of any concomitant risk factor or comorbidity for ED. VOP studies revealed impaired endothelium-dependent vasodilatation in O-ED but not in NO-ED and controls (12±6 vs 32±4 and 34±5 ml min−1, respectively; P=0.003). Overall patients showed a direct relationship between HOMA-IR and PSV (r2=0.47, P<0.0001), which was maintained in men with organic ED (r2=0.62, P<0.0001). In cannabis consumers, a direct relationship between HOMA-IR and VOP was also found (r2=0.74, P<0.0001). Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that VOP values below 17.22 ml min−1 were suggestive for vasculogenic ED. We conclude that early endothelial damage may be induced by chronic cannabis use (and endocannabinoid system activation); insulin resistance may be the hallmark of early endothelial dysfunction and may concur to determine vascular ED in the absence of obesity. Further studies are warranted to establish a direct relationship between cannabis abuse, onset of insulin resistance and development of vascular ED.International Journal of Impotence Research (2008) 20, 566–573; doi:10.1038/ijir.2008.43 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This study examines ethnic differences in relationships between a large number of risk factors and adolescent binge drinking with data collected from 14 to 17 year olds who participated in the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Logistic regression analyses were conducted to determine whether 39 risk factors in community, family, school, and peer-individual domains were differentially associated with past-30-day binge drinking among youth in ethnic minority groups (black, Hispanic and Asian) relative to whites. Forty-three percent (17) of the risk factors examined were differentially associated with binge drinking in at least one of the ethnic groups relative to whites. Most of these risk factors were more strongly associated with binge drinking among white adolescents than Hispanic and black youth, but not Asians. The direction of the relationships between these risk factors and binge drinking, however, was usually the same for whites and ethnic minority groups. A multivariate prediction model indicated that risk factors in the community, family, school, and peer-individual domains accounted for 27% of the variance in binge drinking for white adolescents, 22% for Hispanics, 10% for blacks, and 39% for Asians. These findings suggest that research is needed to identify additional risk factors that are associated with binge drinking among adolescents, particularly blacks, Hispanics and possibly other ethnic minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Household survey data on age at first use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and hard drugs can be biased due to sample selection and inaccurate recall. One potential concern is attrition, whereby individuals who get involved with substance use at an early age become increasingly less likely to be surveyed in successive years. A comparison of data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) with data from a longitudinal study suggested that attrition might have caused substantially less bias than did “forward telescoping,” the inflating of age at first use over time. The evidence of forward telescoping was particularly pronounced with respect to age at first use of alcohol. This paper presents a procedure for correcting the distribution of age at first use for forward telescoping (but not attrition) by viewing a portion of the NHSDA data collected in successive years as constituting a cohort study. Results are presented from applying this procedure with NHSDA data collected from 1982 to 1995 for respondents born 1968–1973. The findings suggest that prevention programs need to be introduced at an earlier age than would be indicated by “uncorrected” retrospective data. Other implications are also highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tests the feasibility of adapting and implementing in La Paz, Bolivia a drug education course originally developed for use in United States middle schools. Implications for the prevention of other health-related problems; Implementation of a demand-reduction strategy to prevent drug abuse.

The premise of this paper is that the drug war cannot be won without the public's full commitment. Based on a random sample of households (a 532) in Belize City. public attitudes are analyzed to assess the degree of support foe drag enforcement. The findings show strong support for drug education as well as for increasing criminal sanctions and the size of the police force. Support fades, however, as drug enforcement is militarized. The significant determinants of public support are education, gender, attitudes toward the police, fear of property crime, and neighborhood come prevalence. The paper closes by offering two concrete ways to build public support for drug enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents definitions related to alcohol drinking ranging from abstainers to social drinkers and various categories of alcoholics, including excessive and problem drinkers. Various phases of chronic alcoholism and its symptoms are presented, including ethical, social, psychological, and physiological disturbances.

The article reports on the launch of a privately funded scientific committee by psychopharmacologist David Nutt to advice the public on the risks of drug use in the Great Britain.