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Call 1.855.378.4373 to schedule a call time with a specialist

The Latest News from Our Field

We curate a digest of the latest news in our field for advocates, policymakers, community coalitions and all who work toward shaping policies and practices to effectively prevent substance use and treat addiction.

Advocates in the smallest state have big plans: New report outlines 12 steps toward closing the treatment gap in Rhode Island ... In California, marijuana prices are dropping as legal use of the drug rises ...

Hazelden has unveiled a new online screening tool for consumers called About My Drinking. Visitors to the website who answer 18 questions can get a personalized assessment of their current alcohol and other drug use and -- if necessary -- a referral to a Hazelden addiction counselor ...

Employees of British American Tobacco (BAT) are actively promoting the company's cigarette brands by administering Facebook groups, joining groups as fans and posting promotional materials -- all violations of the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control -- according to Australian researchers.

Michelle Durst, a former staffer on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) and more recently the deputy director of government affairs at the American Psychiatric Association, has been named the new Director of Public Policy at the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD).

The Whopper Bar in Miami’s South Beach is exactly what it sounds like -- a place where you can get a beer along with your Burger King sandwich. The new fast-food concept opened in February -- it’s the first BK to sell alcohol in the U.S., though a couple of similar outlets are operating overseas.

How big a problem is addiction in your community? The latest report won’t provide all the answers, but it will give you a snapshot of treatment admissions -- if you live in one of the 27 communities where data was collected.

Hollywood’s current poster child for untreated addiction, actress Lindsay Lohan, has been ordered by a Los Angeles judge to wear an alcohol-monitoring bracelet, attend alcohol education classes, and submit to random weekly drug tests.

No surprise here: report finds wide variances in alcohol, tobacco, other drug use among Asian-Americans ? Hospital admissions for heart attacks would drop by 18,000 if all states banned indoor smoking, AHA estimates ?

Some states may say that marijuana is medicine, but the VA is having none of that: doctors affiliated with the federal veteran’s health program have been barred from recommending medical marijuana to patients ... Meeting with the enemy: the head of the FDA’s new tobacco-regulation agency spoke this week at a conference of Big Tobacco execs ...

Like many other studies, new research from France concludes that moderate alcohol drinkers have a lower risk of heart disease than abstainers. However, researchers said that moderate drinkers also tend to have a higher social status, get more exercise, had better levels of "good" cholesterol, are less depressed and are generally healthier -- factors that may have more to do with their coronary health than how much they drink.
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) doctors are forbidden from recommending medical marijuana for patients even in states that allow medical use of the drug.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) won't be shy about penalizing tobacco companies for violating new federal regulations on the industry, but the head of FDA's Center for Tobacco Products also said that the agency would be open to new ideas from tobacco firms.

The Rhode Island Closing the Addiction Treatment Gap initiative released its report this morning. They asked me to speak at the event. That got me thinking. Why do we have this enormous gap? Why is such a complicated but treatable brain/behavioral disease treated mostly in a separate and unequal system where care is provided almost entirely without physicians by individuals with relatively modest formal training?

Fifteen states enacted increases in cigarette excise taxes in 2009, but three states haven’t raised their cigarette taxes in more than a decade, according to the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland at College Park.