It is also altered by both the acute and chronic administration of various psychoactive substances

Especially notable are impairments in identifying and responding to stimuli that are either salient or novel.The P300 event-related potential is a physiological index of the cognitive processes elicited by such task-relevant or novel deviant stimuli . Generators of the P300 are widely distributed across both cortex and subcortex. However, the scalp-recorded P300 response to an auditory…

A trend among young people is smoking marijuana cigars

Both the cross-sectional and longitudinal studies highlight individual and socio-contextual factors that may shape HIV risk. Of note is in the emergence of brain imaging data to this body of literature. Thayer et al. found that network connectivity strength of the dorsal default mode network was associated with initial and longitudinal trajectories of alcohol use and that alcohol…

Alcohol and marijuana use are common in adolescence

We retrospectively reviewed health records of patients referred to the outpatient substance use program affiliated with the medical school. Information collected from the records included the patients’ background characteristics, reasons for ED visit, current substance use, mental health symptoms, buprenorphine use during their ED visit, and engagement in outpatient substance use treatment after ED discharge. Variables…

The relevance of these values is that adolescent initiation of substance use plays a key role in this equation

Specifically, more than half of adolescents have tried at least one substance by age 18, with many using at least one substance in a “harmful way”, such as binge use. Due to the inherently illicit behaviors that must be engaged in to access and utilize most substances, many youth use substances in ways that increase…

Smokeless only users had significantly reduced odds of marijuana use compared to cigarette only users

Our results do not support prior findings of a negative association between marijuana and PPR use. Boehnke, Litinas, and Clauw report that among individuals with chronic pain, use of medical marijuana was negatively associated with opioid use. Further, legalization of medical marijuana has been correlated with a drop in the number of hospitalizations attributed to…

The panel produced a comprehensive and well-considered set of priorities

The third recommendation was to improve surveillance capacities to ensure that sufficient population-based data are available to query the health effects of cannabis. Finally, the fourth recommendation addressed the barriers that impede research on cannabis and cannabinoids. This recommendation highlighted significant obstacles for both preclinical and clinical researchers who are interested in studying cannabis and…

Many people believe that crack causes crime because of its physical effects on the user

By undermining the black market, marijuana legalization could also be expected to reduce systemic or economically motivated marijuana-related crime , and the costs of law enforcement efforts targeted at marijuana. Miron also estimates that legalization would save the federal and state governments a combined $7.7 billion in prohibition enforcement expenditures. While the assumptions required for…

Most consumers use the drug relatively infrequently and for relatively short periods of time

Reuter characterizes cocaine as a “career” rather than an “event,” because as they come to appreciate the harmful consequences of the drug, the casual users quit, leaving in place a core of more serious users. Marijuana consumption is concentrated among individuals in their late teens and their twenties.Taken as a whole, these drug use distribution…

Further information on survey methodology is provided in the annual NSDUH findings report

Those with personal experiences of arrests—as either offender, victim, or acquaintance—expect greater arrest risks than citizens without such experiences .Those with personal experience in offending without sanctions perceive lower sanctioning risks than the broad non-offending public .Unfortunately, most of these studies have examined relative risk on Likert-type attitude scales, rather than assessing actual knowledge of the…

All pairwise comparisons were performed with Sidak correction for multiple testing

Use of nonprescription medications over the past 24 hours was assessed via self-report. Samples were stored at -20 °C, and rapidly thawed and centrifuged prior to assay using a highly sensitive enzyme immunoassay . All samples were assayed in duplicate with intra- and inter-assay coefficients of variation less than 10% and 15%, respectively.All analyses were performed…