STATISTICS & TRENDS

STATISTICS & TRENDS

The East Coast Suffers under the Weight of Opioid Addiction

The United States has suffered for nigh on two decades with an opioid crisis. It is a sweeping addiction epidemic that has torn millions of families and individual lives apart. Widely publicized as the worst addiction-related epidemic in the history of...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Advertising Addiction: How Modern-Day Marketing Makes Good People into Addicts

How Modern-Day Marketing Makes Good People into Addicts The United States is a unique country in a lot of ways. We are the land of the free, the home of the brave. But there is one area in which we are quite trapped.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Unhappy Americans & An “Epidemic of Addiction”

A March 21st edition in the Washington Post caught my eye for its leading article by Allyson Chiu. The article was titled, “Americans Are The Unhappiest They’ve Ever Been, U.N. Report Finds.” An interesting topic certainly, but what really caught...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Should a Jail Be Responsible For Treating Addiction?

When I checked the news the other day I was shocked to find a story of a federal judge who ordered that a county jail in Massachusetts be made to give an inmate his methadone doses, so he could continue his medication-assisted therapy.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Is Addiction Really a Form of Suicide?

I was recently on a short trip and the motel I stayed at gave patrons a complimentary copy of USA TODAY. I generally don’t like to read newspapers because all they put in the papers is bad news and I don’t think a lot of it is even true, let alone...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

French Health Officials Warn Its Citizenry of Alcohol Consumption

In the U.S., we love our alcohol. That just goes without saying. Alcohol consumption has become a regular part of our lives and such a frequent and normal occurrence that we don’t even think twice about.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Portugal Finds Value in Diversion of Drug Addicts to Treatment Instead of Incarceration

Imagine the worst possible drug den, the ultimate cesspool of addiction and drug-related misery. That was Portugal in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Then, in just a matter of a few years, the country completely turned their drug problem around...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Meth Surge Now Rivals Opioids for National Headlines

Most of the headlines I see on America’s addiction crisis are related to the opioid epidemic, and rightly so. Opiates account for a significant portion of our nation's drug crisis. But it’s not the only drug to be aware of.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

HIV Outbreaks, Opioid Misuse, and Small Town America

When we hear the words, “HIV outbreak” odds are we think of Africa, or maybe the United States in the early to mid-1990s. Even if we consider an “HIV outbreak” as occurring on American soil, we instantly assume cloud-shrouded high rises, sprawling...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

What We Can Learn from the Overdose Capital of the U.S.

I saw a headline yesterday that read “City with the Most Per Capita Overdose Deaths in the Nation Begins to Recover.” It caught my eye.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Michigan’s Drug Problem and What a New Grant Could Do to Stem the Tide of Addiction

Throughout our history, the individual states of the United States of America have gone through their ups and downs. Sometimes these issues have mirrored what was going on in the country at large, and sometimes they were unique to the state.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Taking a New Look at Alcohol Consumption

We know that there are unintended consequences of alcohol consumption. We know that drinking alcohol can lead to poor choices, drunk driving, fights, public drunkenness, legal issues, unhealthy sexual decisions, bad hangovers, failed drug tests, career...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

How Did Hawaii Become the Meth Capital of the U.S. and How Can We Help?

Crystal meth. Meth. Ice. Speed. Crank. Chalk. Glass. Wash. Pookie. These are all slang names for methamphetamine, a drug which grows in global public use every year. Across most parts of the United States as well, use of meth has increased.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Three Countries and Their Drug Problems

We hear on the news these days that the U.S. struggles with an “opioid epidemic,” “an addiction crisis,” or a “national public health emergency.” All of this is true. But what we don’t hear about are the addiction struggles of other countries.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Work, Community, Family, and How Social and Economic Disparities Affect Addiction

“Addiction does not discriminate.” How many times have we heard that line? But what if I said to you that addiction does discriminate? What if I told you that discrimination in addiction is part of the fundamental reasons why we have such a cataclysmic...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

Is Criminalizing Drug Use During Pregnancy the Answer?

I was surfing through U.S. News the other day when I came across a news story that really caught my eye. U.S. News posted an article titled, “Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Pregnant Women Abusing Drugs is Not Child Abuse.”Having worked in addiction...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

How Can We Mobilize to Reduce the Opioid Epidemic?

In light of what may be the country’s worst substance abuse epidemic, the American people look high and low for answers on how they can do their part to resolve the addiction crisis. This is especially true if they had addiction touch their own life...

STATISTICS & TRENDS

How Can We Use Diplomatic Solutions for Reducing Drug Trafficking?

Let’s talk about diplomacy, a word that gets lost in translation too many times to count. More specifically, let’s talk about diplomacy and how the U.S. could use a diplomatic methodology to reduce drug trafficking from foreign nations.

STATISTICS & TRENDS

New Study Finds that Fentanyl Is Grossly Overprescribed

The term “over-prescribing” is one we hear with frequency today. Over-prescribing is a phenomenon where a doctor administers a prescription for too much of a drug. Such can manifest by a doctor giving a patient a medicine for too long…

STATISTICS & TRENDS

2019: Caring for Women Must Include Reversing Losses to Overdoses

Ensuring that women in the United States and around the world receive equal protection must also include reversing our current radical increases in female overdose deaths.