Americans may not say it aloud, but drug addiction has long been considered a moral failing. "Just say no," as Nancy Reagan famously declared during the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 80s. That ...

Opioid addiction has devastated the United States over the past decade. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), more than 100 people in the United States die from opioid overdoses each day ...

The terms “addiction” and “dependence” can seem similar, but they are different. Dependence occurs when the body physically relies on a drug. Addiction involves changes in behavior. A person with an ...

It's time for America to end its black-and-white thinking about addiction and recovery, according to Johns Hopkins professor Hanna Pickard. Traditional approaches in the U.S.—framing addiction as ...

It is frequently said that addiction occurs when drugs “hijack” the brain. It’s hard to nail down what that means, but it does rightly suggest that there is an involuntary takeover of the brain that ...

Whether the substance involved is crack cocaine or alcohol or a behavior such as gambling, the common denominator of all addictions is continued use despite the development of negative ...

You’ve probably heard of dopamine as a “pleasure chemical” that’s been associated with addiction. Think of the term “dopamine rush.” People use it to describe the flood of pleasure that comes from ...

There’s a lot of confusion around words like “tolerance,” “dependence,” and “addiction.” Sometimes people use them interchangeably. However, they have very different definitions. Let’s look at what ...

Imagine a website that reviewed narcotics. Imagine that people who were really into methamphetamine or heroin could go to one of dozens of sites to weigh the pros and cons of each drug. Imagine these ...

Every day, drug and alcohol addiction shatters families, destabilizes neighborhoods, derails careers, and steals the lives of countless Americans. This National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery ...