For people like me, who long to relive on the iPhone their childhood love affair with the eccentric, class-less, and addictive Worms franchise: approach with caution.
The Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences, has called for a gradual reduction of the nicotine content in all cigarettes to non-addictive levels (an approach I proposed 13 years ago when I worked at the Food and Drug Administration).
Marlatt and Gordon (1985) were responsible for developing a set of relapse prevention strategies for addictive disorders, but the approach has been extended to a broad range of psychological problems including obesity, depression, and criminal behavior.
There is room for a conversation about whether decriminalization is nevertheless a more rational approach for addictive drugs, but it's not the conversation, or the bill, at hand.
Although it is often easier and faster to respond to the patient presenting with chronic pain by writing a prescription, increasingly for a substance with addictive potential, an integrative medicine approach may more closely approximate the Institute of Medicine's blueprint for transforming health care.
David said the approach of "regulating the addictive potential out of combustible tobacco" is likely to prompt resistance from the tobacco industry and its allies in Congress.
Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral for Treatment (SBIRT) has been proposed as a structured approach to the assessment of addictive behaviours in these service contexts [ 9].
These findings are of importance as it opens new areas of research and approaches in understanding depression and addictive disorders for which pharmacological treatment has been disappointing.
In recent years, innovative approaches of developing vaccines against addictive drugs have been pursued.
This brief approach has been successful in impacting addictive behaviors and has recently been used to establish positive health-related behaviors [ 24].
