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Every day and everywhere you go in Iowa, you see people who are in recovery from alcohol or drug abuse. You can’t tell by looking at them, but these are people whose substance abuse created problems for them professionally or personally and they decided to do something about it.

People who began drinking and using marijuana regularly prior to their 15th birthday face a higher risk of early pregnancy, as well as a pattern of school failure, substance dependence, sexually-transmitted disease and criminal convictions that lasts into their 30s.

New research finds that a national campaign’s anti-drug TV ads failed to convince young children and teenagers to stay away from marijuana and actually might have encouraged some to try smoking pot.

More teenagers in Northern Ireland are experimenting with illegal drugs at an earlier age than elsewhere in the UK, according to a new study. Youth experts and psychologists will meet at a free public lecture hosted by the NI Branch of The British Psychological Society in The Wellington Park Hotel, Malone Road, Belfast on Tuesday 21 October 2008 at 7.

The effectiveness of Proposition 36, a ballot measure approved by California voters in 2000 that offers treatment instead of incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders is being undermined by inadequate funding, participants dropping out of treatment, and increased arrests for drug and property crimes.

An Indonesian Ministry of Health study conducted in 2007 found that injection drug users are at the greatest risk of HIV in the country, with approximately 50% of the IDUs participating in the study living with the virus, the Jakarta Post reports.

The number of adult alcohol-related admissions to an inner London hospital has tripled in the last four years, new research shows. The three psychiatrists who carried out the study claim the results “raise concerns about the changing of the licensing laws”.

Using positron emission tomography (PET) to track tracer doses of methamphetamine in humans’ brains, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory find that the addictive and long-lasting effects of this increasingly prevalent drug can be explained in part by its pharmacokinetics - the rate at which it enters and clears the brain, and its distribution.

Could an aversion to bitter substances or an overall heightened sense of taste help protect some people from becoming addicted to nicotine? That’s what researchers at UVA have found using an innovative new method they’ve developed to analyze the interactions of multiple genetic and environmental factors. Their findings one day may be key in identifying people at risk for nicotine dependence.

Brain imaging shows that the brains of teens that use marijuana are working harder than the brains of their peers who abstain from the drug. At the 2008 annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Boston, Mass.