As the country struggles with a terrible opioid crisis, we remember a similar epidemic that raged through the U.S. in the 1800s.

What drives a person to smoke cigarettes—and keeps one out of six U.S. adults addicted to tobacco use, at a cost of 480,000 premature deaths each year despite decades of anti-smoking campaigns? What role do emotions play in this addictive behavior? Why do some smokers puff more often and more deeply or even relapse many years after they've quit? If policymakers had those answers, how could they strengthen the fight against the global smoking epidemic?

A story about the connection between one patient and her doctor—and how more hospital emergency rooms are becoming entryways to drug treatment.

Long-term BYU study looks at the effect of video game play and the trajectories of addiction

A short documentary about my family's sordid past with Beanie Babies. Made for my Documentary Production class at The University of Arizona.

When “Breaking Bad” debuted in 2008, I was 27 years removed from a methamphetamine addiction. But if I thought about the drug, I could still smell it exactly: Medicinal and metallic and crude and burning. I know fans will be sad when the show ends its sixth and final season later this year, but not me. For me, the show can’t end soon enough.

Drug-harm experts to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society

Electronic cigarettes could save the lives of millions of smokers, or they could set millions of non-smokers on the path to nicotine addiction, revolutionizing the tobacco industry into the bargain. So the question on the lips of health experts, policy-makers and consumers alike is, are the devices a health problem that needs tight regulation, or a welcome aid to smokers trying to quit?

The show developed legions of fans thanks to deft writing, superb acting and the miracles of binge-watching

Oreos are as addictive as cocaine, at least for lab rats, and just like us, they like the creamy center best. Eating the sugary treats activates more neurons in the brain’s “pleasure center” than drugs such as cocaine, the team at Connecticut College found.

The addicts stalk the streets of this border post like hollowed-out skeletons, hair matted by filth and eyes glassy. The villages that hug the roads are veritable zombie towns, where families of men, women and children hide their addiction within barren mud compounds.

The cigarettes of the future could be safer, cheaper and less taboo than the smokes of the past. But they also threaten to upend decades of anti-smoking efforts.

Scientists say that if all smokers in the world switched from cigarettes to electronic cigarettes, it could save millions of lives.

It’s not easy to export the American recovery movement — even to a nation that needs it.

Cigarette use among middle school and high school students is on the decline, but public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are concerned about other ways that tobacco and nicotine use is rising among kids.

Indonesia’s chain-smoking baby has kicked the habit. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he’s a junk-food junkie, packing on some serious pounds!

After decades of prohibition, research is illuminating new uses for some illegal drugs.

All new behaviours raise complex questions of etiquette. The sudden ubiquity of e-cigarettes – electronic substitutes for the cancer sticks of old – is challenging our assumptions about where it is appropriate to "smoke". More than a million people are using them in the UK and, according to Bloomberg, on present trends they will outsell conventional cigarettes by 2047. So is it OK to "fire up" in an office? In a restaurant? In a hospital bed?

The industry is warning countries that their tobacco laws violate an expanding web of treaties, raising the prospect of costly, prolonged legal battles.

It wrecks lives – but it has also inspired art from the poetry of Baudelaire to the music of Lou Reed. Andrew Hussey traces the path of heroin through modern European culture