It’s tempting to see each of the country’s creeping public disasters as an epidemic. But an epidemic would probably be a lot easier to solve.

Fentanyl is a big culprit, but there are also encouraging signs from states that have prioritized public health campaigns and addiction treatment.

The international health community has decided that if you play video games like Fortnite or World of Warcraft a lot, you might suffer from a mental-health issue: Gaming Disorder. It’s a behavioral condition that the World Health Organization has added to the proposed 11th revision of its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, or ICD-11, the first update to the classification since 1992.

A homeless woman addicted to heroin whose newborn was adopted by a police officer has completely turned her life around. The story behind her transformation.

By your early forties, the best part about going to bed is imagining the coffee you’re going to drink in the morning.

Just don’t quit entirely, okay?

Poop studies are helping communities make intervention decisions

WTF?! Since the dawn of video games, concerned parents have worried about their kids becoming addicted. Thanks to the advent of the internet and streaming platforms like Twitch, gaming is more popular today than ever before, but does that mean children are more at risk? One UK couple would likely agree, after their nine-year-old daughter was put into rehab to address her addiction to Fortnite.

I was a gay teen in the 1980s, hiding from a terrifying world in an arcade. The WHO's push to uniquely pathologize gaming won't help people like me.

People tend to think pot is not addictive, yet many regular users still struggle to quit. We spoke with an expert and pot-smokers across the stoner spectrum to figure it out.

Poker machines use a range of design features that leverage psychology to keep people playing. Here, we break them down so you can see exactly how they work, and how it affects people.

“It is perhaps the defining feature of someone my age and from my state to have a friend, sibling, or cousin who has died from opioid addiction.” By Paul Blest.

The scale and darkness of this epidemic is a sign of a civilization in a more acute crisis than we knew. This nation pioneered modern life. Now epic numbers of Americans are killing themselves with opioids to escape it.

Doctor-prescribed painkillers are not the biggest threat.

The scale and darkness of this epidemic is a sign of a civilization in a more acute crisis than we knew. By Andrew Sullivan.

The more money a physician receives from an opioid manufacturer, the more likely he or she is to prescribe opioids, according to an exclusive analysis by CNN and researchers at Harvard University's schools of medicine and public health.

Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced the unsealing today of an Indictment in Manhattan federal court charging five Manhattan doctors, GORDON FREEDMAN, JEFFREY GOLDSTEIN, TODD SCHLIFSTEIN, DIALECTI VOUDOURIS, and ALEXANDRU BURDUCEA, with participating in a scheme to receive bribes and kickbacks in the form of fees for sham educational programs (“Speaker Programs”) from a pharmaceutical company (“Pharma Company-1”) in exchange for...

You can't overdose on the opioid just by touching it.

Two new studies support this correlation

Drug users don't take heroin because of postindustrial despair — they do it because withdrawal feels worse than anything you can imagine.

Amid the opioid crisis, the concept of “pain acceptance” is gaining credibility.

Victoria Toline would hunch over the kitchen table, steady her hands and draw a bead of liquid from a vial with a small dropper. It was a delicate operation that had become a daily routine — extracting ever tinier doses of the antidepressant she had taken for three years, on and off, and was desperately trying to quit. “Basically that’s all I have been doing — dealing with the dizziness, the confusion, the fatigue, all the symptoms of withdrawal,” said Ms. Toline, 27, of Tacoma, Wash. It took nine months to wean herself from the drug, Zoloft, by taking increasingly smaller doses.

Boundless Mind is here to disrupt the addiction

What opioid addiction treatments are more effective and can we vaccinate against addiction?

America’s social hierarchies rule everything – even the opioid epidemic. You don’t have to dig deep to find the hypocrisy and insult to people of color.

In the midst of a national crisis, mothers addicted to drugs struggle to get off them — for their babies’ sake, and their own.

It was the question that struck many Australians as they read about the bizarre case of Queensland's so-called 'poo jogger' this week - why?

Episode 1 of Narcotica is here! In the first segment Zachary Siegel does some mythbusting around overdosing by touching fentanyl; Troy Farah gives a nuanced take on what's driving the overdose crisis;

“This is an organization that really preys on people’s weaknesses.” By Ellen Huet.

Using opioids gives some brain cells a call to action. Opioid addicts’ brains, examined after death, contain about 50 percent more nerve cells that release a molecule called hypocretin, compared with people who didn’t use the drugs, a new study finds. Giving the opiate morphine to mice also induced similar changes in their brains. But the increase didn’t come from new nerve cells, or neurons, being born. Instead, once-dormant neurons appear to rev up their hypocretin machinery in response to the addictive drugs, researchers report June 27 in Science Translational Medicine.

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?