Addiction

Summer 2019

Tails of comfort

Veterinarian, author, and counselor Robert Slack helps health-care workers who struggle with substance use disorders, mental health problems, or both. » More ...

Winter 2016

The reference in William Stimson’s article (Fall 2016) on the 1925 rally for the Cougar football team to students as forerunners of “The Greatest Generation” struck a chord. As a history department T.A., I researched the 1938 student strike for Dr. George Frykman. Issues may seem trivial to postmodern eyes (Dean Fertig’s proscription of blankets on picnics is one example), but students’ experience in campus mobilization was not. What started as pique over parietal rules became an experience in leadership. Indeed, some student organizers became war heroes within the decade. I remember that Lt. Col. Jerry Sage responded to my … » More …

Fall 2016

Kristi Molnar-Nelson takes back her life

Veteran Kristi Molnar-Nelson invited us to a counseling session with her psychiatrist Matt Layton, a Washington State University clinical associate professor, at a Spokane methadone clinic where she’s being treated for opioid addiction.

Video by Rajah Bose

Read more about treatment for opioid and heroin addiction in “The Epidemic.”

Read about WSU’s research into understanding the prevention and treatment of addiction, and studies into the neuroscience of addiction.

Fall 2016

The long view

“I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of … the history of the world of the past.” —Theodore Roosevelt, 1911

A hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of conservation came to fruition with the establishment of the National Park Service. Although President Woodrow Wilson established the NPS, Roosevelt had doubled the number of national parks and passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 when he was in the Oval Office. Roosevelt believed that we must have a deeper and longer-term view of our country’s natural and historical heritage.

In the spirit of Roosevelt’s aims, … » More …

Fall 2016

Opiates, gender, and alternative pain relief

The WSU Spokane Program of Excellence in Addictions Research (PEAR) is a wide-ranging effort aimed at improving the understanding, treatment, and prevention of addictions.

Founded in 2006 by John Roll, senior vice chancellor at WSU Health Sciences, PEAR is today one of the primary addictions science programs at WSU, says director and assistant professor in the College of Nursing Celestina Barbosa-Leiker.

PEAR is currently in collaboration with the Spokane Regional Health District methadone clinic, led by medical director Matt Layton.

Barbosa-Leiker is working with Layton to identify individuals for a state-wide study comparing gender differences in opioid use and the ways … » More …

Fall 2016

Targeting the brain’s “bad opioids”

The stark reality of drug abuse hit home for Brendan Walker when two college classmates overdosed on heroin and Xanax. Their unsettling deaths steered Walker toward a career in the neuroscience of psychology and addictions.

Today, the associate professor of psychology and member of the Neuroscience Program at WSU is a leader in the study of alcohol and opioid drug dependence. His research is advancing the development of new pharmacotherapy treatments for addiction.

“Alcohol and abused opioids have a lot of similarity,” says Walker. “They both manipulate very powerful primitive systems in the brain that are critical for our motivation.”

One of those systems … » More …

Winter 2015

The Adderall Empire: A Life with ADHD and the Millennials’ Drug of Choice

Andrew K. Smith ’14

Booktrope: 2015

Smith’s memoir, The Adderall Empire, gives you a look into his life and struggle with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Diagnosed in late high school, Smith was prescribed Adderall and was catapulted into what he calls the “Adderall Empire.” This empire is a world in which Smith believes people lose their creative minds to the drug.

“Being inside the Adderall Empire is like being in a lighthouse across … » More …

Summer 2014

Sex, drugs, and differences

After decades of researching gender differences in the effects of drugs, Rebecca Craft has found that females using marijuana are likelier than men to become dependent on the drug and suffer more severe withdrawals.

At the same time, females seem to be more sensitive to the drug’s pain-relieving qualities.

Craft, a Washington State University psychology professor who studies the effects of psychoactive drugs on rats, has reported these findings most recently in journals such as Life Sciences and Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Her work, funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, focuses on the medical side of cannabinoids, the class of drugs … » More …

Summer 2010

Video: Jaak Panksepp on the brain and searching the web

Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp discusses how a simple web search can be driven by one of the brain’s most fundamental impulses.

Read what other WSU professors say about reading and thinking in the digital world in “Dear reader” in the Summer 2010 issue of Washington State Magazine.