One of the most frequent causes of accidental death is poisoning, and it is frequently ascribed to pharmaceutical agents. Already Paracelsus, in the 16th century, stated that the difference between remedy and medicine was the dose ("All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison"). However, some drugs could become dangerous even at therapeutic dose, depending on patient's clinical conditions and on the interactions with different molecules."Drug abuse" is a common medical condition involving a high percentage of the world population. It was estimated that a quarter of a billion people, or around 5% of the global adult population, used drugs at least once in 2015 [1]. The most abused substances are alcohol, opioids, cannabinoids, sedative-hypnotics, cocaine, and many other stimulants such as caffeine, hallucinogens, tobacco, and volatile solvents. Not all these substances are equally harmful and many of them have different "harm ratings" to users themselves and/or to third persons [2].The term "drug abuse" is still of common use, even if it is no longer considered a medical diagnosis in both the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD), the most used diagnostic tools in the world. The DSM-5, released in 2013, revisited the terminology, and both the terms "substance abuse" and "substance dependence" were merged into the bigger
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