Patients being prescribed opioid analgesics frequently or at high dosage face a substantial overdose risk. Prescription monitoring programs might be the best way for prescribers to know their patients' prescription histories and accurately assess overdose risk.

Conducted a study of samples of blacks and whites, males and females, young and old, hardcore unemployed, and working- and middle-class individuals to investigate "ecosystem distrust." The term is defined as a distrust of people, things, and institutions in one's environment. The components include less trust in people, suspicion of the motives of others, rejection of authority figures and institutions of the establishment, and seeing the environment as malevolent. Consistency was obtained across a heterogeneous set of questions, suggesting the presence of ecosystem distrust among the black hard-core. The implications of these findings for training the hard-to-employ and their supervisors are discussed. (22 ref)

AlthougE there is much descriptive research concerning freq u e n q of drug use, few studies have reported quantitative data on patterns of drug use. 33 college srcdents with experience with a variety of drugs were studied. Alcohol and sorre legal drugs were included as well as drugs of abuse. Gutunan scalogram analyses yielded very high coefficients of reproducibility (.89 to .98). The pattern of drug use was cross-validated on a sample of young drug users in another setting. The relative frequency of drug use for our sample was also highly related to that reported in other studies of student populations.In order to identify the dimension underlying the pattern of drug use, ratings of the safety and availability of each of the 18 substances were obtained. Both availability and safety were highly related to the relative frequency of drug use, with availability being the more important variable.

Several samples of youthful drug users and non-users were asked to rate the credibility of a variety of sources of information about drugs. For both users and non-users these sources can be scaled along dimensions of authority, drug experience, and friendship. The profile of credibility of these sources differed markedly for users and non-users. There are clear implications of these findings for drug education and drug counseling.

Judgements were obtained from 26 subjects being treated for heroin use concerning the time of day they most commonly used heroin, marijuana, and alcohol. Heroin chipping, or occasional use, showed a peak time, 6 P.M. to 10 P.M., coinciding with the most common time for use of a variety of substances in several populations. However, the habitual use of heroin is most common upon awakening--apparently to ward off withdrawal symptoms. The results also suggest that the use of marijuana and alcohol does not deviate significantly from the recreational pattern of drug use demonstrated by other populations for other nonprescribed drugs.