Neuropsychology and Substance Use

<p>Substance use continues to be a major public health problem and the ramifications of this are manifold. For instance at present on a yearly basis the total economic cost of substance misuse is literally hundreds of billions of dollars. These costs are related to a number of factors including but not limited to treatment and prevention reduced job productivity and/or absenteeism interdiction by the criminal justice and incarceration.</p><p>There are many more psychosocial consequences of substance misuse and these have been well–documented over the past four to five decades; in contrast with the exception of alcohol the effects of substance misuse on the brain have received attention only in the past 10 to 15 years. An emerging body of literature has reported on the effects of various drugs on neuropsychological functioning including benzodiazepines cocaine marijuana MDMA methamphetamine nicotine and opioids. Despite the fact that the neuropsychological consequences of many drugs of abuse are well–documented to our knowledge no one had previously published an edited volume that focused exclusively on this issue. Based on this fact we decided to create a volume that would review the available literature regarding on this topic. </p><p><em>Neuropsychology and Substance Misuse: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions</em> explores cutting-edge issues and will be of interest to clinical neuropsychologists who require the latest findings in this increasingly important area of neuropsychology.</p>