Book Review: Addiction: Pagliaros' Comprehensive Guide to Drugs and Substances of Abuse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Addiction Pagliaros' Comprehensive Guide to Drugs and Substances of Abuse. Louis A Pagliaro, Ann Marie Pagliaro. Washington (DC): American Pharmacists Association; 2004. 462 p. US$89.00. Reviewer rating: Good The need for an authoritative, referenced, and up-to-date compilation of consumption trends and individual pharmacology for drugs and substances of abuse in North America cannot be overstated. It is this book's main objective, according to the authors' statement in the preface, and the text achieves it well. Pagliaros' is designed, first, to assist general health care professionals and, second, to serve as a review and quick reference for clinicians who specialize in the treatment of patients with substance use disorders. Given the text's emphasis on pharmacologie mechanisms, I suggest that physicians and pharmacists are the targeted readers. The 2 Canadian authors are well-known faculty at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. They have published numerous articles and textbooks on the pharmacology of substance abuse, and they have taken great care to provide us with as much information from Canadian sources as possible, which is without any doubt a clear advantage of this book. First, let me offer some clarifications about the exact content of Pagliaros' guide, which follows an unusual format for a publication in the substance abuse field. Those who may want a to treating substance abuse or dual diagnosis will find that these subjects are beyond the book's scope (although they are the focus of a planned companion text). In fact, it would have been possibly more appropriate to use the term dictionary instead of guide in the title to avoid confusing potential readers. Notwithstanding this detail, the book is worth reading and is well organized in 2 major parts. Part I provides an overview of the history and pharmacology of almost all substances of abuse, along 3 broad categories: psychodepressants (that is, opiates, sedativehypnotics, alcohol, and inhalants), psychostimulants (that is, amphetamines, cocaine, nicotine, and others), and psychedelics (including cannabis, amphetamine-like psychedelics, and indoles). Drugs that may be abused for reasons other than their specific effects on the brain, including vasodilators (such as amyl nitrate) and anabolic steroids, are not discussed anywhere in this text. This first part is scholarly documented, yet pleasant to read, thanks to the clear and concise writing style. I personally enjoyed the few literary quotations that punctuate the text, but they are easy to skip for those who want to stick to the essentials. In each category, a substantial portion of the discussion is devoted to historical landmarks in the discovery and synthesis of the major substances, to wars and laws ruling their availability, and to the cultural attitudes surrounding their use in North America-definitely an aid to better understanding the present trends in drug consumption. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".