Methamphetamine use and its social and health consequences pose a serious public health challenge in the United States and beyond. The focus of this article is on functional methamphetamine use from the insider's perspective. In-depth interviews were conducted in Atlanta, Georgia with 40 heavy methamphetamine users. Heavy use was defined as having used methamphetamine at least 10 times during the 30 days prior to the interview. For these respondents, functional use comprised using methamphetamine to improve an action or skill. Further exploration resulted in three recurrent categories of functional use. These include enhanced functioning, increased productivity, and the ability to function normally while using methamphetamine. It is argued that functional drug use may not be unique to methamphetamine. In addition, the findings show the importance of incorporating the complexities of functional use in future studies as well as risk reduction and treatment services targeting drug users.

Evolutionary theory can inform the biopsychosocial approach to addictive behavior through the use of adaptationist thinking, or how natural selection has shaped the mechanisms and processes underlying addiction. Covering how evolutionary theory relates to biology, psychology and sociality, this paper examines three components to drug use and abuse: a biological mechanism (mesolimbic dopamine), a developmental trajectory (attachment) and a social phylogeny (dominance, submission, social dependence). The paper argues for a salience (or wanting) view of the function of dopamine; outlines how attachment affects time perspective, closure of internal models and self-regulation; and examines how inequality affects drug abuse and how social dependence and manipulative behaviors can play a role in relationships with drugs. The article concludes with an analysis of how the adaptive approach applies to interventions against addictive behavior.

These findings suggest that 30-s HIT protocols limit the perceptual drift that occurs during exercise, in comparison to HC exercise. Moreover, performing more intervals of shorter durations appears to produce lower postexercise RPE values than performing fewer intervals of longer duration and equal intensity. Because effort perception may influence behavior, these results could have implications for the prescription of interval training in overweight sedentary adults.

Cheri Smarr-Foster, and Emmy Swisher. We'd also like to thank 444 alumnus (from fall 2011) Scarlett Eisenhauer, now at UCLA, who has stayed engaged with our research and helped with interviews. We acknowledge Colorado State University and its Department of Anthropology for financial and other support for this research, especially for ensuring that all software and equipment in Dr. Snodgrass' Ethnographic Research and Teaching Laboratory (ERTL) ran smoothly and were up-to-date. We also acknowledge support from the U.

The integration of neurobiology into ethnographic research represents one fruitful way of doing biocultural research. Based on animal research, incentive salience has been proposed as the proximate function of the mesolimbic dopamine system, the main brain system implicated in drug abuse (Robinson and Berridge 2001). The research presented here examines incentive salience as the mediator of the wanting and seeking seen in drug abuse. Based on field work with adolescents at a school and a drug treatment center in Bogotá, Colombia, this article addresses: 1) the development of a scale to measure the amount of incentive salience felt for drugs and drug use; 2) the results from a risk‐factor survey that examined the role of incentive salience and other risk factors in addiction; and 3) the ethnographic results from in‐depth interviews with Colombian adolescents examining dimensions of salience in the reported experiences of drug use. Incentive salience proved to be a significant predictor of addicted status in logistic regression analysis of data from 267 adolescents. Ethnographic results indicated that incentive salience applies both to drug seeking and drug use, and confirmed the importance of wanting, a sense of engagement, and shifts in attention as central dimensions of experiences related to drug use.