No abstract

The results confirm that rumination is an important prospective predictor of drinking status and level of alcohol use in alcohol abusers and highlight the potential relevance of targeting rumination in the treatment of alcohol abuse.

2C-T-7 ('Blue Mystic'), an illicit compound which shows similarities with MDMA and other designer drugs, has been only occasionally identified in the EU, but discussion on the Internet between experimenters has recently grown significantly. We aimed at collecting together in a review the available information on 2C-T-7, both at the cyber and at the street market level. 2C-T-7 was first synthesized in 1986; its desired effects include both a sense of empathy and of well-being. Hallucinations, nausea, anxiety, panic attacks and paranoid ideation are anecdotally reported. According to the different European sources here approached, the availability of 2C-T-7 at street level seems to be currently very low, although one death related to a mono-intoxication with 2C-T-7 has been documented in the USA. With respect to information on 2C-T-7 available online, due to both redundancy and relevance issues the initial identified sample of 360 was reduced to 118 websites. In 14 (11.9%) websites, the detailed description of the 2C-T-7 synthesis was given. Harm Reduction websites appeared significantly earlier in the search engines results' list than Anti drugs (p 0.006) websites. Five (4.2%) websites apparently offered 2C-T-7 for sale. The large body of knowledge available online seems to contrast with small numbers of seizures at street level; an exhaustive web mapping of drug-related issues may be of interest for the clinician. Projects aimed at designing more 'attractive' prevention websites should be planned and future studies should better assess the characteristics of those consumers who take advantage of the online information of hallucinogenic compounds.

The present study explored the role of the general tendency to ruminate as a predictor of problem drinking (alcohol abuse) in clinical and community samples. A sample of 36 patients with a diagnosis of problem drinking and 37 social drinkers from the general population were compared on the following measures: Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS) and Quantity Frequency Scale (QFS). Mann-Whitney U-tests, and logistic and hierarchical regression analyses were performed on the data. Mann-Whitney U-tests revealed that depression, rumination and alcohol use were significantly higher for problem drinkers than for social drinkers. The logistic regression analysis indicated that rumination was an independent predictor of classification as a problem drinker over and above depression. Finally, the hierarchical regression analysis on the combined samples showed that rumination independently predicted alcohol use. These results highlight the potential relevance of targeting the general tendency to ruminate in the treatment of problem-drinking behaviour.

What do therapy and cybertherapy need to take into account to be effective for the treatment of drug-related disorders? The Psychonaut 2002 project is aimed to create a new and updated Web-based tool, which will be based on evolving drug scenarios, in order to provide professionals from the drug addiction field with easily accessible and reliable information. The drug abuse settings available on the Web will be described and the methodology will be discussed. Preliminary results of a search on MDMA and MDMA-like substances confirm that it is possible both to identify emerging trends and to provide information for prevention and appropriate intervention.