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substance abuse
Sign in to saveAlso known as drug abuse, harmful use, chemical substance abuse, psychoactive substance abuse, abuse of substances, injecting drug use, injecting drug abuse
patterned use of a drug in which the user consumes the psychoactive/chemical substance substances in amounts or with methods which are harmful to themselves or others
Key facts
- Other names
- Drug misuse, drug abuse, substance use disorder, substance misuse disorder
- Specialty
- Psychiatry
- Complications
- Drug overdose
- Frequency
- 27 million
- Deaths
- 1,106,000 US residents (1968–2020)
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- human activity
- Image
- Heroin paraphernalia.jpg
Show 10 more facts
- Commons category
- Substance abuse
- handled, mitigated, or managed by
- substance abuse prevention
- topic's main category
- Category:Substance abuse
- ICD-9-CM
- 305.90
- NCI Thesaurus ID
- C16522
- health specialty
- narcology
- exact match
- identifiers.org/doid/DOID:302
- drug or therapy used for treatment
- buprenorphine
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
- has cause
- substance use disorder
via Wikidata · CC0
~40 min read
Encyclopedic overview
A person using an inhalant Substance misuse, also known as drug misuse or, in older vernacular, substance abuse, is the use of a drug in amounts or by methods that are harmful to the individual or others. It is a form of substance-related disorder. Differing definitions of drug misuse are used in public health, medical, and criminal justice contexts. In some cases, criminal or anti-social behavior occurs when some persons are under the influence of a drug, and may result in long-term personality changes in individuals. In addition to possible physical, social, and psychological harm, the use of some drugs may also lead to criminal penalties, although these vary widely depending on the local jurisdiction.
Lines of cocaine prepared for snorting. Contaminated currency such as banknotes might serve as a fomite of diseases like hepatitis C
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “substance abuse” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.