One of the mysteries of drug addiction is why people start to use drugs that are known to be addictive. Prior research has found that people generally under-predict the impact on their own future preferences of visceral states, such as hunger, thirst and fear that they are not currently...

Needle sharing contributes to the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus and other health concerns and remains a persistent problem among injection drug users. We determined whether needle sharing may be related to the discounting of the value of delayed outcomes. Outpatients in treatment...

Conventional wisdom once held that the demand for addictive substances like cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs was unlike that for any other economic good and, therefore, unresponsive to traditional market forces. Recently, however, researchers from two disparate fields, economics and behavioral...