Oral semaglutide reduced heavy drinking days, drinks per drinking day, naturalistic craving, alcohol-related consequences, and cannabis use days in an 8-week RCT for alcohol use disorder. Very impressive results confirming previous studies in humans and rodent.

Only 61% of US retail pharmacies made same-day over the counter naloxone available, a year after FDA approval. Even more shocking "When pharmacists without same-day naloxone were asked about alternative sources, approximately half provided no suggestion."

GLP-1 receptor agonists decreases alcohol and substance use hospitalizations during treatment. The effect slowly disappears after stopping GLP1.

No safe level of alcohol found. Mortality risk exceeds 1-in-100 above 8.5 drinks per week, and hits 1-in-25 at 14 drinks per week. The "low-dose protection" story is dead. doi.org/10.15288/js...

Near-daily cannabis users were more likely to use after high positive affect, not negative affect. Cannabis briefly boosted mood but the effect faded fast. Emotion regulation drove less of this than expected. doi.org/10.1111/add...

Only 1 in 6 adults with co-occurring addiction and mental illness received treatment for both. Race and insurance gaps drive this. Integrated care is not optional, it is the baseline we keep failing to meet. doi.org/10.1176/app...

Two spots in the left lateral OFC predicted cocaine relapse with AUC up to 0.90. Each had protective and risk circuits.

The negative-affect model of drinking (and drug use) has always had a gap: not everyone who feels bad drinks or use drugs. This paper suggest a potential explanation. Distress intolerance adds a layer to the negative affect status in whether or not it causes craving.

Fentanyl has become so ubiquitous that kids do not register it as dangerous. Less than half of 8th graders see trying fentanyl once as high risk. that normalization is a crisis on its own. Risk perception drives behavior. doi.org/10.1001/jam...

Interesting meta-analysis showing enriched environments decreases cocaine-seeking across 48 rodent studies using CPP (A), self-administration (B), and locomotor sensitization (C). Remarkable reproducibility across laboratories, particularly for CPP.

Clever use of a complex behavioral task to show that BLA dopamine tracks emotional salience, not value or prediction error. Threat/Safety cues drive larger, sustained signals than reward/neutral cues. Dopamine in the BLA is very much different than in the striatum.

This paper took nine years and was, honestly, a labor of love and a fair amount of suffering. It took several labs, sustained NIH support, and a lot of people who stuck with it, a whole village!

Reduced drug use without full abstinence should count as success, not failure. 
This topic is very important to me, harm reduction is ALWAYS a success.

Add fentanyl to the list! Acute semaglutide blocks cue-, drug-, and stress-induced fentanyl seeking in rats, with drug- and stress-induced reinstatement dropping to the floor at every dose, and cue-induced seeking down about 70% at the higher doses.

I get more excited by a good behavioral pharmacology paper than by anything else. Great example. Heroin cues drive relapse-like seeking in rats after 385 days of abstinence. And a "drug not available" cue suppresses it just as long, even after a heroin injection. doi.org/10.1038/s41386-026-02447-6

One of the best and most interesting papers that I've read in the last year is even featured in a short podcast. Congrats on the fantastic work @brainaddiction.bsky.social! #RewardSignals

Neuropsychopharmacology@npp-journal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Our latest episode of NPP BrainPod is out! "Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats"

Behind this podcast is an outstanding student, Jarryd Ramborger. If you are interested in his approach using 60 cameras recording behavior simultaneously and a data pipeline using supercomputer clusters throughout the US, he’s your man!

Neuropsychopharmacology@npp-journal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Our latest episode of NPP BrainPod is out! "Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats"

Our latest episode of NPP BrainPod is out! "Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats"

Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats

NPP BrainPod · Episode

open.spotify.com

GLP-1 agonists will be the first meds for polysubstance use disorder. Cocaine, meth, nicotine, alcohol, opioids: same mechanism. For decades the field said animal models couldn't crack mental disorders. The preclinical peptide nerds were onto something. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2026.05.002

As a former smoker for 30+ years, nicotine e-cigs never worked for me. Varenicline did. That said, this is a clean randomized trial. 5% nicotine pod vs placebo vape, 6 weeks. 36.5% quit in the nicotine arm vs 11.5% in placebo. About 3x. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.13292

Go big or go home. Bigger reward, faster learning, not exactly news. The addiction field has long used 100 µL rewards. Much of systems neuro stuck with tiny ones, assuming DA saturated. It doesn't. Mice learn ~10x faster with a few large rewards. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeb0813

If you have any interest in science, medicine, veterinary medicine, biotechnology, agriculture, conservation, or the future of biomedical research, stop what you are doing and take 5 minutes to submit your input to NIH. You have only until next Tuesday May 26, Your voice MATTERS!

the technician position in my lab is now posted! Please pass this along: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/319...

Not buying the doomsday scenario. AI accelerates research and makes it more replicable, leading to more success, more growth, and more scientist employment, not less. The job will change. But we'll still need scientists to guide and curate. https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2056898746961846460

Interesting line from the Robin paper: "All hypotheses, experimental directions, data analyses, and figures in this report were produced by Robin." Curious what NIH thinks. They prohibit grant proposals "substantially developed by AI." https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2056898746961846460

One of many reasons we'll still need scientists for years to come in the AI world. Because sometimes AI produces dogshit, and while the techbros and VCs will gladly eat dogshit, a true human scientist will not. https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2056956645331410993

Longitudinal PET study of FAAH (enzyme degrading the endocannabinoid anandamide) in cannabis users. brain FAAH binding rises ~10% within days of stopping cannabis, with the biggest jump in the ventral striatum.

There is no free lunch in psychopharmacology: 21 longitudinal studies, ~28,000 people, ~24 yrs of follow-up. Cannabis use tracks with lower IQ and worse executive function over time. Effect scales with frequency and dependence. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-026-07072-1

Couldn't make GRS/GRC Addiction this year; it turns out my folks didn't really need me there ;-) Congrats @esneddon21, Kokila Shankar, and Selene Bonent-Zahedi!

Is symptom-based dosing for neonatal opioid withdrawal really better for the infant or just better for the hospital? This is a very interesting study recently highlighted by the NIH. Tailoring treatment to each infant's withdrawal severity is a real step forward.