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Almost one year ago, in its tenth year of continuous publication, The WAGER evolved into The BASIS. At that time, we expanded our focus from reviewing the science of gambling and disordered gambling to include reviews of research on alcohol and tobacco, and explorations of the cultural context in which addictive behavior develops. This expansion stemmed from a recognition that disordered gambling often is associated with other addictive behavior, such as alcohol abuse (e.g., 7(20), 9(36), 10(10), 6(16)), as well as tobacco and drug use (e.g., 4(48), 1(34), 1(25), 6(48), 6(49)). The Division on Addictions developed a new syndromal model of addiction (i.e., (10(1)) that incorporates this association and this model serves as the guiding framework for The BASIS.
The BASIS staff strives to bring you the latest scientific advances related to addictive behavior. We also try to bring you new resources that might help you or people you know deal with an addiction problem. Some of these resources include our new First Step to Change edition dedicated to drinking, a new education section, and adding to our resources page.
Continuing this effort to consistently improve The BASIS, this week we bring you Science Threads on Addiction, Substance Use, & Health (STASH). STASH is a new science review dedicated to providing readers with direct access to the latest scientific information on substance use and abuse. As always, we hope this information will be useful to you and we welcome any feedback you have. We often post reader letters on our letters page, and some readers who send letters are invited to expand their ideas into editorials. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and receiving your opinions about our editorials, science reviews, and other web content.
We hope that you will continue to read The BASIS each week and encourage you, if you have not already done so, to subscribe to The BASIS. The BASIS is supported by the National Center for Responsible Gaming, bwin.com, Hyatt Gaming Services, and the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling in collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Because the Division on Addictions is independently funded and does not receive financial support from the Cambridge Health Alliance or Harvard Medical School, we need your support to launch additional resources and maintain the high standards of the current science reviews. Please see our support page.