Introducing The BASIS: Your Portal to Addiction Science and Resources

March 14, 2017

Heather Gray, Ph.D.
Senior Editor, The BASISAssociate Director of Academic Affairs, Division on Addiction

Do you struggle to keep up with the latest addiction research? Do you spend too much time search for trusted, evidence-based addiction resources? If so, The BASIS (Brief Addiction Science Information Source) is for you!

The BASIS is a product of the Division on Addiction at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. Each week, Division on Addiction faculty members select a recent scientific article related to drinking, smoking, other drug use, or gambling, and summarize its key details: What was the purpose? What did the authors do, and what did they find? What are the implications for treatment and public health? Our science reviews are brief, engaging, and designed to appeal to a general audience. Subscribe to our mailing list to get each science review delivered straight to your inbox. It's a quick and easy way to keep on top of emerging scientific literature.

We organize our science reviews into four categories:

• ASHES (Addiction Smoking Health Education Service) explores issues related to tobacco use and abuse. 
• STASH (Science Threads on Addiction, Substance use, and Health) investigates substance use and abuse. 
• The DRAM (Drinking Report for Addiction Medicine) reviews research related to alcohol use. 
• The WAGER (Worldwide Addiction Gambling Educational Report) reviews gambling-related research.

In addition to these weekly science reviews, we provide timely op-eds, including the First-Person: Personal Narratives of Addiction series, giving voice to experiences of addiction and recovery. By discussing addiction and related mental health conditions openly and encouraging compassion, tolerance, acceptance, and hope, The BASIS hopes to reduce the stigma often associated with addiction. 

Searching for addiction resources to share with your clients or others? Our Addiction Resources page includes screening options as well as a variety of free self-help tools, such as Your First Step to Change—an evidence-based self-change toolkit series. The Division on Addiction created these toolkits to help people:

• Learn about addiction-related problems,
• Evaluate their behaviors, and
• Develop change strategies, should they decide that change is the best course.

For more than 20 years, The BASIS has helped advance the Division on Addiction's overall mission to provide the general public, treatment providers, policy makers and others with access to addiction research. Subscribe today and start taking advantage of this free public health resource. To subscribe, simply click here or send an email to theBASISonline@gmail.com.

We look forward to sharing addiction science and resources with you.

About our guest blogger:

Dr. Heather M. Gray is Associate Director of Academic Affairs at the Division on Addiction, Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School Teaching Hospital, and an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University in 2006 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Boston University Health and Disability Research Institute.