ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the impact of social factors on the occurrence of addiction, then their influence on the quality of addiction treatment services. It discusses four major current phenomena in detail to illustrate the effects of macro social factors on the occurrence of addiction. The first two include the current prescription opioid and heroin epidemic in the US; and the convergent trends of alcohol use and alcohol use disorder between men and women in the past decades in the US. The last two phenomena include the emergence and heightening of various behavioral addictions such as internet gaming addiction, gambling disorder, shopping addiction, and sex addiction resulting from social change and easy access to computers and internet; and the impact of legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana. The discussions also include strategies to curtail the problems inherent in these phenomena and the importance of integrating time-space variations in developing strategies.
