ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of epidemiological methods and models used to study processes of becoming dependent upon tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and other internationally regulated drugs, with ‘drug dependence’ serving more or less as a synonym for ‘drug addiction.’ Epidemiologists discovered sustained tobacco smoking as a malleable causal determinant of pulmonary cancer with focus on ‘pack-years’ concepts, with little attention to behavioral choice issues or processes such as tobacco dependence syndromes that foster sustained smoking. Outside epidemiology circles, there is little awareness that the epidemiology discovery process often has included formal randomized controlled trials, including randomized trials of hypothesized preventive interventions. The basic architecture for case-control research typically involves specifying a discrete population for sampling of affected cases, with the non-case controls coming from the same population such that sources of variation in environmental conditions, host characteristics, and at least some agent-exposures are constrained.
