Abbreviations and Acronyms                                                                             

Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.)
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA)
Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART)
Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

In general, spell out first appearance of the name of an organization in a chapter.

 

Numbers                                                                                                                               

20 micrograms (numerals okay with units of measure)
1980s
the eighties
$100 million
16 percent
top 40

 

Punctuation                                                                                                            

Period always inside quotation marks
Serial comma: alcohol, cocaine, and heroin

 

Spelling, Capitalization, Compounds, and Italics                                          

acidhead
African American communities
antialcohol
ayahuasca
best seller (noun)
bookstore
the Brotherhood (referring to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love)
by-product
Cannabis sativa
civil rights movement

Congressional Record

the Constitution
constitutional (lowercase as adjective)
these data show . . . (plural verb)
drug testing (noun)
drug-test, drug-testing, drug-tested (verb; e.g., “All employees will be drug-tested.”)
drug use
drug-use rates
Ecstasy (capitalize when referring to drug)
fearmongering
frontlines
front man
Furthur Festival
hard-core users
Heroin (capitalize when referring to the nineteenth-century trademarked drug)
high-school memories
Humboldt County (California)
In the Dark (record albums, CDs, italicized)
long-standing practice
like-minded
markup (noun)
Medellín
moneymaking (adj.)
narco-trafficker
the New York Times (italicized in text; however, if the Times, or any other newspaper, is mentioned in material quoted from another newspaper, it should be set roman, consistent with AP style.)
northern California
per capita consumption (no hyphen in per capita)
Percocet
pro-drug (prodrug could be confusing)
pro-pot (meaning “in favor of marijuana”)
the Revolution (when referring to the American Revolution)
Rite Aid (no hyphen)
Roe v. Wade (italicize legal cases)
’shrooms (preceded by apostrophe, not single quotation mark)
Socialist (capitalize when referring to the political party)
southern
speed freaks
Tocqueville (no particle used in subsequent references; see Chicago 8.11)
twelfth-graders

Use lowercase following a colon unless the colon introduces two or more sentences.