Although craving was proposed as an additional DSM-5 SUD criterion, latent variable analyses of craving with the other criteria is limited to studies of alcohol use disorders, three in the general population (Keyes et al., 2010) and one in emergency room patients (Cherpitel et al., 2010). Our study is consistent with the others in that craving fit well on the underlying unidimensional latent SUD variable and its addition did not change factor loadings for other criteria or overall model fit. However, adding craving alone to the DSM-IV dependence criteria did not significantly increase the total information for any of the four substances we examined, suggesting that it is largely redundant with these criteria. However, in contrast to previous studies showing that craving was a mid-to-high severity indicator (Cherpitel et al., 2010; Keyes et al., 2010), we found that craving was a mild-severity criterion, with intermediate-level discrimination compared to the other criteria. We further examined whether addition of craving as a criterion while holding the diagnostic threshold constant would add new cases, thus potentially casting a wider “diagnostic net”. For users
