Daily news - 26th January 2016 |
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UK news
Drug health harms – national intelligence (PDF)
Notes reflecting presentations and discussion from the ninth meeting of the National Intelligence Network on the health harms associated with drug use, held in London on 2 December 2015. These notes are for directors of public health, commissioners, service providers and needle and syringe programmes | PHE, UK
Cirrhosis: how dangerous is drinking?
Most of us who drink alcohol won’t die from liver disease – but it still kills more of us than diabetes and road deaths combined | Guardian, UK
Teenagers who use e-cigarettes 'more likely to take up smoking', study finds
Never-smokers who tried e-cigarettes were almost three times as likely to smoke cigarettes a year later | Telegraph, UK
If tobacco firms paid 1p for every cigarette sold in the UK, £500m would be raised to help fund health services, a charity says | Sky News, UK
Manchester police live tweeted a night of 999 calls and this is what happened
Officers recorded every drunken fight, row and missing person during an alcohol-fuelled night in and around the city's nightspots | Telegraph, UK
Spike in mental health patient deaths shows NHS 'struggling to cope'
MP Norman Lamb likens rise of over 20% in the unexpected deaths of mentally ill people in NHS care to Mid Staffs scandal and calls for investigation | Guardian, UK
Breaking free wins new contract with Tower Hamlets
The London Borough of Tower Hamlets Drug and Alcohol Action Team (DAAT) has signed a contract with Breaking Free Group, the pioneering digital healthcare provider | Breaking Free, UK
Police task force to tackle 'legal highs' in Newcastle
A task force has been set up by police in Newcastle to crack down on so-called "legal highs" | BBC, UK
Bail for Wenjie He, 38, and Jaizhu Cai, 31, over £20m cannabis smuggling plot
Two men accused of taking part in a plot to smuggle cannabis valued at nearly £20m into Northern Ireland have been granted bail | BBC, UK
International news
Cannabis-growing nuns grapple with California law: 'We are illegal'
The Sisters of the Valley, who say they do not follow any traditional religion, hope they can make marijuana ‘a healing industry instead of a stoner industry’ | Guardian, UK
Epidemic levels of heroin in Mallow, inquest into woman’s death hears
A woman who met a man online was found dead in his bed the next morning, an inquest has heard. Margaret Crowley, 37, of St Colman’s Place, Buttevant, Co Cork, joined ‘social discovery’ website Tagged where she met Brian Glass, from Tallaght in Dublin | Irish Examiner, Ireland
Teens Who Use E-Cigs Three Times More Likely To Pick Up Tobacco Cigarettes A Year Later
A vape today may mean a puff of the real deal tomorrow — at least if you’re a teen | Medical Daily, USA
Teens and NIH scientists join forces for National Drug & Alcohol Facts Week(SM)
Teens and scientists will connect for the sixth annual (NDAFW) held Jan. 25-31. This week-long observance gives young people the facts about how alcohol and drugs can affect them, both in the short-term and over their lifetime | Yahoo News, USA
Overdose Reversal Drug Now Available To Every U.S. High School Free Of Charge
Advocates say this is another important step toward preventing fatal opioid overdoses | Huffington Post, USA
'New Hampshire' Episode 3: How The Heroin Crisis Is Bleeding Into The Primary
The epidemic has taken a particularly ruinous hold in the nation's first primary state, and the candidates are listening | Huffington Post, USA
Organised crime paying low prices to import drugs into Australia
Organised crime groups have become so successful at importing drugs into Australia that the wholesale price being paid for ice, cocaine and ecstasy has dramatically fallen in the past 18 months | Age, Australia
Christchurch man says Marlborough rehab 'too religious'
A Christchurch man who moved to Blenheim to quit synthetic cannabis says Blenheim's only residential rehab programme is too religious | Stuff.co.nz, New Zealand
Blogs, comment and opinion
How the Government's Legal High Ban Will Directly Harm Users and Help Dealers
Around 15 months ago, Blackburn's main head shop stopped selling legal highs. After pressure from former MP Jack Straw, Trading Standards, police and the local paper, Smoker's World packed in their trade of research chemicals and synthetic substitutes – the idea being the consumption of these substances would plummet if they weren't so easily available | VICE, UK
How did the mind-boggling new drugs bill make it through parliament?
There are two things that politicians tend to be bad at: sex and drugs. Thankfully, MPs' recent visits to our bedrooms have tended to be brief, and usually have left us in a more liberal place than we were before. But drugs? Politicians can really get their teeth into drugs – with often messy results | Conversation, UK
Seven things you only know if you vape
Weird flavours, mishaps with water and constant fear - if you've swapped cigarettes for ecigs then this may come as no surprise | Manchester Evening News, UK
Dr Ciara Kelly: Dry in January masks
Dry January may have its merits but it's only a sop, masking our real national problem with alcohol | Independent, Ireland
Una Mullally: It’s ludicrous to hand over drug quality control to criminal gangs
The highest level in Europe of so-called ‘legal high’ drug use was found among young Irish people | Irish Times, Ireland
Drug epidemics, now and then
People are dying. We are in the midst of the third drug epidemic in the last 50 years and the second one involving opioids | The Real Edition, USA
“Common and Shared Responsibility: A Confession”
We admit, we Member States and subscribers to three United Nations drug-control treaties, in preparation for the UNGASS in April 2016, that we are the source of a failed “World War on Drugs” that has been counterproductive to our “common and shared” objective to minimize drug production, cultivation, distribution, use, addiction, death and sale | Gierach Blogs, USA
Responding to illicit drugs: a level playing field for evidence?
There were only six heroin overdose deaths in Australia in 1964. But by 1997, heroin overdose deaths in Australia had climbed to 1116. Just imagine the number of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters who had suddenly lost a young loved one | Age comment, Australia