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Daily news - 4th November 2024

UK news

Opened 1 Nov 2024, Closes 20 Dec 2024. The Right to Addiction Recovery (Scotland) Bill was introduced in the Scottish Parliament on 15 May 2024 by Douglas Ross MSP. Annie Wells MSP is the additional member in charge of the Bill. The Bill, as introduced, seeks to make provision about the rights of persons addicted to drugs or alcohol to receive treatment for addiction. Responses to this call for written evidence will help to inform the Committee’s scrutiny of the Bill, including the selection of witnesses to be invited to give oral evidence on the Bill | Scottish Parliament, UK

Watchdog: shift from crisis model for alcohol & drugs

Audit Scotland has revealed that barriers persist for people trying to access alcohol and drug services, meaning services are not tailored to individual needs – recommending widescale changes including how the Scottish government funds services. The national watchdog reports that Scotland is behind on its landmark ‘mission’ to reduce drug and alcohol harms, including long-awaited workforce plans to help move away from crisis-led services | Healthandcare.scot, UK

Reported recreational drug and new psychoactive substance use versus laboratory detection of substances by high-resolution mass spectrometry in patients presenting to an emergency department in London with acute drug toxicity

[Open access] Clinicians managing patients with acute recreational drug or new psychoactive substance toxicity typically depend on self-reported drug(s) used. This study compares patient self-report (and/or from other sources) to the substance(s) that were subsequently identified in serum | Clinical Toxicology, UK

Disposable vapes ban could push some users back to smoking, ministers told

Defra report warns there could be ‘health disbenefits’ with 29% of vapers reverting or relapsing to cigarettes | Guardian, UK

England may not be ‘smoke-free’ until 2039, cancer charity warns

Government plan to reduce smoking rates in danger of falling a decade behind schedule | Guardian, UK

Lung Cancer Awareness Month: Can I get lung cancer if I’ve never smoked?

Lung cancer experts tell Lisa Salmon that although smoking causes most cases, nearly a third are in non-smokers | Independent, UK

‘I wish I’d never taken it’: More young people seeking rehab as ketamine addiction spirals in the UK

Casey Innalls was left in excruciating pain and was hospitalised for 12 days with a condition known as k-bladder | Independent, UK

Nitazenes: Birmingham

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) hospitalisations and (b) deaths from people using nitazenes in Birmingham; and what steps he is taking to reduce these numbers | They work for you, UK

Smoking: Pregnancy

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to increase funding for NHS smoking cessation programmes for pregnant women | They work for you, UK

No alcohol for school sixth-formers, says council

Queenswood, a girls' private school in Hertfordshire, said it wanted to introduce an "educational" system of alcoholic drinks vouchers for 16 to 18-year-olds at occasional evening social events | BBC, UK

'Pack of cigs and a Bic lighter': Why are celebs glamorising smoking again?

Brat summer might be over as we grapple with how dark it is at 4pm, but the concept of being a brat – “pack of cigs and a Bic lighter”, according to the singer Charli XCX – lives on | BBC, UK

Chancellor keeps off-trade duty in line with RPI while increasing Draught Relief - podcast

On this month's podcast we spoke to Dr Aveek Bhattacharya, Research Director at the Social Market Foundation, about the decisions taken on alcohol duty in Labour's first Budget in 14 years. We discussed the positives and negatives of the decisions, whether Labour could and should have been more radical, how duty should be structured to cover the cost of alcohol harm, and whether public health groups should have welcomed the decision | IAS, UK

Let’s talk e-cigarettes no 36, October 2024, Professor Stephen Higgins University of Vermont - podcast

Associate Professor Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Associate Professor Nicola Lindson discuss the new evidence in e-cigarette research and interview Professor Stephen Higgins from the University of Vermont Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science, Burlington, USA. Professor Stephen Higgins uses the concepts and methods of behavioural economics and behavioural pharmacology to investigate tobacco, illicit drugs, and other health-related risk behaviours in vulnerable populations | University of Oxford, UK

Police seize £8m of cannabis in drugs crackdown

Millions of pounds worth of drugs were seized by police officers as part of an nine-month operation to tackle serious and organised crime in Norfolk and Suffolk | BBC, UK

International news

Crack cocaine 'crisis' on Dublin's streets

Dublin is in the midst of a crack cocaine crisis, according to the city's drug counsellors. The number of people seeking treatment for the use of the drug in the Republic of Ireland increased by 594% from 173 cases in 2017 to 1,201 in 2023, statistics from the Health Research Board (HRB) show, external | BBC, UK

Gunfight and massive brawl in France seriously wounds five

Shootings in Poitiers are latest to injure children, with minister saying country at ‘tipping point’ on drug violence | Guardian, UK

California drug bust yields enough fentanyl to kill quarter of state’s population

Officials uncovered ‘alarming amount of fentanyl-laced pills’ during routine traffic stop in state’s central valley | Guardian, UK

Burning out: how Australia’s bid to cut smoking rates exploded into suburban tobacco wars

With the illicit market worth at least $2bn a year and the rise of illegal vapes, experts say the status quo is failing | Guardian, UK

Sadness simmers inside this Melbourne hospital ward. But it’s a lifeline for people suffering a mental health crisis

Guardian Australia was given access to a sealed-off section of St Vincent’s to find out why other hospitals are copying what it does | Guardian, UK

Over €200,000 worth of cocaine seized at Dublin Airport

The drugs were discovered concealed in a passenger’s luggage yesterday | Journal, Ireland

An autonomous implantable device for the prevention of death from opioid overdose

At overdose levels, opioid-induced respiratory depression becomes fatal without the administration of naloxone within minutes. Currently, overdose survival relies on bystander intervention, requiring a nearby person to find the overdosed individual and have immediate access to naloxone to administer. To circumvent the bystander requirement, we developed the Naloximeter: a class of life-saving implantable devices that autonomously detect and treat overdose while simultaneously contacting first responders | Science Advances, USA

Cancer research reinforces calls for menthol cigarette restrictions

A team of researchers including Roberta Freitas-Lemos, assistant professor at Virginia Tech's Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, found that reducing sales of menthol products while making replacement therapies such as nicotine gum and lozenges available could improve health outcomes for people who use menthol cigarettes | Medical Xpress, USA

Novel digital pet game within smoking cessation app increases user engagement

Mobile apps that offer smoking cessation support can be effective alternatives to conventional clinical treatment for people who want to stop smoking—but user engagement is key to this success | Medical Xpress, USA

To Me, International Drug Users Day Should Mean Pride

International Drug Users Day, marked on November 1, is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve lost so many people who were close to me, through harms of drug prohibition such as overdose, blood-borne diseases or injection-related infections. I’ve been lucky to survive myself | Filter Magazine, USA

Blogs, comment and opinion

The devil is in the detail – concerned and cautious Budget optimism

Our Executive Director, Will Haydock, responds to this week’s Budget | Collective Voice blog, UK

Stubbornly glamorous cocaine lures us into addiction

If we really want to halt the scourge, we need to understand how the drug affects the many weekend users | Guardian letters, UK

Government’s Own Assessment Admits Ban Will Drive 30% of Vapers Back to Cigarettes

The government’s plan to ban disposable vapes by next summer has already been trashed by free-market wonks and industry insiders, the prevailing argument – one the NHS touts – being that many smokers turn to disposable vapes to cut back on cigarettes as a safer option. Now the government’s own impact assessment has admitted that the ban will lead to more people lighting up… | Guido Fawkes, UK

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