USA

From The White House – April 3, 2025

The Administration will focus on six key areas in its first year

Today, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is announcing the release of the Trump Administration’s Drug Policy Priorities, a comprehensive and coordinated blueprint to reduce the devastating impact of illicit drugs on American society. The Statement lays out the urgent, first-year steps that must be taken to address the scourge of illicit drug use that continues plaguing our nation and taking American lives. The implementation of these priorities will complement President Trump’s tireless efforts to stop Foreign Terrorist Organizations, cartels, and drug traffickers from harming Americans, and will help build a safer, healthier future for America.

In the next year, the White House will work across the government to implement the following six priorities:

  1. Reduce the Number of Overdose Fatalities, with a Focus on Fentanyl
  2. Secure the Global Supply Chain Against Drug Trafficking
  3. Stop the Flow of Drugs Across our Borders and into Our Communities
  4. Prevent Drug Use Before It Starts
  5. Provide Treatment That Leads to Long-Term Recovery
  6. Innovate in Research and Data to Support Drug Control Strategies

“Terrorists, cartels, and other drug traffickers are taking hundreds of thousands of American lives by poisoning them for profit,” said Jon Rice, the ONDCP Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director. “To meet the urgent need of this moment, the Trump Administration is launching an unprecedented whole-of-government effort to stop these drugs from entering our communities and hold drug traffickers accountable. The priorities in this framework outline the first steps to kick cartels out of our country, free Americans from the deadly grip of addiction, and guide America back to health and safety.”

To achieve our vision of a safer, healthier future for Americans, we will disrupt the supply chain from tooth to tail. We will continue to take decisive action and exploit all existing authorities, both punitive and economic, to eliminate the production and distribution networks that allow these drugs to reach the United States. We will develop bold policy choices, employ innovative and sophisticated technology, and create a skilled, recovery-ready workforce to combat this crisis and ensure the safety of all Americans. Domestically, we must acknowledge the complexity of substance use disorder and addiction. The statistics surrounding drug use and overdose deaths mandate a comprehensive approach that emphasizes drug use prevention and increases access to recovery and overdose prevention and reversal services. Recognizing that a sustainable solution requires coordination across all levels of government, we will collaborate with law enforcement, first responders, healthcare providers, community-based organizations, and individuals to ensure the health and well-being of all Americans.

The staggering loss of life caused by illicit drugs underscores the severity of the challenge, but the Trump Administration has already taken critical steps to confront this crisis through a series of Executive Orders that secure our borders, combat foreign terrorist organizations and drug trafficking organizations, and demand reform by source countries from which illicit drugs and precursor chemicals flow into the United States. Critically, the Trump Administration will identify and hold accountable those responsible for exacerbating the flow of drugs within our borders.

While these Policy Priorities outline the broad areas of effort for the first year, the President’s drug control policy will evolve to keep pace with the changing landscape of illicit drug trafficking and ensure that our borders, communities, and schools are secure from the destructive influence of illicit drugs.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/04/7856/

Filed under: Latest News,Political Sector,USA :

by Rodielon Putol – Earth.com staff writer – 04-06-2025

Nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas, is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Despite warnings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), more people across the U.S. are misusing the substance – often with tragic results.

AD

Once a common feature in dental offices and whipped cream canisters, this gas is now tied to a sharp increase in poisonings, hospitalizations, and even deaths.

Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are investigating this growing trend, sounding the alarm about its risks.

“This is a chemical that is commonly used as a sedative or anesthetic, but what we’re seeing is a rise in recreational use,” said Andrew Yockey, University of Mississippi assistant professor of public health.

“But what we’re also seeing is also a rise in hospitalizations, in poisonings and in deaths.”

Nitrous oxide deaths are doubling

According to the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, over 13 million Americans have misused nitrous oxide at some point in their lives.

And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that deaths from nitrous oxide poisoning have more than doubled – rising over 110% between 2019 and 2023.

While the number of deaths remains relatively low compared to other drugs, the speed of the increase is cause for concern.

“The preliminary findings of our study are that deaths have remained fairly small compared to other dangerous substances,” said Rachel Hoopsick, assistant professor of health and kinesiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

AD

“But what we’re seeing is that over the last couple of years, those rates have increased exponentially. At that continued rate, we could be looking at a much larger problem.”

Why nitrous oxide slips under the radar

Whippets – another name for nitrous oxide canisters – have long been used for a quick, euphoric high.

But the side effects are no joke. The FDA warns that repeated inhalation can lead to brain damage, frostbite, numbness, blood clots, and even paralysis.

Despite these warnings, the gas remains widely accessible and largely unregulated.

Unlike many controlled substances, nitrous oxide is easy to buy online or at local shops. A simple search brings up brightly packaged, flavored options – clearly designed to catch the attention of younger audiences.

“Think back to big tobacco; they deliberately targeted young people with cartoons, fun flavors and flashy colors,” said Hoopsick. “That is a parallel we’re seeing now with nitrous oxide.”

The product is often marketed as a whipped cream propellant. But some of the available options make the culinary angle hard to believe.

“I really doubt anyone is buying flavored nitrous oxide to make blueberry mango whipped cream,” Yockey said. “Or ‘Bomb Pop.’ But I can have it delivered to my house in a couple of days.”

Marketing tactics that mimic big tobacco

What’s even more alarming is how sellers downplay the risks.

“We have evidence that nitrous oxide poisoning is a very real danger, but this is very often ignored or trivialized,” said Hoopsick.

“Sellers of nitrous oxide rarely, if ever, provide health warnings. I think the public sees it as a party drug.”

And like many dangerous trends, social media is making things worse. Videos of teens and young adults inhaling the gas are easy to find online, often glamorized with hashtags and flashy effects.

“We know that if you watch videos of someone else doing it, you’re more likely to try it,” said Yockey.

“I worry about the high school and college-aged adolescents who see this online and decide to buy a fruit-punch flavored tank. Because right now, that’s perfectly legal.”

A call for policy change

The researchers believe that more data is needed to understand the full impact of nitrous oxide misuse. But they also stress that legislation must catch up with reality.

AD

“Policy level interventions are what are lacking at the moment,” Hoopsick said.

“If we have some guardrails on who can sell this, who can buy it and how it’s marketed, maybe we can get ahead of the problem.”

For now, the listings keep growing. And with speedy shipping options, the danger is just a few clicks away.

“Some of these brands were not here even a week ago,” Yockey said, scrolling through listings on his screen. “What they’re doing here is very ingenious, but it’s also incredibly dangerous.”

Source: https://www.earth.com/news/laughing-gas-crisis-nitrous-oxide-misuse-and-abuse-is-rising-in-the-u-s/

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Latest News,USA :

by Drug Free America Foundation <hhorning> 10 April 2025 15:45

 

As marijuana becomes more accessible across the U.S., it’s easy to assume that legality equals safety. But that assumption can put both individuals and workplaces at risk. Whether you’re a small business owner trying to protect your team or an employee navigating changing laws, here’s the truth: legal doesn’t mean harmless.

 

With more than half of U.S. states allowing marijuana in some form, and ongoing federal discussions around reclassifying the drug to a lower-risk category, many people are wondering if this means marijuana is “officially safe.” The answer isn’t so simple.

 

Health experts and addiction researchers caution that the reclassification—or legalization—of marijuana does not erase its risks. In fact, the marijuana available today is much more potent than in decades past, and regular use is linked to a variety of health and safety concerns, including:

·    Addiction: Around 30% of users may develop cannabis use disorder (CUD).

·    Impaired judgment and motor skills, increasing the risk of workplace accidents.

·    Mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, and in more and more cases, marijuana-induced psychosis.

·    Cognitive impairment, especially harmful during adolescence and young adulthood.

·    Decreased productivity and increased absenteeism in workplace settings.

 

Additionally, what many people don’t realize is how dramatically marijuana has evolved. The THC content (the chemical responsible for the “high”) has skyrocketed—by up to 20 times compared to marijuana from the 1960s–1980s. That higher potency means stronger effects, more intense impairment, and greater risk of dependence.

 

As a small business owner, it’s your job to keep your workplace safe and your team informed. That starts with clear policies, open communication, and a basic understanding of the facts:

·    Marijuana may be legal in your state, but you can still set limits in your workplace, especially for safety-sensitive roles.

·    Employees might be confused by changing laws or think rescheduling makes marijuana “safe”—education is key.

·    Workplace drug testing policies may need updates to reflect new realities while maintaining your drug-free goals.

 

Dr. Deepak D’Souza, a psychiatrist and marijuana researcher at Yale, warns that the health effects of marijuana are still not fully understood. “We’ve done a very bad job of educating people,” he says, adding that many turn to celebrities instead of scientists for information.

Legalization and regulation are evolving. But as an employer or employee, it’s crucial to separate policy from perception. Just because something is allowed doesn’t make it appropriate—or safe—for every situation.

At the end of the day, a safe, productive, and healthy work environment depends on informed choices. Let’s make sure everyone in your workplace has the facts to make them.

 

Source: 

Easing marijuana laws doesn’t mean the drug is safer. (n.d.). WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20240501/reclassification-of-marijuana-doesnt-mean-its-safer

 
Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Legal Sector,USA :

 Kyle Jaeger – April 10, 2025

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has notified an agency judge that the marijuana rescheduling process is still on hold—with no future actions currently scheduled as the matter sits before the acting administrator, who has called cannabis a “gateway drug” and linked its use to psychosis.

It’s been almost three months since DEA Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) John Mulrooney temporarily paused hearings on a proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) that was initiated under the Biden administration.

Pursuant to the Tribunal’s January 13, 2025 Order, the United States Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration (Government or DEA), by and through undersigned counsel, hereby submits the ordered Joint Status Report on behalf of the Government and Movants,” attorneys for DEA said in a joint status report on Thursday.

“To date, Movants’ interlocutory appeal to the Acting Administrator regarding their Motion to Reconsider remains pending with the Acting Administrator,” DEA said in the joint update, which was also signed by, or otherwise submitted for review to, pro-rescheduling witnesses. “No briefing schedule has been set.”

What this means for the fate of rescheduling isn’t clear. But if the decision-making is left up to DEA Acting Administrator Derek Maltz, it likely wouldn’t bode especially well for supporters of rescheduling.

The official, who retired from DEA in 2014 after 28 years of service, has made a series of sensational comments about cannabis—at one point linking marijuana use to school shootings, for example.

He also repeatedly insisted that the Biden administration “hijacked” the rescheduling process from DEA for political purposes. “It sure seems to me that DOJ has prioritized politics and votes over public health and safety!” Maltz said last May, for example.

Originally, hearings were set to commence on January 21, but those were cancelled when Mulrooney granted the appeal motion. He ordered DEA and the witnesses to provide a joint status update within 90 days, which would be this coming Sunday.

The appeal came after the judge denied a motion that sought DEA’s removal from the rescheduling proceedings altogether, arguing that it is improperly designated as the chief “proponent” of the proposed rule given the allegations of ex parte communications with anti-rescheduling witnesses that “resulted in an irrevocable taint” to the process.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department told a federal court in January that it should pause a lawsuit challenging DEA’s marijuana rescheduling process after Mulrooney cancelled the hearings.

Also in January, Mulrooney condemned DEA over its “unprecedented and astonishing” defiance of a key directive related to evidence it is seeking to use in the marijuana rescheduling proposal.

At issue was DEA’s insistence on digitally submitting tens of thousands of public comments it received in response to the proposed rule to move cannabis to Schedule III.

Mulrooney hasn’t been shy about calling out DEA over various procedural missteps throughout this rescheduling process.

For example, in December he criticized the agency for making a critical “blunder” in its effort to issue subpoenas to force Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials to testify in hearings—but he allowed the agency to fix the error and ultimately granted the request.

Relatedly, a federal judge also dismissed a lawsuit seeking to compel DEA to turn over its communications with the anti-cannabis organization.

Mulrooney had separately denied a cannabis research company’s request to allow it to add a young medical marijuana patient and advocate as a witness in the upcoming rescheduling hearing.

Also, one of the nation’s leading marijuana industry associations asked the judge to clarify whether it will be afforded the opportunity to cross-examine DEA during the upcoming hearings on the cannabis rescheduling proposal.

Further, a coalition of health professionals that advocates for cannabis reform recently asked that the DEA judge halt future marijuana rescheduling hearings until a federal court is able to address a series of allegations they’re raising about the agency’s witness selection process.

Meanwhile, two GOP senators introduced a bill in February that would continue to block marijuana businesses from taking federal tax deductions under Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code 280E—even if it’s ultimately rescheduled.

Beyond the hearing delays, another complicating factor is the change in leadership at DEA under the Trump administration.

Trump’s nominee to serve as DEA administrator, Terrance Cole, has previously voiced concerns about the dangers of marijuana and linked its use to higher suicide risk among youth.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was previously vocal about his support for legalizing cannabis, as well as psychedelics therapy. But during his Senate confirmation process in February, he said that he would defer to DEA on marijuana rescheduling in his new role.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)—Trump’s first pick for U.S. attorney general this term before he withdrew from consideration—said recently that “meaningful” marijuana reform is “on the horizon” under the current administration, praising the president’s “leadership” in supporting rescheduling.

After Gaetz withdrew from consideration to lead DOJ, Trump then picked former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) to run the department, and the Senate confirmed that choice. During her confirmation hearings, Bondi declined to say how she planned to navigate key marijuana policy issues. And as state attorney general, she opposed efforts to legalize medical cannabis.

Former officials with DEA and HHS said this week that, without proactive advocacy for marijuana rescheduling from Trump personally, the process could stall indefinitely.

Supporters of rescheduling got an unwelcome update last week, however, as the White House Office of Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) released a report that outlined the administration’s top drug policy priorities for Trump’s first year of his second term—and it notably did not mention rescheduling or other cannabis reforms.

A marijuana industry-funded political action committee (PAC) recently attacked Biden’s cannabis policy record as well as the nation of Canada, with new ads promoting sometimes misleading claims about the last administration while making the case that Trump can deliver on reform.

Source: https://www.marijuanamoment.net/dea-says-stalled-marijuana-rescheduling-process-awaits-action-from-agency-head-who-called-cannabis-a-gateway-drug/

 

Note: To access the Joint Status Report – Dkt No. 24-44 , contributed by Tom Angell (Marijuana Moment) visit the Source as indicated above.

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Latest News,Political Sector,USA :

by AddictionPolicy Forum – Apr 3, 2025

Adults under 50 who use marijuana may face a significantly higher risk of heart attack, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC). 

Researchers analyzed data from more than 4.6 million adults and found that individuals under 50 who use cannabis were more than six times as likely to suffer a heart attack compared to non-users. The study also found that those who use cannabis are four times more likely to experience an ischemic stroke, three times more likely to experience major adverse cardiovascular events, and twice as likely to experience heart failure.
“Asking about cannabis use should be part of clinicians’ workup to understand patients’ overall cardiovascular risk, similar to asking about smoking cigarettes,” said Ibrahim Kamel, MD, clinical instructor at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and internal medicine resident at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston and the study’s lead author in a press release. “At a policy level, a fair warning should be made so that the people who are consuming cannabis know that there are risks.”

The findings applied even to individuals who did not use tobacco products, suggesting marijuana may be an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that marijuana use can increase heart rate and blood pressure — both of which may contribute to cardiovascular strain. Researchers believe these effects could play a role in damaging blood vessels and increasing the risk of blood clots.

Experts advise that cannabis should be considered alongside other recognized risk factors when evaluating heart health, particularly in younger adults. “Until we have more solid data, I advise users to try to somehow put some regulation in the using of cannabis,” said Ahmed Mahmoud with Boston University. “We are not sure if it’s totally, 100% safe for your heart by any amount or any duration of exposure.”
Source: https://mailchi.mp/addictionpolicy.org/halt-fentanyl-act-sign-on-letter-16446882?e=67079d94e3

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Health,Latest News,USA :

by Robyn Oster – April 2025

It lays out 6 priorities:

  1. Reduce the Number of Overdose Fatalities, with a Focus on Fentanyl: This includes harm reduction efforts including increasing availability of naloxone and drug test strips, educational campaigns on overdose prevention, and diverting people from incarceration to supportive services. However, it also includes pursuing “the harshest available penalties” for those who sell fentanyl that results in overdose deaths.
  2. Secure the Global Supply Chain Against Drug Trafficking: This includes law enforcement and regulatory actions with other countries to address global drug trafficking, including exercising the administration’s “economic powers to demand change” when other countries “fail to take action.”
  3. Stop the Flow of Drugs Across our Borders and into Our Communities: This includes enhancing border security to prevent the smuggling of drugs into the U.S., with the goal of decreasing the domestic availability. The administration will use “both punitive and economic” measures and will “hold states and localities accountable for committing appropriate resources” to these efforts. The administration “will prosecute those individuals responsible for disseminating drugs within our communities and pursue severe penalties against the most culpable actors.”
  4. Prevent Drug Use Before It Starts: This includes educational campaigns and evidence-based prevention programs in schools and communities, including building resilience in youth and promoting healthy behaviors. The administration will also use social media to educate on dangers, overdose prevention, and treatment and recovery services.
  5. Provide Treatment That Leads to Long-Term Recovery: The administration will ensure effective, timely, and evidence-based treatment is available to all who need it. This includes expanding access to medications for opioid use disorder, improving integration of mental health and recovery support services, and strengthening the peer recovery support workforce and infrastructure.
  6. Innovate in Research and Data to Support Drug Control Strategies: The includes collecting and analyzing data to inform policy and modernizing technologies/systems for data collection and sharing. The administration will monitor trends to identify and address emerging threats.

Source: https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/trump-administrations-drug-policy-priorities-unveiled/

Filed under: Latest News,Political Sector,USA :
by Alan Earls Editor – Franklin Observer – 4-12-2025 

The new top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts underscored her opposition this week to supervised drug use sites and issued a “guarantee” that the Trump administration will never allow states like Massachusetts to skirt the federal law criminalizing the long-debated facilities.

U.S. Attorney Leah Foley, who took office in January, issued a statement Wednesday responding to an editorial in which the Lowell Sun suggested the federal government could turn a “blind eye” to the issue and asked, “Has the time finally arrived to challenge prevailing federal law in an effort to save addicts’ lives?”

Foley, a former deputy chief of the office’s Narcotics & Money Laundering Unit who has previously said she would oppose supervised drug use sites, said her response was simple: “No.”

“As to the hope for a blind eye, I guarantee that such a time will never come during this Administration,” she said. “‘Safe injections sites,’ ‘harm reduction sites,’ or however they are branded by advocates, are categorically illegal and do nothing to help people overcome their addictions. To the contrary, they facilitate destructive behavior that ruins lives, consumes families and devastates communities.”

Activists have been pushing state government for years to pass a bill authorizing overdose prevention centers and federal law has consistently been identified as the primary barrier. In 2018, Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said anyone who uses or works at such a facility could face federal charges “regardless of any state law or study.”

Gov. Maura Healey’s administration announced its support for the idea of supervised drug use sites in 2023, and the Senate approved language last year allowing municipalities to open locations as part of a broader addiction and substance use bill. That provision was dropped in negotiations with the House.

Supporters of the idea say allowing medically trained professionals to monitor street drug use, then intervene and try to prevent an overdose from turning fatal, would help prevent fatal overdoses as powerful synthetics flood the drug supply and could serve as an opportunity to connect addicts with treatment or other services.

Foley said Wednesday that policymakers needs to look only as far as the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard to see “the direct result of the ill-conceived experiment allowing drug users to flout the law.”

“Businesses left and have not come back. Creating environments that assist people with pumping poisons into their bodies is neither compassionate nor constructive,” the U.S. attorney said. “We should continue to direct all our resources to the prevention efforts that steer people, especially our youth, away from drug use and treatment protocols that truly save peoples’ lives from their addictions.”

Source: https://franklinobserver.town.news/g/franklin-town-ma/n/297912/just-say-no

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Education,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

From NIHCM Newsletter / April 2025

Alcohol & Substance Use

Learn about the latest news on substance use, including views on alcohol, and how fentanyl deaths are declining.

  • Alcohol Awareness: April is alcohol-awareness month and an opportunity to reflect on the impacts of alcohol use and how alcohol-related deaths have increased over the last decade, with a sharp increase during early-pandemic years. A new Pew Research Center survey explores Americans’ views on the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption. A majority of routine drinkers, 59%, say their alcohol use increases their risk of serious physical health problems at least a little.
  • Fentanyl Deaths Declining: Recent preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates a 25% decrease in opioid overdose deaths for the 12-month period ending in October 2024, compared to the same timeframe in 2023. This is driven in large part by a reduction in the number of deaths involving fentanyl. The Wall Street Journal examines the decline in a series of charts. KFF Health News discusses how misinformation about fentanyl is impacting the overdose response.
  • Federal Funding: A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from terminating a variety of public health funds that had been allocated to states during the Covid-19 pandemic, including funding that was being used to support opioid addiction and mental health treatments. The administration also closed the office that tracked alcohol-related deaths and harms and helped develop policies to reduce them.

Resources & Initiatives

  • The US Surgeon General’s 2025 Advisory, Alcohol and Cancer Risk, describes the scientific evidence for the causal link between alcohol consumption and an increased risk for cancer.
  • NPR dives into 8 theories from experts on why fentanyl overdose deaths are declining, including increased access to Naloxone, better public health, and the waning effects of the COVID pandemic.
  • The National Academy for State Health Policy’s State Opioid Settlement Spending Decisions tracker shares state-level settlement funding decisions and priorities.
  • With support from a $5.4 million Elevance Health Foundation grant, Shatterproof created an online training curriculum for healthcare professionals that aims to dispel myths and misunderstandings about substance use disorder, and promote person-centered, culturally responsive care.

Source: https://nihcm.org/newsletter/the-relationship-between-alcohol-and-health

Filed under: Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Health,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :
by Raminta Daniulaityte – College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, United States et al.

“I don’t know how you can overdose smoking them:” 

Highlights

  • •
    Smoking was viewed as protective against overdose compared to other routes of use.
  • •
    Beliefs about inconsistency of blues drove concerns about the overdose risks.
  • •
    Some believed that the quality of blues improved recently, and they became safer.
  • •
    Many aimed to avoid the fentanyl in powder form to reduce their overdose risks.
  • •
    Dosing-related strategies emphasized personal responsibility and victim blaming.

Abstract

Aims

Illicitly manufactured fentanyl (IMF) remains the primary driver of overdose mortality in the US. Western states saw significant increases in IMF-laced counterfeit pain pills (“blues”). This qualitative study, conducted in Phoenix, Arizona, provides an in-depth understanding of how overdose-related risks are viewed and experienced by people who use “blues.”

Methods

Between 11/2022–12/2023, the study recruited 60 individuals who used “blues” using targeted and network-based recruitment. Qualitative interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using NVivo.

Results

The sample included 41.7 % women, and 56.7 % whites. 55.3 % had prior overdose, but most (62.2 %) rated their current risk as none/low. Risk perceptions centered on a multi-level calculus of drug market conditions, individual vulnerabilities, and behavioral factors. Smoking was considered a “normative” way of using “blues”, and most viewed it as protective against overdose in comparison to injection and other routes of use. Drug market conditions and the unpredictability of “blues” were emphasized as important factor of overdose risk. However, some believed that over time, the quality/consistency of “blues” improved, and they became less risky. Many also expressed fears about the emerging local availability of powder fentanyl and its risk. Views about safer dosing, polydrug use, tolerance, and health emphasized personal responsibility and individual vulnerability to overdose risks. Discussions of protective behaviors, including take-home naloxone, varied bases on the perceptions of overdose risks.

Conclusions

The findings emphasize the need for close monitoring of local IMF markets and design of comprehensive interventions and risk communication strategies to address perceptions that minimize IMF-laced counterfeit pill risks.

Introduction

Illicitly manufactured fentanyl (IMF) remains a critical driver of overdose mortality in the US (Spencer et al., 2024), and there are emerging concerns about its proliferation in other regions of the globe (Friedman & Ciccarone, 2025; Piatkowski et al., 2025). The spread of IMF in the local drug markets in the US has shown increasing complexity with notable regional differences in the types of IMF products available, and associated contamination risks (Kilmer et al., 2022). While powder IMF has been the predominant form in the Eastern part of the US, western states, including Arizona, have seen significant increases in the availability of IMF in counterfeit pill form, most commonly 30 mg oxycodone, referred to as “blues” or “M30s” (Daniulaityte et al., 2022; O’Donnell et al., 2023; Palamar et al., 2022, 2024). For example, between 2017 and 2023, the total number of IMF pill seizures in the US increased by 8509.7 %, and the increase was the steepest in the West (an 11,266.7 % increase) (Palamar et al., 2024). Increases in IMF pill presence have been especially dramatic in Arizona with retail-level seizures of IMF pills increasing from about 1000 in 2017, to 18,004 in 2019, and 155,572 pills in 2020 (Mully et al., 2020). In 2023, Arizona had the highest number of IMF pill seizures in the country (n = 1638), and the second highest in the total number of IMF pills seized (n = 36,525,410) (Palamar et al., 2024).
Along with the increasing availability of IMF in counterfeit pill form, Arizona experienced significant rise in overdoses. Overdose deaths in Arizona increased from 1532 in 2017 to 2550 in 2020, and 2664 in 2022 (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2022). Available data on seized drugs in Arizona indicate that in 2022 seized counterfeit pills contained 2.5 mg of fentanyl on average, with a range of 0.03 to 5.0 mg/tablet (Drug Enforcement Administration, 2024). Nationally, in 2022, an estimated 6 in 10 seized counterfeit pills were found to contain at least 2 mg of fentanyl, which is considered a potentially lethal dose (Glidden et al., 2024). Arizona currently does not have community-based drug checking programs, and there is limited up-to date information on the changes in potency of counterfeit pills or on the types of other substances that may be present in them. Data from other regions suggest that besides fentanyl, the pills may contain other fentanyl analogs, acetaminophen, and other drugs (Wightman et al., 2024).
Prior studies have identified a broad range of behaviors and conditions that are associated with an increased likelihood of opioid overdose. Some of these established risk factors include prior overdose experiences, concurrent use of benzodiazepines or alcohol, returning to high doses after losing tolerance (e.g., individuals recently released from prison or inpatient drug treatment), and physical and mental health comorbidities (Carlson et al., 2020; Darke & Hall, 2003; Darke et al., 2014; Kline et al., 2021; Park et al., 2016). However, established frameworks and “expert knowledge” that guide overdose prevention interventions may not align with the perceptions and experiences of people who use drugs (Chang et al., 2024; Moallef et al., 2019). Risk assessment is not an objective and value free enterprise, but it is embedded in the individual histories and experiences, underlying socio-cultural values, and broader structural and environmental conditions (Agar, 1985; Rhodes, 2002). There is a need for qualitative studies to help increase the understanding of how people who use IMF view, experience and judge their overdose-related risks.
Several prior qualitative studies have examined overdose risks in the era of IMF spread, aiming to characterize how people who use drugs (PWUD) experience IMF risks, what harm reduction strategies they employ, and how broader social and structural factors contribute to the local environments of risk (Abadie, 2023; Bardwell et al., 2021; Beharie et al., 2023; Ciccarone et al., 2024; Collins et al., 2024; Fadanelli et al., 2020; Gunn et al., 2021; Lamonica et al., 2021; Latkin et al., 2019; Macmadu et al., 2022; Victor et al., 2020). Many of the prior studies on IMF-related overdose risk perceptions and experiences were conducted at the initial stages of IMF spread, and primarily focused on overdose risks associated with inadvertent exposures to IMF contaminated heroin or other drugs (Abadie, 2023; Ataiants et al., 2020; Carroll et al., 2017; Lamonica et al., 2021; Latkin et al., 2019; Stein et al., 2019; Victor et al., 2020). More research is needed to understand the perceptions of IMF-related overdose risks in the context of high market saturation with IMF, and among individuals who intentionally seek and use IMF-containing drugs. Further, most prior studies were conducted in the regions where IMF is primarily available in powder form and as a contaminant of or replacement for heroin Carroll et al. (2017); Ciccarone et al. (2024, 2017); Latkin et al. (2019); Mars et al. (2018); Moallef et al. (2019). A few recent studies conducted in California described an increasing trend of individuals who use opioids switching from injection to smoking route of using IMF in powder form. These emerging studies have highlighted health-related benefits that were linked to this transition, including potential reduction in overdose risks (Ciccarone et al., 2024; Kral et al., 2021; Megerian et al., 2024). In the context of these important findings, there remains a lack of data on overdose risk perceptions related to the use of IMF in a counterfeit pill form. This qualitative study, conducted in Phoenix, Arizona, aims to address these key gaps and provide an in-depth understanding of how overdose-related risks are viewed and experienced by people who intentionally seek and use IMF-laced counterfeit pain pills (blues).

Section snippets

Methods

This paper draws on data collected for a study on counterfeit drug use in Phoenix, Arizona. Semi-structured, qualitative interviews were completed between 11/2022–12/2023. To qualify for the study, individuals had to meet the following criteria: 1) at least 18 years of age; 2) currently residing in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area; and 3) use of illicit and/or counterfeit/pressed opioid and/or benzodiazepines in the past 30 days. The study was approved by the Arizona State University (ASU)

Participant characteristics and patterns of drug use

Out of 60 study participants, 58.3 % were men, and the age ranged from 22 to 66-years-old, with a mean of 39.0 (SD 11.2). More than half reported that they were unemployed, and 90 % had lifetime experiences of homelessness. Most (90 %) reported having health insurance, and 65 % had experiences of accessing local harm reduction services in Arizona (Table 1).
Most participants reported their first use of blues about 2–3 years ago (mean years since first use 2.7, SD 1.5) (Table 1). All participants

Discussion

Participants who use IMF pills reported deploying a range of calculated tactics to reduce their overdose risk. Many shared attitudes that tended to minimize the risks and reinforce a sense of personal invulnerability. Some of the contextual and behavioral factors of risk that were emphasized by the study participants align with the prior studies conducted in other regions of the US (Abadie, 2023; Beharie et al., 2023; Ciccarone et al., 2024; Collins et al., 2024; Fernandez et al., 2023; Victor

Role of funding source

This study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Grant: 1R21DA055640-01A1 (Daniulaityte, PI). The funding source had no further role in the study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, in the writing of the report, or in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Declaration of ethics

The study received ethics approval from the Arizona State University Institutional Review Board.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Raminta Daniulaityte: Writing – original draft, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Kaylin Sweeney: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Formal analysis, Data curation. Patricia Timmons: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Formal analysis, Data curation. Madeline Hooten: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Formal analysis,

Declaration of competing interest

All authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395925001070
Filed under: Addiction,Brain and Behaviour,Drug use-various effects,Fentanyl,HIV/Injecting-Drug-Users,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

The world’s first injectable CBD product is raising concerns

By Lester Black, Cannabis editor –

The Food and Drug Administration warned a California cannabis company on Monday that its injectable hemp CBD could be posing “serious harm” to public health, telling the company that its product is violating federal law.

Pico IV sells a purified version of CBD, a non-intoxicating compound produced by cannabis, that is designed to be injected into the bloodstream through an intravenous infusion. The Sacramento company has testimonials on its website that say the CBD IV therapy can help treat chronic pain, Crohn’s disease and arthritis.

The FDA, however, warned Pico IV in a Monday letter that it is breaking the law by marketing CBD as a “dietary supplement,” even though it is explicitly designed to not be ingested and instead be injected. The agency also said the product is “especially concerning” because injectable drugs “can pose risks of serious harm to users.” The FDA said injecting anything directly into a person’s bloodstream can “lead to serious and life-threatening conditions.”

Pico IV CEO Joe Young said in an emailed statement to SFGATE that “public safety is our top priority” and that the company’s product undergoes a process “designed to ensure sterility and safety.”

“We are confident in the safety profile of our product and are working diligently to provide the FDA with the necessary information to resolve their concerns,” Young’s statement said.

Pico IV’s website states that it offers the world’s first injectable CBD product. The product is produced from American-grown hemp plants, a legal category for some cannabis plants, and is “completely sterile and safe for intravenous use.” It is not available for regular retail sale; only “physicians, providers, and IV therapy clinics” can purchase vials of the injectable CBD, according to the company’s website.

Toxicologists have long been concerned about cannabis products because they do not face rigorous federal safety standards. Cannabis products are also at a higher risk of being contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides. Pico IV says on its website that all of its products are tested by third-party labs for purity.

Source: https://www.sfgate.com/cannabis/article/california-injectable-cbd-gets-fda-warning-20219801.php
Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Latest News,Legal Sector,Marijuana and Medicine,USA :

by Lindsey Leake  August 27, 2024 at 4:30 PM EDT

While the modern marijuana consumer may be shedding that lazy stoner stereotype, new research shows that employees who use and abuse the drug are more likely to miss work.
The findings were published Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

For the study, researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and the New York University Grossman School of Medicine analyzed data from the 2021–22 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on 46,500 adults employed full-time in the U.S. Recent and frequent cannabis use, as well as cannabis use disorder (CUD), they found, was associated with greater workplace absenteeism.

Work absences included days missed due to illness or injury in addition to skipped days when employees “just didn’t want to be there.” Respondents were a majority or plurality white (62%), male (57%), ages 35 to 49 (35%), married (52%), had at least a college degree (42%), and had an annual household income exceeding $75,000 (55%). About 16% of employees had reported using cannabis within the last month, with about 7% of whom meeting CUD criteria (mild: 4%; moderate: 2%; severe: 1%).
People who said they had never used cannabis missed an average 0.95 days of work in the past 30 days due to illness/injury and skipped 0.28 days. Cannabis users, by comparison, recorded the following absences:
  • Past-month use: 1.47 illness/injury, 0.63 skipped
  • Mild CUD: 1.74 illness/injury, 0.62 skipped
  • Moderate CUD: 1.69 illness/injury, 0.98 skipped
  • Severe CUD: 2.02 illness/injury, 1.83 skipped

The results also showed that people who used cannabis most frequently skipped the most work. For instance, those who consumed it once or twice per month skipped 0.48 days, while those who consumed it 20 to 30 days per month skipped 0.7 days. People who used cannabis three to five days per month had the highest prevalence of missed days due to illness/injury (1.68). Cannabis use longer than a month ago had no bearing on employee absence.

“These findings highlight the need for increased monitoring, screening measures, and targeted interventions related to cannabis use and use disorder among employed adults,” researchers wrote. “Moreover, these results emphasize the need for enhanced workplace prevention policies and programs aimed at addressing and managing problematic cannabis use.”

Researchers said that while their latest work supports much of the existing literature on cannabis use and workplace absenteeism, it also contrasts with other studies. One previous study, for example, showed a decline in sickness-related absences in the wake of medical marijuana legislation, while another found no link between the two.

One limitation of the new study, the authors note, is that it relied on participants’ self-reported answers. In addition, the data don’t reflect whether cannabis was used for medicinal or recreational purposes, whether it was consumed during work hours, or address other factors that may have affected a person’s cannabis use patterns.

What are the signs of cannabis use disorder?

That marijuana isn’t addictive is a myth. People with CUD are unable to stop using cannabis even when it causes health and social problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Cannabis consumers have about a 10% likelihood of developing CUD, a disorder impacting nearly a third of all users, according to previous research estimates. At higher risk are people who start using cannabis as adolescents and who use the drug more frequently.

The CDC lists these behaviors as signs of CUD:
  • Continuing to use cannabis despite physical or psychological problems
  • Continuing to use cannabis despite social or relationship problems
  • Craving cannabis
  • Giving up important activities with friends and family in favor of using cannabis
  • Needing to use more cannabis to get the same high
  • Spending a lot of time using cannabis
  • Trying but failing to quit using cannabis
  • Using cannabis even though it causes problems at home, school, or work
  • Using cannabis in high-risk situations, such as while driving a car
  • Using more cannabis than intended

In addition to interfering with everyday life, CUD has been linked to unemployment, cognitive impairment, and lower education attainment. People with CUD often have additional mental health problems, including other substance abuse disorders. In this study, for example, 14% of respondents reported having alcohol use disorder within the past year.

Source: https://fortune.com/well/article/marijuana-abuse-cannabis-use-disorder-workplace-absenteeism-sick-days/

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Culture,Drug use-various effects,Economic,Latest News,USA,Workplace :
Original Investigation
Substance Use and Addiction
January 21, 2025

Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD1,2; Hannah Goodman, BA1; Joseph Rosansky, PhD1,2; et alAlaine Kiera Fredericksen, MSW, LICSW1; Javier Barria, MPH1; Gareth Parry, PhD1,2; Randi Sokol, MD3,4; Paula Gardiner, MD1,2,3,4; Benjamin Lê Cook, PhD1,2; Roger D. Weiss, MD2,5
Author Affiliations Article Information
JAMA Netw Open. 2025;8(1):e2454950. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.54950

visual abstract icon 

Visual

Abstract

 

Mindfulness Training vs Recovery Support for Opioid Use, Craving, and Anxiety During Buprenorphine Treatment

Key PointsQuestion  During buprenorphine treatment, does group-based mindfulness training reduce opioid use, craving, and anxiety compared with group recovery support?

Findings  In this randomized clinical trial including 196 adults prescribed buprenorphine for opioid use disorder, mindfulness was not superior at reducing illicit opioid use compared with an active group intervention with an evidence-based curriculum. Both arms experienced significantly reduced anxiety, and the reduction in opioid craving during mindfulness groups was greater than during recovery support groups, a significant difference.

Meaning  The findings of this study suggest that mindfulness groups may have utility during opioid use disorder treatment, especially for patients with residual opioid craving while prescribed buprenorphine.

 

Abstract

Importance  During buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), risk factors for opioid relapse or treatment dropout include comorbid substance use disorder, anxiety, or residual opioid craving. There is a need for a well-powered trial to evaluate virtually delivered groups, including both mindfulness and evidence-based approaches, to address these comorbidities during buprenorphine treatment.

Objective  To compare the effects of the Mindful Recovery Opioid Use Disorder Care Continuum (M-ROCC) vs active control among adults receiving buprenorphine for OUD.

Design, Setting, and Participants  This randomized clinical trial was conducted from January 21, 2021, to September 19, 2023. All study procedures were conducted virtually. Participants were randomized 1:1 and blinded to intervention assignments throughout participation. This trial recruited online from 16 US states and was conducted via online platforms. Patients prescribed buprenorphine for OUD were recruited via social media advertisements, flyers, and health care professional referrals.

Interventions  The M-ROCC program was a 24-week, motivationally adaptive, trauma-informed, mindfulness-based group curriculum. Participants attended a 30-minute informal check-in and 60-minute intervention group each week. The recovery support group control curriculum used 4 evidence-based substance use disorder–focused nonmindfulness approaches and was time and attention matched.

Main Outcomes and Measures  The primary outcome was the number of 2-week periods with both self-reported and biochemically confirmed abstinence from illicit opioid use during study weeks 13 to 24, which was analyzed with an intention-to-treat approach using generalized estimating equations comparing between-group differences.

Results  This sample included 196 participants, predominantly female (119 [60.7%]). Mean (SD) age was 41.0 (10.3) years. Opioid use was 13.4% (95% CI, 6.2%-20.5%) in the M-ROCC group and 12.7% (95% CI, 7.5%-18.0%) in the recovery support group, a 0.6% difference (95% CI, −8.2% to 9.5%; P = .89). Cocaine and benzodiazepine use were also not significantly different. Anxiety T scores were reduced across both the M-ROCC and recovery support groups but were not significantly different between groups from baseline to week 24 (1.0; 95% CI, −2.4 to 4.3; P = .57). The M-ROCC participants demonstrated a larger reduction in opioid craving compared with the recovery support group participants: −1.0 (95% CI, −1.7 to −0.2; P = .01; Cohen d = −0.5).

Conclusions and Relevance  In this study, during buprenorphine treatment comparing mindfulness vs active control, both groups significantly reduced anxiety without significant differences in substance use outcomes. Mindfulness led to significantly greater reductions in residual opioid craving than control. The findings of this study suggest that mindfulness training groups may be recommended for people receiving buprenorphine maintenance therapy who have residual opioid craving.

Trial Registration  ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04278586

 

Introduction

 

Opioid use is a major public health crisis in the US, with approximately more than 80 000 opioid overdose deaths in 2023.1 Buprenorphine treatment reduces illicit opioid use and overdose risk2,3; however, studies report that most patients discontinue buprenorphine medical management within 6 months.4,5 Several factors that may serve as treatment targets can increase the likelihood of poor outcomes. Comorbid substance use (eg, cocaine, methamphetamine) increases treatment dropout.6,7 Psychiatric symptoms (eg, anxiety), benzodiazepine misuse, and opioid craving increase relapse risk.8,9 Opioid craving is associated with subsequent use during buprenorphine treatment, is often preceded by negative affect or withdrawal states, and intensifies during exposure to drug cues or stressful life events.3,6–13 Behavioral interventions targeting these factors may improve outcomes, but, aside from contingency management, a systematic review identified no clear benefits to adjunctive individual counseling or cognitive-behavioral therapy.14 Unlike individual treatment, group treatment attendance has been associated with increased opioid treatment completion, and group-based opioid treatment appears feasible, acceptable, and may improve treatment outcomes.15

 

Mindfulness-based interventions are an increasingly popular evidence-based group treatment for substance use disorders.16,17 A recent fully powered randomized clinical trial found that a mindfulness program reduced opioid use and craving among people with both chronic pain and OUD during methadone maintenance.18 Mindfulness training appears to increase individuals’ capacities for self-regulation through enhanced attentional control, cognitive control, emotion regulation, and self-related processes.19 Mindful behavior change, a curriculum created to leverage those mechanisms, was shown to reduce anxiety symptoms, increase self-regulation, and catalyze health behavior change in trials of the Mindfulness Training for Primary Care program.20,21 The established Mindfulness Training for Primary Care curriculum was adapted for patients with OUD and a 24-week trauma-informed Mindful Recovery Opioid Use Disorder Care Continuum (M-ROCC) was created. A single-arm multisite pilot trial found M-ROCC feasible and acceptable during buprenorphine treatment.22 Additionally, participants experienced significant reductions in anxiety and decreased benzodiazepine and cocaine use but not opioid use.23

 

The present full-scale clinical trial compared the effectiveness of M-ROCC, delivered as an adjunctive live-online group during buprenorphine treatment, with an attention-balanced nonmindfulness control recovery support group using evidence-based approaches. We hypothesized that M-ROCC would be more effective than a recovery support group at reducing opioid use and anxiety.24

 

Methods

 

Design, Setting, and Recruitment

 

We designed this randomized clinical trial, approved by the Cambridge Health Alliance Institutional Review Board, to compare the effectiveness of live-online M-ROCC vs a recovery support group during outpatient buprenorphine treatment. Participants were recruited through social media (ie, Facebook), community partners (eg, Lynn Community Health, Boston Medical Center, North Shore Community Health), online telemedicine health care professionals (eg, Bicycle Health, Boulder Care), and quick response code flyers linking an online referral form, and participants provided informed consent.25,26 Participants received financial compensation. Study inclusion required participants to be aged 18 to 70 years with a stable buprenorphine dose prescribed (>4 weeks) for OUD, confirmed by participants signing a consent form for study personnel to contact their health care professional. Because some people receiving buprenorphine attain sustained remission of OUD, this study aimed to enroll individuals with a less clinically stable status, with residual symptoms of anxiety and/or substance use; therefore, participants had either mild or greater anxiety (Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System–Anxiety Short Form 8a [PROMIS-ASF] T score >55) or recent substance use (<90 days of abstinence from alcohol, opioids, benzodiazepines, cocaine, or methamphetamine). Exclusion criteria included psychosis, mania, suicidality or self-injury, cognitive impairment, past mindfulness group experience, expected inpatient hospitalization or incarceration, or group-disruptive behaviors. Research coordinators (including H.G.) screened participants for eligibility through self-report surveys and telephone interviews.24 This trial followed the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) reporting guideline. The trial protocol is available in Supplement 1.

 

Blinding and Randomization

 

The data coordinator (J.B.) randomized participants in random blocks of 4, 6, and 8 with a 1:1 ratio, using a random spreadsheet sequence (Excel; Microsoft Corp). The data coordinator concealed allocation in a password-protected file from personnel managing recruitment and screening until the randomization allocation was assigned. Participants and the primary investigator (Z.S.-O.) were blinded to intervention assignments.

 

Interventions

 

Groups were attention matched and offered at the same day and time as their comparator within each cohort. Each group started with a 30-minute informal check-in during which participants completed weekly surveys and research coordinators video-monitored oral toxicology tests in a video communications platform (Zoom; Zoom Video Communication) breakout rooms, recording results with screen capture (Droplr; Droplr Inc).27 Then, a 60-minute intervention group was led by 1 to 2 group leaders, including a lead instructor (A.K.F.) and with more than 4 years of group facilitation experience.24 Participants without reliable internet access received smartphones with unlimited data plans.

 

The M-ROCC curriculum had 3 components, starting with a 4-week orientation focused on fostering group engagement through comfort, curiosity, connection, and confidence. Participants continued into a 4-week low-dose mindfulness group, building a trauma-informed foundation for learning mindfulness and increasing daily formal mindfulness practice time. To provide choice about embarking on intensive mindfulness training, we offered those who successfully completed low-dose mindfulness the opportunity to continue into an intensive recovery-focused 16-week mindful behavior change program.20,21 This group focused on cultivating mindfulness of the body, breathing, thoughts, and emotions, plus mindful behavior change skills, interpersonal mindfulness practice, increasing self-compassion and emotion regulation, and developing OUD recovery skills, such as mindful savoring and urge surfing.24

 

We designed the recovery support group based on best practices in group-based opioid treatment, using evidence-based techniques while fostering a sense of accountability, shared identity, and supportive community.15,28–30 It incorporated 8 weeks of group-building orientation followed by 16 weeks of evidence-based treatment techniques for substance use disorders, including cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, community reinforcement, and 12-step facilitation.31–35

 

Measures

 

All surveys were hosted by Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap). During the screening and baseline periods, participants completed telephone screening interviews to report demographic characteristics (eg, race and ethnicity) and self-report surveys with substance use and buprenorphine dose information. The interventions in the study organize participants within group cohorts, which feature social elements. These are generally positive for many people, but the experience of group belonging and group cohesion may be influenced by participant experiences of minoritization, implicit bias, and microaggressions, which have been reported to lead to feelings of inclusion and exclusion related to race and ethnicity that might impact attrition or intervention adherence or continuation.36,37 In addition, studies have found that demographic variables have been underreported in mindfulness intervention research, leading to systemic bias and inclusion disparities in the field.38 Consequently, we report the racial and ethnic makeup of the study participants to contextualize the results and the limitations of generalizability.

 

Primary Outcome

 

Our primary outcome was the number of 2-week periods with both self-reported and biochemically confirmed abstinence from illicit opioid use during study weeks 13 to 24. During each 2-week period, participants completed at least one randomly assigned 14-panel oral toxicologic report via the video communications platform and 2 self-reported weekly surveys inquiring about past 7-day illicit opioid use. Participants were considered abstinent during each of the six 2-week periods if they had no self-reported opioid use and a negative oral toxicology test result for all illicit opioids tested. We hypothesized that participants in the M-ROCC arm would experience more abstinent periods compared with those in the recovery support group.

 

Secondary and Exploratory Outcomes

 

Participants completed the PROMIS-ASF at baseline and weeks 8, 16, and 24. PROMIS-ASF is an 8-item questionnaire using a 5-point scale asking about the past 7 days (1 = never to 5 = always).39 The T scores were calculated, with higher scores indicating greater symptoms of anxiety. We hypothesized that participants assigned to M-ROCC would experience greater reductions in anxiety than those in the recovery support group between baseline and week 24.

 

Secondary outcomes of benzodiazepine and cocaine use were collected for six 2-week periods in the same manner as described for opioids. We hypothesized that M-ROCC participants would experience greater reductions in benzodiazepine and cocaine use than those in the recovery support group.

 

As a prespecified exploratory outcome, changes in opioid craving during weekly surveys from weeks 1 to 24 were measured. The Opioid Craving Scale asked participants to rate 3 items assessing different aspects of opioid craving on a scale of 0 to 10. Mean ratings were calculated across these items, with higher ratings representing greater opioid craving. In previous research, the Opioid Craving Scale was positively associated with risk for opioid use in the following week.40 We hypothesized that participants assigned to M-ROCC would experience greater reductions in opioid craving between baseline and week 24 compared with those in the recovery support group.

 

Adverse Events

 

Staff monitored adverse events at each study visit and via a REDCap survey at weeks 8, 16, and 24, rated by severity, relatedness, and expectedness. Events were reviewed regularly by a National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health–approved data safety and monitoring board.

 

Statistical Analysis

 

Power analyses assumed randomization of 192 individuals, with an effective sample size of 156. This sample size provided 80% power to detect an effect size of 0.45 for negative toxicologic findings for illicit opioids between M-ROCC and the recovery support group, with a 2-sided significance level of P < .05, using an unpaired test.

 

For the primary outcome, we used an intention-to-treat approach to estimate differences between the M-ROCC and recovery support groups in biochemically confirmed illicit opioid abstinence over 6 biweekly time periods during weeks 13 to 24. We used generalized estimating equation logistic regression accounting for clustering at the individual participant level over weeks 13 to 24.

 

For the secondary outcome of anxiety and the prespecified exploratory outcome of opioid craving, we conducted a difference-in-differences intention-to-treat repeated-measures analysis using linear mixed-effects models with a study week by group interaction term to estimate the relative changes from baseline to week 24. For changes in anxiety, we included only participants with PROMIS-ASF T scores above 55 at baseline.39 We used the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate procedure to account for multiple comparisons.41 Effect sizes (Cohen d) were calculated.

 

We used maximum likelihood estimation to address missingness for all analyses, adjusting the models to account for baseline covariates that differed between study groups after randomization (P < .10). We conducted a supplemental analysis using multiple imputation. We also conducted supplemental sensitivity analyses adjusting for all covariates associated with the outcome measure missingness. We conducted completer analyses for all outcomes among a subsample of intervention-adherent participants, defined as completing at least 15 of 24 sessions. For the number of adverse events, we conducted a negative binomial regression to evaluate between-group differences. All analyses were conducted in Stata, version 18 (StataCorp LLC).

 

Results

 

Participant Characteristics

 

Of 1728 patients referred between January 21, 2021, and February 15, 2023, 260 participants signed informed consent forms. We excluded 64 individuals for exclusion criteria (n = 18) or incomplete baseline assessments (n = 46) and randomized 196 participants to M-ROCC (n = 98) or the recovery support group (n = 98) (Figure 1). Of these individuals, 119 were female (60.7%), 75 were male (38.3%), and 1 (0.5%) was nonbinary. Mean (SD) age was 41.0 (10.3) years. Once 192 participants were randomized, recruitment ended, although 4 screened participants were able to complete the consent process and join the final cohort. Data collection was completed September 19, 2023. Baseline buprenorphine dose, cocaine use, and annual income differed between groups and were added to the models for primary, secondary, and exploratory outcomes (Table 1).

 

Outcomes

 

During weeks 13 to 24, mean illicit opioid nonabstinence time periods were 13.4% (95% CI, 6.2%-20.5%) in the M-ROCC group and 12.7% (95% CI, 7.5%-18.0%) in the recovery support group, a difference that was not statistically significant (0.6%; 95% CI, −8.2% to 9.5%; P = .89) (Table 2). During weeks 13 to 24, benzodiazepine use time periods did not differ significantly between the M-ROCC (22.1%) and recovery support (20.2%) groups (1.9%; 95% CI, −10.3%- 14.1%; P = .76) (Table 2). Similarly, there was no significant difference in cocaine use periods between the M-ROCC (8.4%) and recovery support (1.5%) groups (6.9%; 95% CI, −2.4%-16.2%; P = .15).

 

Large effect size reductions in anxiety from baseline to week 24 were observed in the recovery support group, with a mean T score change of −10.0 (95% CI, −12.0 to −8.0; P < .001; Cohen d = −1.3), and in the M-ROCC group, with a mean T score change of −9.0 (95% CI, −11.7 to −6.3; P < .001; Cohen d = −1.1). The interaction term for study group by week (weeks 0, 8, 16, and 24) was not significant (χ23 = 4.5; P = .31), and there was no significant difference between study groups at week 24 (95% CI, 1.0; −2.4 to 4.3; P = .57) (eFigure 1 in Supplement 2).

 

In exploratory analysis of change in opioid craving over time, we added baseline opioid craving to the other outcome covariates. The interaction term for study group by week was significant (χ224 = 56.5; P < .001). At week 24, the recovery support group mean opioid craving decreased by −44% (−1.3; 95% CI, −1.9 to −0.8; P < .001; Cohen d = −0.7) compared with a −67% (−2.3; 95% CI, −2.9 to −1.7; P < .001; Cohen d = −1.3) decrease in the M-ROCC group (Table 3). This represented a significant differential reduction among the M-ROCC group compared with the recovery support group (−1.0; 95% CI, −1.7 to −0.2; P = .01; Cohen d = −0.5) (Figure 2).

 

Results of the imputation analyses for primary, secondary, and exploratory analyses did not differ substantially from the maximum likelihood estimation analyses (eTable 1, eTable 2, and eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). Sensitivity analyses using all covariates associated with missingness (eg, COVID-19 Delta and Omicron wave cohorts) on the primary, secondary, and exploratory outcomes also had similar results (eResults 1, eTable 3, and eTable 4 in Supplement 2). Only 59% of the participants (116 of 196) completed week 24 of the study. Completer analyses also had similar results. A completer analysis found that women (52.9%) were more likely than men (41.3%) to continue after week 8 in both arms, and non-Hispanic White individuals who spoke English (48.8%) were more likely than others (6.3%) to continue into the intensive M-ROCC after week 8.

 

Adverse Events

 

There were no significant between-group differences in adverse events. One adverse event, which was of mild severity, was intervention-related (ie, pain during mindful movement practice in the M-ROCC group) (eResults 2 in Supplement 2).

 

Discussion

 

This geographically diverse randomized clinical trial recruiting from 16 states (eFigure 3 in Supplement 2) demonstrated that M-ROCC was not more effective than a nonmindfulness, evidence-based recovery support for reducing illicit opioid, benzodiazepine, or cocaine use. Infrequent opioid use in both groups may have limited the study’s power to detect between-group differences. This may have resulted from positive intervention effects, study attrition, missing data, or selecting a sample of participants receiving stable buprenorphine doses for at least 30 days. Additionally, both the M-ROCC and recovery support groups demonstrated similarly large reductions in anxiety, suggesting that, irrespective of theoretical approach, group-based live-online psychosocial interventions may have similar benefits for anxiety during buprenorphine treatment.

 

The M-ROCC participants experienced a differential reduction in opioid craving, a risk factor for illicit opioid use and treatment dropout during buprenorphine treatment.40,42,43 Similar craving reductions were observed in a recent study of mindfulness among opioid misusers with chronic pain.44 However, unlike this and other prior research,45 differential craving reductions among M-ROCC participants did not translate into significantly less opioid use than observed in the comparator intervention group. Participants were required to have stable buprenorphine doses for 30 days or more, which resulted in relatively low levels of baseline residual craving and possibly less opioid use.

 

Several mechanisms may explain the differential reduction in opioid craving among M-ROCC participants.46,47 Mindfulness-based interventions may ameliorate reward processing dysfunction through mindful savoring practices designed to resensitize people with OUD to natural reward signals.48,49 Craving involves interoceptive processing, and several mindfulness practices (eg, body scan) may impact craving by enhancing healthy interoceptive awareness and correcting interoceptive dysregulation.50–56 Mindfulness enhances self-regulation capacity and improves emotion regulation, thereby reducing reactivity to negative affect and breaking associations between negative affect and substance use craving.19,21,57,58 Additionally, mindfulness training reduces attentional bias toward opioid-related cues, possibly reducing autonomic reactivity and enhancing cognitive control during a craving response.59–61 Mindful urge surfing represents a resilient coping response, reducing craving elaboration and increasing awareness of early signs of craving.62,63 Repeated urge surfing with successful inhibition of craving-related responses paired with reconnection to deeply held values may uncouple activating drug-use cues from conditioned appetitive responses64,65 and realign motivation, helping sustain behavior change.19,66,67

 

Group-based opioid treatment is an increasingly common approach to providing concurrent behavioral health interventions during buprenorphine treatment.15,28–30,68 Groups may facilitate improved treatment outcomes by teaching coping techniques and increasing social support, which has been associated with decreased substance use and improved retention in medications for opioid use disorder treatments.69 More research comparing group-based opioid treatment directly with individual care is needed, as well as understanding which implementation factors (eg, telehealth/in-person, delivery of evidence-based curriculum, and providing buprenorphine prescriptions during group) may support improved outcomes in group-based opioid treatment.28,30 The use of a group-based opioid treatment control arm incorporating evidence-based interventions for substance use disorder distinguishes this study from another recent randomized clinical trial18 for people with chronic pain during methadone maintenance that compared an adjunctive telehealth mindfulness group with an active supportive psychotherapy group control that did not provide any therapeutic skill training. In that study, the mindfulness arm demonstrated fewer drug use days and greater medication adherence, although anxiety was not significantly different between the groups.

 

The results of this present study align with meta-analyses suggesting that mindfulness, while often better than passive controls, does not differ substantially from other evidence-based interventions with respect to substance use and anxiety outcomes.70,71 In contrast, meta-analyses suggest that mindfulness outperforms active controls for reducing cravings among individuals with substance use disorders.72,73 This trial extends these findings, highlighting that mindfulness training may be helpful for patients with residual craving during buprenorphine treatment. The findings of this trial suggest the utility of mindfulness training as an evidence-based adjunctive approach for treating residual craving during opioid treatment with buprenorphine.

 

Limitations

 

This study has limitations. Higher levels of attrition in the M-ROCC group were noted compared with the pilot study,23 especially between weeks 8 and 16, when the intensive mindfulness program started. To be trauma informed, M-ROCC leaders encouraged participants at week 8 to consider their personal motivations for continuing into the more intensive Mindfulness Training for Primary Care OUD curriculum, emphasizing the choice to continue or withdraw from the group. The recovery support group did not have similar warnings about changing intervention intensity. Studies of trigger warnings suggest they do not typically lead to therapeutic avoidance in the general population74; however, levels of experiential avoidance can be higher among patients with OUD.75 Women were more likely than men to continue in both arms, and non-Hispanic White individuals who spoke English were most likely to continue into the intensive M-ROCC, suggesting that these warnings might have been experienced differently based on gender, identity, and culture. Additionally, the significant difference between groups in opioid craving changes over time could have resulted from a smaller, more committed group of engaged individuals continuing in M-ROCC compared with recovery support. Future multivariate analyses will be conducted to examine the effects of differential attrition on craving outcomes.

 

Stress, illness, and changes in lifestyle or employment changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic created barriers for multiple participants to engage with this study, resulting in higher than expected attrition particularly during cohorts overlapping with the Delta and Omicron waves of COVID-19 infections. Nevertheless, intention-to-treat analysis using maximum likelihood estimation methods allowed all 196 participants to be included in the final analyses.

 

The study’s predominantly White sample reflects national statistics on buprenorphine treatment engagement, but the study enrolled fewer Black participants than expected, allowing the possibility that findings may not generalize to all populations. Geographic and regional diversity was a unique strength of this study (eFigure 3 in Supplement 2), but integration of geographically diverse populations with different racial and ethnic and cultural backgrounds into common live-online groups added complexity during an intense period of national racial unrest that started in 2020.76–78 This study also lacked a control condition with no behavioral treatment; therefore, it is unclear whether specific behavioral interventions, general group effects, or time in buprenorphine treatment were the primary factors of anxiety reduction.

 

Conclusions

 

In this randomized clinical trial, the impacts of a trauma-informed mindfulness-based group intervention during buprenorphine treatment on opioid use, substance use, and anxiety were similar to a recovery support group with a curriculum using evidence-based substance use treatment approaches. While further research is required, the study suggests that mindfulness-based groups may be particularly useful for reducing craving among patients with OUD who are experiencing residual opioid craving during buprenorphine treatment.

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Opioids,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

by WRD News Team – March 12, 2025

The global fight against addiction has taken an important step forward with the launch of the Hyannis Consensus Blueprint, an initiative that offers a comprehensive, balanced drug policy supported by leading experts and organisations. Speaking at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Dr. Kevin Sabet, President and CEO of SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana), highlighted the Hyannis Consensus Blueprint as a “blueprint for effective drug policy” introduced by international experts and organisations. He emphasised its focus on prevention, treatment, recovery, criminal justice, global cooperation, and supply reduction. Dr. Sabet also warned against the push to normalise drug use, describing the catastrophic human toll of addiction and urging nations to invest in the pillars outlined in the blueprint. His remarks underscored the need for a balanced, evidence-based approach to tackling drug-related challenges worldwide.

What is the Hyannis Consensus Blueprint?

The Hyannis Consensus Blueprint is a groundbreaking framework designed to guide international efforts in addressing the devastating impact of addiction. Key pillars shape this balanced drug policy, including prevention, intervention, treatment, recovery, supply reduction, and enhanced global collaboration. With addiction now at catastrophic levels in many regions, the blueprint represents a vital roadmap for sustainable change.

The principles outlined in the blueprint prioritise strategies that discourage drug use while addressing underlying systemic challenges. It promotes innovating criminal justice systems, encourages adopting evidence-based treatment options, and advocates uniting globally to combat addictive substances.

The Cost of Ignoring Addiction

Failing to address addiction comes with an enormous human and economic cost. The transcript from the Hyannis Consensus launch highlights a pressing need to move beyond toxic cycles of permissive drug policies and normalisation. Legalisation of drugs, as seen in North America, has reportedly led to devastating effects, particularly among young people, and prioritised corporate profits over public health.

The Hyannis Consensus Blueprint stands as a counterpoint to this trend. It promotes a world where communities can thrive without the shadow of addiction, empowering individuals to recover fully and lead drug-free lives.

Prevention and Recovery as Pillars of Change

At its core, the Hyannis Consensus Blueprint revolves around prevention and recovery. Prevention aims to stop drug use before it starts, while recovery offers individuals a path to rebuild their lives. This proactive approach aims to not only reduce harm but also transform lives for the better.

The blueprint urges balancing efforts across criminal justice and public health systems. Effective drug courts alongside harm-reduction interventions serve as vital tools in discouraging drug use and fostering recovery. Nations serious about tackling addiction must consider these solutions to safeguard future generations.

Governments Urged to Prioritise Resilient Societies

Governments worldwide are now being urged to realign their national drug policies with the principles of the Hyannis Consensus Blueprint. Countries are encouraged to reaffirm their commitment to international drug conventions, reject legalisation experiments that prioritise private interests, and expand programmes rooted in criminal justice reform and effective public health measures.

The launch of this blueprint serves as a rallying cry for nations determined to prioritise human dignity and community wellbeing. By adopting the Hyannis Consensus Blueprint, countries can pave the way for healthier, more resilient societies.

Why the Hyannis Consensus Matters

Addiction is more than an individual struggle; it’s a societal challenge that affects families, economies, and futures. The Hyannis Consensus Blueprint is a bold step towards reversing the tide of permissive drug policies and ineffective strategies. For countries looking to protect their citizens, this balanced drug policy provides the tools and vision necessary for meaningful change.

Organisations like the Dalgarno Institute and WFAD are at the forefront of this global effort, highlighting the importance of this significant, timely initiative. Communities deserve policies that prioritise recovery, not exploitation, and the Hyannis Consensus Blueprint is uniquely positioned to achieve this goal.

Learn more here.

Source: https://wrdnews.org/the-hyannis-consensus-blueprint-a-landmark-in-balanced-drug-policy/

Filed under: Addiction,Culture,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

AddictionPolicyForum.png

Mar 5 – Updated: Mar 12
 
A randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Network Open found that incorporating online group mindfulness sessions into buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) significantly reduced opioid cravings compared to treatment as usual.
The study, led by Dr. Zev Schuman-Olivier and colleagues from Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, examined the effectiveness of a 24-week virtual mindfulness-based program compared to a standard recovery support group using evidence-based practices. The trial included 196 participants across 16 U.S. states.

The mindfulness-based program showed similar levels of opioid use and anxiety reduction compared to standard best-practice groups but significantly outperformed in reducing self-reported opioid craving (67 percent vs. 44 percent, P<0.001). Study results indicate that mindfulness is a potent treatment option that can help reduce opioid craving during buprenorphine treatment.

“These findings are compelling evidence that trauma-informed mindfulness groups can be offered as an option for people during medication treatment for opioid use disorder,” said Dr. Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD, principal investigator of the study, founding director of the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, and director of addiction research at Cambridge Health Alliance. “Mindfulness should be strongly considered for patients experiencing residual cravings after starting buprenorphine.”
As one participant reported, “This program helped me learn new techniques that I didn’t even know existed before I began. I still meditate all the time and don’t even need to have any sound on. I just lay down and push away all of my stress. It was well worth every minute I spent there.”

OUD remains a major public health crisis in the U.S., with over 100,000 opioid overdose deaths each year. Medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), such as buprenorphine, are evidence-based treatments for opioid use disorder (OUD). Opioid craving is a risk factor for relapse for patients receiving MOUD. Experts highlight that further research is needed to explore how mindfulness can be integrated into existing OUD treatment frameworks to improve long-term recovery outcomes.

Source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2829421
Filed under: Addiction,Culture,Latest News,Mental Health,Opioids,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

 

 

 by Drug Free America Foundation – www.dfaf.org

 

As marijuana continues to be legalized for recreational use across more U.S. states, the impacts on various aspects of society are becoming clearer. A recent study published in the JAMA Health Forum shines a spotlight on an unsettling trend: an increase in on-the-job injuries among young workers following the legalization of recreational marijuana.

 

The Study Findings: A 10% Increase in Injuries Among Young Workers

According to the study, the legalization of recreational marijuana was associated with a 10% increase in workplace injuries among workers aged 20 to 34.1 While this might seem like a small percentage, for small business owners, the implications can be significant. An increase in workplace injuries can lead to higher insurance premiums, loss of productivity, and in some cases, legal consequences if safety standards aren’t met.

 

How Does Marijuana Affect Younger Workers?

The study’s authors suggest that the rise in workplace injuries among younger workers could be tied to impaired cognitive function caused by marijuana use. Marijuana can impact attention, memory, and motor skills, which are all critical factors in performing certain job tasks safely and efficiently. For young workers, whose experience and judgment may still be developing, this could be particularly dangerous, leading to an increased likelihood of accidents.

 

For small business owners, this information raises important questions about workplace safety, employee well-being, and the need for updated safety protocols. Businesses that employ younger workers, particularly in industries such as construction, manufacturing, and retail, may need to re-evaluate their safety practices and training to mitigate these risks.

 

Broader Implications: The Relationship Between Marijuana Legalization and Workplace Injuries

It’s important to note that these findings are just the latest in a growing body of research on the effects of marijuana legalization. Other studies have shown that legalization may have mixed impacts on public health. For instance, a 2023 study in Social Science & Medicine analyzed data from several states, examining the impact of recreational marijuana on fatalities from motor vehicle accidents, which is an integral part of many workers’ responsibilities on the job.

 

What Small Business Owners Can Do

With the rise of marijuana legalization, small business owners face new challenges in ensuring workplace safety and maintaining a productive workforce. Here are some key takeaways for small business owners:

1.  Re-evaluate Safety Protocols: If your business employs younger workers, consider reviewing and updating your safety training and protocols. Ensuring that employees are educated on the risks of marijuana use at work and the importance of staying alert on the job could help reduce injury rates.

2.  Implement Clear Policies: Developing clear policies regarding marijuana use—both on and off the job—can help establish boundaries for employees. While recreational marijuana use may be legal, it’s important to create a work environment where safety and productivity are prioritized.

3.  Encourage Open Dialogue: Foster an open environment where employees can discuss their concerns about workplace safety and substance use. Offering support and resources for employees who may be struggling with substance use can also help maintain a healthy work environment.

4.  Invest in Employee Wellness: Offering wellness programs that educate employees on the effects of marijuana and other substances, as well as promoting overall health and well-being, can help minimize the risks associated with impaired work performance.

 

The Bottom Line

For small business owners, the rise in workplace injuries among young workers is an issue that cannot be ignored. By understanding the risks and taking proactive steps to ensure workplace safety, businesses can help protect their employees and their bottom line. As the landscape of marijuana legalization continues to evolve, staying informed and adaptable will be key to navigating these new challenges successfully.

 

Source: www.dfaf.org

 
Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Latest News,Legal Sector,Marijuana and Medicine,USA,Workplace :

The attached guide describes Planet Youth – a prevention model which has proved very successful in practice.

Planet Youth relies heavily on the Icelandic Prevention Model, as summarised below. (This graphic is borrowed from the ‘Planet Youth Guidance Program – Information Guide’) as attached.

To access the full Planet Youth document:

  1. Click on the ‘Source’ link below.
  2. An image  – the front page of the full document will appear.
  3. Click on the image to open the full document.

Source: Planet-Youth-Guidance-Program-Information-Guide-English.-Electronic-Edition.-2021.

 

Filed under: Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

by Anonymous | Thursday, Mar 13, 2025

Drugs are everywhere—in movies, music videos, social media, and school hallways. Over the years, more young adults have been experimenting with substances at younger ages. The drugs of choice have also changed: before, the “cool” substances were tobacco and alcohol; nowadays, they’ve been replaced by marijuana, nicotine, and hallucinogens (Abrams, 2024). Back in high school, there were a lot of days when I would walk into the bathrooms and be hit by the smell of cotton candy and blueberry. The vaping problem got so bad that the administration implemented bathroom monitors to limit how many students could enter at a time. What irritated me the most was that everyone knew what was happening, but unless the students were caught red-handed, they never got in trouble. All those measures and for what? The number of students vaping didn’t decrease, and after a while, it felt like the school stopped caring altogether. My high school was not the only one with a substance-use issue; this is an issue amongst all schools and a major cause for concern for parents and students alike.

Ever since I was young, I’ve been aware of drugs and their effects, since both my parents were psychologists. My dad traveled around the country educating parents and teachers about substance use, early sex, and violence prevention, and my mom was a school psychologist. I considered myself lucky not to have anyone close to me struggle with addiction, however, two years ago, I found out my younger cousin had started using laughing gas and other substances recreationally. I actually discovered this through a fake account I created after noticing alarming social media posts. I didn’t tell her mom because I had previously reported her concerning behaviors, and nothing came of it. In fact, my cousin only distanced herself from me, hence the need to create a fake account. No matter what, I tried to keep communication open, despite her responses being brief. I don’t blame her for the way she reacted. Although I acted out of concern, she felt betrayed by my actions, and rebuilding trust will take time.

Over the past two years, I’ve thought a lot about what led to my cousin’s situation. First, I thought about why people use substances in the first place: people often use substances as a way to escape their life situations or traumas. Drugs provide a temporary “high,” which allows users to feel good, but the effects are fleeting. In the words of a famous rapper, Eminem, they “snap back to reality” and are forced to face their troubles all at once. Their discontent or distress with reality drives them to seek another “fix,” thus leading to a vicious cycle. As tolerance builds, higher doses are required to achieve the same effect. Drugs are dangerous because they distort emotions, cognition, memory, motor skills, perception, and behavior. All of these effects leave people vulnerable to making fatal mistakes and becoming victims of crimes.

There are several factors that can enhance the risk of substance abuse in youth: family history of addiction, poor parental involvement, associating with peers who use drugs, mental health issues, poverty, and childhood sexual abuse. Teens and young adults who abuse substances are more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors, experience violence in interpersonal relationships, and face a higher risk for mental health issues and suicide. As if this weren’t enough, early drug use also increases the likelihood of substance use disorders in adulthood and problems with the justice system (Welty et al., 2024, p. 5).

On the other hand, protective factors like strong family support, high self-esteem, and good use of free time can help prevent young adults from abusing substances. While we might not always be able to prevent our loved ones from using substances, we can still be supportive family members they can turn to. Studies show that children with strong family support often find stability in adulthood (Chiang et al., 2024, p. 922). How can society address the issue of youth substance abuse? On a larger scale, we need to stop treating drugs as a taboo topic; keeping children in the dark about drugs does them a disservice because their lack of knowledge often leads to uninformed decisions and sometimes fatal consequences. Drug prevention programs educate youth about harm reduction techniques, healthy coping alternatives, and promote an honest discussion about substance use. Additionally, they teach children refusal strategies so that they can feel confident saying no without fearing they’ll be seen as “lame” by their peers. These prevention programs should also add a parental education component so that both parents and teachers could attend workshops on how to prevent, recognize, and address substance abuse. I believe education starts at home, and therefore, parents need the right tools to steer their kids away from drugs and know how to react if their child uses substances or asks questions about them. I also think the program should help kids plan and visualize their life goals, as establishing goals can be important for maintaining motivation and dedication. If a proper plan is set out for a child, they can identify what they need to do to get closer to their goals and what will set them back (e.g., drugs).

On a personal level, you can educate yourself about substance abuse to approach the issue with empathy rather than judgment. Most importantly, keep communication open, because sometimes just letting someone know you’re there for them can make a huge difference. If someone you know is struggling, encourage them to seek professional help, since addiction often requires counseling and medical intervention. Finally, set boundaries to protect yourself, because you cannot help others if you do not help yourself, and remember that you can be supportive without enabling dangerous behavior.

Source: https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.fau.edu/thrive/students/thrive-thursdays/substance_abuse_among_teens/&ct=ga&cd=CAEYASoUMTQwNTE0OTI3NTUyNDQ1MjA2MTUyGjJiNzI5NDQxMGY0ZDBmNTc6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw2s994ac9kbEI-oVZO4FBmo

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Education,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :
by Brian Mann, NPR March 15, 2025

This story originally appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” 

Pennsylvania is seeing roughly 2,000 fewer drug deaths a year. Nationwide, the number of annual deaths from drug overdoses has dropped by more than 30,000 people a year.

On a blustery winter morning, Keli McLoyd set off on foot across Kensington. This area of Philadelphia is one of the most drug-scarred neighborhoods in the U.S. In the first block, she knelt next to a man curled on the sidewalk in the throes of fentanyl, xylazine or some other powerful street drug.

“Sir, are you alright? You OK?” asked McLoyd, who leads Philadelphia’s city-run overdose response unit. The man stirred and took a breath. “OK, I can see he’s moving, he’s good.”

In Kensington, good means still alive. By the standards of the deadly U.S. fentanyl crisis, that’s a victory.

It’s also part of a larger, hopeful trend. Pennsylvania alone is seeing roughly 2,000 fewer drug deaths a year.

Nationwide, the number of annual deaths from drug overdoses has dropped by more than 30,000 people a year.

That’s according to the latest provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comparing drug deaths in a 12-month period at the peak in June 2023 to the latest available records from October 2024.

Officials with the CDC describe the improvement as “unprecedented,” but public health experts say the rapidly growing number of people in the U.S. surviving addiction to fentanyl and other drugs still face severe and complicated health problems.

“He’s not dead, but he’s not OK,” McLoyd said, as she bent over another man, huddled against a building unresponsive.

Many people in Kensington remain severely addicted to a growing array of toxic street drugs. Physicians, harm reduction workers and city officials say skin wounds, bacterial infections and cardiovascular disease linked to drug use are common.

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see people live in these conditions,” she said.

Indeed, some researchers and government officials believe the fentanyl overdose crisis has now entered a new phase, where deaths will continue declining while large numbers of people face what amounts to severe chronic illness, often compounded by homelessness, poverty, criminal records and stigma.

“Initially it’s been kind of this panic mode of preventing deaths,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, who studies addiction data and policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His team was one of the first to detect the national drop in fatal overdoses.

His latest study found drug deaths have now declined in all 50 states and the trend appears to be long-term and sustainable. “Now that we have found some effective ways to keep people alive, it’s really important to reach out to them and try to help them improve their whole lives,” Dasgupta said.

Source: https://whyy.org/articles/fentanyl-deaths-help-for-survivors/

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Fentanyl,HIV/Injecting-Drug-Users,Latest News,Synthetics,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

by Mia Holloman, Directorate of Prevention, Resilience and Readiness – March 11, 2025

A strong Army starts with healthy Soldiers and communities. When Soldiers are at their best, they’re ready for any mission. The Army Substance Abuse Program is committed to preventing substance misuse before it becomes a problem, giving leaders the tools to recognize risks and take action early.

Prevention starts with awareness and the right support. ASAP provides education and resources to help Soldiers, leaders and units work together to address alcohol and drug misuse. Commanders play a vital role in creating positive, substance-free environments and encouraging activities that strengthen resilience and teamwork. By taking a proactive approach, Soldiers stay focused, engaged and mission-ready.

“Take advantage of services that the Army offers before there is an incident,” said Georgina Gould, Army Substance Abuse Program Specialist, Ready and Resilient Integration and Training division.

“If there are indicators that problematic substance misuse is getting in the way at work or at home, schedule an appointment to meet with a provider at your assigned embedded behavioral health clinic, where you can be assessed for voluntary care without command involvement.”

The Substance Use Disorder Clinical Care Program, a vital resource for Soldiers and their Families impacted by substance misuse, complements ASAP’s prevention initiatives.

SUDCC is the Army’s model for delivering substance use treatment in a manner that is integrated, aligned with unit needs and conveniently co-located. Substance use disorder treatment is part of a comprehensive plan aimed at achieving rapid recovery and restoring individuals to full readiness.

“SUDCC’s mission of providing treatment and returning Soldiers to the fight is congruent with the ASAP mission of strengthening the overall fitness and effectiveness of the Army workforce, (conserving) manpower and enhancing Soldier combat readiness,” Gould said.

SUDCC provides care tailored to the unique needs of the Total Army, ranging from initial assessment and counseling to outpatient and inpatient treatment options. Gould said the SUDCC program has a low recidivism rate, meaning individuals are less likely to return to the program.

“There is a low number of Soldiers returning for further treatment after services are completed, which means they are successful in returning to the mission and their Families with enhanced coping skills and wellness,” Gould said.

Together, ASAP and SUDCC demonstrate the important role of the Army community in prevention, awareness and recovery. Substance misuse is not just a personal issue; it can impact entire teams, communities and missions. ASAP and SUDCC bring together partners from different sectors and engage stakeholders to build a strong, united effort against substance misuse.

Source: https://www.army.mil/article/283651/strengthening_the_army_community_through_substance_misuse_prevention_treatment_options

Filed under: Addiction,Culture,Drug use-various effects,Education,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
This special section of the International Journal of Drug Policy brings together empirical and conceptual contributions to youth cannabis research through diverse methodological and critical social science approaches. Specifically, we present a collection of four empirical papers and three commentaries, all engaging with the central question, how can theoretical and methodological innovations advance youth and young adult-centered cannabis research, policy, and practice?
The current evidence base on cannabis use among youth and young adults under 30 years of age is limited by two key challenges. First, there is a strong emphasis on biomedical forms of knowledge production centred on individualistic understandings and abstinence-focused goals, with a tendency to overlook the broader social contexts that influence cannabis use patterns. Second, the incorporation of youth and young adult perspectives is lacking. In a shifting drug policy landscape where many nations and regions, including ours (Canada), have either legalized cannabis or are considering doing so, we need research approaches that can comprehensively examine the documented risks of cannabis use as well as those that can account for the social and structural contexts that shape youth and young adult substance use decision-making (Rubin-Kahana et al., 2022). To date; however, much of the research addressing youth and young adult cannabis use remains under-theorized, overly descriptive, and lacking in critical analysis of the links between substance use harms and social inequities (Kourgiantakis et al., 2024).
Over the last several decades, mounting research has documented the potential health harms of cannabis use, particularly for those who initiate early or consume regularly. This includes substantial evidence that identifies risks related to the onset of psychotic disorders, motor vehicle accidents, and cannabis use disorder as well as effects on educational and occupational outcomes (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, 2017). However, a focus on risks in the absence of considerations of lived experience or social-contextual influences restricts our understandings and may limit the development of impactful and supportive interventions for those who may benefit most.
At this juncture, we argue that in addition to rigorous examination of health impacts, there is a pressing need for inquiry using methodological approaches that meaningfully engage youth and young adults with lived experience of cannabis use in research, peer-based education, and advocacy and activism for policy and practice change. This is particularly important given that different populations experience varying levels of risk and protection based on their social and structural circumstances (Gunadi & Shi, 2022), while cannabis policy, education, and care continue to rely on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, disregarding the diverse perspectives, experiences, patterns, and motivations of young people with regard to their cannabis use.
In preparing for this special section, we sought to collate research from diverse disciplines and geographic regions. We were particularly interested in highlighting research that moves beyond description towards theoretically engaged analyses, as well as research using participatory, arts-based, or youth engagement methodologies to understand youth and young adult cannabis use practices. Taken together, we envisioned that these papers would highlight new ways of theorizing, researching, and advocating in the global context of cannabis policy liberalization. We also hoped that this process would create new research connections among scholars with shared interests in this area. However, while various efforts were made to attract contributions from around the world, all but one of the final submissions were from Canada, with one additional contribution from Nigeria.
While the geographical representation is limited, the papers in this special section demonstrate innovative approaches to studying youth and young adult cannabis use while maintaining awareness of documented health risks. Bear and colleagues introduce “mindful consumption and benefit maximization” as a framework that acknowledges both potential risks and the importance of informed decision-making. They argue that harm reduction campaigns focused on cannabis risk, being received as stigmatizing or out of touch, given that cannabis is perceived by young consumers as a “relatively harmless drug” compared to other regulated substances, such as alcohol and tobacco. Instead of centering potential harms, mindful consumption and benefit maximization is presented as a strengths-oriented approach that aims to reduce stigma while promoting informed decision making to maximize positive experiences. Bear and colleagues offer that efforts to shift and better inform how young people make choices related to cannabis use can contribute new pathways for better preventing potential long-term consequences.
Another area of focus within the contributed articles included research problematizing the socio-structural contexts of cannabis use, foregrounding the perspectives of marginalized youth whose voices and life circumstances are often absent from the research literature, despite inequitably bearing the brunt of cannabis-related harms (Huang et al., 2020; Jones, 2024; Zuckermann et al., 2020). Haines-Saah and colleagues tackled the concept of “risk” among youth and young adults living with profound health and social inequities across several Canadian provinces. Using a youth-centred qualitative approach, this research makes visible the experiences of young people whose everyday lives are characterized by intersecting hardship and inequity. Within these circumstances, the risks of cannabis use are reconceptualised by the youth participants as they thoughtfully consider the ways that cannabis has served as a tool for survival while navigating historical and ongoing experiences of trauma and violence. Many of these youth also spoke to the ways that they engage in regular reflection about their cannabis use practices, informing efforts to reduce or abstain when recognizing that their use is too frequent or when experiencing adverse mental health effects.
Aligned with this focus on growing understandings of the cannabis use experiences and contexts of marginalized youth, Nelson and Nnam contributed a qualitative paper on cannabis use and harm reduction practices among youth and young adult women aged 21–35 living in Uyo, Nigeria. For young women in this setting, cannabis use was noted to progress quickly from more casual or social use, to frequent and heavy consumption. Aligned with the findings presented in Haines-Saah and colleagues’ Canadian research, the results of this study illustrate the ways that cannabis use and related risk is shaped by health and social contexts characterized by trauma and mental health challenges tied to marginalized social locations. Indeed, it is noted that in this setting, cannabis was used to “treat the psychological symptoms of structural inequalities”. Nelson and Nman powerfully argue that to make progress in supporting young people, interventions must target the social and structural roots of drug-related harms.
Examinations of the intersections between cannabis use and queer and trans youth identities was also a theme across several of the special section papers. Barborini and authors drew on community-based participatory research approaches, including photovoice, to examine how cannabis use features within the experiences of transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming (TGNC) youth in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Barborini et al. identified how TGNC youth use cannabis in purposeful and strategic ways, including as they enact ‘non-normative’ gender expressions. They also found that TGNC youth use cannabis in to facilitate introspection, including as they advance personal discoveries about their gender identities and development. In their analysis, they describe how TGNC youth are using cannabis in emancipatory ways, with some of their sample describing how cannabis use is important for them in accessing moments of gender euphoria and affirmation, particularly given many of the broader social structural oppressions they face in their everyday lives.
London-Nadeau and colleagues’ research paper, led by their team of queer youth, presents a community-based qualitative study conducted in Quebec, Canada. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how certain populations face unique risks and challenges that require more tailored approaches. They action Perrin and colleagues’ (2020) Minority Strengths Model to advance understandings about how cannabis use features in queer and trans youth’s endeavours to “survive and thrive”. Here, cannabis was identified as supporting the production of an “authentic [queer and trans] self”, facilitating processes centering on self-exploration, introspection, and expression. Additionally, London-Nadeau and colleagues contributed a commentary presenting insights gained through conducting their empirical research. In this paper, they reflect on barriers and opportunities for cannabis research conducted by queer and trans youth, including the importance of “leading from the heart” in their efforts to connect with the shared cultures of their study participants while attuning to the ways that their experiences may differ, in part due to their academic affiliations that serve as a source of privilege within the context of knowledge production.
Finally, D’Alessio and colleagues offer details on their experiences with Get Sensible, a project of the Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy. In this reflection piece, the Get Sensible team describes how their work developing and implementing an educational toolkit challenged historical approaches to cannabis education by prioritizing young people’s voices, harm reduction, other evidence-based strategies, and peer-to-peer models. They also describe how, by drawing on a youth-led project design, the Get Sensible educational toolkit provides young people with the information they need to make empowered and informed decisions to minimize cannabis-related harms.
Across diverse geographical and drug policy contexts, cannabis remains one of the most widely used substances among youth and young adults. As such, there is a pressing need for knowledge generation that pushes boundaries to expand understandings beyond the confines of biomedical and risk-dominated paradigms. Moreover, drug policy scholarship, including that published in this journal, has advocated for research and practice that embodies the harm reduction principle of “nothing about us without us,” centering the expertise of people who use substances (e.g. Harris & Luongo, 2021; Olding et al., 2023; Piakowski et al., 2024; Zakimi et al., 2024). When it comes to cannabis, or any substance use for that matter, it is our view that the impetus to protect youth from drug harms should not preclude their meaningful participation and leadership in drug prevention research and policy. The youth-centered scholarship and advocacy we highlight in this special issue is our contribution to prioritizing youth empowerment, not just their “protection.”
While our special section may not capture the full breadth of critical research being conducted with and for youth who use cannabis, the narrow geographical scope of the contributions underscores a degree of urgency for advancing innovative methodological approaches to youth and young adult cannabis research within and across global settings. We are nevertheless deeply inspired by the progress that has been made, as evidenced by the contributions in this special section, including those that critically challenge traditional approaches to cannabis use policy, education, and care via youth-centered research approaches. Ultimately, we hope that this issue will inspire a renewed research agenda that privileges the expertise of young people and engages with theories and methodologies that advance new understandings and possibilities for supporting cannabis use decision making and accompanying efforts to minimize potential harms.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395925000519
Filed under: Canada,Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,New Zealand,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :

After achieving six months of sobriety, Horning has become a vocal advocate for comprehensive substance use prevention and education programs aimed at helping students in Warren County lead substance-free lives.

His initiative, developed in collaboration with Dr. Patricia Hawley-Mead and district officials, seeks to implement substance use prevention and education services across the school district. The goal of the initiative is to provide students, teachers, and parents with the education, community resources, and intervention strategies needed to prevent substance use and promote healthier lifestyle choices.

“If you were to tell me eight months ago I would be standing in front of you talking about substance abuse prevention and putting Narcan in AED boxes, I would have said you were crazy,” Horning shared with the audience during a recent school board meeting.

Horning’s passion for substance use prevention stems from his own difficult experience with addiction. He has openly shared his struggles with substance use, depression, and unhealthy coping mechanisms that led him down a painful path.

“My addiction was full of loss, hardships, and failures,” Horning explained. “Nothing seemed to work, nothing was helping me, and most importantly, I wasn’t helping myself. I’ve been in and out of psychiatrists’ offices, tried different medications, and felt completely lost. The only way I found recovery was by chance, but it shouldn’t be that way. We need a system in place to give students a way out before it’s too late.”

Looking back on his darkest moments, Horning admitted he never imagined he would be advocating for change in front of a crowd.

“I was not a great person at that moment in time,” he said, becoming emotional. “I made a lot of mistakes. My family, who is sitting behind me today, can tell you that. People inside and outside of school districts saw me at my worst. The disease of addiction is a lifelong battle that I will face until the day I die. But that does not mean it has to end in tragedy. That is why I am standing here today – to fight for others like me.”

Horning recognizes that many students turn to substances for a variety of reasons–whether out of boredom, depression, anxiety, or as a way to cope with personal struggles. His initiative is designed not only to educate students on the dangers of substance use but also to provide them with the tools and support systems they need to make better, healthier choices.

“This initiative will not only help students stay alive in case of an overdose, but it will help them find a way out of addiction and into a new life,” he emphasized. “Even if this helps just one person, it will all be worth it.”

INITIATIVE’S INSPIRATION

The inspiration behind Horning’s initiative came after a district-wide program held on September 18, 2024. During the event, public speaker Stephen Hill presented the First Choice & A Second Chance program to high school students. The program aimed to break the stigma surrounding substance use disorder, raise awareness about the ongoing drug epidemic, and encourage students to make healthier decisions.

Following the event, Horning was motivated to take action. He reached out to district administrators, safety officers, the school nurse department head, and a Family Services of Warren County drug and alcohol counselor to begin crafting a proposal for a comprehensive Substance Use Prevention and Education Service in the district.

The proposal calls for the establishment of educational programs that would teach students about the risks associated with substance use, provide early intervention services, and offer mental health support. Additionally, Horning’s plan includes provisions for Narcan to be available in school AED boxes, ensuring that life-saving measures are ready in case of an overdose emergency.

Hawley-Mead, who has worked closely with Horning on the initiative, stressed the importance of early intervention and prevention.

“The increasing prevalence of substance use among young people is a growing concern,” Mead said. “It poses a significant risk to their academic success, emotional well-being, and future prospects. Early prevention and education efforts have been shown to reduce substance use, improve student decision-making, and help create a more supportive and empathetic learning environment.”

Mead believes that by fostering a collaborative effort among educators, parents, and community partners, the district can proactively address the issue of substance use and equip students with the knowledge and support they need to thrive.

“This initiative will provide students, teachers, and parents with education, resources, and intervention strategies to support healthy choices and foster a positive, drug-free environment,” Mead said.

Horning concluded his speech with an emotional reflection on his own personal journey and the importance of offering help to others who may be struggling.

“What drove me to do this was really a lot of depression and unhealthy coping skills,” he shared. “I was not in the right mindset when I first used. I was not okay. If somebody had sat me down and told me, ‘We can help you,’ it could have saved me years of pain. That’s why we need this now. We need to offer students the opportunity to get help before it’s too late.”

Horning is determined to ensure that no student has to face the same struggles he did. His initiative is not only aimed at providing support for those already struggling with substance use but also preventing others from ever going down that difficult path.

“The only way I found recovery was by chance,” he admitted. “That’s the best way I can put it. Recovery is important, but when you are in an active addiction, it feels impossible to get through to someone. That’s why, eight months ago, I would have called you crazy if you told me I’d be standing here today. But now, I’m here. I have made myself a better person, and I want to give back for what I have found.”

Horning and district officials are now seeking approval from the school board and the community to bring this initiative to life in Warren County schools. Their goal is to integrate substance use prevention education into the curriculum, provide resources for students and families, and ensure that Narcan is available in AED boxes to help prevent potential overdose deaths.

“We don’t have to live in tragedy like other schools have,” Horning said. “We need to teach students how to use Narcan, how to stay alive, and most importantly, how to find a way out of addiction. Recovery is possible, and I want to show others that they don’t have to suffer alone.”

HORNING’S PROPOSAL

Horning’s written proposal outlines five key goals for the pilot initiative: Enhance school safety by increasing access to Narcan for emergency overdose response. Educate the school community about substance use prevention, intervention, and response strategies. Establish a student club focused on substance use awareness, prevention, and peer education to increase awareness and reduce stigma surrounding substance use disorder. Actively engage stakeholders, including students, staff, families, and community partners, to establish an anonymous and supportive program where students can learn about and advocate for substance use prevention. Create a district-sponsored club dedicated to promoting substance use prevention and education.

Hawley-Mead emphasized that while Narcan is already available in nurse’s offices during school hours, having it in AED boxes would ensure it’s accessible during after-school activities and weekend events.

“This proposal aims to make Narcan more widely available and accessible to first responders during emergencies, regardless of the time of day,” she said. “We want to ensure that this life-saving measure is available whenever and wherever it’s needed.”

Horning also reached out to Family Services of Warren County, which has expressed strong support for the initiative.

“They are very, very responsive towards this program,” Horning said. “I’ve spoken with counselors, including Nicole Neukum, executive director, and they’re all willing to give us whatever we need to make this a success.”

School board member Mary Passinger asked Horning if he felt comfortable sharing the personal story behind his addiction.

“It was really a lot of depression and unhealthy coping skills,” Horning responded. “I was not in the right mindset when I first used. If someone had told me, ‘We can help you,’ it could have saved me from years of pain.”

Board member John Wortman commended Horning for his bravery in speaking out and bringing this important issue to the district’s attention.

“There is nothing more important than standing up for what you believe in,” Wortman said. “The proposals outlined here will help make a significant, positive impact on students in Warren County. And that’s something we can all support.”

Superintendent Gary Weber also voiced his strong support for the initiative.

“We are 100% behind this initiative,” he said. “It’s clear that Jessie and Dr. Mead have worked hard to bring together stakeholders and develop a plan that will have a lasting and positive impact. We want to make sure this program is sustainable, and we’re committed to supporting it every step of the way.”

The district is currently reviewing Horning’s proposal, and community members are encouraged to get involved in supporting this critical initiative. For updates and information on how to help, individuals can reach out to district officials or Family Services of Warren County.

With this initiative, Horning hopes to not only save lives but also inspire others to break free from addiction and reclaim their futures.

“Recovery is possible,” he said. “And I want to show others that they don’t have to suffer alone.”

Source: https://www.timesobserver.com/news/local-news/2025/03/student-leads-charge-for-substance-use-prevention/

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Cannabis/Marijuana,Culture,Education,Latest News,Mental Health,Opioids,Prescription Drugs,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :
by Ioulia Kondratovitch – UNODC

Globally, the number of people who used drugs rose to 292 million in 2022 – a 20 per cent increase over 10 years.  The UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2024 World Drug Report shows that the emergence of new synthetic opioids and a record supply and demand of other drugs have compounded the impacts of the world drug problem, including overdoses, violence, instability, environmental harms and more.

The Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), the United Nations’ central drug policy-making body, is meeting this week to take stock of progress made in the implementation of international drug policy commitments.

Below, learn more about the CND and why it matters.

The basics

The CND is where UN member states set policy on all issues related to drugs. 53 Member States from all regions of the world are elected to serve four-year terms.

UNODC acts as Secretariat to the CND.

Why does the CND matter?

Drug production, trafficking and consumption can cause violence, instability and even death.

UNODC’s 2024 World Drug Report found that 64 million people worldwide suffered from drug use disorders in 2022, with only one in 11 in treatment.

Drug trafficking is empowering organized crime groups, who are also engaged in other crimes including human trafficking, online scams, fraud and illegal resource extraction.

A new record high of cocaine production has coincided with a rise in violence in states along the supply chain, as well as an increase in health harms in countries of destination. Meanwhile, nitazenes – a group of synthetic opioids which can be even more potent than fentanyl – have recently emerged in several high-income countries, resulting in an increase in overdose deaths.

How does it work?

CND reviews and analyses the global drug situation and takes action through resolutions and decisions. At this year’s CND, Member States will be discussing resolutions on preventing drug use among children; research on evidence-based interventions for the treatment and care of stimulant use disorders; alternative development; safety of officers in dismantling synthetic opioid laboratories; the impact of drugs on the environment; and strengthening the global drug control framework.

The CND also decides, based on recommendations by the World Health Organization and the International Narcotics Control Board, on which substances will be placed under international control – or “scheduled” – under the three international drug control treaties.

These conventions help prevent the abuse of psychoactive substances, protecting individuals, communities and entire countries from drug use epidemics while reducing crime and violence. They also ensure that these substances are available for necessary medical and scientific purposes.

International scheduling of substances, including precursor chemicals, helps law enforcement efforts to curb production and trafficking of dangerous drugs.

Why are we talking about it now?

In recognition of these new and persistent challenges, the CND adopted the 2019 Ministerial Declaration to accelerate the implementation of the international drug policy commitments made since 2009.

At last year’s CND, Member States made new commitments under the “Pledge4Action” on how they could expedite actions to tackle the world drug problem. This year, Member States will report on efforts to fulfill these pledges, as well as have an opportunity to make new ones.

What else is the UN doing to address the world drug problem?

UNODC collects, analyses and reports data on drug trends and developments. Find more in our 2024 World Drug Report, Afghanistan Drug Insights Series, Colombia and Bolivia coca surveys, and Myanmar opium survey.

Additionally, by strengthening the ability of Member States to detect and intercept illicit drug flows at borders and equipping front-line officers with testing equipment, UNODC bolsters countries’ national security by disrupting the operations and profits of organized drug trafficking groups. Making borders and key shipping routes less vulnerable to exploitation also fosters a safer environment for legitimate business and trade, contributing to a more stable and resilient global economy.

UNODC also works with Member States to support the prevention of drug use; treatment and rehabilitation for people who use drugs; and access to controlled drugs for medical purposes.

Source: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/news/2025/March/explainer_-what-is-the-commission-on-narcotic-drugs.html

Filed under: Australia,Canada,Europe,Latest News,New Zealand,Others (International News),UK,USA :
Authors:
Christopher Williams
Kenneth W. Griffin
Sandra M. Sousa
Gilbert J Botvin – Weill Cornell Medicine
www.researchgate.net
  • February 2025
  • Psychology of Addictive Behaviors

Abstract and Figures

Objective: School-based health promotion programs can have a positive effect on behavioral and social outcomes among adolescents. Yet, limited classroom time and suboptimal program implementation can reduce the potential impact of these interventions. In the present randomized trial, we tested the effectiveness of a classroom-based substance use prevention program that was adapted for hybrid implementation. Method: The hybrid adaptation included eight asynchronous e-learning modules that presented didactic content and eight classroom sessions designed to facilitate discussion and practice of refusal, personal self-management, and general social skills. Nineteen high schools were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. Students (N = 1,235) completed confidential online pretest and posttest surveys to assess the effects of the intervention on tobacco and alcohol use and life skills. The sample was 50.7% female and 35.5% non-White with a mean age of 15.2 years. Results: Analyses revealed significant program effects on current cigarette smoking, alcohol use, drunkenness, and intentions for future use. There were also program effects for communication, media resistance, anxiety management, and refusal skills. Conclusions: Taken together, these findings suggest that hybrid approaches can produce robust prevention effects and may help reduce barriers to the widespread adoption and implementation of evidence-based prevention programs.

 

To access the full document:  Click on the ‘Source’ link below.

Source:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389399186_Preventing_tobacco_and_alcohol_use_among_high_school_students_through_a_hybrid_online_and_in-class_intervention_A_randomized_controlled_trial/fulltext/67c174cb207c0c20fa9ac7ba/Preventing-Tobacco-and-Alcohol-Use-Among-High-School-Students-Through-a-Hybrid-Online-and-In-Class-Intervention-A-Randomized-Controlled-Trial.pdf?

Filed under: Alcohol,Education,Latest News,Nicotine,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

Consumption of alcoholic beverages could make people more likely to experiment with other drugs

Melissa Rudy
by Melissa Rudy Fox News  – Published 
Longevity doctor reacts to alcohol cancer advisory: ‘It’s about time’

Following the U.S. surgeon general’s new advisory warning of alcohol’s link to multiple cancers, Dr. Brett Osborn, a Florida neurosurgeon and longevity doctor, speaks with Fox News Digital about alcohol’s toxic effects on the brain and body.

A vast majority of American adults say they have consumed alcohol at some point — yet experts warn that alcoholic beverages could be a “gateway drug” to more harmful substances.

More than 84% of adults in the U.S. report having drunk alcohol in their lifetime, according to the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).

That same survey found that among underage Americans (12 to 17 years of age), more than 21% had consumed alcohol.

What is a ‘gateway drug’?

Dr. Kenneth Spielvogel, senior medical officer at Carrara Treatment in California, defined a “gateway drug” as a substance that exposes someone to other drugs.

Man drinking alcohol

More than 84% of adults in the U.S. report having drunk alcohol in their lifetime, according to the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. (iStock)

Marijuana is often pegged as a “classic gateway drug,” he told Fox News Digital, as it can lead to cocaine, heroin and other “harder drugs” that present a greater threat to loss of life via impaired driving and other volatile behaviors.

“Alcohol maintains a firm grip on a large portion of the adult population.”

“Any substance that impairs judgment is potentially a gateway drug, in my opinion — however, alcohol is the king of this,” Spielvogel said. “It maintains a firm grip on a large portion of the adult population.”

“I personally have seen the ravages of this — hungover victims turn to meth, cocaine and other drugs for the ‘pick me up’ they feel they need.”

Why alcohol can be a ‘gateway’

For many young people, alcohol is the first substance they try, according to Chris Tuell, a clinical psychotherapist and a chemical and behavioral addiction specialist at the Lindner Center in Mason, Ohio. This makes them more likely to experiment with other drugs later.

“Most people can use alcohol and it does not become problematic — but for some, it is destroying their lives,” he said in an interview with Fox News Digital.

Smoking marijuana

Marijuana is often pegged as a “classic gateway drug,” but one expert said that “alcohol is the king” when it comes to impairing judgment. (iStock)

Consumption of alcohol impairs judgment and decision-making, which can lead to riskier behaviors, including trying other substances, Tuell noted.

“Studies indicate that alcohol alters brain chemistry in ways that increase susceptibility to drug addiction,” the expert cautioned.

Jeremy Klemanski, addiction specialist and CEO of Gateway Foundation in Chicago, echoes his belief that alcohol is a gateway drug.

“We often hear reports from patients that they only use or started using while drinking, or that they were first exposed to alcohol and then tried other drugs for greater physical symptoms and feelings,” he told Fox News Digital.

friends with drinks

Research from the National Institute of Drug Abuse suggests that early exposure to alcohol can “prime the brain” for heightened responses to other drugs. (iStock)

“It is also important to note that once a person has used one mind-altering substance, their general thinking skills are impaired on some level,” he went on. “Other things they might not normally do become easier to justify or accept as an idea to act on.”

There is also a neurological element that comes into play, according to Dr. David Campbell, clinical director and program director at Recover Together Bend in Oregon.

“Alcohol affects neurotransmitter systems that are involved in the reward pathways that are similarly targeted by other drugs,” he told Fox News Digital.

Research from the National Institute of Drug Abuse suggests that early exposure to alcohol can “prime the brain” for heightened responses to other drugs, perhaps increasing the risks of the “gateway effect,” Campbell added.

Other factors at play

Experts emphasized that correlation does not equal causation.

“Just because people who use harder drugs often drink alcohol first does not necessarily mean alcohol caused their drug use,” Tuell noted.

Refusing beer

“There are few drugs where the sudden stoppage of their use can be deadly — alcohol is one of these,” an addiction specialist warned. (iStock)

Campbell agreed, noting that many “contextual factors and psychosocial stressors” should be considered within the broader context of someone’s life.

“Social environment, stressors, ease and proximity to access, social influences, mental health conditions, childhood trauma, genetics and other biological factors may all play a role,” he told Fox News Digital.

When and how to stop

Spielvogel shared some warning signs that someone may be dependent on alcohol and more susceptible to trying other harmful substances.

“One sign is if they have ever tried to cut down on their drinking and failed,” he said. “Also, they may be annoyed when asked about their alcohol consumption.”

People with alcohol dependency may also feel guilty when they drink, or they might consume alcoholic beverages in the morning, he added.

“It is very important that if someone has a use disorder, they seek professional help for their detox and recovery.”

Stopping “cold turkey” may not be the healthiest route, Spielvogel cautioned.

“There are few drugs where the sudden stoppage of their use can be deadly — alcohol is one of these,” he said.

“I cannot stress this enough; it is very important that if someone has a use disorder, they seek professional help for their detox and recovery, whether it’s a private treatment facility or going to a medical professional.”

“Do not do this on your own.”

Melissa Rudy is senior health editor and a member of the lifestyle team at Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to melissa.rudy@fox.com.

 

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/health/drinking-alcohol-can-lead-other-substance-use-addiction-experts-warn

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

University of Southern California – Mar 3 2025

A new USC-led study provides the first nationwide picture of who knows about, carries, and uses naloxone to reverse deadly opioid overdoses.

Mireille Jacobson, professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and a senior fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, said the study was conducted to address the lack of comprehensive data on access to the lifesaving medication and eventually to support work on how it affects the number of deaths attributed to opioid overdoses in the U.S.

There have been many analyses of how new policies, including naloxone becoming available through pharmacy dispensation, correlate with reductions in opioid deaths, but we don’t know exactly how much of the improvement is directly due to naloxone use versus any of the various other things being done to address this crisis at the same time. We don’t really have any data on who knows what naloxone is for, carries it, and administers in the case of an overdose. We’re trying to fill in a missing link.”

Mireille Jacobson, professor of gerontology, USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology

Addressing an epidemic

In the study, Jacobson and coauthor David Powell, a senior economist at RAND, note the critical need to tackle the ongoing opioid crisis, which has had profound effects in the U.S, and understand the impacts of measures intended to address the devastating rate of overdose deaths.

Of the more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths that occurred nationwide in 2023, more than 75% of them involved opioids, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Previous USC Leonard Davis School research has also shown how opioid overdose deaths have contributed to the widening gap in life expectancy between the United States and other high-income countries.

Since 2023, naloxone has been available over the counter, in hopes that wider availability would encourage more people to have the drug at the ready to save the life of someone overdosing. However, the lack of reliable, nationwide data on who was buying, carrying, and using naloxone has hindered research on how to best prevent overdose deaths, Jacobson said.

“With the problem being so widespread, one question is how to most effectively manage this crisis,” she said. “To know where to put our resources, we need to know about the actual ways this medication gets to the people who will use it. Our goal was to fill in the data and allow people to understand the mechanisms.”

Online surveys shed light

In June 2024, Jacobson and Powell conducted an online survey of two groups of participants. The first group was a nationally representative sample of 1515 people over the age of 18 not living in an institutional setting, while the second group contained 512 individuals who reported currently or ever having opioid dependence. Additionally, 50 respondents, or 3.3%, from the national sample also reported opioid dependence, bringing the total number of people reporting their own dependence on opioids to 562.

 

  • 700 (46.2%) reported having heard of naloxone and correctly identified it as a drug to reduce opioid overdoses.
  • 160 people, or 10.6%, said they carried naloxone with them.
  • 128 people (8.4%) said they had administered naloxone to someone else, while 93 respondents (6.1%) said they had been administered naloxone themselves.

Among the 562 individuals reporting current or prior opioid dependence:

  • 500 people (89%) had heard of naloxone and knew its purpose.
  • 340 respondents (60.5%) reported carrying naloxone.
  • 267 (47.5%) reported administering the drug to someone else, and 221 (39.3%) said naloxone had been administered to them.

The survey also showed that a person’s perception of the risk of overdose, either for themselves or for someone they know, correlated with the choice to carry naloxone. Of the survey respondents in the national sample who reported themselves as “very likely to overdose,” 31% carried naloxone, and in the sample of people reporting opioid dependence, nearly 74% of those who said they had a high likelihood of overdosing carried the drug. The likelihood of carrying naloxone followed a similar pattern among those who stated that they knew someone else who was very likely to overdose.

Another notable finding concerned how people obtained the naloxone they carried. Among those who have ever carried naloxone, only 42% of those in the national sample, and just 22.6% of those who reported opioid dependence, said they purchased the medicine themselves. These results highlight the problem with estimating naloxone availability based on pharmacy sales, as it excludes the hospitals, clinics, and other community organizations who give the drug away for free, Jacobson explained.

Next steps

While the data provides some of the first nationwide insights on who has and uses naloxone, this is just a starting point for future research, Jacobson said.

She explained that she’s eager for the results to be examined and validated in other larger, more robust surveys, including in the USC Understanding America Survey. Ideally, future study will uncover the best ways to teach people about naloxone and the most efficient avenues to get the drug to the people who will use it to save lives.

“The hope is that we can look at this more longitudinally and in more detail,” Jacobson said.

Source: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250303/USC-study-sheds-light-on-nationwide-naloxone-awareness-and-use.aspx
Filed under: Addiction,Latest News,Opioids,Prevalence,USA :
Home
United Nations
The United Nations Office at Geneva

 

Synthetic drugs are rapidly transforming the global drug trade, fuelling an escalating public health crisis, according to the UN administered International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).

In its 2024 Annual Report, released on Tuesday, the INCB explains that unlike plant-based drugs, these substances can be made anywhere, without the need for large-scale cultivation, making them easier and cheaper for traffickers to produce and distribute.

The rise of powerful opioids like fentanyl and nitazenes – potent enough to cause overdoses in tiny doses – has worsened the crisis, driving record-high deaths.

“We need to work together to take stronger action against this deadly problem which is causing hundreds of deaths and untold harm to communities,” he continued.

Traffickers stay ahead of regulations

Criminal groups are constantly adapting to evade law enforcement.

By exploiting legal loopholes, they develop new synthetic compounds and use artificial intelligence to find alternative chemicals for drug production.

New smuggling methods – including drones and postal deliveries – make these drugs harder to detect.

As a result, seizures of synthetic substances are now outpacing those of traditional plant-based drugs like heroin and cocaine.

Patchwork response

Despite efforts to curb synthetic drugs, responses remain fragmented, allowing traffickers to stay ahead.

The INCB is calling for stronger global cooperation, including partnerships between governments, private companies and international organizations, to disrupt supply chains and prevent harm.

Medication out of reach

While synthetic drugs flood illegal markets, millions of people in low- and middle-income countries still lack access to essential pain relief medication.

The report highlights that opioid painkillers such as morphine, remain unavailable in regions like Africa, South Asia and Central America – not due to supply shortages, but because of barriers in distribution and regulation.

The INCB is urging opioid-producing nations to increase production and affordability to improve palliative care and pain management.

Regional hotspots concerns

The report identifies several regions where synthetic drug trafficking is expanding.

In Europe, the looming heroin deficit following Afghanistan’s 2022 opium ban could push more users toward synthetic alternatives while in North America, despite efforts to curb the crisis, synthetic opioid-related deaths remain at record highs.

The manufacture, trafficking and use of amphetamine-type stimulants are increasing across the Middle East and Africa, where treatment and rehabilitation services are often inadequate.

Meanwhile, in the Asia-Pacific region, methamphetamine and ketamine trafficking continues to grow, particularly in the Golden Triangle.

Call for urgent action

The INCB is urging governments to strengthen international collaboration, improve data-sharing and expand drug prevention and treatment services.

Without decisive action, the synthetic drug trade will continue to evolve, putting more lives at risk.

 

Source: ‘Rapid expansion’ of synthetic drugs reshaping illicit markets, UN anti-narcotics body warns
Filed under: Australia,Canada,Europe,Fentanyl,Latest News,New Zealand,Others (International News),Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Synthetics,UK,USA :

Arizona State University

Children seen from behind sit next to each other with their arms around each other while looking out at a large body of water.

Over the past 20 years, science-based interventions and treatments using a statistical method called mediation analysis have contributed to reduced rates of smoking and drinking among teenagers and young adults in the U.S. Research from Arizona State University has developed these statistical techniques, which save time and money and are now used widely in psychology, sociology, biology, education and medicine. Many of available medical treatment options are the result of clinical trials that used mediation to figure out what worked.

Image by Duy Pham/Unsplash

by Kimberlee D’Ardenne –

Smoking rates among teenagers today are much lower than they were a generation ago, decreasing from 36% in the late 1990s to 9% today. The rates of alcohol consumption among underage drinkers have also decreased. At the turn of the century, people aged 12–20 years drank 11% of all the alcohol consumed in the U.S. Today, they only drink 3%.

These decreases are in part the result of science-based interventions that were designed to prevent substance use. But these interventions would not have been possible without statistical methods, including a statistical method called mediation analysis that lets researchers understand why an intervention or treatment succeeds or fails. Mediation analysis also identifies how aspects of a substance use reduction program or medical treatment cause its success.

About this story

There’s a reason research matters. It creates technologies, medicines and other solutions to the biggest challenges we face. It touches your life in numerous ways every day, from the roads you drive on to the phone in your pocket.

The ASU research in this article was possible only because of the longstanding agreement between the U.S. government and America’s research universities. That compact provides that universities would not only undertake the research but would also build the necessary infrastructure in exchange for grants from the government.

That agreement and all the economic and societal benefits that come from such research have recently been put at risk.

Prevention makes our lives better — and it saves money. Though smoking and drinking rates among adolescents are on the decline, there is still room for mediation analyses to save the U.S. more money. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, misusing alcohol costs the U.S. $249 billion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that cigarette smoking costs the U.S. around $600 billion, including $240 billion in health care spending and over $300 billion in lost productivity from smoking-related deaths and illnesses.

David MacKinnon, Regents Professor of psychology at Arizona State University, has been studying and using mediation analyses for the past 35 years because of the many practical applications — and because they work really well.

“I like using science and math to address serious health problems like smoking, drug abuse and heart disease,” MacKinnon said. “Mediation analyses let us extract a lot of information from data and have the promise of identifying mechanisms by which effects occur that could be applicable to other situations.”

Unlike a third wheel, third variables are crucial — and causal

There are many paths to a teenager ending up struggling with substance abuse. They might struggle with impulsivity in general — or they might have parents who fight often, or maybe their friends get drunk most weekends.

Because there is more than one way to connect risk factors to substance use, scientists often have to take an indirect path that considers variables like parenting style or peer influences.

“Most research looks at the relationship between two variables — like risk-taking and substance use — but there can be a lot happening in between, and those ‘third variables’ can cause the outcome,” MacKinnon explains.

Long-lasting impacts

Adolescents who experiment with drugs and alcohol at a young age are more likely to develop lifelong substance abuse problems. A psychology department research team led by Nancy Gonzales, executive vice president and university provost, used mediation to create a program that decreases alcohol use in teenagers who started drinking at a young age.

The program brought families to their child’s school for a series of interactive sessions. Each session taught a skill, such as good listening practices or strategies for talking about difficult topics, and parents and students practiced as a family. Just spending 18 hours in the program produced protective effects against teenage alcohol misuse that lasted at least five years. By their senior year, kids who had participated in the program as seventh graders were drinking less.

This reduced alcohol consumption is important because even small reductions in adolescent drinking can have a cascade effect on other public health problems like alcoholism and drug abuse disorders, risky sexual behavior and other health problems.

Helping children of divorce

Close to half of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce, affecting over 1 million children each year. These children are at an increased risk of struggling in school, experiencing mental health or substance use problems and engaging in risky sexual behavior. Mediation analyses have shown that a lot of these risks stem from conflict between divorced or separated parents, which creates fear of abandonment in children and contributes to future mental health symptoms.

Prevention scientists working in ASU’s Research and Education Advancing Children’s Health Institute leveraged decades of work using mediation to create an online parenting skills program for separated or divorced couples. The program reduces interparental conflict and decreases children’s anxiety and depression symptoms.

The answers to ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions save time and money

How much do school-based prevention programs decrease teen vaping rates? Why do monetary incentives and mobile clinics increase local vaccination rates?

Answering “how” and “why” questions like these require scientists to figure out what exactly caused a decrease in teen vaping or the reasons that caused more people to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated. Causation can happen in many ways and can even be indirect, and mediation can accurately find the cause.

Mediation analysis strategies MacKinnon has developed are now used widely, in medicine, psychology, sociology, biology and education. And, many of the treatment options our doctors can offer us are possible because of clinical trials that used mediation to figure out what worked.

Mediation analysis lets researchers pull more information from scientific studies, which is why the National Institutes of Health recommends research proposals include a section evaluating why and how treatments or interventions work.

Source: https://news.asu.edu/20250304-science-and-technology-asu-research-helps-prevent-substance-abuse-mental-health-problems

Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Culture,Education,Latest News,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

 

(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

by Aneri Pattani / KFF Health News (TNS)  –  March 3, 2025 at 8:45 p.m.

Jennifer Carroll, a public health and addiction researcher at North Carolina State University, wrote a national guide on how counties can invest opioid settlement funds in youth-focused prevention. (Nathaniel Gaertner/TNS)
Jennifer Carroll, a public health and addiction researcher at North Carolina State University, wrote a national guide on how counties can invest opioid settlement funds in youth-focused prevention. (Nathaniel Gaertner/TNS)

A Kentucky county nestled in the heart of Appalachia, where the opioid crisis has wreaked devastation for decades, spent $15,000 of its opioid settlement money on an ice rink.

That amount wasn’t enough to solve the county’s troubles, but it could have bought 333 kits of Narcan, a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses. Instead, people are left wondering how a skating rink addresses addiction or fulfills the settlement money’s purpose of remediating the harms of opioids.

Like other local jurisdictions nationwide, Carter County is set to receive a windfall of more than $1 million over the next decade-plus from companies that sold prescription painkillers and were accused of fueling the overdose crisis.

County officials and proponents of the rink say offering youths drug-free fun like skating is an appropriate use of the money. They provided free entry for students who completed the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) curriculum, recovery program participants, and foster families.

But for Brittany Herrington, who grew up in the region and became addicted to painkillers that were flooding the community in the early 2000s, the spending decision is “heartbreaking.”

“How is ice-skating going to teach [kids] how to navigate recovery, how to address these issues within their home, how to understand the disease of addiction?” said Herrington, who is now in long-term recovery and works for a community mental health center, as well as a regional coalition to address substance use.

She and other local advocates agreed that kids deserve enriching activities, but they said the community has more pressing needs that the settlement money was intended to cover.

Carter County’s drug overdose death rate consistently surpasses state and national averages. From 2018 to 2021, when overdose deaths were spiking across the country, the rate was 2.5 times as high in Carter County, according to the research organization NORC.

Other communities have used similar amounts of settlement funding to train community health workers to help people with addiction, and to buy a car to drive people in recovery to job interviews and doctors’ appointments.

Local advocates say $15,000 could have expanded innovative projects already operating in northeastern Kentucky, like First Day Forward, which helps people leaving jail, many of whom have a substance use disorder, and the second-chance employment program at the University of Kentucky’s St. Claire health system, which hires people in recovery to work in the system and pays for them to attend college or a certification program.

“We’ve got these amazing programs that we know are effective,” Herrington said. “And we’re putting an ice-skating rink in. That’s insane to me.”

A yearlong investigation by KFF Health News, along with researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the national nonprofit Shatterproof, found many jurisdictions spent settlement funds on items and services with tenuous, if any, connections to addiction. Oregon City, Oregon, spent about $30,000 on screening first responders for heart disease. Flint, Michigan, bought a nearly $10,000 sign for a community service center building , and Robeson County, North Carolina, paid about $10,000 for a toy robot ambulance.

Although most of the settlement agreements come with national guidelines explaining the money should be spent on treatment, recovery, and prevention efforts, there is little oversight and the guidelines are open to interpretation.

A Kentucky law lists more than two dozen suggested uses of the funds, including providing addiction treatment in jail and educating the public about opioid disposal. But it is plagued by a similar lack of oversight and broad interpretability.

Chris Huddle and Harley Rayburn, both of whom are elected Carter County magistrates who help administer the county government, told KFF Health News they were confident the ice rink was an allowable, appropriate use of settlement funds because of reassurances from Reneé Parsons, executive director of the Business Cultivation Foundation. The foundation aims to alleviate poverty and related issues, such as addiction, through economic development in northeastern Kentucky.

The Carter County Times reported that Parsons has helped at least nine local organizations apply for settlement dollars. County meeting minutes show she brought the skating rink proposal to county leaders on behalf of the city of Grayson’s tourism commission, asking the county to cover about a quarter of the project’s cost.

In an email, Parsons told KFF Health News that the rink — which was built in downtown Grayson last year and hosted fundraisers for youth clubs and sports teams during the holiday season — serves to “promote family connection and healing” while “laying the groundwork for a year-round hockey program.”

“Without investments in prevention, recovery, and economic development, we risk perpetuating the cycle of addiction in future generations,” she added.

Icelandic Model of Prevention

Reneé Parsons went on to say that the rink, as well as an $80,000 investment of opioid settlement funds to expand music and theater programs at a community center, fit with the principles of the Icelandic prevention model, “which has been unofficially accepted in our region.”

That model is a collaborative community-based approach to preventing substance use that has been highly effective at reducing teenage alcohol use in Iceland over the past 20 years. Instead of expecting children to “just say no,” it focuses on creating an environment where young people can thrive without drugs.

Part of this effort can involve creating fun activities like music classes, theatrical shows, and even ice-skating. But the intervention also requires building a coalition of parents, school staffers, faith leaders, public health workers, researchers, and others, and conducting rigorous data collection, including annual student surveys.

About 120 miles west of Carter County, another Kentucky county has for the past several years been implementing the Icelandic model. Franklin County’s Just Say Yes program includes more than a dozen collaborating organizations and an in-depth annual youth survey. The project began with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has also received opioid settlement dollars from the state.

Parsons did not respond to specific questions about whether Carter County has taken the full complement of steps at the core of the Icelandic model.

If it hasn’t, it can’t expect to get the same results, said Jennifer Carroll, a researcher who studies substance use and wrote a national guide on investing settlement funds in youth-focused prevention.

“Pulling apart different elements, at best, is usually going to waste your money and, at worst, can be counterproductive or even harmful,” she said.

At least one Carter County magistrate has come to regret spending settlement funds on the skating rink.

Millard Cordle told KFF Health News that, after seeing the rink operate over the holidays, he felt it was “a mistake.” Although younger children seemed to enjoy it, older kids didn’t engage as much, nor did it benefit rural parts of the county, he said. In the future, he’d rather see settlement money help get drugs off the street and offer people treatment or job training.

“We all learn as we go along,” he said. “I know there’s not an easy solution. But I think this money can help make a dent.”

As of 2024, Carter County had received more than $630,000 in opioid settlement funds and was set to receive more than $1.5 million over the coming decade, according to online records from the court-appointed settlement administrator.

It’s not clear how much of that money has been spent, beyond the $15,000 for the ice rink and $80,000 for the community arts center.

It’s also uncertain who, if anyone, has the power to determine whether the rink was an allowable use of the money or whether the county would face repercussions.

Kentucky’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, which controls half the state’s opioid settlement funds and serves as a leading voice on this money, declined to comment.

Cities and counties are required to submit quarterly certifications to the commission, promising that their spending is in line with state guidelines. However, the reports provide no detail about how the money is used, leaving the commission with little actionable insight.

At a January meeting, commission members voted to create a reporting system for local governments that would provide more detailed information, potentially opening the door to greater oversight.

That would be a welcome change, said John Bowman, a person in recovery in northeastern Kentucky, who called the money Carter County spent on the ice ink “a waste.”

Bowman works on criminal justice reform with the national nonprofit Dream.org and encounters people with substance use disorders daily, as they struggle to find treatment, a safe place to live, and transportation. Some have to drive over an hour to the doctor, he said — if they have a car.

He hopes local leaders will use settlement funds to address problems like those in the future.

“Let’s use this money for what it’s for,” he said.

 

Source: https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2025/mar/03/an-ice-rink-to-fight-opioid-crisis-drug-free-fun/

Filed under: Latest News,Opioids,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

by Monte Stiles, drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com

In a decisive victory, the Idaho House of Representatives has passed HJR 4 with an overwhelming 58-10 vote.

HJR 4 proposes a constitutional amendment that would give Idahoans the power to proactively determine the state’s future regarding drug legalization and normalization. If approved by the Senate and ratified by voters in November 2026, this amendment will ensure that ONLY the Idaho Legislature has the authority to legalize the manufacture, sale, possession, and use of marijuana, narcotics, and other psychoactive substances—preventing outside influences from dictating Idaho’s future.

Idaho’s firm stance against foolish laws and policies has earned it the reputation of being “the most hostile state in America for drug legalization.” The passage of HJR 4 reinforces this position, further establishing Idaho as “an island of sanity in a sea of insanity.”

With 29 co-sponsors in the House and 19 in the Senate, the bill now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Note to readers in USA: Please take a moment to thank your Representatives for taking this important proactive stand in protecting Idaho’s future. And then let your Senators know of your support.

Source: Drug Watch International

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug Specifics,Latest News,Political Sector,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

By Tina Underwood – February 23, 2025

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show there were about 107,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2023. Of those, about 75 percent, or 81,000, involved opioids.

With the aim of reducing those statistics, Lauren Jones ’22, who is in a post-baccalaureate at Harvard University, Brenna Outten ’22, a third-year doctoral student at Caltech and Leah Juechter ’24, who is working temporarily as a medical assistant, used computational chemistry as undergraduates at Furman to study the impacts of synthetic opioids.

Their work, with collaborators at Hendrix College and California State University, Los Angeles, was published in December in The Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

To say the project was formative for Jones and Outten is an understatement. They laid the foundation for the study during the height of COVID when traditional wet labs were all but shuttered.

“It’s amazing we were able to continue the work virtually during the pandemic,” said Jones, who researches sensory processing in children with autism and brain activity in children with rare neurodevelopmental and neurogenetic disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Outten said the project “opened my eyes to how a scientist can contribute to fields like neuroscience, chemistry, biology and physics in ways I had never considered before.”

The paper focuses on work targeting the mu opioid receptor, or MOR. It resides mainly in the central nervous system and the GI tract. It’s like a molecular lock waiting for the right key (a drug like morphine or fentanyl) to unlock or activate a favorable response, such as reduced pain signals. But the same drugs can activate negative responses like drug tolerance, constipation, respiratory depression, addiction and overdose.

“There’s a lot we don’t understand about how opioids interact with the receptors embedded on nerves that mitigate the pain-signaling process,” Juechter said. “So the more we can uncover about how these drugs are interacting with the receptors in our bodies and the responses we feel, the better we’re able to help create pain therapeutics with reduced adverse effects and more beneficial safety profiles.”

What makes the researchers’ study unique is the application of both quantum mechanics conducted by Juechter, Outten and Jones, led by chemistry Professor George Shields, and molecular dynamics carried out by teams at Cal State and Hendrix College.

“It was interesting to see two drugs (morphine and fentanyl) that elicit almost identical effects are binding to the receptor in completely different ways,” Juechter said. “And to demonstrate that with highly accurate quantum mechanics was one of the first times we’ve seen that done.”

The manner in which opioids bind to MOR is diverse and complex. “So the need for a precise computing model becomes essential,” Juechter explained. “Even slight variations in calculations can drastically affect the data and subsequent conclusions.”

The ability to do research computationally can make drug development faster and cheaper, Juechter added. “Being able to paint the picture of what’s going on using empirically-supported mathematical theories, we can streamline the initial process of drug development.”

Impactful undergraduate research is a hallmark of The Furman Advantage, a four-year approach to education that creates a pathway for students to determine who they want to be and how they want to contribute to the world once they leave the university.

Juechter spent about eight months post-graduation fine-tuning the work with her co-authors before the paper was published.

“It was exceedingly evident Dr. Shields wanted to elevate me and give me the opportunity to pursue research,” Outten said.

Juechter hopes the project will set the tone for organic chemists involved in drug research and development.

“I want a role in the health care industry because I like the idea of affecting someone’s life in real time, in a positive way,” she said.

 

Source: https://www.furman.edu/news/neuroscience-grads-studied-how-to-make-opioids-safer

Filed under: Culture,Drug use-various effects,Education,Health,Latest News,Opioids,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :
 by Ella Denton – Kentucky Health News – The Lexington Times – February 23, 2025

Kentucky has battled the opioid crisis for decades, but a new drug prevention campaign targeting youth could protect future generations.

Attorney General Russell Coleman launched the “Better Without It” campaign in partnership with the University of Kentucky, the University of Louisville and Western Kentucky University Wednesday, Feb. 19 at the State Capitol. 

The statewide education campaign will encourage young people to be independent, make their own decisions and stay informed about the dangers of drug use, while also highlighting the positive effects of a drug-free lifestyle. The prevention campaign is modeled after a Florida initiative targeting youth ages 13-26. 

The “first-of-its-kind” campaign in Kentucky will include student-athletes from UK, UofL and WKU. 

 “To reach Kentucky’s young people with an effective statewide drug prevention message, we need the right messengers. That’s why we’re partnering with some of the biggest names in Kentucky’s college athletics to tell the commonwealth’s young people they are truly better without it,” Coleman said in a news release. “Whether you’re a Hilltopper, you throw an “L” or you bleed blue, this is our chance to come together to save lives.”

Through name, image and likeness agreements, or NIL, athletes such as UK basketball’s Trent Noah, UofL basketball’s J’Vonne Hadley and WKU basketball’s Tyler Olden will be some of the first participants in the “Better Without It” campaign. 

The main outlet of this campaign will be through social media platforms. Apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat will all be utilized to promote positive messages about a drug-free lifestyle. 

According to a Pew Research Center survey, in 2024, 96% of teens between the ages of 13 to 17 report using the internet daily, 73% report visiting YouTube daily, 57% said they visited TikTok daily, 50% said they visited Instagram daily and 48% said they visited Snapchat daily. In today’s world, social media is the most effective way to influence the opinions of the future generation.

Aside from social media content, the athletes will also attend on-campus and sporting events to promote their message.

The Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission approved Coleman’s two-year, $3.6 million proposal to establish a research-backed youth drug prevention initiative in September.

The commission was created by the legislature in 2021 to distribute the state’s portion of the $900 million in settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors. Half of the money goes to the state and the other half to local governments.

 “Partnering with our state universities and student-athletes is a great way to reach our youth to promote substance use prevention,” Cabinet for Health and Family Services Secretary and Opioid Commission member Eric Friedlander, said in the release. 

The “Better Without It” campaign will spread across Kentucky in the upcoming months, using the power of social media, popular athletes and influencers to fight against harmful drugs. 

In addition to the “Better Without It” campaign, the prevention program will also promote existing school-based programs and amplify the work of the commission to support youth-focused prevention efforts.

According to the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy, 1,984 Kentuckians died from an overdose death in 2023. Between 2021 and 2023, 101 of those deaths were in Kentuckians aged 24 and younger.

Ella Denton is a student at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health and a spring intern for Kentucky Health News, an independent news service of the Institute for Rural Journalism in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, with support from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky. 

Kentucky Health News is an independent news service of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, with support from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

Filed under: Education,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :
Release: February 25, 2025 by CDC Media Relations

New provisional data from CDC’s National Vital Statistics System predict a nearly 24% decline in drug overdose deaths in the United States for the 12 months ending in September 2024, compared to the previous year. This is the most recent national data available and shows a continued steep decline in overdose deaths. Provisional data shows about 87,000 drug overdose deaths from October 2023 to September 2024, down from around 114,000 the previous year. This is the fewest overdose deaths in any 12-month period since June 2020.

“It is unprecedented to see predicted overdose deaths drop by more than 27,000 over a single year,” said Allison Arwady, MD, MPH, Director of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “That’s more than 70 lives saved every day. CDC’s public health investments, our improved data and laboratory systems for overdose response, and our partnerships with public safety colleagues in every state mean that we are more rapidly identifying emerging drug threats and supporting public health prevention and response activities in communities across America.”

While this national decline is encouraging news, overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-44, highlighting the importance of sustained efforts to ensure this progress continues. President Trump first declared opioid overdose to be a public health emergency in 2017, a designation that remains in place, and the subsequent public health investments to CDC from Congress have transformed the nation’s ability to use data to save lives. In the most recent data, 45 states showed declines in overdose deaths, but five states—Alaska, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota, and Utah—still saw increases in overdose deaths, highlighting the continued need for rapid local data and tailored response. In addition to the large provisional drop in fatal overdoses, we also see smaller decreases in nonfatal overdoses, as measured by emergency department visits for overdose, and welcome continued decreases in self-reported youth substance use.

Multiple factors contribute to the drop in overdose deaths, including widespread, data-driven distribution of naloxone, which is a life-saving medication that can reverse an overdose; better access to evidence-based treatment for substance use disorders; shifts in the illegal drug supply; a resumption of prevention and response after pandemic-related disruptions; and continued investments in prevention and response programs like CDC’s flagship Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) program.

CDC’s OD2A program provides the United States with robust data through its fatal (SUDORS) and nonfatal (DOSE) overdose data systems. Currently, 49 state and 41 local health departments receive OD2A funding to collect, improve, and immediately use the data in their communities to implement life-saving activities. For example, the OD2A program funds comprehensive laboratory testing, which allows us to identify emerging substances involved in nonfatal and fatal overdoses and quickly highlight geographic shifts in the illegal drug supply. State and local public health departments, in partnership with CDC experts, use the data to inform where, what, and when overdose prevention efforts are needed in communities to have the greatest impact and save lives. Finally, CDC funds the Overdose Response Strategy, an innovative public health-public safety data collaboration in every state which allows public safety professionals like law enforcement officials to use data to better understand and intercept illegal drugs.

We are moving in the right direction, and we must accelerate and strengthen CDC’s continued investments in prevention to reduce overdose deaths. Expanding access to evidence-based treatment for substance use disorders—including medications for opioid use disorder such as buprenorphine and methadone—is important, in addition to building more community-driven interventions and promoting education and early intervention to prevent substance use disorders before they begin.

For more information on CDC’s overdose prevention efforts and data, visit: What CDC is Doing | Overdose Prevention | CDC

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are curable or preventable, chronic or acute, or from human activity or deliberate attack, CDC’s world-leading experts protect lives and livelihoods, national security and the U.S. economy by providing timely, common-sense information, and rapidly identifying and responding to diseases, including outbreaks and illnesses. CDC drives science, public health research, and data innovation in communities across the country by investing in local initiatives to protect everyone’s health.

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Prevalence,USA :
George Soros and his Open Society Foundations have been significant supporters of drug policy reform, including efforts to legalize marijuana, but exact figures specifically earmarked for “legalization lobbyists” are not always broken out distinctly in public records. Instead, contributions are typically reported as broader donations to organizations advocating for drug policy reform, which includes lobbying as part of their activities.
Based on available information, Soros has personally funded drug reform efforts since the 1990s, with estimates suggesting he has contributed at least $80 million to the broader legalization movement since 1994. This figure comes from analyses of his foundation’s tax filings and includes support for various initiatives, not just lobbying. His Open Society Foundations have donated roughly $200 million globally to drug policy reform since 1994, with about $25 million specifically focused on marijuana-related reforms, including decriminalization, medical use, and full legalization. These funds have primarily flowed through organizations like the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), which Soros has supported with approximately $4 million annually in recent years.
The DPA, a leading advocate for ending the war on drugs, uses these funds for a mix of research, public education, and lobbying efforts, though the precise portion allocated to lobbying isn’t always specified. Additionally, Soros has supported the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), both of which engage in lobbying for legalization, though his donations to these groups are periodic rather than fixed annual amounts. For instance, in 2014, Soros teamed up with others to provide over 80% of the funding for a Florida medical marijuana ballot initiative, contributing significantly through the DPA.
Beyond these specifics, the Open Society Policy Center, a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm of the Foundations, has ramped up lobbying spending in recent years—tripling its budget between 2021 and 2022 to influence policy directly—but these efforts span multiple issues, not just drug legalization. While the Foundations’ total giving exceeds $32 billion since 1984, only a fraction ties directly to drug policy, and an even smaller slice to lobbying specifically for legalization.
So, while a precise dollar amount for “legalization lobbyists” alone isn’t fully isolated in the data, a reasonable estimate based on historical patterns suggests Soros and Open Society have channeled tens of millions—likely between $25 million and $80 million—into efforts that include lobbying for marijuana legalization over the past three decades, with the DPA’s $4 million annual contribution being a consistent anchor. The actual lobbying-specific figure could be lower, as these sums also cover advocacy, research, and grassroots campaigns. Without more granular public disclosures, this remains an educated approximation.
Source: https://x.com/i/grok/share/FyZ3V2g7xQXKuKO6Z3a21Jy5k
Filed under: Culture,Economic,Latest News,Legal Sector,Social Affairs,USA :
Teen non-medical misuse of medications may be more common than we believed.

by Mark Gold M.D. – Professor of Psychiatry, Yale, Florida and Washington Universities

Updated February 27, 2025 |  Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Key points

  • Teen nonmedical misuse of medications may be more common than previously reported.
  • Adolescents misuse dextromethorphan (DXM) products for their dissociative/hallucinogenic effects and euphoria.
  • A recent alert highlights increasing adolescent interest in using DXM and promethazine together

According to Sharon Levy, MD,Harvard Medical School’s pediatric addiction expert, nonmedical medication misuse may be much more common than previously reported. One of the older fads is in the news again: getting high from cough and cold medicines containing dextromethorphan (DXM). This drug is sometimes combined with prescribed promethazine with codeine. At very high doses, DXM mimics the effects of illegal drugs like phencyclidine (PCP) and ketamine.

More than 125 over-the-counter (OTC) medicines for cough and colds contain DXM. It’s in Coricidin, Dimetapp DM, Nyquil, Robitussin Cough and Cold, and store brands for cough-and-cold medicines. These products are available in pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retail outlets. A safe dose of products with DXM is about 15-30 milligrams (mg) over 24 hours. It usually takes 10 times that amount to make a teenager high.

Teen DXM Slang

A syrup head is someone using cough syrups with DXM to get high. Dexing is getting high on products with DXM. Orange Crush alludes to some cough medicines with DXM. (The name may stem from the orange-colored syrup—and packaging—Delsym.)

Poor man’s PCP and poor man’s X are also common terms, because these drugs are inexpensive, but can cause effects similar to PCP or ecstasy at high doses. Red devils refer to Coricidin tablets or other cough medicines. Robo usually refers to cough syrup with DXM. It derives from the brand name Robitussin but is common slang for any cough syrup. Robo-tripping alludes to abusing products with DXM and, specifically, to the hallucinogenic trips people can attain at high doses.

Parents who hear teens using these terms should ask questions when the child and parent are alone.

Prevalence and Trends

The Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey, conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the University of Michigan, provides insights into adolescent substance use. The survey began monitoring OTC cough-and-cold medication abuse every year in 2006. That year, the MTF reported that 4.2% of 8th-graders, 5.3% of 10th-graders, and 6.9% of 12th-graders misused OTC cough-and-cold medications in the previous year. In 2015, 2.6% of 8th-graders, 3.3% of 10th-graders, and 4.0% of 12th-graders reported past-year misuse. The most recent data, in 2024, indicate that the percentage dropped somewhat. However, a recent alert from the National Drug Early Warning System at the University of Florida (NDEWS) suggests a resurgence of interest in DXM and its combination with antihistamines.

DXM+ Combination Dangers

When taken alone, DXM’s dissociative and hallucinogenic effects may include euphoria, altered perception of time, paranoia, disorientation, and hallucinations. Physical symptoms of intoxication are hyperexcitability, problems walking, involuntary eye movements, and irritability. High doses can lead to impaired motor function, numbness, nausea and vomiting, increased heart rate, and elevated blood pressure. Chronic misuse results in dependence and severe psychological or physical health issues.

Combining DXM with other substances, especially alcohol, sleeping pills, antihistamines, or tranquilizers, is highly risky, as is combining DXM with antidepressants affecting serotonin, due to the risk of a possibly life-threatening serotonin syndrome.

Combining DXM With Promethazine

Combining the abuse of the prescribed antihistamine promethazine (Phenergan) with DXM may be increasing. The recent alert from the National Drug Early Warning System suggested that this new combination is an emerging threat.

The NDEWS recently checked for recent reports of saccharine (artificial sugar) being detected in abused drugs. Putting on their detective hats, the NDEWS team discovered that increased saccharine in drugs was caused by users adding cough syrup to promethazine. The signal for this combination was detected in more than double the number noted in early 2024.

Combining DXM and promethazine can amplify central nervous system depression, leading to increased drowsiness, dizziness, and impaired motor function. High doses may cause aggression, severe respiratory depression, hallucinations, delirium, paranoia, and cognitive impairments. Reddit social media reports noted an increased risks of falls and injuries due to severely impaired coordination and balance from the DXM-and-promethazine combination.

Promethazine with codeine is still available by prescription in the U.S., but access is restricted due to its classification as a Schedule V controlled substance at the federal level. Pharmacies and healthcare providers have become more cautious in prescribing promethazine with codeine due to its association with recreational use. Some manufacturers have discontinued production of promethazine with codeine, but generic versions remain on the market under tight regulation.

Purple drank is drug slang for the mixture containing codeine and promethazine mixed with a soft drink such as Sprite or Fanta—and sometimes with candy such as Jolly Ranchers. The drink gets its name from the purple color of some cough syrups. Purple drank has been popularized in certain music and hip-hop cultures, with some artists glorifying its use in their lyrics. However, many rappers who once promoted the drug later warned against its dangers after experiencing serious health consequences themselves or witnessing peers suffer from addiction and overdoses.

Professor Linda Cottler, Ph.D., M.P.H., director of NDEWS. commented: “Healthcare professionals should be aware of the potential for abuse and monitor for signs in patients, especially adolescents and young adults,”  Linda added: “Parents should be aware of these combinations and talk to their children about avoiding “cough” medicines acquired from friends, friend’s siblings, or friends’ parents.”

Summary

While the combination of DXM and promethazine is not commonly reported in drug abuse or emergency-room cases, misuse could lead to significant health risks. Stores have started to keep these cough and cold remedies behind the counter to reduce access and potential for teen abuse. Some makers of OTC medicines with DXM have put warning labels on their packaging about the potential for abuse. Many states have banned sales of meds with DXM to minors. These actions have helped reduce teen DXM abuse. However, recent teen interest in abuse of combined DXM and promethazine is concerning.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/202502/teenage-abuse-of-cough-medicines-and-promethazine

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Medicines,Mental Health,Prescription Drugs,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :
Opinion – by Hannah E. Meyers, Published Feb. 16, 2025, 6:19 a.m. ET
Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute.

In November, Donald Trump made significant electoral gains in New York’s black and Latino neighborhoods, and in the city’s least affluent communities. Now he is poised to take an important step to improve public safety in these voters’ neighborhoods.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-SI) last week wrote to new Attorney General Pam Bondi, pleading for the administration to shut down the city’s two “safe injection sites.”

These facilities, located in East Harlem and Washington Heights, provide supervision to drug abusers as they consume harmful substances like fentanyl, meth, heroin and cocaine.

Yes, these are illegal drugs under federal law — and the aptly nicknamed federal “crack house statute” prevents individuals from retaining property for their consumption.

Indeed, Trump’s Justice Department successfully shuttered similar sites in the past – In 2019, his first administration sued to stop a Philadelphia injection center from opening, and in 2024 a US District Court judge in Pennsylvania finally agreed that the center was not exempt from federal drug laws.

Now Trump should listen to his NYC minority constituents and close the injection sites that are harming their neighborhoods.

New York’s two centers, both run by non-profit OnPoint, were the first in the nation, opening in 2021 under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio — who never met an injurious policy he wouldn’t support in the name of racial justice.

De Blasio gambled successfully that the Biden administration wouldn’t intervene.

OnPoint claims to have saved over 1,000 lives by preventing overdoses. But as my colleague Charles Fain Lehman has pointed out, the sites do not reduce addiction — so they are likely just delaying fatalities: More than 15% of those administered naloxone are dead within a year.

Indeed, data shows that NYC overdose rates have continued to rise since the centers opened.

That’s no surprise, since a rigorous look at the data from even the most touted injection sites in other countries provide no evidence of their effectiveness

But rigor has never been the calling card for politicians and advocates who happily sacrifice other people’s communities in the name of compassion.

State Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) has had the chutzpah to claim that “public drug use, syringe litter and drug-related crime goes down” around sites. In 2023, Rivera urged Gov. Hochul to expand supervised consumption sites statewide, and sponsored Senate legislation — still in committee — to do so.

In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams also proposed adding three more facilities to NYC — but he might be amenable to updating his views with some pressure from Washington.

And that pressure will come if Trump cares about the lives of local residents.

While major crimes fell 13% in northern Manhattan over the past two years, the predominantly black and Hispanic precinct around the East Harlem drug site has seen an almost 8% rise in major crime.

I’ve toured that location with the Greater Harlem Coalition. Members pointed out the large early-childhood education center directly across the street from the injection site, as parents hurried their tots into school in plain view of ongoing drug deals.

The perimeter of the block is dotted with addicts nodding off. Nearby restaurants have had to invest in private security to defend against the criminality the center attracts to the neighborhood.

What’s been keeping this site open despite four years in which the only evidenced change is neighborhood degradation?

Shameless advocacy by pompous, ideologically motivated and race-obsessed elites . . . whose kids don’t go to preschool in Harlem.

In August, Greater Harlem Coalition co-founder Shawn Hill was interviewed by one such far-left advocate: Ryan McNeil, director of harm reduction research at Yale’s School of Medicine.

McNeil was conducting funded “research” into safe injection sites — but a “hot mic” recording revealed his and his colleagues’ woke bias in favor of supporting safe injection sites (and drug decriminalization, more broadly).

With no sense of irony, McNeil — who is himself Caucasian — scorned Harlemites’ concerns over open drug abuse as nothing but “white discomfort,” and derided Hill for suggesting that the Yale researchers should walk around and speak with actual local residents.

But Trump has every reason to listen to these locals, three-quarters of whom are black or Latino.

And it would behove Adams, who faces a crowded primary race this summer, to reverse his past stance and voice support for a federal closure of the city’s two drug consumption sites.

In East Harlem, Trump won about 860 more votes last year than in 2020. Now these supporters, and their neighbors he has yet to persuade, are depending on his help.

 

Source: https://nypost.com/2025/02/16/opinion/inject-some-common-sense-shut-down-nycs-safe-drug-sites/

Filed under: Addiction,Crime/Violence/Prison,Culture,Drug use-various effects,Education,Health,HIV/Injecting-Drug-Users,Latest News,Needle Exchange,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

by  Steven T. Bell,  Special Agent in Charge – Omaha Drug Enforcement Administration, and Emily Murray.
February 18, 2025


In an effort to build on drug education messaging to tribal communities, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Omaha Division worked with the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska and Mandaree High School of North Dakota to develop a poster that blends Native Indian imagery with wording emphasizing the importance of culture over drug use.

During visits to tribal communities, DEA’s community outreach specialist noticed posters sounding the alarm to human trafficking, domestic violence and missing  and murdered indigenous women at schools and buildings across Reservations. The common thread tying each poster together was an emphasis on native culture.

Looking to build on the Good Medicine Bundle

Culture-based prevention resources available through DEA’s Operation Prevention, conversation began on how best to help tribal communities relate to important messaging on drug use. Elders were consulted and the vision of a poster, reflecting youth, culture and the DEA mission, began to take shape.
With permission from the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, photos reflecting tribal values were taken in Norfolk. Youth from the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska highlighted the significant role dance plays in Native Indian Culture. Dancing is used to tell stories, honor ancestors and celebrate important events. A photo of a drum from Mandaree High School places importance on the sacred instrument often used to symbolize the heartbeat of the earth. The wording at the top of the poster, “Drumming and Dance: The Heartbeat of our Culture, NOTDRUGS,” was written for tribal members to feel connected with the poster.
“It’s critical that we find ways to communicate with all members of our communities about the dangers of drug use,” DEA Omaha Division Special Agent in Charge Steven T. Bell said. “Our hope is that this poster resonates with tribal communities and sparks conversation about life choices and their ensuing consequences.”

Source: https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2025/02/18/dea-works-tribal-communities-advance-drug-education

Filed under: Culture,Education,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,Uncategorized,USA,Youth :

Wall Street Journal      by Patricia Kowsmann, Dylan Tokar and Brian Spegele                      Feb. 18, 2025   

Chinese money brokers are teaming up with Mexican cartels, greasing the wheels of the fentanyl trade, U.S. officials say

On an October morning in 2022, an alleged drug trafficker drove a white pickup truck into the parking lot of a Global Fresh Market in San Gabriel, Calif., and stopped alongside a blue Maserati.

After a quick discussion with a woman in the Maserati, the man placed a large black bag in the sportscar’s back seat. Members of a U.S. government task force, who were watching, say it contained some $300,000 in cash.

The drop was part of what U.S. officials say is a new front in America’s war on drugs: an emerging partnership that has made China a crucial pit stop for dirty money flowing from the U.S.’s fentanyl crisis, according to law-enforcement officials and court documents.

Chinese money brokers, part of an underground banking system that has long served the country’s immigrant diaspora, have become go-to partners for fentanyl traffickers and other criminal groups needing to launder illicit drug profits, officials say.

Long operating in the shadows, the Chinese brokers use intermediaries, such as the woman in the Maserati, to collect drug profits from fentanyl dealers. Then, through a series of transactions, they sell those dollars to Chinese customers who want cash in the U.S. for purposes such as buying real estate or other investments, but can’t legally send money directly from China because of capital controls there.  The drug dealers end up with clean money in the process, law-enforcement officials say.

In the case involving the Maserati, dubbed “Operation Fortune Runner,” members of the Drug Enforcement Administration task force spent years investigating one such network, including thousands of hours of street-level surveillance. Traffic stops of suspects turned up cash stowed in a Fruity Pebbles cereal box and a gift bag with “Happy Birthday” printed on the side.

The investigation eventually led to indictments of 24 individuals last year, involving more than $50 million in drug proceeds prosecutors say Chinese brokers were laundering for associates of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.

Evidence of a deepening relationship between drug cartels and Chinese money brokers presents a challenge for President Trump, who has vowed to end the fentanyl crisis that causes the death of tens of thousands of Americans every year.

So far, his focus has been on cutting off the flow of fentanyl and the precursor ingredients that are used to make it into the U.S., imposing tariffs against producing countries, including a new 10% tariff on Chinese imports to the U.S. earlier this month.

But shutting down the sprawling network of money brokers, who U.S. officials think are critical to greasing the wheels of the trade, could also prove difficult.

In testimony to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party last year, a former DEA official estimated global drug sales reach $500 billion to $750 billion annually. The official said he believed Chinese networks were laundering a sizable chunk of it.

“The fentanyl crisis starts in China, and it ends in China,” Jarod Forget, DEA’s acting chief of operations, said in an interview.

China’s Foreign Ministry, in a written response to questions, didn’t directly address the role of Chinese nationals laundering drug proceeds. It said the root of the fentanyl crisis lies in the U.S. itself, and Trump’s tariffs ignored the results of U.S.-China cooperation, which has included cracking down on fentanyl production in China.

“Blaming others will not solve this problem,” the Foreign Ministry said. “Pressure and threats are not the right way to deal with China.”

While deaths from overdoses have fallen, fentanyl remains the U.S.’s deadliest drug. Last year, the amount of fentanyl the DEA seized—more than 55 million pills and nearly 8,000 pounds of powder—was estimated by the DEA to be enough to kill every American.

How the system works 

Drug cartels have always faced the problem of getting their profits from illegal sales in the U.S. converted into clean money and sent back home. Some have tapped middlemen who charge a high commission to help launder the money through a series of transactions that involve Colombian pesos, in what is known as the black-market peso exchange, according to U.S. officials.

Chinese money brokers came in with a much faster and cheaper service. They had a competitive edge because so many people in China want U.S. dollars, U.S. officials say.

The transaction begins in the U.S. Drug traffickers sell fentanyl or other narcotics to U.S. customers for cash. They then turn over that cash to a Chinese money broker.

The Chinese money broker now advertises the U.S. dollars on WeChat, a Chinese app. To buy them, a Chinese customer will transfer yuan, including a commission, into the broker’s bank account in China.

The Chinese broker then releases the U.S. dollars to Chinese customers who want to spend money in the U.S., acquiring real estate, paying college tuition, gambling, or making other investments.

Now the Chinese money broker needs to get the yuan to the drug traffickers in Mexico. One way to do that is for the broker to exchange the yuan for pesos in Mexico through a business that is looking to buy Chinese goods for export to Mexico.

The Chinese goods are exported to Mexico and sold. The Chinese broker now has Mexican pesos, which it can hand over to the Mexican cartel, minus a 1–2% commission.

Under China’s capital controls, meant to keep too much money from flowing out of the country, Chinese citizens are limited to buying only $50,000 worth of foreign currency each year. As China’s economy slows and its real-estate and stock markets languish, more Chinese want to move money overseas to protect their wealth. Tapping into underground banks connected to the fentanyl trade is a way to do that, U.S. officials say.

This is how it works: The Mexican cartels’ U.S. operatives provide the U.S. cash they received from selling fentanyl to a broker working for a Chinese money-laundering ring, all in the U.S. Through the Chinese messaging app WeChat, the brokers advertise the cash to people in China who could use the money on U.S. soil, according to current and former law-enforcement officials.

Once a Chinese buyer of the U.S. dollars is found, that person transfers the equivalent in Chinese yuan, plus a hefty commission, to a bank account in China belonging to the money launderers. The Chinese customer then receives access to the cash bought in the U.S.

The cartel’s money, now clean, is sitting in the Chinese money broker’s bank account in China. The money can then get back to the cartel in a couple of ways. It can be used to buy fentanyl precursors for the cartel, starting the cycle again.

Or, the yuan can be used to buy Chinese manufactured goods that are then shipped to Mexico and sold for pesos, which are then handed to the cartels.

Some Chinese nationals using the service might not know it involves drugs, U.S. officials say.

“This is now one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent way in the world that people launder money,” said Craig Timm, a former money-laundering official in the U.S. Department of Justice who is now at the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists.

Chinese money brokers have also differentiated themselves from competitors by taking on some of the risk associated with this multistep process. Instead of waiting until the process is complete to release pesos to Mexican cartels, they operate essentially on credit, transferring money to drug traffickers soon after receiving a cash delivery in the U.S., officials say.

The commission they charge drug traffickers is small, because they also make money from selling U.S. dollars to customers of their underground banking network.

“When the Colombians controlled it, it cost 7% to 10%. The Chinese were charging 1% to 2%. It was unheard of,” said Chris Urben, a former DEA agent who saw firsthand the emergence of Chinese money launderers in the New York area.

“All of a sudden, we were seeing Chinese money launderers picking up drug money all across the U.S.,” added Urben, now a managing director at private investigations firm Nardello & Co.

Many former law-enforcement officials say more cooperation with China is needed.

“A lot of the money under the scheme is flowing through banks in China where the Chinese have oversight,” said Anthony Ruggiero, a former senior U.S. Treasury official now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The DEA and other agencies have launched a spate of investigations in the U.S. In one case, two Chinese nationals were charged with laundering money for Mexican cartels after agents went undercover as money couriers. Both were later convicted, with one of the men receiving a 10-year sentence in December for taking part in efforts to launder $62 million.

The task force surveilling the cash drop in San Gabriel, Calif., in 2022 was part of a special DEA team that worked wiretaps on drug trafficking investigations. Their target was an alleged Chinese money-laundering ring run by a man named Sai Zhang who did business with alleged drug dealers, including the Sinaloa cartel, and cash runners such as the woman in the blue Maserati, who wasn’t identified in court records.

Officers spent several years following the suspects, watching them pick up and drop off bags throughout the Los Angeles area.

On the October morning in San Gabriel, officers said they were relying on a wiretapped phone conversation between two members of Zhang’s ring who were organizing the pick up of $300,000.

After the bag was handed off to the blue Maserati, agents followed the car to a residence, where the money was allegedly mixed with other drug proceeds and parceled out to underground banking customers, people familiar with the matter said. Later, police pulled over a driver who had left the residence and found $25,000, according to court documents.

Zhang was among the people charged with laundering money, running an unlicensed money transmitting business and facilitating drug trafficking. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. A lawyer for Zhang didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Chinese authorities said in June they had arrested in the mainland one of the men indicted for allegedly working with the network.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-fentanyl-trade-network-9685fde2?mod=hp_lead_pos5

Filed under: Crime/Violence/Prison,Culture,Fentanyl,Latest News,USA :

Dangerous but common misconceptions can prevent crucial early addiction treatment.

Key points:

  • Misconceptions and the ignoring of research-based evidence prevent crucial early treatment of addiction.
  • Drugs of abuse cause health, life, and relationship problems with many long-lasting effects.
  • Teen and young adult drug prevention is necessary and needs funding.

Research published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals reveals key information on the realities of addiction, exposing pervasive myths and misconceptions, as in these examples.

False Belief 1: Drug experimentation is normal for teens and shouldn’t alarm parents.

Drug use and experimentation among teens often is ignored by many—even parents, who then may be unaware that any use places adolescent brains in jeopardy. For today’s teens, life often feels overwhelming, but avoiding alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other drugs is their one best choice to promote continued healthy physical and mental development. Preventing or delaying all teenage substance use not only reduces their current risks for depression, psychosis, and school/learning problems, but it also significantly decreases their probability of addiction as adults.

Harvard’s Sharon Levy, MD, MPH, and founding National Institute of Drug Abuse Director Robert DuPont, MD, strongly advocate a zero-tolerance approach to youth substance use. They emphasize that no amount of drug use is safe for young people. They promote the One Choice initiative encouraging adolescents to avoid substance use: alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other drugs.

It’s now known that THC in marijuana interferes with the developing brain circuits responsible for regulating behavior, leading to increased risk-taking and poor decision-making. Even infrequent teen use can impede judgment, increasing the probability of risky behaviors and accidents. Adolescents also are more likely than adults to develop cannabis use disorder (CUD) due to their heightened neuroplasticity during this developmental stage. The resulting impairment may lead to academic underperformance and problematic interpersonal relationships.

False Belief 2: Addiction is a personal weakness.

Addiction is not about people being weak-minded. It’s far more complicated. Becoming addicted depends on the drug used, dose, route, frequency, and risk factors like ages of users. Also, the same drug at the same dose affects people differently because of personal differences, as well as the presence/absence of traumatic past life experiences.

Yale’s Joel Gelernter identified genetic variants associated with vulnerability to addictions. However, genetic characteristics themselves interact with environmental factors in developing substance use disorders (SUDs). As Nora Volkow, director of NIDA, has said, “Addiction is a complex disease of a complex brain; ignoring this fact will only hamper our efforts to find effective solutions …”

False Belief 3: People must hit “rock bottom” to recover from addiction.

No, no, and no! Roadside alcohol testing has prevented thousands of deaths and helped many people with alcohol use disorders (AUD) obtain help, sometimes by coercion of courts. About 50 percent of those arrested for DUI have an AUD. Users often deny they have a problem with drugs or alcohol and believe they are truthful. But they are lying to themselves.

Addiction is a chronic, relapsing condition driven by changes in brain circuitry, particularly in areas controlling reward, stress, and decision-making. While some people seek help after suffering dire consequences, others are compelled into treatment by the courts, based on a past offense. Waiting to hit “rock bottom” increases major risks of harming the person’s relationships, job, and health—and strengthens the hold of the drug over the person.

False Belief 4: Addiction treatment never works.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Medical School recently analyzed survey data from nearly 57,000 participants in 21 countries over 19 years, providing clear data. They discovered that the number-one barrier to treatment was addicted people themselves: Most were in denial and did not recognize they needed treatment.

Alcoholics Anonymous is often successful, non-judgmentally providing new members a roadmap, role models, hope, and social connections. Successful people actively involved in AA complain that their friends kept asking them why they “weren’t cured yet” since they went to so many meetings. But going to meetings is what works.

Even among experts, there’s no consensus on what constitutes successful treatment. To some, success is that the person is still alive and hasn’t been rushed to the emergency room because of an overdose in the past 6 months or year. To others, it is taking treatment medications. And to still others, only abstinence and a full resumption of all family and work obligations counted as success.

Another issue is that most people with SUDs have multiple addictions. Even when they overdosed, most took multiple drugs. It’s also true that many people come to treatment also needing treatment for other medical, addiction, and psychiatric problems. Yet only rarely are patients evaluated and treated for all issues.

False Belief 5: Overdoses of drugs don’t cause brain damage.

Drugs of abuse can harm the brain. Overdose survivors may suffer from undetected brain damage and hypoxic brain injury caused by opioid-induced respiratory depression. As a society, we better understand hypoxia as associated with drowning or choking than its much more common occurrence in drug overdoses with loss of consciousness.

Recent studies estimate that at least half of people using opioids have illicitly experienced a non-fatal overdose or witnessed an overdose. People who regularly use drugs are at elevated risk of brain injury due to accidents, fights, and overdoses. A single fentanyl overdose could cause hypoxia, brain injury, and memory and concentration problems.

Overdoses with counterfeit pills, cocaine, methamphetamine, xylazine, or heroin usually also include fentanyl, making neurologically compromising overdoses more common.

Summary

Myths and misconceptions increase stigma and decrease the likelihood that someone with an addictive illness will receive prompt, effective treatment. We need early intervention and treatment during the preaddiction phase. Bottom line: Preventing teen and young adult use is crucial.

Mark Gold M.D.

Mark S. Gold, M.D., is a pioneering researcher, professor, and chairman of psychiatry at Yale, the University of Florida, and Washington University in St Louis. His theories have changed the field, stimulated additional research, and led to new understanding and treatments for opioid use disorders, cocaine use disorders, overeating, smoking, and depression.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/addiction-outlook/202502/5-common-false-beliefs-about-drug-use-users-and-addiction
Filed under: Addiction,Brain and Behaviour,Crime/Violence/Prison,Culture,Economic,HIV/Injecting-Drug-Users,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,Parents,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Psychiatric drugs,Social Affairs (Papers),USA,Vaping :

by Dan Krauth WABC logo    Eyewitness News – Friday, February 14, 2025

Dan Krauth has more on the letter sent to the newly confirmed attorney general asking her to shut down safe injection sites in New York City.

NEW YORK (WABC) — There are places people can go take illegal drugs under the watchful eye of supervisors to ensure they don’t die.

They are called Overdose Prevention Centers, or also known as safe injection sites, and there are two of them in New York City — the first of its kind in the nation.

Now, after more than three years of operating, there’s a new effort under a new president to shut down the centers that are run by a non-profit organization.

It’s called OnPoint NYC and they have two locations in Washington Heights and East Harlem.

Drug users can take their drug of choice from heroin to cocaine inside the centers and supervisors intervene, most times with oxygen, if the user starts to overdose. They also provide test strips for drugs to ensure they don’t have fatal doses of fentanyl inside.

Since opening in 2021, the executive director said they’ve intervened in more than 1,700 overdoses. They also provide services like medical help, substance abuse treatment and housing assistance.

Opponents say the centers encourage people to do illegal drugs.

“They’re encouraging people to use by giving them a community center to go to and to use heroin, it’s something that’s encouraging addicts not helping them,” said Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis.

She sent a letter to the newly confirmed attorney general, asking her to shut down both locations along with any others that have opened across the country.

“They don’t work, these heroin injection centers, in fact they attract crime to the neighborhood but also drug dealing, it just does not make sense and they should be shut down,” Malliotakis said.

In response, the executive director of OnPoint NYC sent Eyewitness News a statement:

“OPCs save lives. At OnPoint NYC, our staff has intervened in over 1,700 overdoses, providing life-saving care to mothers, fathers, and loved ones,” said OnPoint NYC Executive Director Sam Rivera. “Every single one of them deserves compassion and a chance at healing. I’m incredibly proud of our team and continually inspired by the dedication they show every day. They don’t just look at the overdose epidemic and wonder what can be done-they don’t have that luxury. They act, because they have lives to save. This work is not just vital; it’s transformational. Lives are being saved, hope is being restored, and healing is possible.”

 

Source:  https://abc7ny.com/post/president-trump-asked-shut-down-overdose-prevention-centers-have-operated-3-years-nyc/15907033/

Filed under: Addiction,Culture,Latest News,Mental Health,Political Sector,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :
COMMENTARY:  Public Health  – Feb 14, 2025

by Paul J. Larkin – Rumpel Senior Legal Research Fellow and Bertha K. Madras, PhD – Professor of psychobiology at Harvard Medical School, based at McLean Hospital and cross appointed at the Massachusetts General

Key Takeaways

Today, some members of America’s political class are desensitized to the drug crisis. They tolerate normalizing psychoactive substance use.

The relentless movement to legalize drug use has succeeded, largely by appealing to the goodwill and sympathies of the American public.

For supply reduction, the U.S. must send a clear message to the world that we are not an open market for drugs.

The federal government has long sought to prevent the horrors of drug addiction by interdicting the supply of dangerous psychoactive drugs—and reducing demand for them.

One step was the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. It established the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) within the Executive Office of the President. Headed by a director colloquially known as “drug czar,” ONDCP had the task of developing a national drug-control strategy to reduce drug use. Its creation symbolized a strong bipartisan effort to prevent illicit drugs from destroying lives and weakening the nation.

Sadly, we have lost that shared mission. No president since George W. Bush has publicly demonstrated a deep and firm support for ONDCP and its mission.

The agency does not reside in the White House office building, let alone the West Wing. The federal government has largely been a bystander despite the unraveling of restrictive opioid prescribing, state implementation of medical/recreational marijuana programs in violation of federal laws, and the incipient movement by states to legalize psychedelics. Most presidents have largely ignored these trends.

The first Trump administration assembled a commission to combat drug addiction and the opioid crisis. The current one should support a comprehensive effort led by ONDCP to overhaul drug policies and strengthen America’s commitment to reducing and delegitimizing drug use. We need a revitalized ONDCP equipped with innovative goals and measurable outcomes to disrupt the pipeline to addiction and to cease preventable, premature deaths and mental health decline. A single centralized agency ensures coordination across federal agencies, state, and local levels to maximize efficiency and accountability.

Today, some members of America’s political class are desensitized to the drug crisis. They tolerate normalizing psychoactive substance use and the addiction, health crises, deaths, and collateral damage to families that follow.

Reformers advocate destigmatizing regular use of hazardous psychoactive drugs. “Harm reduction” practices, initially framed as temporary measures, now are uncritically promoted in some quarters without clear boundaries or outcome goals.

This “Meet drug users where they are” approach has regressed to a “Leave them where they are” one. The grim realities of “tranq”-induced catatonia on the streets of Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Boston’s Mass and Cass intersection, and other drug-ridden homeless encampments lay bare the stark failure of America’s waning resolve to minimize drug use.

Among other nations, we are an outlier. America’s drug crisis has escalated dramatically since ONDCP was born. Overdose deaths surged from 3,907 (1.6 per 100,000) in 1987 to a record 107,543 (32.2 per 100,000) in 2023, with teen rates doubling recently. Among twelfth-graders, 13 percent use marijuana daily, despite heightened risks for addiction and psychosis. In 2023, daily use of marijuana and regular use of hallucinogens among 19- to 30-year-olds reached record levels, fueled by pervasive myths about “safety” or “medical” efficacy

Whether used for medical or recreational purposes, or both, 25 percent of cannabis users have a cannabis-use disorder; among twelve- to 24-year-olds, such a disorder is more prevalent than alcohol-use disorder. Over 90 percent of individuals with substance-use disorders (48.7 million people) neither recognize their need for help nor seek treatment.

Topping it off, seizures of fentanyl-laced pills exploded from 49,000 in 2017 to a staggering 115 million in 2023. Reversing this runaway train demands a transformative political and cultural shift led by the president, ONDCP, and Congress.

How?

Start by learning from past mistakes. The relentless movement to legalize drug use has succeeded, largely by appealing to the goodwill and sympathies of the American public. In 1996, activists persuaded California’s voters to adopt marijuana as a medicine by labelling it as “compassionate use” for end-stage cancer and HIV-AIDS wasting.

That success gave legalizers a foothold. Slowly, the movement persuaded other states to adopt medical-use marijuana for myriad purposes without a shred of evidence; this later morphed into recreational-use programs. Dual-purpose “dispensaries” now sell marijuana for any reason. Activists persuaded the medical profession that pain was the “fifth vital sign” and pressured caregivers to prescribe highly addictive opioids liberally for any type of pain. We know where that went.

Finally, recent campaigns to use political means to normalize hallucinogens for medical use bear a striking resemblance to the two campaigns noted above, including media hype and their tendency to lampoon cautious Cassandras. Compassion is a virtue, except when it leads to long-term harm.

Those who are driving the normalization of substance use as a chemical shortcut for pleasure or relief are willing to sacrifice long-term well-being for short-term escapism. Without prevention strategies to disrupt this pathway of use, addiction, and death, no amount of treatment or law enforcement will resolve the crisis.

We should oppose efforts to destigmatize drug use but support destigmatization of individuals with substance-use disorders to ease their entry into treatment and recovery. To end the frequently heard lament of parents—“If only I knew”—we need a national educational campaign that counters the myths promulgated by proponents.

We need more research to understand why substance-use disorders are resistant to treatment- and recovery. Harm-reduction strategies that don’t show objective reductions in disordered use should be challenged. And we must recognize that minorities are hurt, not helped, by liberalizing drug use because it can worsen the conditions in already suffering neighborhoods.

Finally, we should strengthen ONDCP by returning it to cabinet-level status and empowering it to adopt a results-driven business model. Steps would include, on the demand side, ensuring that federal funding is allocated to prevention and treatment programs that prioritize objective, evidence-based positive outcomes.

For supply reduction, the U.S. must send a clear message to the world that we are not an open market for drugs. This will involve stopping the smuggling of fentanyl, dismantling illegal markets, and seizing traffickers’ ill-gotten gains. Incentives and penalties can persuade nations that produce drugs and their precursor chemicals to curb their export of substances poisoning Americans.

President Trump has a unique opportunity to pivot and reform America’s recurring drug crises. A bold approach will signal America’s commitment to reversing our damaging trajectory.

This piece originally appeared in the National Review

Source:  https://www.heritage.org/public-health/commentary/the-drug-crisis-hasnt-gone-away-the-trump-administration-should-confront

Filed under: Culture,Drug Specifics,Drug use-various effects,Effects of Drugs,Latest News,Mental Health,Political Sector,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :

(1)    Use of Alternative Payment Models for Substance Use Disorder Prevention in the United States: Development of a Conceptual Framework

Journal: Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy, 2025, doi: 10.1186/ s13011-025-00635-z

Authors: Elian Rosenfeld, Sarah Potter, Jennifer Caputo, Sushmita Shoma Ghose, Nelia Nadal, Christopher M. Jones, … Michael T. French

Abstract:

Background: Alternative payment models (APMs) are methods through which insurers reimburse health care providers and are widely used to improve the quality and value of health care. While there is a growing movement to utilize APMs for substance use disorder (SUD) treatment services, they have rarely included SUD prevention strategies. Challenges to using APMs for SUD prevention include underdeveloped program outcome measures, inadequate SUD prevention funding, and lack of clarity regarding what prevention strategies might fit within the scope of APMs.

Methods: In November 2023, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), through a contract with Westat, convened an expert panel to refine a preliminary conceptual framework developed for utilizing APMs for SUD prevention and to identify strategies to encourage their adoption.

Results: The conceptual framework agreed upon by the panel provides expert consensus on how APMs could finance a variety of prevention programs across diverse populations and settings. Additional efforts are needed to accelerate the support for and adoption of APMs for SUD prevention, and the principles of health equity and community engagement should underpin these efforts. Opportunities to increase the use of APMs for SUD prevention include educating key groups, expanding and promoting the SUD prevention workforce, establishing funding for pilot studies, identifying evidence-based core components of SUD prevention, analyzing the cost effectiveness of APMs for SUD prevention, and aligning funding across federal agencies.

Conclusion: Given that the use of APMs for SUD prevention is a new practice, additional research, education, and resources are needed. The conceptual framework and strategies generated by the expert panel offer a path for future research. SUD health care stakeholders should consider ways that SUD prevention can be effectively and equitably implemented within APMs.

To read the full text of the article, please visit the publisher’s website.

(2)     Quitline-Based Young Adult Vaping Cessation: A Randomized Clinical Trial Examining NRT and mHealth

Journal: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2024 .10.019

Authors: Katrina A. Vickerman, Kelly M. Carpenter, Kristina Mullis, Abigail B. Shoben, Julianna Nemeth, Elizabeth Mayers, & Elizabeth G. Klein

Abstract:

Introduction: Broad-reaching, effective e-cigarette cessation interventions are needed.

Study design: This remote, randomized clinical trial tested a mHealth program and nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for young adult vaping cessation.

Setting/participants: Social media was used from 2021 to 2022 to recruit 508 young adults (aged 18-24 years) in the U.S. who exclusively and regularly (20+ days of last 30) used e-cigarettes and were interested in quitting.

Intervention: All were offered 2 coaching calls and needed to complete the first call for full study enrollment. Participants were randomized to one of 4 groups in the 2×2 design: mailed NRT (8 weeks versus none) and/or mHealth (yes versus no; stand-alone text program including links to videos and online content).

Main outcome measures: Self-reported 7-day point prevalence vaping abstinence at 3 months.

Results: A total of 981 participants were eligible and randomized; 508 (52%) fully enrolled by completing the first call. Enrolled participants were 71% female, 31% non-White, and 78% vaped daily. Overall, 74% completed the 3-month survey. Overall, 83% in the mailed NRT groups and 24% in the no-mailed NRT groups self-reported NRT use. Intent-to-treat 7-day point prevalence abstinence rates (missing assumed vaping) were 41% for calls only, 43% for Calls+mHealth, 48% for Calls+NRT, and 48% for Calls+NRT+mHealth. There were no statistically significant differences for mailed NRT (versus no-mailed NRT; OR=1.3; 95% CI=0.91, 1.84; p=0.14) or mHealth (versus no mHealth; OR=1.04; 95% CI=0.73, 1.47; p=0.84).

Conclusions: This quitline-delivered intervention was successful at helping young adults quit vaping, with almost half abstinent after 3 months. Higher than anticipated quit rates reduced power to identify significant group differences. Mailed NRT and mHealth did not significantly improve quit rates, in the context of an active control of a 2-call coaching program. Future research is needed to examine the independent effects of coaching calls, NRT, and mHealth in a fully-powered randomized control trial.

To read the full text of the article, please visit the publisher’s website.

(3)     The Alcohol Exposome

Journal: Alcohol, 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.alcohol.2024.12.003

Authors: Nousha H. Sabet, & Todd A. Wyatt

Abstract:
Science is now in a new era of exposome research that strives to build a more all-inclusive, panoramic view in the quest for answers; this is especially true in the field of toxicology. Alcohol exposure researchers have been examining the multivariate co-exposures that may either exacerbate or initiate alcohol-related tissue/organ injuries. This manuscript presents selected key variables that represent the Alcohol Exposome. The primary variables that make up the Alcohol Exposome can include comorbidities such as cigarettes, poor diet, occupational hazards, environmental hazards, infectious agents, and aging. In addition to representing multiple factors, the Alcohol Exposome examines the various types of intercellular communications that are carried from one organ system to another and may greatly impact the types of injuries and metabolites caused by alcohol exposure. The intent of defining the Alcohol Exposome is to bring the newly expanded definition of Exposomics, meaning the study of the exposome, to the field of alcohol research and to emphasize the need for examining research results in a non-isolated environment representing a more relevant manner in which all human physiology exists.

To read the full text of the article, please visit the publisher’s website.

(4)     Neural Variability and Cognitive Control in Individuals with Opioid Use Disorder

Journal: JAMA Network Open, 2025, doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.55165

Authors: Jean Ye, Saloni Mehta, Hannah Peterson, Ahmad Ibrahim, Gul Saeed, Sarah Linsky, … Dustin Scheinost

Abstract:

Importance: Opioid use disorder (OUD) impacts millions of people worldwide. Prior studies investigating its underpinning neural mechanisms have not often considered how brain signals evolve over time, so it remains unclear whether brain dynamics are altered in OUD and have subsequent behavioral implications.

Objective: To characterize brain dynamic alterations and their association with cognitive control in individuals with OUD.

Design, setting, and participants: This case-control study collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from individuals with OUD and healthy control (HC) participants. The study was performed at an academic research center and an outpatient clinic from August 2019 to May 2024.

Exposure: Individuals with OUD were all recently stabilized on medications for OUD (<24 weeks). Main outcomes and measures: Recurring brain states supporting different cognitive processes were first identified in an independent sample with 390 participants. A multivariate computational framework extended these brain states to the current dataset to assess their moment-to-moment engagement within each individual. Resting-state and naturalistic fMRI investigated whether brain dynamic alterations were consistently observed in OUD. Using a drug cue paradigm in participants with OUD, the association between cognitive control and brain dynamics during exposure to opioid-related information was studied. Variations in continuous brain state engagement (ie, state engagement variability [SEV]) were extracted during resting-state, naturalistic, and drug-cue paradigms. Stroop assessed cognitive control.

Results: Overall, 99 HC participants (54 [54.5%] female; mean [SD] age, 31.71 [12.16] years) and 76 individuals with OUD (31 [40.8%] female; mean [SD] age, 39.37 [10.47] years) were included. Compared with HC participants, individuals with OUD demonstrated consistent SEV alterations during resting-state (99 HC participants; 71 individuals with OUD; F4,161 = 6.83; P < .001) and naturalistic (96 HC participants; 76 individuals with OUD; F4,163 = 9.93; P < .001) fMRI. Decreased cognitive control was associated with lower SEV during the rest period of a drug cue paradigm among 70 participants with OUD. For example, lower incongruent accuracy scores were associated with decreased transition SEV (ρ58 = 0.34; P = .008). Conclusions and relevance: In this case-control study of brain dynamics in OUD, individuals with OUD experienced greater difficulty in effectively engaging various brain states to meet changing demands. Decreased cognitive control during the rest period of a drug cue paradigm suggests that these individuals had an impaired ability to disengage from opioid-related information. The current study introduces novel information that may serve as groundwork to strengthen cognitive control and reduce opioid-related preoccupation in OUD.

To read the full text of the article, please visit the publisher’s website.

Source: https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/research-news-roundup-february-13-2025/

Filed under: Addiction,Brain and Behaviour,Culture,Health,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,Mental Health,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Vaping,Youth :

by CNN Health (selected text) – February 12, 2025

A legal loophole is allowing children who access social media to see enticing advertisements for marijuana with potentially dangerous consequences, according to experts.

Under the Controlled Substances Act, it’s illegal to advertise the sale or use of marijuana using federal airwaves or across state lines. But that hasn’t stopped social media ads on cannabis websites from reaching youth of all ages who use screens, said Alisa Padon, research director for the Prevention Policy Group, a health equity and prevention association in Berkeley, California.

“Businesses are allowed to make their own pages and then post ads on their feed. Youth are bypassing age restrictions and seeing the ads for products they’re not legally allowed to buy. They can like, comment and share those posts with their friends,” Padon said.

“Research shows that type of engagement is related to an increased likelihood of wanting to use and using cannabis,” she added. “It’s a perfect storm, and regulators are doing nothing about it.”

According to a 2024 national survey, over 7% of eighth graders, nearly 16% of 10th graders and almost 26% of 12th graders said they have used cannabis in the past 12 months. When marijuana use occurs during the teen years, it’s more likely the individual will become addicted, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Cannabis use during adolescence can interfere with memory, cognition and brain growth at a critical time in a child’s natural development, said pediatrician Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor and academic chair of the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.

“There’s a dose response, so heavier users have longer-term effects, and there are concerns these developmental impacts may not reverse after abstinence,” Moreno said.

“It’s the wild west out there,” she added. “If you put an ad on your own little marijuana website, and it spreads virally through social media, there are no regulations against that.”

Effective advertising tactics

Marijuana stores and manufacturers are marketing their wares to youth using tested techniques popularized by the alcohol, tobacco and food industries, experts say.

“The marketing that we’re seeing in California for cannabis looks just like the marketing that is nationwide for alcohol and for e-cigarettes,” Padon said.

When it comes to social media advertising, however, the cannabis industry has excelled, said Moreno, who has studied the impact of marijuana ads on youth.

“The cannabis industry came into the market with traditional advertisements already illegal, so they became incredibly creative on social media,” she said. “The content is expertly crafted to appeal to youth.”

Moreno researched how marijuana sellers in four states where recreational marijuana is legal (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington) have advertised to underage adolescents.

A key method was the use of young-looking salespeople called “budtenders” who help clients in the store pick out their marijuana products.

“Budtender is a riff on bartender. Advertisers tend to photograph budtenders who look like they are 16,” Moreno said.

“Also, the crossover between food and tobacco industry advertising and cannabis marketing really stands out — both use enticing color schemes and flavors,” she said.

“And they are using the alcohol industry’s playbook to send messages hinting it’s sexy to use marijuana.”

Padon quizzed 409 California youth between the ages of 16 and 20 about their reaction to various online cannabis ads. The research was published in the March edition of the International Journal of Drug Policy.

Overall, illustrations and food and flavor references were extremely appealing to youth, Padon said. Depictions of heavy cannabis use and positive sensations from that use were also a hit with young audiences. Advertisements focusing on the health benefits of cannabis, however, fell flat.

An advertisement placing marijuana in the middle of a burst of red cherries and bright colors was the most appealing ad to kids in the study, Padon said. Another popular ad showed an attractive young man who appeared to be 14 to 15 years old displaying cannabis products in a store.

“Another theme we found in our past studies was tying cannabis to athletics and being active, which is appealing to youth,” Moreno said. “Teens are in that phase of identity development trying to figure out who they are. So if part of an adolescent’s identity is a sport or being outdoorsy, the cannabis product is tying into something that’s valuable to them.”

A problem that may only worsen

According to a 2024 report, daily or near daily marijuana use by California adults tripled and marijuana use during pregnancy nearly doubled in the past decade. This occurred despite warnings to expectant moms about the dangers of cannabis on an unborn fetus.

During a four-year period between 2015 and 2019, cannabis-related visits to emergency rooms increased by 70% in older adults, the report stated.

Nationally, the rate of use has been rising steadily, with 15% of all American adults saying they smoke marijuana, according to a Gallup poll. A 2022 study found people in states where recreational cannabis is legal use it 20% more frequently than those in states that have not passed legislation.

Increases in cannabis use can result in unforeseen dangers, Padon said: “Nationwide, there have been skyrocketing rates of accidental ingestion of gummies and chocolate edibles among very small kids because they look like candy.”

Calls to poison control centers about children age 5 and younger consuming edibles containing tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, rose from 207 to 3,054 in four years — a 1,375% increase, according to a January 2023 study.

In fact, many edibles are packaged to look exactly like their candy and chip counterparts on store shelves. One bag of gummies looks virtually identical to the popular candy Gushers, said Danielle Ompad, a professor of epidemiology at NYU School of Global Public Health, in a prior interview.

“The Nerd Rope knockoffs I have personally seen looked just like the licensed product,” Ompad said.

However, small print included on the label of the Gushers knockoff said the bag contained 500 milligrams of THC, she said. A look-alike bag of Doritos contained 600 milligrams.

“The (knockoff) Doritos were shaped just like the real thing and had a crunch as well. If I ate that whole package, I would be miserable. People who are using edibles recreationally aren’t typically eating more than 10 milligrams,” Ompad said.

If a child ingests edibles, they can become “very sick,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They may have problems walking or sitting up or may have a hard time breathing.”

 

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/12/health/marijuana-ads-child-danger-wellness/index.html

Filed under: Culture,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,Parents,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

by Brian Mann –  NPR’s first national addiction correspondent – published January 29, 2025 at 7:00 AM EST

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks about the journey that led to his growing focus on health and wellness — and ultimately to his confirmation hearings this week for U.S. secretary of health and human services — it begins not with medical training or a background in research, but with his own addiction to heroin and other drugs.

“I became a drug addict when I was 15 years old,” Kennedy said last year during an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman. “I was addicted for 14 years. During that time, when you’re an addict, you’re living against conscience … and you kind of push God to the peripheries of your life.”

Kennedy now credits his faith; 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous-style programs, which also have a spiritual foundation; and the influence of a book by philosopher Carl Jung for helping him beat his own opioid addiction.

If confirmed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services after Senate hearings scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, Kennedy would hold broad sway over many of the biggest federal programs in the U.S. tackling addiction: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

While campaigning for the White House last year, Kennedy, now 71 years old, laid out a plan to tackle the United States’ devastating fentanyl and overdose crisis, proposing a sprawling new system of camps or farms where people experiencing addiction would be sent to recover.

“I’m going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions,” Kennedy promised, during a film on addiction released by his presidential campaign. “We’re going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America’s soil.”

People without housing in San Francisco in May 2024. A film released by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign included a scene that 
appeared to blame methadone — a prescription medication used to treat opioid addiction — for some of the high-risk street-drug use visible
on the streets of San Francisco.

Some addiction activists — especially those loyal to the 12-step faith- and values-based recovery model — have praised Kennedy’s approach and are actively campaigning for his confirmation.

“RFK Jr is in recovery. He wants to expand the therapeutic community model for recovering addicts,” Tom Wolf, a San Francisco-based activist who is in recovery from fentanyl and opioid addiction, wrote on the social media site X. “I support him for HHS secretary.”

 

A focus on 12-step and spirituality, not medication and science-based treatment

 

But Kennedy’s approach to addiction care is controversial, described by many drug policy experts as risky, in part because it focuses on the moral dimension of recovery rather than modern, science-based medication and health care.

“He clearly cares about addicted people,” said Keith Humphreys, a leading national drug policy researcher at Stanford University. “But in terms of the plans he’s articulated, I have real doubts about them.”

According to Humphreys, Kennedy’s plan to build a network of farms or camps doesn’t appear to include facilities that offer proper medical treatments for seriously ill people facing severe addiction.

“That’s a risk to the well-being of patients, and I don’t see any merit in doing that,” Humphreys said.

“I think [Kennedy’s plan] would be an enormous step backward,” said Maia Szalavitz, an author and activist who used heroin and other drugs before entering recovery.

“We have spent the last 15, 20 years trying to move away from treating addiction as a sin rather than a medical disorder,” she said. “We’ve spent many years trying to get people to take up these medications that we know cut your death risk in half, and he seems to want to go backwards on all that.”

The vast majority of researchers, doctors and front-line addiction treatment workers agree that scientific data shows medications like buprenorphine, methadone and naloxone are game changers when it comes to treating the deadliest street drugs, including fentanyl and heroin.

The Biden administration moved aggressively to make medical treatments far more affordable and widely available. Many experts believe those programs are factors in the dramatic national drop in overdose deaths that began in 2023.

Kennedy, who studied law and political science, not health care, before becoming an activist on subjects ranging from pharmaceuticals and vaccines to the American diet, has remained largely silent on the subject of science-based medical treatments for opioid addiction.

His campaign film included a scene that appeared to blame methadone — a prescription medication that has been used to treat opioid addiction since the 1970s — for some of the high-risk street-drug use visible on the streets of San Francisco.

In public statements, Kennedy has also repeated the inaccurate claim that the addiction and overdose crisis isn’t improving. In fact, fatal overdoses have dropped nationally by more than 20% since June 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, falling below 90,000 deaths in a 12-month period for the first time in half a decade.

“What we have mostly heard from Kennedy is a skepticism broadly of medications and a focus on the 12-step and faith-based therapy,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on drug policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

“That appeals to a lot of crucial groups that have supported President Trump in the election. But we know what is fundamental for recovery and stabilization of people’s lives and reducing overdose is access to medications,” Felbab-Brown said. “Unfortunately, many of the 12-step programs reject medications.”

She’s worried that under Kennedy’s leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services could shrink or eliminate funding for science-based medical treatment and instead focus on spirituality-based approaches that appear to help a relatively small percentage of people who experience addiction.

Kennedy’s views on other science-based treatments, including vaccines, have sparked widespread opposition among medical researchers and physicians.

 

Kennedy boosts an Italian model for addiction recovery that has faced controversy

 

Another concern about Kennedy’s addiction proposals focuses on his interest in a program for drug treatment created in Italy in the 1970s.

The San Patrignano community is a therapeutic rehabilitation community center in Italy for people with drug addictions. The center, which
was founded by Vincenzo Muccioli in 1978, received renewed media attention after a 2020 Netflix documentary described alleged abuses.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now describes the program as a model for recovery care in the United States.

“I’ve seen this beautiful model that they have in Italy called San Patrignano, where there are 2,000 kids who work on a large farm in a healing center, learning various trades … and that’s what we need to build here,” Kennedy said during a town hall-style appearance on the cable channel NewsNation last year.

According to Kennedy’s plan, outlined in interviews and social media posts, Americans experiencing addiction would go to San Patrignano-style camps voluntarily, or they could be pressured or coerced into accepting care, with a threat of incarceration for those who refuse care.

But the San Patrignano program has been controversial and was featured in a 2020 Netflix documentary that included images of people with addiction allegedly being held in shackles or confined in cages. The farm’s current leaders have described the documentary as biased and unfair.

Kennedy, meanwhile, has continued to use the program as a model for the camps he would like to build in the United States.

“I’m going to build these rehab centers all over the country, these healing camps where people can go, where our children can go and find themselves again,” he said.

Szalavitz, the author and activist who is herself in recovery, noted that the Italian program doesn’t include science-based medical care, including opioid treatment medications. She said Kennedy’s fascination with the model reflects a lack of medical and scientific expertise.

“It really is great to include people who have personal experience of something like, say, addiction in policymaking. But you don’t become an addiction expert simply because you’re someone who struggled with addiction,” Szalavitz said. “You have to engage with the research literature. You have to understand more beyond your own narrow anecdote. Otherwise you’re going to wind up doing harm to people.”

Copyright 2025 NPR

Source: https://www.ideastream.org/2025-01-29/rfk-jr-says-hell-fix-the-overdose-crisis-critics-say-his-plan-is-risky

Filed under: Addiction,Culture,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Political Sector,Prevention and Intervention,Social Affairs,USA,Youth :
By: Jake Goldstein-Street – February 7, 2025 4:01 am

They’re not old enough yet to drink in bars, but a group of Washington students wants to make nightlife in the state safer.

A bill in the state Legislature requested by Lake Washington High School students aims to protect people from drink spiking.

The measure would require some establishments selling alcohol, including bars and nightclubs, to have testing kits on hand so patrons can see if their drinks have been drugged. Sponsors amended the bill this week in light of concerns of overreach lodged by a hospitality trade group.

Businesses covered by the proposal would also have to post a notice that test kits are available.

Bars would sell the test strips, stickers or straws to customers for a “reasonable amount based on the wholesale cost of the device.”

Usually, the tests look for drugs like Rohypnol, also known as “roofies.” When placed in alcoholic drinks, the drugs can incapacitate people unexpectedly so they can’t resist sexual assault, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The tests also detect ketamine and gamma hydroxybutyric acid.

“As a group of young women entering college, we are scared for our future,” Lake Washington senior Ava Brisimitzis told a Senate panel last week. “While nightlife is still years away, there are thousands of Washingtonians right now affected by this problem. No one should question whether or not they might return home safely.”

Senate Bill 5330 would take effect Jan. 1, 2026. It has a committee vote set for Friday.

The proposal is patterned after a similar law passed in California that went into effect last July. That law affected 2,400 establishments.

When a drink is spiked, “many times, it’s too late to prevent that person from falling victim to another crime, and that’s why prevention awareness is so important,” said Sen. Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond, the bill’s prime sponsor.

Critics said the original bill in Washington goes far beyond the California law. The initial version included taverns, nightclubs, theaters, hotels and more. The California legislation only applies to establishments like nightclubs that exclude minors and aren’t required to serve food.

Last week, Washington Hospitality Association lobbyist Julia Gorton said the bill “needs many more conversations.”

The hospitality association would support a version like California’s law, said Jeff Reading, a spokesperson for the trade group.

Now, a revised version of the bill looks to more closely align Washington’s proposal with California’s by focusing on establishments that don’t allow minors.

Washington’s unusual liquor licensing system has made drafting the bill difficult, Dhingra said. The state simply has too many types of licenses. She wants to “clean up” Washington’s liquor license statute.

“This is really not meant to be onerous, but really meant to be a partnership to make sure all the patrons are safe,” Dhingra told the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee last week.

California’s legislation also stated the signage must say “Don’t get roofied! Drink spiking drug test kits available here.” But Dhingra felt that language may be seen as blaming the victim, so the new version of the Washington bill doesn’t require specific verbiage in the sign.

A 2016 study published in the American Psychological Association’s journal Psychology of Violence found nearly 8% of 6,064 students surveyed at three universities believed they’d been drugged.

Source: https://washingtonstatestandard.com/briefs/washington-could-require-bars-to-carry-spiked-drink-drug-tests/

Filed under: Alcohol,Culture,Health,Latest News,Mental Health,Sexual Behaviour,USA,Youth :

INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY NDPA:

THIS ARTICLE IS INCLUDED FOR ITS INTERESTING DESCRIPTION OF THE CONSUMPTION ROOM PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE. NDPA HAS SEVERAL SERIOUS CONCERNS ABOUT SO-CALLED ‘CONSUMPTION ROOMS’ AND WOULD TAKE ISSUE WITH SOME OF THE CLAIMS MADE IN THIS ARTICLE, NOT LEAST THE HEADLINE CLAIM THAT THIS IS A ‘SAFE’ SITE … (SEE OTHER ARTICLES ON THE NDPA SITE), NEVERTHELESS, IT IS WORTH READING, IN ORDER TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE ATTITUDE BEHIND THE PROVENANCE OF SUCH FACILITIES.

by  Rebecca. L. Root – December 24, 2024 – SOURCE PRISM

At 8 a.m. on a Monday morning, most of the soft recliners in the waiting area of the three-story East Harlem overdose prevention center (OPC) are already occupied by those who have come to consume their first dose of the day. Whether it’s for fentanyl, heroin, or another drug, people of all ages trickle into the consumption room at OnPoint NYC, where mirrored cubicles line opposite sides of the room and a staff station sits in the middle with trays of needles, elastics, and wipes organized in rows.

A man, who looks to be in his late 30s, unwraps today’s first fix of what most likely is the opioid fentanyl, which staff say is the most common drug used here. He simultaneously chats with the staff who welcome each visitor with familiarity. The calm ambiance is occasionally punctuated with noise as the metal doors swing, allowing another person to enter.

OnPoint NYC, which opened in 2021 as the country’s first overdose prevention site, aims to be a judgment- and persecution-free space for drug users to safely consume. The idea of preventing people from dying of an overdose is a controversial one. Last year, former U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York Damian Williams told The New York Times that OnPoint’s methods were illegal and hinted at a shutdown, while New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is also opposed, having repeatedly said the centers violate federal and state laws, putting their future operations in the balance.

But amid the national opioid epidemic, drastic measures are needed. More than 100,000 people die each year from drug overdoses in the U.S., according to the National Center for Health Statistics. In November, President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to impose further tariffs on Chinese imports in an attempt to curb what he believes are fentanyl deliveries into the U.S. It follows calls in 2022 from President Joe Biden to increase funding in the budget to address the overdose epidemic, while in 2023 New York Times editors declared that the U.S. had lost the war on drugs.

“Every 90 minutes…four New Yorkers die [of an overdose],” said Sam Rivera, the executive director of OnPoint NYC.

Advocates for OPCs say having a sanitary and safe place to consume drugs diminishes the element of haste or need for discretion that might exist in a public place. This reduces the risk of an overdose, but should one occur, medically trained staff dressed in jeans and leather are ready to respond.

Tilting a chair back, a staffer explains the importance of getting the blood circulating and offering rescue breaths before administering naloxone, which can reverse the effects of opioids. Since 2021, OnPoint NYC has reversed 1,600 overdoses, cleaned up community parks, and opened a sister center in Washington Heights.

Despite the progress, the center, and the few others like it in the U.S., remain controversial. When a similar center was opened in San Francisco in 2022, a group of local mothers protested while others posited that creating safe spaces to consume drugs only increases drug use.

However, research found that following the opening of an OPC in San Francisco, there was no visible increase in drug use, and a Brown University study found no affiliation between the centers and increased crime.

Instead, Michel Kazatchkine, a commissioner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), which advocates for drug policies to be more humane and prioritize public and individual health, believes it is the current approach of criminalizing drug users that is the problem.

“The criminal justice approach has sent hundreds of thousands of people to prison with no benefit for these people and no benefit for the society and huge expenses involved,” said Kazatchkine, who is also the former executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, France.

Over 1.16 million people each year are incarcerated in the U.S. on drug offenses, while globally, governments spend $100 billion annually on punitive drug policies. In spite of such policies, global drug use has risen from about 180 million people in 2002 to 292 million in 2022, according to a report by the GCDP.

In states like New York, the response to tackle the drug problem has predominantly been to fund the distribution of naloxone and fentanyl test strips, which can detect the presence of fentanyl in other drugs, explained Toni Smith, the New York state director at Drug Policy Alliance. The group works with grassroots groups to advance public health solutions to drug use. While such resources are critical, Smith emphasized that the state must offer a full range of life-saving tools and services. More OPCs, Smith believes, could save more lives.

The harm reduction quandary

Historically, the U.S. has pushed back on any initiatives under the harm reduction umbrella, Kazatchkine said. Harm reduction, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), focuses on offering a suite of interventions designed to minimize the negative impacts related to drug use. That could include providing people with clean needles and syringes, with naloxone, with HIV testing, or with access to opioid substitution therapy programs. OPCs—often referred to as safe consumption sites in Europe, where they are widely used—are not on the WHO’s list of recommended harm reduction interventions but are a harm reduction approach.

 

“The concept of harm reduction is acknowledging that people use drugs and that these people have risks, but it is prioritizing health approaches over criminalization,” Kazatchkine said. “Acknowledging that people use drugs, you acknowledge something that is prohibited under the law and actually under criminal law, so a government or an international entity finds itself in a very uncomfortable situation.”

“Many people would come in and be shocked…They open the door and think everybody’s just using drugs. They don’t expect this kind of structure and loving environment,” he said. “We’ve invited the governor for three years. [She] hasn’t been here once. But you’re going to sit around and tell us the program doesn’t work.”

Beyond a safe space for consumption

More than just a consumption space, the center offers a health clinic and, up a narrow staircase to a second floor, therapy rooms host complimentary holistic treatments such as reiki, massage, and sound baths. Rivera himself occasionally hosts one. All services, including health care, are free.

On this day, a woman sleeps deeply in a reclining chair as soft music tinkles in the background and candles burn in the corner; two others lie on massage tables awaiting their treatments. Shower facilities are available in another corner of the center, and an on-site psychologist offers mental health services in a bid to help tackle the underlying trauma behind the addiction. It’s “multidimensional” support to treat a problem that surpasses simply addiction but intersects with issues around housing, access to care, criminalization, food and nutrition, sleep, as well as structural racism, Smith said. And the services aren’t just for drug users but all local community members.

“Creating this community and this space around a loving environment is so impactful, and it changes the experience for folks who come in,” Rivera said.

In New York City, Rivera believes there have also been economic benefits. OnPoint’s data suggests a reduction in visits to the emergency room for overdoses that has relieved the burden on the health system and, Rivera said, potentially saved two New York City neighborhoods $45 million in less than three years.

More OPCs could benefit the U.S. and reduce the impact the drug crisis is having, said Kazatchkine, but amid what Rivera believes is a game of politics, whether that will happen remains to be seen. In the meantime, elsewhere in the U.S., people will shoot up in alleyways and parks, at increased risk of unnecessarily overdosing. But the reality, Rivera said, is that with OPCs, there’s the potential for no one to have to die this way again.

Source: https://www.nationofchange.org/2024/12/24/inside-the-countrys-first-official-safe-drug-consumption-site/

Filed under: Crime/Violence/Prison,Culture,Drug use-various effects,Economic,Education,Heroin/Methadone,HIV/Injecting-Drug-Users,Latest News,Mental Health,Needle Exchange,Opioids,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY MAGGIE PETITO (OF DRUGWATCH INTERNATIONAL) WHO SUBMITTED THIS ARTICLE TO US:

“Albania, a nation of 11,000 square miles and population today of some 2.5 million, saw a recent exodus of half of its people, mostly claiming to be “refugees” – exiting to global outposts. Today’s Albania offers numerous benefits besides a lovely landscape. Resort and golf course maestros plan safe havens for Albanians and “friends” to relax, launder their dirty money, escape Interpol and wash with crypto-Bitcoin. This statement is not racist: it is a fact. NATO member Albania is half Sunni Muslim. Albania is still under a multi-year consideration to join the EU”. Maggie P.

                    

Opinion piece in Washington Post, by Samantha Schmidt,  Arturo Torres, and Anthony Faiola

December 28, 2024

 

A global boom in cocaine trafficking defies decades of anti-drug efforts

The cocaine trade is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history as Albanian traffickers expand the market in Europe for the drug.

Ecuadorian military officers seized what they said amounted to 22 tons of cocaine in January 2024 — one of the world’s largest single cocaine seizures on record.

In Guayaquil, Ecuador — Dritan Rexhepi, the drug lord, had already escaped the law in three countries, and he planned to do it again.

In less than a decade, Dritan Rexhepi had built a smuggling business that ran from the fields of Colombia to the ports of Ecuador and on to the streets of Europe, Italian and Latin American investigators said, rivaling the influence of Mexico’s powerful cartels. His brand, carved into cocaine packages, was “Bello” — beautiful.

The Albanian’s rise from gunman in his home country to transatlantic kingpin is part of a global explosion in the cocaine industry, a trade that is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history. South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Cultivation of coca crops in Colombia, the origin of most of the world’s cocaine, has tripled, according to U.S. figures, and the amount of land used to grow the drug’s base ingredient is more than five times what it was when the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993. And production keeps soaring. A record 2,757 tons of cocaine was produced worldwide in 2022, a 20 percent increase over 2021, according to the most recent global drug report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

“It’s going up and up and up,” said Thomas Pietschmann, a research officer at the UNODC. “A few years ago, people were saying the future is synthetic drugs. … Right now, it’s still cocaine.”

For decades, cocaine consumers were primarily Americans, and interdiction was a U.S. government priority. But despite the tens of billions of dollars spent in the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America, the industry has not only grown, it has globalized, with new routes, new markets and new criminal enterprises.

Nearly every one of Latin America’s mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug, with Ecuador now one of the most important cocaine transit points in the world. Demand is soaring in Europe, which rivals the United States as the world’s top cocaine destination. Cocaine seizures in E.U. countries grew fivefold between 2011 and 2021, and exceeded those in the United States in 2022. While the United States remains a huge market, cocaine use has declined by about 20 percent since 2006, according to UNODC.

Balkan, Italian, Turkish and Russian criminal groups have all swept into Latin America for a piece of the action. Few have managed to muscle their way into cocaine trafficking quite like Albanian criminal networks, investigators and analysts say.

“We know there’s not only one channel for cocaine,” said Marco Martino, a senior Italian police official in charge of coordinating counternarcotics operations. But “the Albanians,” he said, “are the best and the biggest.”

As cocaine production was exploding, investigators said, Albanian criminal networks rode the opportunity it presented. They were critical to getting the drug to Europe and fueling consumption across the continent.

Rexhepi, 44, built much of his empire from an Ecuadorian prison cell, fostering connections with Latin American gangs and turning his cellblock into an executive suite. A lawyer representing him in Albania declined to comment. Rexhepi, in a 2015 appeal, denied any involvement in drug trafficking, “either as a perpetrator, accomplice or accessory.” But in 2021, Italy sought his extradition, warning the authorities in Ecuador in a letter from its embassy in Quito that Rexhepi was the “undisputed leader” of an Albanian drug trafficking network with global reach and access to “infinite quantities of cocaine.”

Rexhepi’s emergence as a feared power broker within a federal prison in Cotopaxi province was symptomatic of the collapse of government control in Ecuador. But with the authorities in Rome seeking to imprison him for drug trafficking, he decided it was time to move again.

A local judge, citing a medical need, ordered him into home detention in an upscale neighborhood here in the port city of Guayaquil in August 2021, according to Ecuadorian officials. Then, predictably, Rexhepi vanished.

This investigation into the global expansion of the cocaine business and the rise of Albanian drug traffickers is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials in Ecuador, Colombia, Europe and the United States, gang members in Ecuador, and thousands of pages of court documents from Ecuador, Albania and Italy. It reveals how criminal networks led by Albanians infiltrated Ecuador’s ports, judiciary, prison system and security forces to gain control of key parts of the cocaine supply chain and trigger a deluge of the drug in Europe — a more than $12 billion annual cocaine market, according to the E.U. Drugs Agency.

“With these profits, these organizations manage to permeate all public and private institutions, corrupting any structure,” said Ecuador’s former anti-narcotics director, Gen. Willian Villarroel, in an interview.

Drug trafficking entrepreneurs from Albania, a country of only about 2.8 million people, have begun to rival the world’s most powerful cartels by working with them, not against them, transforming how the trade is run. The new networks, investigators say, are often criminal coalitions of disparate and independent groups, rather than hierarchical, violently competitive cartels.

A boom in cocaine production and the expanding power of criminal organizations pose a growing threat in Latin America, the United States’ biggest trading partner. In a multipart series, The Washington Post is examining how organized crime groups have vastly expanded their influence, corroding the region’s democracies, strangling commerce and propelling thousands of people to the U.S. southern border.

Latin America is producing more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Nearly every one of its mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug, feeding booming markets in the United States, Europe and South America.

Organized crime groups have moved well beyond narcotics. They’ve created sprawling illicit industries in extortion, migrant smuggling and gold mining. Their power has become so great that they form a new kind of insurgency, infiltrating government operations.

Europol is aware of dozens of “Albanian-speaking” clans or organized criminal networks currently operating in Europe, Robert Fay, the head of Europol’s drug unit, said in an interview.

“It’s not about how many people you have,” said Fatjona Mejdini, an Albanian analyst with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “It’s about the right alliances you can form.”

From his prison cell in Ecuador, Rexhepi paved the way. He befriended leaders of Ecuador’s most powerful gang, Los Choneros, who were already working for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, according to one of the gang’s founding members, who, like some others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. That led to strategic partnerships with both South American traffickers and gang leaders across Europe. His goal was simple, investigators and analysts said: sell as much cocaine as possible with abundant profit for all parties to the deals. “Rexhepi is the pioneer,” Mejdini said.

Soaring cocaine production

The explosion in cocaine production can be traced back to the demobilization of Colombia’s largest leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). A historic peace deal with the country’s government in 2016 ended the longest-running civil conflict in the hemisphere, a conflict in which the United States played a critical role.

Since the start of the counternarcotics and security package known as Plan Colombia in 2000, the United States has sent about $14 billion in funding to Colombia, at least 60 percent of it for the military and police. The plan focused in large part on combating the country’s cocaine production and export, which the FARC controlled, using the proceeds to fund its insurgency and secure territory.

When the guerrillas laid down their weapons, a proliferation of smaller armed groups, driven by profit rather than ideology, swept into coca-producing areas.

These drug traffickers “no longer have political interests,” said Leonardo Correa, the head of the UNODC mission in Colombia. “What they want is to get the drug out as fast as possible, to make the most money possible.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/28/cocaine-consumption-soars-europe-asia/

 

Filed under: Cocaine,Crime/Violence/Prison,Economic,Latest News,Others (International News),USA :

by  David G. Evans, Esq., Senior Counsel, Cannabis Industry Victims Educating Litigators (CIVEL)

This item was collected by Dave Evans without any covering article.

To access the full array of documents:

  1. Click on the ‘Source’ links below.
  2. An image  – the front page of the full document will appear.
  3. Click on the image to open the full document.

 

  1. CDC.DELTA.8.DATED.9.14, 2021
  2. FDA.DELTA.8.WARNING
  3. FDA.HEMP.WARNING.LETTERS
  4. INTOXICATING HEMP PRODUCTS
  5. LETTER.HB.563.ROSSHEIM
  6. Rossheim – CV 6 7 24 pdf (1)
  7. Rossheim et al., 2022 Delta-8 THC Retail Availability, Price, and Minimum
  8. Rossheim et al., 2023 Delta-8, Delta-10, HHC, THC-O, THCP, and THCV What should we call these products_
  9. Rossheim et al., 2024 Derived psychoactive cannabis products and 4_20 specials An assessment of popular brands and retail price discounts in Fort Worth, Texas, 2023
  10. Rossheim et al., 2024 Types and Brands of Derived Psychoactive Cannabis Products an online retail assessment 2023

Source: David G. Evans, Esq., Senior Counsel, Cannabis Industry Victims Educating Litigators (CIVEL)

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Hemp,Latest News,USA :

by David G. Evans, Esq., Senior Counsel, Cannabis Industry Victims Educating Litigators (CIVEL) –

Marijuana use makes autism scores worse. Autism Spectrum Disease (ASD) “is the commonest form of cannabis-associated clinical teratology.” (exhibits 1 and 2 ). A tetralogy is a collection of four things having something in common, such as a deformity with four features.

This is likely epidemiologically highly significant for the US, where autistic spectrum disorders have been shown to be growing exponentially. Cannabis use across the US was shown to be independently associated with autism rates across both time and space, to be dose-related, and, based on conservative projections, has been predicted to be at least 60% higher in cannabis-legal states than in states where cannabis was illegal by 2030. (exhibit 3)

Being particularly vulnerable to the pro-psychotic effects of cannabinoid exposure, autism spectrum individuals present with an increased risk of psychosis, which may be passed on to their own children. (exhibit 4)

Conclusion

Use of marijuana products can make autism scores worse in the user.

Exhibit 1.

Effect of Cannabis Legalization on US Autism Incidence and Medium-Term Projections. Reece AS and Hulse GK. Clinical Pediatrics. Vol 4, Iss 2, No:154

https://www.longdom.org/open-access/effect-of-cannabis-legalization-on-us-autism-incidence-and-medium-term-projections.pdf

Exhibit 2.

In a study, 3,080 young adult Australian twins were used to assess ADHD symptoms, autistic traits, substance use, and substance use disorders. Great ADHD symptoms and autistic traits scores were associated with elevated levels of cannabis use and cannabis use disorder. DeAkwis D, et al. ADHD Symptoms, Autistic Traits, and Substance Use and Misuse in Adult Australian Twins. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, March 2014. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3965675/

Exhibit 3

Epidemiological Association of Various Substances and Multiple Cannabinoids with Autism in the USA. Reese SA and Hulse GK. Clinical Pediatrics., Vol 4, Issue2, No: 155.

Cannabinoids with Autism in USA. Accepted 22nd May 2019.  Clinical Pediatrics: Open Access. Published 31st May 2019.  https://www.longdom.org/open-access/epidemiological-associations-of-various-substances-and-multiple-cannabinoids-with-autism-in-usa.pdf

Exhibit 4.

Cannabis Use in Autism: Reasons for Concern about Risk for Psychosis
Riccardo Bortoletto 1,2, Marco Colizzi 2,3,*
Healthcare (Basel). 2022 Aug 16;10(8):1553. doi: 10.3390/healthcare10081553
PMCID: PMC9407973  PMID: 36011210
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9407973/

 

David G. Evans, Esq.

Senior Counsel

Cannabis Industry Victims Educating Litigators (CIVEL)

203 Main St. Suite 149

Flemington, NJ 08822

908-963-0254

www.civel.org

 

DISCLAIMER OF LIABILITY IN CONNECTING YOU WITH AN ATTORNEY

 

If we have connected you with an attorney this does not mean that we recommend this attorney as to their ability to help you or that we have investigated their ability. It only means that this attorney is interested in hearing about your case. There have been no representations or guarantees made regarding the outcome of this matter as to the obtaining of any award for damages, judgment, or any other aspect of this matter.

 

PRIVACY

This e-mail transmission is protected by state law and the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. Sections 2510-2521 and is intended to be delivered only to the named addressee(s) and may contain information that is confidential, proprietary, attorney work-product or attorney-client privileged. If this information is received by anyone other than the named addressee(s), the recipient should immediately notify the David G. Evans, Esq. by e-mail or by telephone 908-963-0254 and obtain instructions as to the disposal of the transmitted material. In no event shall this material be read, used, copied, reproduced, stored or retained by anyone other than the named addressee(s), except with the express consent of Mr. Evans or the named addressee(s). Receipt of this email does not waive any legal privilege

DISCLAIMER OF LEGAL ADVICE

This should not be considered legal advice. This is for informational purposes only. Use of and access to these materials does not in itself create an attorney – client relationship between David G. Evans and CIVEL and the user or reader. Mr. Evans or CIVEL cannot vouch for any study cited herein since they did not do the study. The readers should consult the study and make their own interpretation as to its accuracy. Please also be advised that case law and statutory and regulatory laws cited herein may have been amended or changed by the time you read this.

IRS Circular 230 Disclosure:

To ensure compliance with requirements imposed by the IRS, we inform you that any U.S. federal tax advice contained in this communication (including any attachments) is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of (i) avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter addressed herein.

Source: www.civel.org

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Mental Health,USA :

Publication: American Journal of Psychiatry – 15 January 2024

Patricia Conrod, Ph.D. patricia.conrod@umontreal.ca, Sherry H. Stewart, Ph.D., Jean Seguin, Ph.D., Robert Pihl, Ph.D., Benoit Masse, Ph.D., Sean Spinney, M.Sc., and Samantha Lynch, Ph.D.

Abstract

Objective:

Rates of substance use disorders (SUDs) remain significantly above national targets for health promotion and disease prevention in Canada and the United States. This study investigated the 5-year SUD outcomes following a selective drug and alcohol prevention program targeting personality risk factors for adolescent substance misuse.

Methods:

The Co-Venture trial is a cluster randomized trial involving 31 high schools in the greater Montreal area that agreed to conduct annual health behavior surveys for 5 years on the entire 7th grade cohort of assenting students enrolled at the school in 2012 or 2013. Half of all schools were randomly assigned to be trained and assisted in the delivery of the personality-targeted PreVenture Program to all eligible 7th grade participants. The intervention consisted of a brief (two-session) group cognitive-behavioral intervention that is delivered in a personality-matched fashion to students who have elevated scores on one of four personality traits linked to early-onset substance misuse: impulsivity, sensation seeking, anxiety sensitivity, or hopelessness.

Results:

Mixed-effects multilevel Bayesian models were used to estimate the effect of the intervention on the year-by-year change in probability of SUD. When baseline differences were controlled for, a time-by-intervention interaction revealed positive growth in SUD rate for the control group (b=1.380, SE=0.143, odds ratio=3.97) and reduced growth for the intervention group (b=−0.423, SE=0.173, 95% CI=−0.771, −0.084, odds ratio=0.655), indicating a 35% reduction in the annual increase in SUD rate in the intervention condition relative to the control condition. Group differences in SUD rates were reliably nonzero (95% confidence) at the fourth and fifth year of assessment. Secondary analyses revealed no significant intervention effects on growth of anxiety, depression, or total mental health difficulties over the four follow-up periods.

Conclusions:

This study showed for the first time that personality-targeted interventions might protect against longer-term development of SUD.
Despite having made some strides with respect to reducing adolescent drinking rates, substance use disorder (SUD) rates are significantly above national targets for health promotion and disease prevention in Canada and the United States (1–5). These data suggest that there is a pressing need for more targeted intervention strategies designed to help those most at risk of transitioning to SUD. Recent national surveys suggest an alarmingly high prevalence of SUD in the general population (16.5%), with the highest rates reported among young adults, and approximately 9% of the adolescent population screened positive for past-year SUD (1–3). There is also an ongoing crisis of nonmedical prescription drug use in North America, as indicated by the dramatic increase in the prevalence of past-year prescription drug misuse and overdose deaths from 2003 to 2022 (1, 2) and the disproportionate growth of hospitalizations due to opioids among individuals 15–24 years of age (1–4). Furthermore, only ∼5% of respondents who report symptoms of SUD report having received any treatment for their SUD (1). As highlighted in numerous reports (5–9), including the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2016 report on addiction (2), evidence-based upstream solutions that prevent transition to SUD are desperately needed, considering the scale and severity of these public health concerns.
Most school-based prevention programs are universal and use some combination of alcohol and drug awareness, testimonials, flyers, brochures, peer education, and alcohol/drug-free activities. These have been shown to have weak positive or even negative effects (10, 11), but programs that promote general coping and drug-refusal skills are more promising (2, 10, 12, 13). One possible contributing factor to poor outcomes of many prevention programs is that they target generic factors implicated in normal drinking and drug experimentation and fail to target factors linked to risk for the development of more severe substance use problems (2, 10, 14–18), despite well-supported evidence for robust predictors of substance use and misuse across several sociodemographic contexts (2). New approaches to prevention are needed that translate research on addiction vulnerability to personalized prevention and early intervention (2).
Longitudinal and machine learning prediction strategies have highlighted the role of both externalizing and internalizing traits in future risk for substance misuse (19–23). A recent review suggests that distinct personality traits are related to risk for substance misuse through different motivational and cognitive risk profiles (23). Impulsivity and its cognitive correlate, poor response inhibition, appear to be specifically associated with conduct problems and misuse of stimulants (including prescription stimulant medications); sensation seeking and its neurocognitive correlate, reward sensitivity, are more associated with alcohol and cannabis misuse (2, 20–23). Anxiety sensitivity and hopelessness have been shown to be associated with risk for internalizing problems and preferential use/misuse of depressant drugs, such as alcohol, sedatives, and opioids (19, 20, 24–26).
The PreVenture Program is a brief (two group sessions) school-based cognitive-behavioral program focusing on building personality-specific skills and self-efficacy to reduce need on the part of a young person to use substances as a way to cope with interpersonal or intrapersonal challenges associated with each personality trait (27, 28). Given research indicating that different neurocognitive profiles mediate the relationship between specific personality factors and concurrent mental health conditions (22–26), the program focuses on promoting personality-specific cognitive-behavioral skills (e.g., skills relevant to the management of poor response inhibition for teens who report high levels of impulsivity vs. skills relevant to the management of global negative attributional styles for teens who report high levels of hopelessness). Numerous randomized trials have shown that the program is effective in reducing alcohol and drug use and mental health symptoms by a notable 30%–80% among secondary students (13–17, 21, 27, 28). However, this approach has yet to be shown to prevent transition to SUDs, which is critical when informing comprehensive drug prevention and health promotion strategies.
As a primary outcome, this longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled trial examined the impact of personality-targeted preventive interventions in reducing risk for SUD in adolescents over a 5-year period (18). It is becoming increasingly recognized that treatment outcome research should focus on pragmatic outcomes to facilitate the translation of research findings to policy and practice, and this was an important aim of the present study. Therefore, in consultation with local stakeholders, we selected a validated measure of SUD that is used to screen for SUD and to guide the delivery of SUD interventions in schools throughout the region in which the study was conducted. The primary research hypothesis was that relative to a control condition, the intervention would be associated with a reduced risk of transitioning to SUD by the end of high school among youths who report personality risk factors. Secondary outcomes examined the intervention effects on mental health outcomes in the 4 years after the intervention.

To access the full document:

  1. Click on the ‘Source’ link below.
  2. An image  – the front page of the full document will appear.
  3. Click on the image to open the full document.

Source: https://www.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.20240042

Filed under: Education,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

 Vern Pierson – January 27, 2025

Vern Pierson is the district attorney of El Dorado County and was a co-sponsor of Proposition 36. He is a past president of the California District Attorneys Association.

A sign warning against selling fentanyl in Placer County hangs over Taylor Road in Loomis on July 24, 2023.
Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

California’s drug crisis has only escalated, with so-called “compassionate solutions” like harm reduction and past policies that decriminalized hard drugs making things worse.  

Many drug addicts in the state have essentially faced two stark choices: homelessness or incarceration. This false dichotomy has normalized substance abuse, endangered public safety and failed to address the root causes of both homelessness and addiction.

In response, California voters last fall overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, a third option that prioritizes rehabilitation over incarceration and offers a clear path to recovery, helping break the cycle of addiction and homelessness.

Programs like syringe exchanges, for example, have fallen short in addressing addiction itself. While well-intentioned, these programs have led to unintended consequences, including public spaces littered with used needles, increased health risks and the normalization of drug use. While syringe exchanges help reduce disease transmission, they don’t always guarantee that people enroll in treatment programs, and research shows they can even increase mortality rates.

The scale of this problem is stark. In 2021 alone, nearly 11,000 Californians died from drug overdoses, with over two-thirds involving opioids like fentanyl. Each of these lives lost represents a missed opportunity for intervention and recovery. Prop. 36 has given the state a framework to address this crisis by requiring treatment and rehabilitation for people struggling with addiction. This approach has the potential to reduce recidivism, save lives and help people reclaim their futures.

Source: https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/01/addiction-homelessness-crisis-proposition-36/

Filed under: Addiction,Latest News,Legal Sector,Social Affairs,USA :

An update on the progress of national initiatives to address the opioid crisis.

by Mark S. Gold M.D. – Addiction Outlook

Updated January 31, 2025 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

  • Key points:
  • In 2016, drug experts mapped out solutions to the opioid epidemic.
  • Several major initiatives subsequently were proposed and implemented.
  • Many changes have had profound influences, reducing the impact of opioid use and saving lives.

In their 2016 New England Journal of Medicine article on opioids, Nora Volkow, M.D., director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and A. Thomas McLellan, Ph.D., who served as deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy during the Obama administration, reported on what was needed to combat the opioid epidemic.

They focused initially on opioid prescribing for pain. Pain experts resisted restrictions on opioids since they were the treatment of choice and addiction was only 3% to 8% for chronic pain and lower for acute pain. Pain patients develop a physical dependence on opioids, but few become addicts.

Volkow and McLellan were prescient in their statements/predictions nearly a decade ago. They acknowledged the need for opioids for managing chronic pain for some but pointed to overprescriptions in the 1990s and 2000s as a major driver of the opioid crisis. They discussed naloxone (Narcan) saving lives by reversing opioid overdoses. They advocated expanding access to medication-assisted treatment (methadone, buprenorphine) to treat opioid addiction, calling it an evidence-based strategy for reducing illicit drug use and deaths. They noted state prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) could be enhanced to track prescribing patterns and minimize diversion.

Volkow and McLellan called for research to develop effective non-opioid pain treatments and reduce reliance on opioids. They also addressed stigma associated with pain management and addiction treatment, urging the medical community and policymakers to view these issues through an evidence-based lens rather than a cloud of blame/moral failure. Most of all, they called for integrating scientific advances into policy and practice and improving training for providers of pain management and addiction treatment.

Here’s my “report card” on how we’re doing, based on the major recommendations from these experts in 2016.

Balancing Pain Management and Developing New Pain Treatment with Addiction Prevention. Grade: C+

Real progress was made in preventing opioid addiction and overdose deaths. However, many chronic pain patients report inadequate relief now due to stricter prescribing practices, sometimes resulting in untreated/undertreated pain. This is a problem without easy answers. Dr. Volkow has emphasized an urgent need for non-opioid-based medications bypassing the brain’s reward pathways, reducing abuse potential. NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative researched non-opioid pain medications and therapies. There are promising candidates, such as cebranopadol, suzetrigine (FDA approved 1/30/25), LEVI-04, and others in the pipeline. However, progress remains slow, and chronic pain patients face limited options.

Curbing Overprescription/Misuse. Grade: A-

Opioid prescribing rates nearly halved, from 81.3 prescriptions per 100 people in 2012 to 43.3 in 2023. Medical, pharmacy, and health professional education reversed years of over-prescription. All states have PDMPs to track opioid prescriptions, reducing over-prescription and diversion. Some overcorrections in prescribing (or rather, not prescribing) opioids led to some patients seeking illicit drugs (heroin or fentanyl), contributing to the overdose crisis.

Expanding Opioid Pain Prescription Guidelines. Grade: A-

The CDC says opioid prescriptions in the United States peaked in 2012, with a rate of 81.3 prescriptions per 100 persons. By 2023, this rate nearly halved to 43.3 prescriptions per 100. This major reduction reflects efforts to address the opioid epidemic through updated prescribing guidelines and increased awareness of opioid risks. The CDC Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain (2016) recommended limiting opioid prescriptions for chronic pain outside active cancer treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life care, emphasizing using the lowest effective dose of opioids and restricting opioid prescriptions for acute pain to three to seven days. However, some health care providers remain hesitant to prescribe any opioids, ever.

The SUPPORT Act (2018) required electronic prescribing for controlled substances under Medicare and imposed new requirements for education and monitoring. Medicare Part D Opioid Policies (2019) implemented stricter safety edits at the pharmacy level for high-dose opioid prescriptions and introduced limits on opioid-naive pain patients, such as a maximum of seven days for acute pain.

Naloxone and Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT). Grade: B+

Naloxone (Narcan) is widely available now, and over-the-counter sales were approved, as has the longer-acting antagonist nalmefene. However, fentanyl, the predominant opioid abused today, is very strong and challenging naloxone reversal protocols. Nalmefene may help.

Access to MAT (buprenorphine, methadone) improved. Patients with OUDs can start on buprenorphine without having to see a physician in person. On the downside, existing treatments are old, and the best outcomes are with the oldest OUD treatment, methadone. Methadone should be available for prescription by office and clinic-based physicians. Without detox and residential care options, patients with polysubstance, alcohol, meth, or cocaine use disorders and psychiatric dual disorders have been difficult to treat .

Stigma. Grade: B

NIDA has led national efforts to destigmatize substance use disorders (SUDs), especially OUDs. Expanding federal and state reimbursement for buprenorphine and methadone, and expanding the number of OUD prescribers, have succeeded somewhat. Classification of addiction as a disease, working with ASAM, and supporting destigmatizing language have helped. However, stigma persists, discouraging patients from seeking care.

Chronic pain patients still report feeling judged. AA, NA, and other mutual help groups are ubiquitous and destigmatizing. Yet, social network fellowships have been underutilized. One 2016 national survey revealed three-quarters of primary care physicians were unwilling to have a person with opioid use disorder marry into their family, and two-thirds viewed people with OUD as dangerous. It is not clear this has changed.

Science-Driven Policy. Grade: A-

Federal and state policies increasingly rely on evidence-based recommendations, such as funding research in non-opioid treatments. This is a huge accomplishment.

Developing totally new approaches has lagged, but innovation and invention can be like that sometimes. Broadly and equitably supporting MATs has helped people with OUD access evidence-based treatments. In the absence of a cure, we have made limited progress in developing and implementing effective non-opioid therapies. However, the doctors’ original focus on leveraging science to guide policy, improve treatments, and address root causes of the opioid epidemic was spot on, saving lives.

Policy Initiatives Impacted Opioid Prescribing and Pain Management Shifts. Grade: B-

Balancing effective pain management with risks of opioid use remains challenging. Patients with pain are treated with a combination of alternative strategies and therapies, with mixed outcomes. In states where it is legal, cannabis is increasingly used as an alternative treatment for chronic pain—even though evidence of its efficacy is mixed and cannabis use disorders may emerge. Complementary and alternative treatments like acupuncture, chiropractic care, massage therapy, and yoga are gaining popularity. Alternative therapies can’t provide the same level of relief as opioids. Those with complex or severe pain feel marginalized by policies restricting opioids. Non-pharmacological therapies like physical therapy, acupuncture, or CBT may be expensive, time-intensive, or uncovered by insurance. Many patients report inadequate relief, difficulty accessing specialized therapies, and frustration with the healthcare system.

New Hope in the Lab

Yale researchers identified alternative compounds with therapeutic potential chemicals extracted from the cannabis plant. A recent study showed that certain cannabinoids reduced the activity of a protein central to pain signaling in the peripheral nervous system. The protein, Nav1.8, enables repetitive firing of those neurons, a key process in transmitting pain signals. Blocking Nav1.8, and muting its activity, has shown promise in reducing pain in clinical studies. Cannabigerol in particular has the potential to provide effective pain relief without opioid risks.

Summary

In the opioid death crisis, the first phase was dominated by prescription pain medication abuse. Volkow and McLellan outlined changes necessary to reverse the epidemic. While tremendous progress has been made in this decade, more needs to be done as users first switched from pain medications to heroin, then fentanyl, adding xylazine, and now speedballing or polydrug use. The investment in prevention efforts, such as the DEA’s “One Pill Can Kill”, should be expanded.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/202501/opioid-crisis-grading-the-progress-of-national-initiatives

Filed under: Addiction,Heroin/Methadone,Latest News,Opioids,USA :

by David Evans, Senior Counsel, CIVEL (USA)

January12, 2025

Article forwarded by Hershel Baker, Drug Free Australia. He opens by saying: “Please find evidence below on a current project to make the marijuana industry legally accountable to their victims in the U.S. if they are SUCCESSFUL, it will become very useful to Victims in many other countries including Australia.” 

Legal Primer – Cannabis Industry Victims Educating Litigators (CIVEL) <https://www.civel.org/legalprimer>

 

The marijuana industry referred to here are those who illegally, negligently or fraudulently produce, market, or distribute marijuana products including those that have not been approved by the FDA or approved under federal law.

Today’s marijuana products can be high in potency and can reach 99% THC.

These products can be very destructive and cause addiction, mental illness, violence, crime, DUIs and many health and social problems. Young people are particularly vulnerable. We must protect them.

A first step is to educate lawyers and the community by providing legal and scientific guidelines for litigators so they can take the marijuana industry to court. We have produced six litigator guidelines:

  1. Product liability for the production and sale of dangerous and/or contaminated and poorly processed marijuana for medical or recreational use.
  2. Medical malpractice for the promotion and use of marijuana as a medicine without FDA approval.
  1. Environmental lawsuits to recover for environmental damage caused by marijuana growing.
  1. The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act prohibits a person (also a corporation) from investing in, acquiring, or participating in the affairs of an enterprise that engages in racketeering activity. RICO applies to “medical” marijuana and recreational marijuana as both are illegal under federal law. Damage claims for economic injuries can be filed.
  1. Server liability for marijuana stores that sell medical or recreational marijuana to customers who then kill or injure others in car crashes or other accidents
  2. Lawsuits under the Drug Dealer Liability Act – several states have passed laws that make drug dealers civilly liable to those injured by a driver under the influence of drugs or families who lose a child to illegal drugs and others injured by illegal drugs.

We will arm the legal profession to recognize cases, prepare them and then litigate as was done in the cases against big tobacco and is now being done against the opiate companies.

We will not conduct litigation. Our goal is to get the legal profession to initiate litigation by educating them as to the legal issues and strategies involved. We also plan to educate the public about how the marijuana industry has destroyed lives and families and to support the victims.

 

For more information contact Senior Counsel, David G. Evans, Esq.

Email: seniorcounsel@civel.org <mailto:seniorcounsel@civel.org>

 

Please see our legal primer on marijuana and federal law

 

LEGAL PRIMER <https://www.civel.org/s/LEGALPRIMERCSA2017.pdf>

 

Other Important Documents

*             CATEGORIES OF THE VICTIMS OF THE MARIJUANA INDUSTRY

<https://www.civel.org/list-of-marijuana-industry-victims>

*             MARIJUANA AS A MEDICINE – POLICY, SIDE EFFECTS, SPECIFIC ILLNESSES

<https://www.civel.org/s/2CIVELMARIJUANA-AS-A-MEDICINE-POLICY-SIDE-EFFECTS-S

PECIFIC-ILLNESSES.pdf>

*             THE FAILURES OF THE STATES TO REGULATE MARIJUANA

<https://www.civel.org/s/THE-FAILURES-OF-THE-STATES-TO-REGULATE-MARIJUANA-ST

UDIES-SHOW-THAT-MARIJUANA-PRODUCTS-HAVE-HIGH-LEVE.pdf>

*             INTERACTIONS BETWEEN MARIJUANA AND OTHER DRUGS

<https://www.civel.org/s/4-CIVELINTERACTIONS-BETWEEN-MARIJUANA-AND-OTHER-DRU

GS.pdf>

*             MARIJUANA AND VIOLENCE

<https://www.civel.org/s/5CIVELMARIJUANA-AND-VIOLENCE.pdf>

*             MARIJUANA USE AND MENTAL ILLNESS AND BRAIN DAMAGE

<https://www.civel.org/s/6CIVELMARIJUANA-USE-AND-MENTAL-ILLNESS-AND-BRAIN-DA

MAGE.pdf>

*             MARIJUANA USE AND DAMAGE TO HUMAN REPRODUCTION

<https://www.civel.org/s/7CIVEL-MARIJUANA-USE-AND-DAMAGE-TO-HUMAN-REPRODUCTI

ON.pdf>

*             CONCERNS ABOUT CBD

<https://www.civel.org/s/8CIVEL-CONCERNS-ABOUT-CBD.pdf>

 

DISCLAIMER OF LEGAL ADVICE

This should not be considered legal advice. This is for informational purposes only. Use of and access to these materials does not in itself create an attorney – client relationship between David G. Evans or CIVEL and the user or reader. Mr. Evans or CIVEL cannot vouch for any study cited herein since they did not do the study. The readers should consult the study and make their own interpretation as to its accuracy. Please also be advised that case law and statutory and regulatory laws cited herein may have been amended or changed by the time you read this.

David G. Evans, Esq. – Senior Counsel – Cannabis Industry Victims Educating Litigators (CIVEL) (USA)

Source: Email by Herschel Baker <hmbaker1938@hotmail.com> Sent: 11 January 2025 23:06

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Latest News,Legal Sector,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Workplace :
Newsmaker Interviews by: Gracie Kirschner, John Thomas – Sep 29, 2024

AUSTIN (Nexstar) – Fentanyl poisonings continue to kill thousands of people across Texas. But the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show an encouraging sign. The numbers show a slight decrease in deaths in Texas, mirroring a nationwide decline that started showing up earlier this year.

Part of the credit for the decline can be attributed to increased awareness of the dangers of the drug, DEA officials say.

Last year, Texas took a new step towards fentanyl awareness when Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill known as Tucker’s Law that requires school districts to educate students in grades 6-12 about the drug. The bill is named after Tucker Roe, a 19 year old who died from fentanyl poisoning.

His mom, Stefanie Roe, helped push for the legislation. She founded the nonprofit Texas Against Fentanyl after Tucker’s death. Tucker was Stefanie’s firstborn and only son.

“He was born with just an adventurous little spirit, a lover of people, and just a real light in our family and in others,” Roe said.

After she lost her son in 2021, Stefanie founded Texas Against Fentanyl, a 501C3 founded to increase awareness, support and legislation surrounding the drug.

“In 2021 when I lost Tucker, I had no knowledge of illicit fentanyl. I had never heard of press pills. I did not know that teens were selling to teens, and seven out of 10 pills were lethal. And as a mom, that just struck me that I didn’t have the information to safeguard my son and give him knowledge of that poison,” Roe said.

Tucker’s Law took effect last year. Since then, Roe says schools have reached out to Texas Against Fentanyl to organize assemblies and bring in the Tucker Project to their school programming. Roe believes that knowledge about the drug is essential to save lives.

“If a student understands that, this is what it looks like. You can’t see it, you can’t taste it, you can’t smell it. It can be added to these things. This is the impact it has on the body. It’s not a just say no campaign. It’s to get educated so you can make better decisions,” Roe said.

Roe said there has been some confusion over how to teach the topic calling it an “unfunded mandate” for schools. She said Texas Against Fentanyl has been developing a curriculum alongside the Texas Education Agency to help schools.

With the next legislative session looming in January, Roe said there are changes to be made. She plans to push lawmakers to make improvements to Tucker’s Law along with implementing new legislation to improve testing at hospitals to increase accurate reporting on fentanyl deaths.

Roe said her group is also working to decriminalize fentanyl test strips. The test strips allow people to detect whether fentanyl is in the drugs they use. Texas is one of a few states where the strips are illegal, considered to be drug paraphernalia. Last session, a bill to decriminalize test strips passed the Texas House but failed to advance in the Senate.

Roe said Texas Against Fentanyl is relentless and will pull every stop to get legislation passed to help save lives. She compares the group to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which leveraged the power of parents to make significant policy changes.

“We’re mad moms who have lost our children to something that we did not have education on, and we’re not backing down,” she said.

Source: https://www.kxan.com/state-of-texas/newsmaker-interviews/texas-mom-who-lost-son-not-backing-down-in-fight-for-fentanyl-education/

Filed under: Fentanyl,Latest News,Parents,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

by William P. Barr & John P. Walters – 23 Jan 2025 | Hudson Institute

(This article forwarded to NDPA by Drug Free Australia)

 

Just weeks after the election, President-elect Trump announced that he would

impose a 25% tariff on all Mexican products, and an additional 10% tariff on

all Chinese products, until the flow of illegal narcotics from those

countries is stopped. These measures will do more to choke off the growing

scourge of illegal drugs than all steps taken in the “drug war” to date.

 

Over the past few years, the flow of illegal narcotics into our country has

become a tsunami, with seizures of fentanyl pills skyrocketing from 4

million in 2020 to 115 million last year. The devastation inflicted on

American society by this traffic is catastrophic.

 

The opioid crisis alone costs us over 100,000 overdose deaths and $1.5

trillion annually, while the flood of potent methamphetamine from Mexico

fuels a new wave of meth addiction, ravaging lives, families and

neighborhoods in its wake.

 

This deadly traffic happens by weakening our border defenses and ignoring

opportunities to choke off the supply chain for illicit drugs, now centered

in China and Mexico.

 

The U.S. policy has focused on “harm reduction” inside the U.S. – deploying

overdose medications, like Naxolone, and funding more treatment for

addiction. While these steps are unobjectionable in themselves, they are an

inadequate response to the flood of poison we are confronting. It is like

addressing violent crime by offering more bandages.

 

Real progress requires eliminating the drug supply at its source. Here the

U.S. has a golden opportunity because the supply chain for drugs poisoning

America has become highly concentrated and vulnerable. It depends entirely

on illegal activities in two countries – the manufacture of illicit drugs in

Communist China, and drug processing and distribution operations in the

cartels’ safe havens in Mexico.

 

All these illegal activities are carried out with – and indeed require – the

connivance or willful blindness of the host governments. As Trump’s

announced tariffs show, the U.S. has the tools and leverage to compel China

and Mexico to shut down these operations. Doing this would strike a decisive

blow: once these operations are dismantled, it would be impossible to

replicate them elsewhere at anywhere near their current scale.

 

China has become the hub of illegal drug production because illegal

narcotics are increasingly synthesized chemically, rather than made from

grown plants. China offers the two prerequisites needed to supply the U.S.

market: a large chemical industrial base, and a government willing to allow

its factories to make illegal narcotics and their precursors on a large

scale.

 

Chinese factories make the essential ingredients for virtually all the

fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, as well as 80% of the methamphetamine,

that come into the U.S. and are producing a new wave of drugs worse than

fentanyl, like nitazenes and xylazines (“tranq”). Simply put, without

China’s production, America’s drug problem would be mere fraction of what it

is.

 

Communist China could easily stop this activity if it wanted to. But a

recent report by the bipartisan Select Committee on the Chinese Communist

Party (CCP) shows that China’s participation in the illegal drug trade is a

deliberate policy.

 

According to the report, the Chinese government and the CCP has been

granting tax subsidies to encourage their drug companies to produce and

export – for consumption in the U.S. – fentanyl and other death-dealing

drugs that are illegal in China, the U.S. and throughout the world.

 

This is an intolerable situation. The U.S. must compel China to stop

producing these drugs by imposing an escalating series of consequences on

those involved.

 

The initial tariff announced by Trump is a critical first step. If it

doesn’t get results, further tools are available – imposing higher tariffs;

targeting sanctions against the Chinese drug companies involved, and

potentially indicting and seizing assets of those companies; sanctioning

Chinese banks found to be involved in laundering drug money; and

facilitating private lawsuits by fentanyl victims against Chinese companies

making the drugs.

 

The second major chokepoint in the drug supply chain lies in Mexico. The

Mexican cartels have become the “one-stop-shop” for processing and

distributing nearly all the illegal drugs coming into the U.S. – the

synthetic drugs made in China, as well as the cocaine from coca plants in

Latin America. Experience eliminating the Colombian Medellin and Cali

cartels in the early 1990s shows that the U.S. can dismantle these

organizations when it becomes directly involved, works jointly with the host

governments and local forces, and uses all available national security and

law enforcement tools.

 

But Mexico poses a particular challenge. Using bribery and terrorist

tactics, the cartels have cowed and co-opted the government to the point

that it is unwilling to confront them nor allow the U.S. to take effective

action against them. And, even if the Mexican government was willing to

tackle the cartels, their military and law enforcement is so rife with

corruption they are incapable of effective action by themselves.

 

Our country cannot tolerate a failed narco-state on our border flooding

America with poison. The only way forward is for the U.S. to use its massive

economic leverage to compel the Mexican government to take a stand against

the cartels. President Trump’s announced tariff does just this.

 

Because the Mexicans cannot do the job themselves, eliminating the cartels

will require a joint campaign through which the U.S. engages in direct

action against the cartels, using a range of our law enforcement,

intelligence and military capabilities. The Mexican cartels are more like

foreign terrorist groups, like ISIS, than they are the American mafia – and

it is heartening that President Trump has signed an executive order

designating them as such. It is time to confront them as national-security

threats, not a law-enforcement matter.

 

Attacking the source of the problem overseas does not mean we should pull

back from trying to dismantle trafficking operations inside the U.S. But

progress abroad will produce exponentially greater results than anything we

do at home. Trump’s tariff initiative shows, that, rather than dither with

America’s stubborn drug crisis and passing it on to his successor, Trump is

willing to tackle it head on with decisive action.

Source: https://drugfree.org.au/index.php

Filed under: Economic,Fentanyl,Latest News,Political Sector,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
by Lauren Irwin – WNCT Greenville

Roughly one in every three Americans have reported knowing someone who has died of a drug overdose, a new survey found.

The poll, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that 32 percent of people have known someone who has died of a drug overdose. Those who reported knowing someone who has passed away from drug use were also more likely to support policy aimed at curbing addition, per the poll.

<cs-card “=”” class=”card-outer card-full-size ” card-fill-color=”#FFFFFF” card-secondary-color=”#E1E1E1″ gradient-angle=”112.05deg” id=”native_ad_inarticle-1-481ef4f6-36e2-4633-875b-892bd5420359″ size=”_2x_1y” part=””>

Whisky InvestorsOwn A Barrel of Whisky With Average Annual Returns of 10.15%*

The survey results, published Friday in JAMA Network, suggest that an avenue for enacting greater policy change for addiction may be by mobilizing those who lost someone due to drug addiction, researchers wrote.

Experts also noted that opioids — often prescribed by doctors for pain management — especially with the proliferation of powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl and polysubstance, have accelerated the rising rate of overdose deaths in recent years.

Since 1999, more than 1 million people have died of a drug overdose in the United States and while studies are still being conducted on the reasoning, researchers noted that there’s not much known about the impacts on the family or friends of the deceased.

The survey also found that personal overdose loss was more prevalent among groups with lower incomes but did not differ much across political parties.

<cs-card “=”” class=”card-outer card-full-size ” card-fill-color=”#FFFFFF” card-secondary-color=”#E1E1E1″ gradient-angle=”112.05deg” id=”native_ad_inarticle-2-c25e2660-6f64-47e7-8515-554a74066c4a” size=”_2x_1y” part=””>

ReassuredPeople Born 1940-1975 With No Life Insurance Could Be Eligible For This

Nearly 30 percent of Democrats said they lost someone to overdose, while 33 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of independents said the same.

“This cross-sectional study found that 32% of US adults reporting knowing someone who died of a drug overdose and that personal overdose loss was associated with greater odds of endorsing addiction as an important policy issue,” the researchers wrote. “The findings suggest that mobilization of this group may be an avenue to facilitate greater policy change.”

A similar study examined overdose deaths from 2011 to 2021 and estimates that more than 321,000 children in the U.S. have lost a parent to drug overdose.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. drug overdose deaths dropped slightly in 2023, the first annual decrease in overdose deaths since 2018. Still, the overall number of deaths is extremely high, with more than 107,000 people dying in 2023 due to the overuse of drugs.

Source:  https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/nearly-1-in-3-americans-have-reported-losing-someone-to-a-drug-overdose-study/ar-BB1nsfVP?

 

Filed under: Addiction,Culture,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Prevalence,USA :

                          More than half of study subjects experienced homelessness in the past six months.

ATLANTA — A new study led by a Georgia State University researcher finds that the opioid epidemic and rural homelessness are exacerbating each other with devastating consequences.

School of Public Health Assistant Professor April Ballard and her colleagues examined data from the Rural Opioid Initiative on more than 3,000 people who use drugs in eight rural areas across 10 states. They found that 54 percent of study participants reported experiencing homelessness in the past six months, a figure that suggests Point in Time Counts used to allocate state and federal funding significantly underestimate homeless populations in rural areas. The findings appear in the January edition of the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

“Rural houselessness is very much an issue in the United States, and there are unique challenges that come with it, such as lack of awareness and a lack of resources,” said Ballard, who co-leads GSU’s Center on Health and Homelessness. “When you add the opioid epidemic on top of it, it really exacerbates the problem.”

Ballard explained that the unemployment, financial ruin and loss of family and social networks that often accompany opioid use disorder and injection drug use can precipitate housing instability and homelessness. The uncertain and harsh living conditions experienced by people without stable housing can perpetuate drug use as a coping mechanism. The result can be a self-reinforcing cycle that contributes to poorer health and shorter lifespans.

Ballard and her colleagues found that study subjects with unstable housing were 1.3 times more likely to report being hospitalized for a serious bacterial infection and 1.5 times more likely to overdose than those with stable housing. She explained that a lack of access to clean water to wash the skin and prepare drugs makes infections more likely, and that using drugs alone and furtively can increase the risk of an accidental overdose.

The Rural Opioid Initiative surveyed people about their experiences with homelessness over the past six months, while Point in Time Counts mandated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development quantify the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. Despite this methodological difference, Ballard said her study’s findings suggest that Point in Time Counts significantly underestimate homeless populations in rural areas.

In Kentucky, for example, the researchers counted up to five times as many people experiencing homelessness than Point in Time Counts, even though their sample of people who use drugs constituted less than 1 percent of the adult population. In three counties that estimated zero people experiencing homelessness using Point in Time Counts, Ballard and her colleagues quantified more than 100 people who use drugs who had experienced homelessness in the past six months.

The dispersed nature of rural areas makes Point in Time Counts difficult, Ballard acknowledged, but the undercounting of people experiencing homelessness can result in fewer federal and state resources reaching vulnerable people and communities.

“House-lessness in rural areas is a major problem,” Ballard said, “but we’re not allocating resources in a way that is proportionate to the problem.”

The research was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse with co-funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Source:  https://news.gsu.edu/2025/01/13/study-examines-links-between-opioid-epidemic-and-rural-homelessness/

Filed under: Culture,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Mental Health,Prevalence,Social Affairs,USA :

Over the last weekend of April 2024, something in Austin’s drug supply went horribly wrong. The first deaths passed largely unnoticed by anyone other than the families and friends of those who consumed the tainted substances. An 8-year-old girl who’d been playing outside her apartment in northeast Travis County on the evening of Sunday, April 28, came home to find her 50-year-old father dead in bed. In a homeless encampment in a wooded area of East Austin, paramedics revived two people with naloxone, the overdose reversal drug known commonly as Narcan. But, hours later, one of them, a 51-year-old woman, was found dead inside her tent—a short walk from a 53-year-old man who likely died around the same time.

A clearer picture wouldn’t emerge, however, until 911 calls began flooding in the following morning.

Most Mondays, the Sixth Street entertainment district would be quietly nursing the hangover from another rowdy weekend, the only souls on the street those who sleep in the shelters, alleys, and sidewalks. But emergency dispatchers were getting repeated reports of people in distress.

The first call came in just after 9 a.m. from someone calmly describing an overdose in an alley. But, as the minutes dragged on, panic crept into the caller’s voice. “I’m scared,” she blurted out. “Oh, my gosh, I’m so fucking scared. Somebody’s going to die because of these people.”

“What happened?” asked the operator.

“Somebody tried to say ‘Don’t call the ambulance,’” the caller responded. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

A little before 10 a.m., a security guard flagged down one of the Austin police officers flooding the district. Two men were sitting on the ground next to a trash bin in an alley near Sixth and Red River Street, slumped forward. Only 20 minutes earlier, both men had been walking and chatting. Now, they weren’t breathing.

The officer administered naloxone and began performing CPR. Paramedics took one to a hospital. The other, 51-year-old Benjamin Arzo Gordon, couldn’t be revived.

The alley where Gordon died had become the epicenter of a mass casualty event. During a two-hour span that Monday morning, at least six others overdosed and were revived with naloxone in a four-block radius in downtown Austin. Over 72 hours, Austin police reported more than 70 overdose calls. Records from Travis County, which includes most of Austin, and neighboring Williamson County indicate that as many as 12 may have died. The culprit: a bad batch of crack cocaine.

Through dozens of open records requests and interviews, the Texas Observer and Texas Community Health News have pieced together what happened during those deadly days—and how changes to state law might have saved lives. Across the capital city, people who consume crack, a stimulant, were suffering symptoms consistent with poisoning from opioids like heroin or fentanyl, the incredibly potent prescription painkiller.

The adulterated crack impacted Central Texans from many walks of life. Among the people who died were a construction worker from Honduras and a young man from Wimberley, who passed away in his parked truck with the engine running. Crack rocks found at the scene of some of the deaths tested positive for fentanyl.

A small, inexpensive item might have averted some of these deaths. Fentanyl testing strips can be used to check for the presence of the synthetic opioid. With an appearance similar to an at-home COVID-19 test, the strips are dipped in water in which a small amount of the drug has been dissolved. A line indicates if fentanyl is present.

But such testing strips are illegal in Texas. They’re considered paraphernalia, and possessing one is a Class C misdemeanor. While the Texas House passed a bill that would have legalized them in 2023, the Senate declined to vote on it.

In general, Texas has been reluctant to embrace the strategy of harm reduction, a broadly defined term for helping people who use drugs without stigmatizing or imposing strict parameters, while also involving drug users in planning and implementation. Harm reduction has been promoted in the United States since at least the 1980s. A classic early example is teaching people who inject drugs to clean needles with bleach, preventing the spread of HIV. The overall approach is sometimes pitched as a means to keep people alive long enough to get off drugs, but many practitioners simply seek to keep substance users safe and healthy, regardless of plans to enter treatment.

Under the administration of President Joe Biden, the federal government embraced aspects of harm reduction. Some states have as well. But policies favored by many Texas officials reflect the singular goal of making it as difficult as possible to use drugs. As it turns out, research and interviews with both experts and users of drugs show, making drug use more difficult also makes it more dangerous. Though Texas ranks low among states in fatal overdose rates, federal data shows the Lone Star State’s rate stayed nearly flat from 2023 to 2024, while overdose deaths fell significantly nationwide.

Among those calling for more humane drug policies in Texas and beyond is a coalition of academics, activists, service providers, and people who use drugs who argue criminalization endangers people with little benefit. Some members of this coalition identify as harm reductionists, while others identify as advocates for drug user health. Some argue that stigma and marginalization do more harm than drugs themselves; many believe that, while kicking drug habits should be the ultimate goal, the best tactic is to meet people where they are. These advocates push for more access to naloxone, legalized drug checking, and reduced stigma so that policymakers, service providers, and drug users and their families can have real conversations about how to stay alive.

In recent months, top Texas officials have not only rejected harm reduction but have also openly antagonized those who practice it.

The prevailing attitude in the state is, “Why should we try and save their lives? They’re just going to use again,” said Joy Rucker, a nationally known advocate who launched Texas’ largest harm reduction nonprofit. In California, where she used to work, harm reduction organizations get robust public funding and operate openly.

“Texas was just a rude awakening,” she said.

A tall, thin Houston native with a quick sense of humor, Benjamin Arzo Gordon had been living on the streets of Austin for years. A January 2024 photo in the Austin American-Statesman shows him with a close-cropped white beard and a gray beanie, at Central Presbyterian Church downtown, looking pensive as he discusses harsh winter weather.

Andi Brauer, who oversees the church’s homeless outreach programs, said Gordon was a regular at weekly free breakfasts, cracking jokes with her and other volunteers and taking a genuine interest in her wellbeing.

“He’d always say, ‘You need to sit down and eat,’” Brauer recalled. “Or, if somebody was sometimes threatening or rude to me, he would say, ‘Don’t mess with Andi.’” She once printed out a photo of the two of them and used it to make a card for him.

In the alley where he died, Gordon was known to stop by with meals from the nearby food truck where he worked. “He used to help people in the alley,” said Loretta, a 55-year-old Austinite who herself suffered an overdose after Gordon.

Bokhee Chun, a Central Presbyterian volunteer, remembered Gordon would sing her hymns. Some months before he passed, Brauer said, Gordon came in to fill out a volunteer application.

Like many who died last April, Gordon was an experienced drug user. His drug of choice, crack, put him at little risk of sudden death by itself. But the crack he smoked that spring day was laced with a substance that has become synonymous with America’s failed drug policies.

In the latter half of last century, as states and the federal government increased penalties for drug sale and use, overdose death rates stayed relatively flat. That raised questions about whether deterrence policies did anything to reduce drug use. Then, this century, overdose rates skyrocketed, driven by synthetic opioids including fentanyl. Fentanyl had been around for decades, but in the 2010s it increasingly caused deaths in northeastern states. As it moved west, the nation’s drug supply transformed.

Initially, fentanyl was used alone or to boost the potency of other opioids and depressants like heroin and prescription pain pills. But, in recent years, people killed by fentanyl are increasingly found to have stimulants like cocaine or methamphetamine in their systems. Explanations for this vary. Stimulants may be intentionally adulterated to hook users on fentanyl. A stimulant user might take opioids to come down. An unsophisticated dealer with a small stimulant supply may add fentanyl to stretch it. And failure to clean scales or surfaces can also mix fentanyl with another drug.

In Texas, overdose rates increased dramatically starting in 2020. From June 2023 to June 2024, more than 5,000 people died of an overdose in the state, with Travis County recording the highest fentanyl-related death rate among Texas’ most populous counties in recent years. Though Texas has one of the lower overdose rates in the nation, deaths in the state declined by less than 3 percent from 2023 to 2024, while the rest of the nation saw a drop of nearly 15 percent, per the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In October, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it recorded a 13-percent drop in the state over the same period—but its figures include only those overdoses deemed accidental, not those labeled intentional, suicide, or of undetermined cause.

Experts also question the general accuracy of Texas’ numbers. In much of the state, underfunded and under-trained justices of the peace are charged with death investigations. Overdoses, which require costly autopsies and toxicology reports, are easy to overlook.

In response to the overdose increase, HHS in 2017 launched the Texas Targeted Opioid Response (TTOR) initiative. HHS is also part of a state awareness campaign using billboards and social media ads focused on cautionary tales of young Texans who overdosed. At the same time, state leaders have doubled down on criminalization.

In 2023, the Legislature passed a law allowing prosecutors to bring murder charges in fentanyl overdose cases. Critics say this discourages people from reporting emergencies, and research shows such laws harm public health. Some who overdosed in Austin last April had shared drugs, putting survivors at risk of being charged. In 2021, the Legislature passed a good samaritan law ostensibly meant to protect people who call 911 to report an overdose. The law created a defense for people arrested for low-level possession, but it has so many caveats—you can only use it once in your life, it doesn’t apply if you’ve been convicted of a drug-related felony, you can’t use it if you’ve reported another overdose in the last 18 months—that you’d need a flow chart to understand it. Critics say the statute’s of little use.

“The fentanyl-induced or the drug-induced homicide laws, that jacks up the consequences and the intensity so much more,” said Alex White, director of services at the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, an Austin non-profit that does street outreach, operates a drop-in center, and provides supplies including for hygiene and wound care.

Some states, like Maryland and Vermont, make a point of prioritizing input from people who use or have used drugs while crafting policy. Harm reduction advocates say this is lacking in Texas, though HHS does have a low-profile advisory committee that is required to include members who’ve received mental health or addiction treatment.

“If you’re thinking that you know how to serve folks, and you don’t have those folks at the table when you’re trying to serve them, it’s not going to work,” said Stephen Murray, a paramedic and overdose survivor on Massachusetts’ Harm Reduction Advisory Council.

Rapid changes in the drug supply can make it difficult to conclusively track policy impacts. Critics blame Texas’ persistent overdose rate at least partly on punitive laws, but a few western states including liberal Oregon—which famously passed a drug decriminalization ballot measure in 2020—actually saw overdoses increase between 2023 and 2024. To this, some experts and at least one study counter that fentanyl’s delayed arrival on the West Coast has distorted the death rates, and that Oregon specifically did not implement sufficient services alongside decriminalization.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Loretta woke up on the morning of Monday, April 29, in the alley where she often goes to smoke crack and sometimes spends the night. She grew up in East Austin, only blocks away.

Loretta said she lent her pipe that morning to a friend who’d just purchased drugs. Then she heard someone ask, “What’s wrong?” and saw the friend staring up, trance-like.

“He stayed looking at the sky,” Loretta said, reclining and rolling back her eyes to demonstrate. “The next thing I know he just went like this,” she said, as she pantomimed slumping limply to the side. “I was shaking him, and I said, ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong?’ And after that he just didn’t answer.”

Despite fear she’d be held responsible, Loretta yelled to a friend to call 911. Police and paramedics swarmed the area. Loretta watched as someone else collapsed. “She hurt herself hard on the concrete and I said, ‘Oh, my God, hell no, this is not happening.’”

Soon, an acquaintance ran up to say Loretta’s boyfriend had also collapsed in a nearby portable toilet. “He was slurring like a baby, like a little boy,” Loretta said. “He started to lose consciousness. I slapped him hard. It hurt my hand. And I shook him and I started praying.”

Around the time that Loretta was calling out for help for her boyfriend, and EMTs were trying unsuccessfully to save Gordon, Adam Balboa showed up to work at an Austin-Travis County EMS (ATCEMS) station in south Austin. A case manager for a unit focused on substance use, Balboa heard the overdose reports and symptoms being described and knew what would save the most lives. “We needed to flood the downtown area with as much Narcan as possible,” he said.

Opioids in the bloodstream bind to receptors in the brain, creating euphoria. But by a quirk of physiology, excessive opioids bound to those receptors interfere with the body’s ability to measure its need for oxygen, slowing breathing—to the point where it can be fatal. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation can keep someone alive. Narcan temporarily blocks the receptors to opioids, essentially short-circuiting an overdose if delivered in time.

The medics and police officers in downtown Austin were running out of naloxone, but Balboa didn’t just want to get them more. He also wanted to get it in the hands of people who use drugs, along with their friends, family, and neighbors. So he and colleagues began throwing together kits containing Narcan, a CPR mask, and instructions, and he hurried downtown with his SUV loaded up with the blue zippered pouches. “Everybody was super receptive,” he said. “They were clipping it to their belts and … going about their normal business.”

As common-sense as that response seems, it’s one strongly associated with harm reduction. By handing out naloxone downtown, Balboa was helping those most vulnerable to the tainted drugs help one another. It’s also a response that would have been impossible a few years ago.

Balboa’s unit is the brainchild of Mike Sasser, a 51-year-old ATCEMS captain who’s been in recovery for 21 years. A longtime paramedic who often worked with Austin’s unhoused population, Sasser became friends in 2018 with Mark Kinzly, a lion of the Texas harm reduction movement. Kinzly, who passed away in 2022, had helped start the Texas Overdose Naloxone Initiative, which was getting grants to distribute the medication. He had a seemingly simple idea for Sasser: ATCEMS could use grant money to buy Narcan, pass it out, and train people how to use it.

“My mind was blown,” Sasser said. “Why have I never thought about this? That would save so many lives.”

ATCEMS doctors then wrote prescriptions that allowed medics to hand out naloxone (today, it’s available over the counter). Sasser’s unit also began reaching out directly to overdose survivors and administering a maintenance drug that reduces opioid cravings, and it now includes two full-time case managers who run an overdose reversal education program called Breathe Now.

All of this fits under the philosophy of harm reduction, which can also include teaching people to use drugs more safely and providing supplies like clean glass pipes, which help prevent disease and infection. Providing food, water, hygiene products, or wound care to people who feel stigmatized in doctor’s offices is another tenet.

“We want to provide people with what they need, so we can build that trust,” said Em Gray, whose NICE Project provides supplies to Austinites, many of them unhoused, and stocks Narcan vending machines. “That’s how we show that we are there for them; we’re there to improve their quality of life, there to reduce their overdose death rates.”

There’s little funding available in Texas for the nonprofits and mutual aid groups that do this work. Across the state, harm reductionists often operate out of backpacks or car trunks.

To the state’s credit, Texas has taken some steps to increase naloxone distribution. TTOR does this with an annual federal grant of about $5.5 million. In 2019, TTOR, whose Narcan distribution program is administered by the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, gave about 40 percent of its naloxone to law enforcement agencies—even as research shows it’s more effective to give the medication to laypeople, who are typically first on the scene and present no threat of arrest—an analysis by Texas Community Health News found. By 2022, TTOR’s emphasis had shifted, with law enforcement making up only about 15 percent of its distribution.

But police are still prioritized in Texas’ long-term naloxone plan. Under a different state program started in April 2023, the Texas Department of Emergency Management (TDEM) began distributing $75 million worth of the medication over 10 years. That naloxone, donated by a pharmaceutical company as part of a court settlement over opioid deaths, is largely earmarked for first responders. Of the more than 150,000 doses that TDEM distributed from April 2023 to September 2024, 118,000 went to law enforcement agencies, mostly sheriff’s offices. Many of these offices cover areas that lack other harm reduction infrastructure, but records provided by TDEM show sheriffs aren’t using the naloxone. Of 13 counties in which agencies reported using doses from TDEM by September, the highest rate of use was 3 percent. Much of that naloxone will expire later this year. In an email, a TDEM spokesperson said the agency had “yet to turn down a request for naloxone” and that “Administration or disposition of distributed naloxone is up to the receiving entity how they see fit, in accordance with manufacturer’s guidance.”

When it set the state’s two-year budget in 2023, the Legislature allocated an additional $18 million in opioid settlement funds to UT Health San Antonio, but it’s not clear the appropriation will be renewed.

In the meantime, harm reductionists rely on a patchwork of naloxone sources, including local governments.

“Had we not saturated Austin with Narcan leading up to [the April] event, then that event would have been a lot more detrimental than it was,” said Sarah Cheatham, a peer support specialist with The Other Ones Foundation, an Austin nonprofit serving the unhoused. “Even when it was hard to get in our hands, we were out there doing this communication for months before this happened.”

By late morning on April 29, the Austin Police Department (APD) had some idea what was happening. Crack rocks and pipes had been found at the scene of a number of overdoses in an area known for its use, and officers had interviewed some who’d been revived with naloxone. They began looking for people seen on surveillance cameras and suspected of selling the tainted crack. While responding to an overdose, detectives found one suspect standing in front of a tent, just a block from police headquarters.

While cops made arrests, harm reductionists tried frantically to figure out what was going on. A little after noon that Monday, Claire Zagorski, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin who’s worked in harm reduction for years, messaged a group chat: “Austin folks there’s a bad batch downtown as of this AM. Not sure on specifics but it does respond to naloxone.”

Groups started handing out Narcan and warning the communities they serve, but without any official information from local governments. “We were really just kind of going in blind,” Cheatham said. “We were all talking to each other about, ‘Who’s going to these camps? Where is it happening? Is it happening downtown?’ And I was mainly reaching out to the people that I know.”

Research shows that, given the chance, drug users will reduce their risk of overdose—including by carrying naloxone, not using alone, or taking a small tester dose. But, lacking detailed information, harm reduction workers in Austin were constrained. “It’s distressing that the thing that got everyone activated was me being notified by a backchannel,” Zagorski said.

When local officials finally made public statements hours after the flood of 911 calls, they only addressed some questions. Whatever was killing people was responding to Narcan, officials said, in a news release and press conference. But they were vague about which drug was adulterated, and there was no mention of test strips.

“It was a very chaotic scene at first,” APD Lieutenant Patrick Eastlick told the Observer. “Something we can look at in the future is, if this happens again, that we reach out to these different groups where we can spread the word.”

Open conversations about drugs are difficult in a state where top elected officials are cracking down on services for people who use them. In late November, state Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a headline-grabbing lawsuit to shut down a homeless navigation center at a south Austin church. The suit specifically blames the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance’s needle exchange program for “the prevalence of drug paraphernalia, including used needles, littering the surrounding area.” Drug use around the church “fuels criminality, and creates an environment where nearby homes and businesses are at constant risk of theft,” the complaint states.

Critics say efforts like Paxton’s just push drug use out of sight, creating greater risk. “It sends the message to people who use drugs that they should hide it, they should be kept in the dark and in the closet,” said Aaron Ferguson of the Texas Drug User Health Union. “The closet is a very dangerous place for people who use drugs. It’s where overdoses happen. It’s where stadiums full of people die every year.”

At least two who died in the Austin overdose outbreak were found alone. Family members of at least two others who perished at home told police they didn’t know their loved one had used drugs that day.

How state officials talk about drug use, critics note, also suggests that only some lives matter. For example, in a 2023 legislative hearing, GOP state Senator Drew Springer—in a successful attempt to woo conservative support for requiring school districts to stock naloxone in middle and high schools—distinguished between different groups of Texas children. “I think the general public, when they hear ‘overdosing,’ they think ‘That’s just a druggie, and that’s a druggie kid’s problem,’” he said. “No, it’s your kid’s [problem], because he may be taking a Xanax or an Adderall” without knowing fentanyl was present.

Claudia Dambra, who runs Street Value, a drug user health organization in Houston, criticized messaging that condemns certain substance users. “All it’s doing is creating more separation,” she said. “It feels like this weird, forced social Darwinism. … It feels like they’re picking us off.”

In an email, an HHS spokesperson said the agency does not discriminate: “[HHS] substance use programs offer treatment and recovery support for people, regardless of substance use duration.”After the horror of watching her boyfriend taken away in an ambulance, Loretta wandered through downtown Austin. Near APD HQ, in the area where police had arrested their suspect earlier, she was offered crack that her friend insisted came from a reliable source. Stressed and scared, she took a hit.

“I started getting a headache right away, like oh, my God, I’ve got a migraine or something. And I started throwing up,” she said. “I said, ‘Call the police, I’m sick.’”

Loretta didn’t lose consciousness, but she was vomiting as police questioned her. Eventually, she was taken to a hospital. She would be among the survivors.

Today, Loretta says that she gets test strips from harm reduction organizations, which quietly distribute them despite state law, and she gives them to friends. But, at the time, she knew little about them. Organizations that distribute strips generally can’t use grant money for their purchase, and government agencies, like ATCEMS, don’t distribute them.

Back in 2023, it seemed Texas was poised to legalize the strips. Before that year’s legislative session, Abbott said he supported allowing the tests, and legislators in both chambers introduced bills to legalize equipment for checking a range of drugs. One by Houston-area Republican Tom Oliverson, which was limited to fentanyl strips only, sailed through the House.

Oliverson, an anesthesiologist who has prescribed fentanyl to patients, said he’d heard from family members of people who purchased black-market pills without knowing they included the powerful opioid.

“That’s literally like stepping on a landmine,” Oliverson told the Observer. “You heard a click and the next thing you know, you were gone.  Nothing you could have done could have saved you. You didn’t know it was there, right? Except for the fact that there are test strips.”

The bill received tepid support from harm reductionists, who were frustrated by its narrowness. The drug supply is constantly changing: Today, the dangerous veterinary tranquilizer xylazine is increasingly used to supplement other drugs. “We’re really trying to craft language that’s inclusive,” said Cate Graziani, former head of the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance and current co-director of a spinoff advocacy group, Vocal TX. “We don’t want to go back to the Legislature every time we have a new overdose prevention tool.”

Oliverson said the bill only applied to fentanyl “because it is that much more dangerous, because it is that much more powerful. … People say to me, ‘I don’t like the idea of giving people test strips because it gives them confidence in the illegal drugs that they’re buying, and I want to discourage people from using illegal drugs,’” he said. “Well, I want to discourage people from using illegal drugs too, but having them insta-killed by a mislabeled pill that they bought, the first time they took it, is not an effective strategy for recovery.”

While other drug-checking legislation failed that session, Oliverson’s bill passed the House 143-2—but it never received a hearing in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. “They just could not get over the idea that you are making it safer for people to use illegal drugs and that we shouldn’t make it safe for people to use illegal drugs,” Oliverson said, “because they shouldn’t be using illegal drugs at all.”

Oliverson said he’ll introduce a similar bill this session and may rewrite it to include xylazine, but he made it clear he doesn’t support other harm reduction measures like needle exchanges. Such a bill will simply fizzle again, though, barring a change of heart in the Senate, which is run with an iron fist by Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, whose office did not respond to arequest for comment for this article.

“It’s so demoralizing to live in a state where your elected leadership is so unwilling to do something so small as legalizing fentanyl test strips, because there’s so much stigma around drug users,”  Graziani said.

By the afternoon of April 29, the tainted crack had made its way to south Austin. Loretta Mooney, another ATCEMS case manager in the substance use unit, was off work but rushed in. Dispatchers could see a new cluster of calls developing on Oltorf Street, east of Interstate 35.

By the time Mooney responded to her first call, at an apartment complex, medics had administered naloxone and revived a woman. Mooney handed out a few doses, then responded to another call from a fast food restaurant across the street. Someone had flagged down police, concerned about a man collapsed against the restaurant’s wall. Officers began CPR and administered Narcan. Mooney gave the man an additional dose and continued life-saving measures. Still, the 53-year-old died.

The situation was starting to look similar to downtown earlier in the day. Teenagers at another apartment complex began waving down Mooney and the officer. They ran over. Mooney administered naloxone to an unconscious woman and helped the officer deploy a breathing bag and mask. After a few minutes, the woman began breathing on her own again.

With Balboa now on his way to meet her and most of the calls near her covered, Mooney came to the same conclusion Balboa had that morning. “I was like, ‘Bring me all the Narcan you have and we’re going to start teaching these kids,’” she said.

On the lower level of a terraced parking lot, Mooney and the officer spread out naloxone kits and gathered the teenagers who had flagged them down.

“I’m telling the kid that came to get me specifically … ‘Because of you, this woman is alive,’”  Mooney said. “We’re on the side of [the road] with, you know, ages 10 to 16, teaching them how to use Narcan.”

While Mooney and then Balboa, too, instructed people in the neighborhood how to use naloxone, a new crisis emerged. Some of the people who had bought the tainted crack were now behind the wheel. First responders were rushing to car wrecks and stalled vehicles.

Responding to the new calls, Mooney and Balboa saw the results of their impromptu training. As Balboa headed to a pawn shop where someone was overdosing, he got stopped in traffic. With his lights and sirens going, trying to weave through vehicles, he saw the teenagers they’d trained earlier.

“Before I can clear an intersection, they’d already sprinted over, pulled out a kit, and started giving Narcan,” he said. “Not only were they excited and ready to help and empowered to be able to do so, but when that opportunity finally came for them, they ran at it.”

As evening fell, the dying slowed. Behind closed doors, away from passersby armed with naloxone, however, it wasn’t through yet. A woman staying at a motel on Oltorf woke up during the night and called her 61-year-old husband, only to hear his phone ringing in the bathroom, then find him lying on the floor. The partner of a 57-year-old man got out of bed to get him warm milk after she noticed his nose bleeding, but, when she came back, he wasn’t breathing. A 36-year-old parked his truck in a lot in north Austin; when a security guard called 911 hours later, he was already dead. Around midnight, a son found his 63-year-old father deceased in an Oltorf apartment.

Later that same Tuesday, Loretta was released from the hospital. Downtown again, she found out her boyfriend had also survived and been released.

The following day, a man in southeast Austin woke up in the afternoon to find that a friend he’d let stay in his apartment had died while he slept. After agonizing for nearly two hours, he called the cops. That afternoon, a 34-year-old resident of Williamson County, just north of Austin, was found on the floor of his bedroom, where police found crack laced with fentanyl. Between April 28 and May 6, nine people in Travis County died from the toxic effects of fentanyl and cocaine, according to Travis County Medical Examiner records, in addition to the Williamson County death. At the request of APD, the Travis medical examiner withheld the cause of death in two other fatal overdoses that may have been related.

In the aftermath, APD made a handful of arrests. In some cases, police affidavits show, detectives were following information about who may have sold the tainted crack; in others, undercover officers simply went to known drug markets and arrested anyone who would sell to them. Eastlick, the APD lieutenant, said investigators believe the crack was adulterated at the local level, not higher up the drug supply chain, but that police had been unable to prove anyone intentionally sold tainted drugs. “It was a short surge … so our thinking is that it was not intentional,” he said.

As the tainted substance faded from the Austin drug supply, Cheatham said she and others heard stories of people who overdosed and were revived by naloxone without the authorities ever being alerted. In Austin’s camps and alleys, anonymous drug users helped one another.

Many of those who died remained anonymous as well, victims of an event whose details remained unclear and which took its toll mostly on the sort of people society tends to lose in its cracks.

Brauer and Chun, with the Central Presbyterian church, didn’t learn of Benjamin Arzo Gordon’s death until months afterward, when contacted for this story. In early November, the pair traveled to the indigent burial cemetery in northeast Travis County. In the wide, level graveyard, rows of nondescript markers rested flush to the ground. By Gordon’s, they left a bouquet of artificial flowers and a potted plastic plant.

“Just being able to picture him so clearly, knowing him as somebody that I value, that I enjoyed seeing, that was full of life and laughter despite the situation he was in—to hear about the way that he died of a drug overdose, probably fairly anonymously, just was incredibly sad to me,” Brauer said. “So because I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye … it just felt like something we needed to do to honor him.”

Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with Texas Community Health News and Public Health Watch. Daniel Carter contributed reporting.

Source:  https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-war-on-drug-users-fentanyl-overdoses-narcan-austin/

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Fentanyl,Latest News,Legal Sector,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

by Nora Volkow, Director, NIDA – January 14, 2025

Dr. Nora Volkow outlines a new roadmap for cannabis and cannabis policy research. In this uncertain and rapidly changing landscape, Dr. Volkow emphasizes that research on cannabis and cannabis policy is badly needed to guide individual and public health decision-making.

The greatly increased availability of cannabis over the last two decades has outpaced our understanding of the public-health impacts of the drug. It is now available for medical purposes in most states, and adults may now purchase it for recreational use in nearly half the states. With greater availability has come decreased public perception of harm, as well as increased use.

In this uncertain and rapidly changing landscape, research on cannabis and cannabis policy is badly needed to guide individual and public health decision-making.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that between 2012 and 2019, past-year use of cannabis among people 12 and older rose from 11 percent to over 17 percent, and although trend comparisons aren’t possible because of changes in the survey’s methodology, in 2022, nearly 22 percent of people had used the drug in the past year. Very steep increases are also being seen in the number of people 65 and older who use cannabis.

At the same time, the cannabis industry is producing an ever-wider array of products with varying and sometimes very high concentrations of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) Greater harms from cannabis use are associated with regular consumption of high-THC doses. And there is a cornucopia of other intoxicating products available to the public, some containing other cannabinoids about which we still know very little.

To create a roadmap for research in this space, NIDA along with the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), sponsored an independent consensus study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). The study resulted in a comprehensive report, Public Health Consequences of Changes in the Cannabis Policy Landscape, that was published in September.

The report describes in detail the different regulatory frameworks that exist in different states, and it draws on prior research to identify policies that are likeliest to have the greatest impact protecting public health. Those include approaches like restrictions on retail sales, pricing, and marketing; putting limits or caps on THC content in products; and laws about cannabis-impaired driving. They also could include different forms of taxation and even state monopolies. While state monopolies have not yet been tried with cannabis, they have proven effective at reducing the public health impacts of alcohol.

But the report also underscores that few conclusions can yet be drawn about the impacts of legalization or the different ways it been implemented. It is clear that people are consuming cannabis more and in a wider variety of ways, and there is some evidence of increases in emergency department visits due to accidental ingestion, car accidents, psychotic reactions, and a condition of repeated and severe vomiting (hyperemesis syndrome). But we are hindered in our further understanding because policy details vary so much between states and because data are collected and reported in so many different ways, making interpretation difficult.

Consequently, the report enumerates recommendations for research that should be conducted by federal, state, and tribal agencies to provide greater clarity and inform policy, including several domains within the purview of the NIH.

The report underscores the need for more detailed information on health and safety outcomes associated with specific policy frameworks. This includes more data on outcomes associated with different regulations for how cannabis products are sold and marketed, whether they can be used in public spaces, and whether more restrictive rules about how cannabis can be sold, such as those existing in other countries like Uruguay, are associated with improved health and safety outcomes. Many states have developed approaches to promote health and social equity, including programs to expunge or seal records of cannabis offenses and preferential licensing for individuals or groups most adversely impacted by the disparities in criminal penalties, but whether these programs will achieve their intended goals also requires careful evaluation.

Finally, more research is needed on the health effects of cannabis use by specific groups like youth, pregnant women, older adults, and veterans, and on its effects in individuals with various medical conditions for which medicinal cannabis might be used. Studies are also needed on health effects of the high-potency and synthetic or semi-synthetic cannabinoid products that are emerging. But the authors underscore that the focus cannot solely be that of risks—it must also include research on potential benefits of cannabis in managing some chronic mental or physical health conditions as well as interactions with prescription drugs that patients may already be taking to manage their health issues.

Much of this research will require or benefit from better surveillance of cannabis cultivation, product sales, and patterns of use. Existing surveillance, as the report points out, has suffered from a lack of funding and coordination, producing gaps in our knowledge. There is also a need for better tests for detecting cannabis impairment. Unlike alcohol, THC remains in the body long after its psychoactive effects have worn off. So, unlike commonly used alcohol sobriety tests, blood tests for cannabis that are currently widely used in law enforcement and employment screening cannot distinguish between recent or past use. Better surveillance and improved tests can inform research on interventions to mitigate risks to health and safety associated with cannabis use. They can also help inform the development of cannabis product safety and quality standards.

Some of the pressing questions identified by the NASEM report are already research priority areas for NIDA. For instance, our medicinal cannabis registry, which was funded starting in 2023, will be able to inform research, policy, and practice by gathering longitudinal data about cannabis use and outcomes from a cohort of people using the drug medicinally. The project will include a program to test the composition and potency of cannabis products used and will integrate registry data with other data sources.

The NIDA-funded Monitoring the Future survey has tracked nationwide cannabis use trends in adolescents and young adults for decades. The survey has recently recorded reduction in teenage use of substances in general, including cannabis, and recent surveys have also shown increases in disapproval of cannabis use and perception of its harms in this age group. However, it continues to show that cannabis is one of the most-used drugs by teenagers, with a quarter of 12th graders reporting use in the past year.

Since its launch nearly a decade ago, the trans-NIH Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study has been collecting longitudinal data on drug use and its developmental impacts in a large national cohort from late childhood through early adulthood. More recently, ABCD has been complemented by a similar study on the first decade of life, the multi-Institute Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study. HBCD is recruiting a cohort of pregnant participants across the country and will use neuroimaging and other tools to track the impacts of prenatal exposure to cannabis and other environmental influences on the developing brain. By identifying risk and resilience factors for cannabis use in youth, the data from ABCD and HBCD will be extremely valuable in informing prevention programs in these age groups.

Advances in cannabis and cannabis policy research could be aided by wider adoption of the standard 5mg unit of THC required in research studies funded by NIDA and other NIH Institutes. Adoption of this standard was based on the need for consistency across research studies, which will facilitate more real-world-relevant research and translation of findings into policy and clinical practice. Research using this standard could also provide better insights into the effects of cumulative exposure and long-term developmental and cognitive effects of prenatal exposure.

Scientific research should always drive best practices in public health. To that end, NIDA and other NIH institutes will continue to support essential research on cannabis, the health effects of new products, and the effects of policy changes around this drug. It is essential to ensure that, where they are legal, product contents are accurately represented to the consumer in an environment where public health takes precedence over profits.

Source:  https://nida.nih.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2025/01/new-roadmap-cannabis-cannabis-policy-research

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Effects of Drugs,Latest News,USA :

by Kenneth Griffin, Professor, Department of Global and Community Health,

New research from Professor  Kenneth Griffin shows that the  Virtual Reality (VR) program helps students handle complex social situations. This success has led to a new research grant to continue the study.

Health-risk behaviors such as binge drinking, drug use, and violence are common among college students. These issues are especially prevalent among first-year students living away from their families for the first time. According to the American Addiction Centers, nearly half of all college students would qualify for at least one substance use disorder.

A pilot and feasibility study by Kenneth W. Griffin and colleagues found that using VR technology to prevent substance misuse and violence is both feasible and engaging. 100% of participants agreed that the program could be implemented on college campuses.

“VR for reducing adolescent risk behaviors is an emerging area of research, focusing mostly on developing VR modules that are appealing and feasible,” Griffin explains. “This study is novel in that it examines the viability of VR technology to provide virtual role-play and skills practice opportunities to supplement an existing evidence-based drug and violence prevention approach.”

VR has been shown to help treat mental health conditions like anxiety, phobias, and PTSD. Griffin and colleagues are testing whether this technology can effectively prevent substance misuse and violence.

In the pilot study, researchers developed a series of VR modules that put users in different virtual social situations. For example, participants might witness someone being drugged at a party or see a classmate cheating. In choosing the best response for each situation, they practice cognitive-behavioral skills for preventing risk behaviors with their virtual peers. These skills may include assertive communication, negotiation, compromise, conflict resolution, or bystander intervention strategies. The VR sessions supplemented online e-learning modules lessons based on the LifeSkills Training program.

Before and after the training, participants took the same assessment. Results showed improved decision-making and stronger anti-violence attitudes.

Due to the program’s success, the research team secured additional grant funding from the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Griffin emphasizes the need for more research. “While VR may be a useful tool for reducing youth health risk behaviors, more rigorous controlled trials are needed to determine whether VR technologies can produce behavioral outcomes and the duration of these effects. The new funding will allow us to conduct a rigorous test of this innovative technology for preventing substance misuse and violence among university students.” Griffin says.

The study dovetails with the College of Public Health’s commitment to harnessing the power of immersive technologies to improve health and health education. The College is home to the Center for Immersive Technologies and Simulation. There, students are trained to use VR in nursing, social work, health administration, and public health. Griffin’s study was not conducted in this Center.

“Using virtual reality technology to prevent substance misuse and violence among university students: A pilot and feasibility study” was published in Health Informatics Journal in October 2024. The study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and developed in collaboration with National Health Promotion Associates (NHPA), a research and development company that developed and markets the LifeSkills Training program. Griffin, a former employee and current consultant with NHPA, worked closely with the team in this pilot and feasibility study of the VR modules.

Additional authors, all from NHPA, include: Gilbert J. Botvin, Weill Cornell Medical College; Christopher Williams, Purchase College, State University of New York; Sandra M. Sousa.

Source:  https://publichealth.gmu.edu/news/2025-01/virtual-reality-pilot-program-shows-promise-preventing-substance-misuse-and-violence

Filed under: Education,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :
President, Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions
Trump Selects Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To Head of Health and Human Services

Prevention is key, and we cannot forget that today’s marijuana is highly potent. In 2025 and beyond, federal agencies must prioritize public health and safety and work to undo legalization’s harmful consequences.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is positioned to implement a wide range of policy initiatives to prevent marijuana use and hold the industry accountable. For example, marijuana legalization has re-elevated the conversation about second-hand smoke. California recently passed a law permitting “cannabis cafes” in which users can openly smoke marijuana. Second-hand marijuana smoke has been found to be more harmful than second-hand tobacco smoke and contains many of the same cancer-causing substances. Our country has legally and culturally rejected indoor cigarette smoking. HHS must stand on science and reject indoor marijuana smoking by publishing strict guidelines prohibiting it, just as it did with indoor cigarette smoking.

Transparency within the “medical” marijuana industry is also desperately needed. As it did with opioids, HHS should create a registry of medical marijuana recommendation practices and make the information available to the public. The database could include information regarding regional breakdowns, a list of overprescribing doctors, and pot-industry kickbacks received by doctors.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant when it comes to quack doctors. In August, a Spotlight PA article uncovered Pennsylvania medical pot doctors who were doling out thousands of medical marijuana cards per year. These are similar to the “pill mills” that fueled the opioid epidemic.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bucked federal legal precedent around marijuana rescheduling by inventing new, lower standards. Its flawed marijuana rescheduling review was designed to permit marijuana rescheduling. The ramifications of changing this precedent aren’t limited to marijuana; other dangerous drugs (e.g., psychedelics) could be reclassified to a lower schedule based on the new lax standards. HHS should issue internal agency guidance that advises FDA to adhere to the established five-factor test for determining currently accepted medical use. This will ensure that drug scheduling, which has direct implications for the availability of drugs, remains science based.

The Trump-Vance administration must soundly reject moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III for one simple reason: marijuana fails to meet the legal definition of a Schedule III drug. It has not been approved by the FDA for the treatment of any disease or condition. Moving marijuana to Schedule III is a handout to corporations, as it would allow companies to deduct advertising and other expenses from their taxes, fueling the growth of an industry that profits from addiction.

Far from being a legitimate medicine, marijuana is harming the millions of Americans who misuse it. Given that 3 in 10 users develop a marijuana use disorder, better known as addiction to marijuana, the incoming administration needs to focus on helping connect Americans to treatment.

Federal law enforcement also plays a crucial role in curbing marijuana legalization and its effects. In 2013, the Obama administration issued the Cole Memo, a document that cemented the federal government’s non-enforcement policy on marijuana. The first Trump administration rescinded the memo, but more must be done to enforce federal laws already on the books. The Justice Department has the power to prevent distribution to minors, curtail drugged driving, and investigate state-legal dispensaries being used as a cover for illegal drug trafficking—all things the Obama administration promised to do. By beginning with this targeted enforcement strategy, law enforcement can shut down the operations of the industry’s worst actors.

To promote public safety, the Trump-Vance administration should also crack down on illegal marijuana grows, particularly those in remote areas on federal lands. These operations are often controlled by cartels and poison the surrounding natural environment with toxic chemicals.

We also need a new national anti-drug media campaign, updated for the 21st century. This campaign must broadcast messages widely through traditional and social media and talk about the dangers and truth behind the use of drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the drug policy office within the White House, has a key role to play, too, particularly in drug use prevention. ONDCP helps oversee the Drug-Free Communities Support Program, which is responsible for much of our federally funded drug prevention work. In an era in which drugs are sold and marketed via social media, it’s more important than ever that effective anti-drug prevention messages reach young people. ONDCP also oversees the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, which forms a crucial partnership between local, state, and federal law enforcement to curtail drug trafficking. Both these programs’ funding should be protected and prioritized.

A good strategy must focus on all drugs, but we can’t ignore the politically inconvenient ones. If President Trump wants to make America healthy again, the conversation must include marijuana, a drug with an addiction rate of up to 30 percent that is being pushed by a profit-driven industry that desperately needs federal accountability.

Dr. Kevin Sabet is the President of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) and the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions (FDPS) and a former White House drug policy advisor to Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton.

SOURCE:  https://www.newsweek.com/making-america-healthy-again-must-start-better-drug-policy-opinion-2014657

Filed under: Addiction,Economic,Education,Health,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,Political Sector,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :
Nora’s Blog  January 8, 2025 – By Dr. Nora Volkow
This past year, NIDA commemorated its 50th anniversary, which made me reflect on how far addiction science has come in a half century—from the barest beginnings of an understanding of how drugs work in the brain, and only a few treatment and prevention tools, to a robustly developed science and multiple opportunities to translate that science into clinical practice. Yet the challenges we face around drug use and addiction have never been greater, with annual deaths from overdose that have vastly exceeded anything seen in previous eras and the proliferation of increasingly more potent addictive drugs.

Our 50th year brought hope, as we finally saw evidence of a sustained downturn in drug overdose deaths. From July 2023 to July 2024, the number of fatal overdoses dropped nearly 17 percent, from over 113,000 to 94,000. We still don’t know all the factors contributing to this reversal, so investigating the drivers of this decline will be crucial for sustaining and accelerating the downturn. We also need to recognize that the decline is not homogenous across populations: Black and American Indian/Alaskan Native persons continue to die at increased rates. And 94,000 people dying of overdose in a year is still 94,000 too many.

As we begin a new year, I see four major areas deserving special focus for our efforts: preventing drug use and addiction, preventing overdose, increasing access to effective addiction treatments, and leveraging new technologies to help advance substance use disorder (SUD) treatment and the science of drug use and addiction.

Preventing drug use and addiction

The brain undergoes continuous development from the prenatal period through young adulthood, and substance exposures and myriad other environmental exposures can influence that development. Prenatal drug exposure can lead to learning and behavioral difficulties and raise the risk of later substance use. Adverse childhood experiences, including neglect, abuse, and the impacts of poverty, as well as childhood mental disorders, can negatively impact brain development in ways that make an individual more vulnerable for drug use and addiction. Early drug experimentation in adolescence is also associated with greater risk of developing an SUD.

Early intervention in emerging psychiatric disorders as well as prevention interventions aimed at decreasing risk factors and enhancing protective factors can reduce initiation of drug use and improve a host of mental health outcomes. Research on prevention interventions has shown that mitigating the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage counteracts the effects of poverty on brain development,1 and some studies have even documented evidence of intergenerational benefits, improving outcomes for the children of the children who received the intervention.2 Studies have also shown them to be enormously cost-effective by reducing later costs to healthcare and other services, providing health and economic benefits to communities that put them in place.3

Yet, in the United States, efforts to prevent substance use have been largely fragmented, and the infrastructure and funding required to bring effective programs to scale is lacking. What kinds of policy innovations could we put into place to ensure that everyone who could benefit from evidence-based prevention services has access to them, whether through school, healthcare, justice, or community settings?  NIDA, along with other NIH Institutes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, have charged the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine with creating an actionable blueprint for supporting the implementation of prevention interventions that promote behavioral health. The report is due out early this year and has the potential for tremendous public health impact.4

Preventing overdose

We also need to continue research toward mitigating fatal overdoses. Comprehensive data on overdose reversals do not currently exist, but recipients of SAMHSA State Opioid Response grants alone reported more than 92 thousand overdose reversals with naloxone in the year ending March 31, 2023, and this is likely just a small fraction of the lives saved. We do not yet know the extent to which greater use of naloxone has played a role in the recent declines in overdose fatalities, but this medication, the first intranasal formulation of which was developed by NIDA in partnership with Adapt Pharma, is a real public health success.

NIDA is supporting research to evaluate approaches to naloxone distribution, for instance through mobile vans and peer-run community services that also provide sterile injection equipment to prevent HIV and HCV transmission. We are also supporting research on new approaches to reversing drug overdoses, such as wearable devices that would auto-inject naloxone when an overdose is detected and electrical stimulation of the phrenic nerve to restore breathing, a method already used in resuscitation devices.5 We are also supporting research on compounds that could potentially reverse methamphetamine overdoses, such as monoclonal antibodies and molecules called sequestrants that bind and encapsulate methamphetamine in the body.6

Improving access to addiction treatment

In 2023, only 14.6 percent of people with an SUD received treatment, and only 18 percent of people with an opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication.7 Stigma, along with inadequate coverage of addiction treatment by both public and private insurers, contributes to this gap. To fix this will require partnering with payors to develop and evaluate new models for incentivizing the provision of evidence-based SUD care.

Increased access to methadone is a particularly high priority in the era of fentanyl and other potent synthetic opioids. Results from a recent study in British Columbia showed that risk of leaving treatment was lower for methadone than for buprenorphine. Risk of dying was similarly low for both groups.8 Currently in the United States, methadone is only available from specialized opioid treatment centers, but studies piloting access through pharmacies have shown promise.

OUD medications also need to be accessible to people with SUD in jails and prisons. Research conducted in justice settings has shown that providing access to all three FDA-approved medications for OUD during incarceration reduced fatal overdose risk after release by nearly 32 percent.9 Access to buprenorphine during incarceration was also associated with a 32 percent reduction in recidivism risk.10 Through NIDA’s  Justice Community Overdose Innovation Network (JCOIN), we continue to promote research into innovative models and strategies for integrating medications for OUD in justice settings.

I am also hopeful that we will soon see increased utilization of contingency management for treating stimulant use disorders. Providing incentives for treatment participation and negative drug tests is the most effective treatment we have for methamphetamine and cocaine addictions, but implementation has been hindered by regulatory ambiguities around caps on the dollar value of those incentives. However, demonstration projects underway in four states (California, Washington, Montana, and Delaware) are implementing contingency management with higher incentives and could further bolster evidence for the effectiveness—including cost effectiveness—of this approach.

Leveraging new treatments and technologies

There are many promising new technologies that could transform the treatment of addiction, including central and peripheral neuromodulation approaches. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was already approved by the FDA as an adjunct treatment for smoking cessation and peripheral auricular nerve stimulation was approved for the treatment of acute opioid withdrawal. TMS, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and peripheral vagal nerve stimulation are under investigation for treating other SUDs. Low-intensity focused ultrasound—a non-invasive method that can reach targets deep in the brain—is also showing promise for the treatment of SUD. NIDA is currently funding clinical trials to determine its safety and preliminary efficacy for treating cocaine use disorder11 and OUD with or without co-occurring pain.12 

Advances in pharmacology have helped identify multiple new targets for treating addiction that are not limited to a specific SUDs like OUD. Instead, these targets aim to modulate brain circuits that are common across addictions; they include among many others D3 receptor partial agonists/antagonists, orexin antagonists and glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonists. The latter are particularly promising, as these types of drugs, including semaglutide and tirzepatide, are already being used for the treatment of diabetes and obesity.

Anecdotally, patients taking GLP-1 agonists report less interest in drinking, smoking, or consuming other drugs. Recent studies based on electronic health records have revealed that people with SUDs taking GLP-1 medications to treat their obesity or diabetes had improved outcomes associated with their addiction, such as reduced incidence and recurrence of alcohol use disorder,13 reduced health consequences of smoking,14 and reduced opioid overdose risk.15 NIDA is currently funding randomized clinical studies to assess the efficacy of GLP-1 agonists for the treatment of opioid and stimulant use disorders and for smoking cessation.

Creation of large data sources and repositories in parallel with advances in computation and analytical modeling including AI are helping in the design of new therapeutics based on the 3D molecular structure of addictive drugs and the receptors they interact with.16 NIDA-funded researchers have published studies showing that AI could be used to provide more timely, comprehensive data on overdose, such as by using social-media to predict overdose deaths.17 It could be used to enable higher-resolution analyses in basic neuroscience research18 and facilitate studies using large data sources like electronic health records.19 AI is also being used to support delivery of behavioral therapies and relapse prevention in virtual chatbots and is being studied in wearable devices. Although there is much work to be done to ensure that AI is deployed safely and ethically, particularly in clinical settings, this technology has considerable potential to enhance and expand access to care.

AI will also be transformative for analyzing big data sets like those being generated by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) Study and HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study. These landmark NIH-funded studies are gathering vast quantities of neuroimaging, biometric, psychometric, and other data across the first two decades of life. They will be able to answer important questions about the impacts of drugs and other environmental exposures on the developing brain, inform prevention and treatment interventions, and establish a valuable—and unprecedented—baseline of neurodevelopment that will be a crucial resource in pediatric neurology.

The field of addiction science has progressed at a breathtaking pace. These advances could not have been made without the commitment of an interconnected community of people. Researchers, clinicians, policymakers, community groups, and people living with SUDs and the families that support them all play a role in collaboratively finding solutions to some of the most challenging questions in substance use and addiction research. Together, we turn our eye to 2025 and the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Filed under: Addiction,Culture,Economic,Education,Health,Latest News,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
  by DFAF.org

 

The Colombo Plan has issued a health alert regarding the growing global threat posed by Benzimidazole (Nitazene) opioids. These highly potent synthetic compounds, which far exceed the strength of fentanyl, are driving significant increases in overdose deaths and public health crises across multiple regions.

 

Nitazene tablets containing 29 mg of metonitazene (equivalent to containing 145 times the lethal dose of fentanyl) heading to Florida, Connecticut, and Brazil were seized from international express mail. Public health and safety officials are urged to remain vigilant against this emerging danger.

 

Hear from Thom Browne, CEO of the Colombo Plan, as he addresses this emerging threat during his session at the upcoming National Prevention Summit. This discussion is especially pertinent for Florida. Click here to register for the conference to stay informed and be part of the solution.

 

Key Insights:

·    Potency and Risk: Nitazenes, also known as Benzimidazoles, are synthetic opioids estimated to be 1.5–20 times more potent than fentanyl. A single tablet seized in 2023 contained metonitazene levels equivalent to 290 mg of fentanyl — 145 times the estimated fatal dose.

·    Global Spread: Reports from North America, Brazil, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and West Africa reveal a sharp rise in nitazene-related deaths.

·    Distribution and Adulteration: Nitazenes are typically found in tablet or powder form, often mixed with fentanyl, other synthetic drugs, or designer benzodiazepines like Bromazolam, further compounding the risks.

·    Sample Testing: U.S. Crime Lab data shows 2.6% of analyzed cases (55 exhibits) contained 19 or more substances in addition to the principal nitazene compound.

·    Adverse Effects: Like other synthetic opioids, nitazenes cause profound sedation and respiratory depression, often leading to fatal overdoses.

 

Naloxone and Treatment:

Naloxone remains effective in reversing nitazene overdoses but may require multiple doses due to the drug’s extreme potency.

 

Emerging Analogs:

Since 2019, a range of nitazene analogs has surfaced in the U.S., including metonitazene, isotonitazene, protonitazene, and N-pyrrolidino protonitazene. The NPS Discovery program at CFSRE tracks these trends quarterly, with protonitazene, metonitazene, and N-pyrrolidino protonitazene among the most common in late 2024.

 

Call to Action:

Stakeholders must collaborate to monitor, educate, and implement strategies to mitigate the escalating threat of nitazenes. Effective policy, public awareness, and access to life-saving tools like naloxone are critical in addressing this public health emergency, as the spread of these synthetic opioids could significantly worsen the opioid epidemic or spark new outbreaks in unsuspecting countries and regions.

Source: https://www.dfaf.org/

 
Filed under: Heroin/Methadone,Latest News,Synthetics,USA :

by Miles Martin –  –

A recent study analyzing data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) found that past-year recreational ketamine use among adults has increased dramatically since 2015, including significant shifts in associations with depression and sociodemographic characteristics such as race, age and education status. Ketamine use has shown promise in clinical trials therapy for several mental illnesses, including treatment-resistant depression, and the new research suggests that ongoing monitoring of recreational use trends is crucial to balancing these clinical benefits against the risk of unmonitored recreational use.

Key findings include:

  • Overall past-year recreational ketamine use increased by 81.8% from 2015 to 2019 and by 40% from 2021 to 2022.
  • Adults with depression were 80% more likely to have used ketamine in the past year in 2015-2019, but this association weakened in later years. In 2021-2022, ketamine use increased only among those without depression.
  • In 2021-2022, adults aged 26-34 were 66% more likely to have used ketamine in the past year compared to adults aged 18-25. Those with college degrees were more than twice as likely to have used ketamine compared to people with a high school education or less.
  • People were more likely to use ketamine if they used other substances, such as  ecstasy/MDMA, GHB, and cocaine.

The researchers recommend expanding prevention outreach to settings like colleges, where younger adults may be at heightened risk, as well as providing education on the harms of polydrug use, particularly in combination with opioids. As medical ketamine becomes more widely available, they also emphasize the need for continued surveillance of recreational ketamine use patterns and further research to understand the factors that contribute to ketamine use.

The study, published online in the Journal of Affective Disorders, was led by Kevin Yang, M.D., a third-year resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine. The research was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Source: https://today.ucsd.edu/story/ketamine-use-on-the-rise-in-u.s-adults-new-trends-emerge

Filed under: Ketamine,Latest News,Prevalence,USA :

Public News Service  – Terri Dee, Anchor/Producer  – Monday, January 6, 2025

One popular New Year’s resolution is to quit alcohol consumption.

Although easier said than done, one recovery center said there are modifications to try if previous attempts are not working. A good start is taking a hard look at what has worked and what has not.

Marissa Sauer, a licensed clinical addiction counselor at Avenues Recovery, a Fort Wayne recovery center, pointed out if there was a simple answer, everybody would use it. She added other influences are linked to alcohol and substance abuse.

“There’s genetics. Were my parents and my grandparents struggling with substances? Does someone have maybe adverse childhood experiences that have led to substances being a coping mechanism of some kind?” Sauer explained. “Maybe there are these mental health diagnoses.”

Sauer mentioned people, places, or things which could inhibit or enable someone to abuse drugs or alcohol, making it complicated to simply walk away. Medication, therapy or conversations with people who have beaten their addictions are all effective measures for recovery.

The US Surgeon General’s 2025 Advisory Report indicates alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer after tobacco and obesity and the public is taking notice.

There is a growing momentum of the “sober curious” movement, avoiding happy hours at bars, ordering a low or no-alcohol drinks known as mocktails, or completely abstaining from alcohol for 30 days for “dry January.” Sauer said longtime substance abusers fear change and she wants them to know there is hope.

“Whether you’re 21 or whether you’re 51, that ability to heal is there,” Sauer emphasized. “The best gift that you could give yourself for a healthy 2025 is to give your loved ones the absolute best version of yourself.”

An Indiana State Epidemiological report from 2021-2022 revealed almost 24% of residents aged 12 and older have participated in binge drinking, with the highest rate among young adults aged 18 to 25.

Source: https://www.publicnewsservice.org/2025-01-06/alcohol-and-drug-abuse-prevention/in-substance-recovery-center-supports-sober-existence/a94456-1

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Latest News,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

KCUR-FM – Radio station – | by Suzanne King – Published December 28, 2024 at 3:55 PM CST
Since Missouri legalized marijuana in 2018, Dr. Bob Batterson has noticed a change in attitudes.

The Children’s Mercy Hospital psychiatrist more often hears from parents wondering if cannabis could help their child’s anxiety, autism or OCD.

“I tell them there are no studies,” said Batterson, the medical associate director of the hospital’s Division of Developmental and Behavioral Health. “A lot of hype, but no studies.”

And even if Children’s Mercy allowed its doctors to prescribe weed (it doesn’t), Batterson wouldn’t know what dose to recommend. He also couldn’t say which patient might experience a marijuana-induced psychotic episode or other serious reaction.

No one could.

Years of federal prohibition and the resulting limits on research mean the science about marijuana is skimpy at best. Public health experts say that should trigger caution in a world where legal marijuana is increasingly accessible and more widely consumed.

“There has been relatively little research on cannabis,” said Steven Teutsch, who chaired a year-long study for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine about the impact legal cannabis is having on public health. “Many of the benefits are often over-promoted and are iffy in many cases. And the harms are often not fully appreciated.”

Despite a well-known and largely accepted narrative that marijuana is safe and not addictive, the reality — especially when people consume greater and stronger amounts of the drug — is often different, health experts said.

Some 30% of cannabis users report having a physical dependency on the drug, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists believe the drug could hurt brain function, heart health and can lead to impaired driving. It also correlates with social anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.

The federal government, which Teutsch said has “ largely been missing in action in all of this,” needs to step in with campaigns to educate the public, with model legislation to help states regulate the drug and with research funding to study health effects — good and bad.

Marijuana rules to protect health up to the states

Marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, and classified by federal law as a Schedule I drug, defined as a highly addictive substance with no known medical use. Hearings on a proposal to reclassify it as a Schedule III drug will begin in January.

That change would remove barriers — and free more money — for research that could give doctors a better understanding of the health effects of all those gummies, pre-rolled joints and THC-spiked drinks at your neighborhood dispensary.

It also could pave the way for more drug development. To date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has only approved three drugs related to cannabis.

Some experts also contend that Congress needs to undo federal law adopted in 2018 that allowed hemp products containing THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis, to be sold in gas stations and grocery stores, free from regulatory oversight.

Under the current system, every state with legal weed takes a different approach to the drug.

California became the first to legalize medical marijuana in 1996. And Colorado and Washington led the way in legalizing recreational pot in 2012.

In the years since, only a handful of states, including Kansas, have resisted passing some level of legalization. Missouri voters adopted a constitutional amendment allowing medical marijuana use in 2018, and one legalizing recreational weed in 2022.

The state has a responsibility, said Dr. Heidi Miller, chief medical officer for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, to make sure people know the risks that come with marijuana.

“Cannabis has multiple potential therapeutic effects, but also potential adverse effects,” she said. “We need to inform the public of what we know and what we don’t know.”

Missouri has budgeted $2.5 million (less than 0.2% of what people in the state spend on weed in a year) for a public information campaign to get this message out.

Miller said the campaign, which is in early planning stages and not yet scheduled, should warn vulnerable populations — young people, pregnant or breastfeeding women and people with a personal or family history of mental illness — about the risks of getting high.

It should also alert people, she said, that the marijuana they may have smoked a few decades ago has little resemblance to the potent variety sold at dispensaries.

The stuff sold today may have four times more THC. And that doesn’t include concentrates, which can have THC levels reaching 90%.

“Clearly, the adverse effects are going to be heightened, the higher the potency,” Miller said. “We can’t assume that all cannabis is safe because it’s, quote, natural. We also want folks to understand that cannabis is potentially addictive.”

More people are using cannabis

Since sales began in Missouri four years ago, the Division of Cannabis Regulation says more than $3 billion has been spent on cannabis products in the state. In fiscal year 2024, recreational sales, referred to as “adult use,” reached $1.16 billion, while medical weed sales totaled just under $166 million.

As in other states that have legalized cannabis, use of the drug is on the rise.

Dutchie, a technology company whose software powers the payment platforms and other backend systems in dispensaries, reported that on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving — known in the industry as “Green Wednesday” — average orders in Missouri dispensaries jumped 18% above a regular Wednesday to more than $84.

The number of people using the drug, which experts said will only continue to rise, is raising alarms.

A November 2023 report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that 61.9 million Americans — 22% of those 12 and older — reported using cannabis in the past year. More than 13 million 18 to 25 year olds — 38% — said they’d used the drug. The same was true for 11.5% of 12 to 17 year olds.

As people consume marijuana more frequently and in higher doses, anecdotal stories related to health problems are becoming more common. They include reports of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a gastrointestinal condition that leads to bouts of vomiting and intense pain, and instances of cannabis-induced psychosis, a mental illness that can lead to violence and suicide.

“They didn’t legalize old school hippy weed,” said Aubree Adams, a Colorado mother whose son became psychotic after using marijuana. “We’re dealing with a really hard drug.”

Every day, Adams said, the organization she founded to educate the public about the dangers of marijuana use, receives inquiries from a handful of families across the country dealing with issues related to marijuana use.

Her organization, Every Brain Matters, is pushing for potency caps on the marijuana being sold in the United States; an end to the sale of edibles, which often look like candy; and a ban on sugary-flavored vapes.

Adams also wants it to be illegal for marijuana companies to market products as medicine that have not been approved for medical use. States need to be out front telling the public the truth, she said.

“I don’t know why we have to sugar coat things and play politics,” she said. “Tell them the truth. Tell them the science.”

Her son is 24 now. He’s come in and out of sobriety since first getting into trouble “dabbing” highly concentrated marijuana when he was 15. She believes he would be fine if he hadn’t used the drug.

“My son fights for his mental well being on a daily basis,” she said.

Adams wants other parents to know the potential risks. And she wants adolescents and young adults — who she believes are a primary target of marijuana companies — to realize what they might be getting into. Doctors say that developing brains are more vulnerable to problems

“This is not a soft drug,” she said. “This is a hard drug that can change your brain chemistry.”

Lack of federal oversight

But getting meaningful regulatory change in an industry that lacks federal oversight is difficult.

Under the current system, every state has its own set of rules about everything from how cannabis products are packaged, tested and sold to what training the budtender at your local cannabis store needs to have. States decide who can buy cannabis, how much someone can buy during a certain period and how potent weed can be.

The states also oversee what’s in the marijuana, including setting maximum levels for contaminants like heavy metals and pesticides. Missouri’s Cannabis Division established rules based on the amendments voters adopted.

The state has licensed 10 private laboratories, which marijuana producers hire to test products for compliance with state rules. Cannabis regulators also are opening a “reference laboratory” by mid-2025 to verify those results.

Because the state legalized weed later than other states, it adopted standards that are among the most stringent in the country, said Anthony David, chief operations officer with Green Precision Analytics, a private marijuana testing lab in Kansas City. Before opening the lab with three partners, he grew marijuana in the Pacific Northwest.

“Cannabis that Missourians are smoking,” he said, “is safer than probably anywhere in the world.”

The National Academies of Sciences’ report on cannabis and public health, which was commissioned by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, recommended several policy changes states could make to protect the public.

Those include things like limiting the potency of marijuana (Missouri has no such limit), and restricting retail hours at dispensaries. While Kansas City limits how late a dispensary can stay open, the state does not, and some weed shops in neighboring communities offer 24-hour-a-day drive-thrus. Other suggested policies from the report involve implementing strategies to protect kids. In short, they want cannabis products to be controlled much like alcohol and tobacco.

“Almost every state does something right, but there are a lot of things they don’t do,” Teutsch said. “We advise the states to look at what was done for tobacco and alcohol because there’s many years of experience there implementing policies that have a public health focus.”

David G. Evans, a New Jersey attorney representing people who claim they’ve been harmed by marijuana, also believes there is wisdom to be gained from what unfolded in the tobacco industry.

He contends that the legal system needs to step in where regulators have failed. Evans is suing marijuana companies for harming clients and marshalling lawyers across the country to do the same. He hopes the legal actions will bring public awareness about risks of marijuana and rein in the industry.

“The marijuana industry is low-hanging fruit,” Evans said. “They’ve been allowed to be reckless. They’ve not been controlled, not disciplined. And the state governments have played right along with them. Now there’s starting to be a reckoning.”

 

Source: https://www.ksmu.org/news/2024-12-28/with-weed-legal-missouri-is-now-looking-at-the-public-health-consequences

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.

Filed under: Culture,Health,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,Mental Health,USA :

 

New York Times    DNYUZ        December 26, 2024

The cartel operatives came to the homeless encampment carrying syringes filled with their latest fentanyl formula. The offer was simple, according to two men living at the camp in northwest Mexico: up to $30 for anyone willing to inject themselves with the concoction.

One of the men, Pedro López Camacho, said he volunteered repeatedly — at times the operatives were visiting every day. They watched the drug take effect, Mr. López Camacho said, snapping photos and filming his reaction. He survived, but he said he saw many others who did not.

“When it’s really strong, it knocks you out or kills you,” said Mr. López Camacho of the drugs he and others were given. “The people here died.”

This is how far Mexican cartels will go to dominate the fentanyl business.

Global efforts to crack down on the synthetic opioid have made it harder for these criminal groups to find the chemical compounds they need to produce the drug. The original source, China, has restricted exports of the necessary raw ingredients, pushing the cartels to come up with new and extremely risky ways to maintain fentanyl production and potency.

The experimentation, members of the cartels say, involves combining the drug with a wider range of additives — including animal sedatives and other dangerous anesthetics. To test their results, the criminals who make the fentanyl for the cartels, often called cooks, say they inject their experimental mixtures into human subjects as well as rabbits and chickens.

If the rabbits survive beyond 90 seconds, the drug is deemed too weak to be sold to Americans, according to six cooks and two U.S. Embassy officials who monitor cartel activity. The American officials said that when Mexican law enforcement units have raided fentanyl labs, they have at times found the premises riddled with dead animals used for testing.

“They experiment in the style of Dr. Death,” said Renato Sales, a former national security commissioner in Mexico. “It’s to see the potency of the substance. Like, ‘with this they die, with this they don’t, that’s how we calibrate.’”

To understand how criminal groups have adapted to the crackdown, The New York Times observed fentanyl being made in a lab as well as a safe house, and spent months interviewing several people directly involved in the drug’s production. They included nine cooks, three chemistry students, two high-level operatives and a recruiter working for the Sinaloa Cartel, which the U.S. government blames for fueling the synthetic opioid epidemic.

The people connected to the cartel spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

One cook said he recently started mixing fentanyl with an anesthetic often used in oral surgery. Another said the best additive he had found was a sedative for dogs and cats.

Another cook demonstrated for Times reporters how to produce fentanyl in a cartel safe house in Sinaloa State, in northwest Mexico. He said that if the batch was too weak, he added xylazine, an animal tranquilizer known on the street as “Tranq” — a combination that American officials warn can be deadly. “You inject this into a hen, and if it takes between a minute and a minute and a half to die, that means it came out really good,” the cook said. “If it doesn’t die or takes too long to die, we’ll add xylazine.”

The cooks’ accounts align with data from the Mexican government showing a rise in the use of fentanyl mixed with xylazine and other substances, especially in cities near the U.S. border.

“The illicit market gets much more benefit from its substances by cutting them with different things such as xylazine,” said Alexiz Bojorge Estrada, deputy director of Mexico’s mental health and addiction commission.

“You enhance it and therefore need less product,” said Ms. Bojorge, referring to fentanyl, “and you get more profit.”

U.S. drug researchers have also noticed a rise in what one called “weirder and messier” fentanyl. Having tested hundreds of samples in the United States, they found an increase in the variety of chemical compounds in fentanyl on the streets.

“It’s just a wild west of experimentation,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who helped coordinate the testing of more than 580 samples of drugs sold as fentanyl in Washington State this year.

He called it “absolute chaos.”

The Experiments: The synthetic opioids that reach American streets often begin in cartel labs, where precision is not always a priority, cooks say. They mix up vats of chemicals in rudimentary cook sites, exposing themselves to toxic substances that make some cooks hallucinate, wretch, pass out and even die. The cartels are actively recruiting university chemistry students to work as cooks. One student employed by the cartel revealed that to test their formulas, the group brought in drug users living on the street and injected them with the synthetic opioid. No one has ever died, the student said, but there have been bad batches. “We’ve had people convulse, or start foaming at the mouth,” the student said.

Mistakes by cooks were met with severe punishment, she added: Armed men locked the offenders in rooms with rats and snakes and left them there for long stretches with no food or water.

The cooks and high-level operatives described the Sinaloa Cartel as a decentralized organization, a collection of so many disparate cells that no single leader or faction had complete control over the group’s fentanyl production.

Some cooks said they wanted to create a standardized product that wouldn’t kill users. Others said they didn’t see the lethality of their product as a problem — but as a marketing tactic.

In a U.S. federal indictment against the sons of the notorious drug lord Joaquín Loera Guzmán (known as El Chapo) who lead a powerful faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, prosecutors said the group sent fentanyl to the United States even after an addict died while testing it in Mexico.

Instead of scaring people off, cartel members, drug users and experts say that many American users rush to buy a particularly deadly batch because they know it will get them high.

“One dies, and 10 more addicts are born,” said one high-level operative for the cartel. “We don’t worry about them.”

The Boss: The boss knew something was wrong when the hens stopped keeling over. He said he’d been in the drug business since he was 12, when he started apprenticing at a heroin processing site.

Now a soft-spoken 22-year-old, the boss said he taught himself how to produce illicit drugs by studying the older, more experienced men he worked with. Eventually, he started his own business with a friend.

The boss said his business grew so fast that soon he was running three fentanyl labs. The drug has made him millions, he said.

Every time he goes to one of his labs, he said he brings four or five rabbits from the local pet store. If the fentanyl his people make is potent enough, he has to inject and kill only one to be sure it is fit for sale.

Two pet store employees in Sinaloa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from cartel members, confirmed that the cheapest rabbits are known to be purchased for drug testing.

The boss’s other test subjects are hens from a nearby ranch. Many fentanyl cooks test their product on chickens, according to the two U.S. Embassy officials.

Until recently, the boss said every time he injected the hens with fentanyl they would either die, fall over or stumble around as if they were drunk. All the locals knew not to eat the chickens or the eggs from the ranch.

But recently, the animals weren’t having a strong reaction to the drug, even though his process hadn’t changed.

His employees were logging the same hours at the same modest lab in the mountains, starting at 5 a.m. and sleeping there for days on end. They were working with the same equipment — laboratory shakers, trays, large containers and a blender to mix up the final product.

The boss said he eventually concluded that the culprit was a “very diluted” supply of the chemical ingredients from China. The result was a bunk product. “It’s too weak,” he said.

To fix the problem, the boss first tried combining fentanyl with ketamine, a short-acting anesthetic, but said users didn’t like the bitter taste that came with smoking the mix. It worked much better to add procaine, he said, a local anesthetic often used to numb small areas during dental procedures. When asked whether he felt guilty about producing a drug that causes mass death, the boss said all he was doing was giving his customers what they wanted.

“If there weren’t all those people in the United States looking to get high, we wouldn’t sell anything,” he said. “It’s their fault, not ours. We just take advantage of the situation.”

The Cook

One cook we spoke with said he got into the fentanyl business a few years ago to pay off growing debts. At first, the former shop owner regularly got sick from the exposure to the fumes. He said the armed cartel members in charge had no patience for it.

“You may throw up at the beginning when you start, and you take a quick break and take some air,” said the cook, but soon enough “one of them will scream at you to get back to work.”

A boss once shot him just because he didn’t answer a question quickly enough, he said, pulling up his shirt to reveal a stomach scar.

He is constantly experimenting with ways to make fentanyl stronger, tweaking his formula and testing it on his lab assistants, many of whom have become addicted in the process, he said. If the product comes out strong, he passes it on to his supervisors to try.

The cook said he knows all the improvisation adds up to an unpredictable product. Each batch he makes is different, he said, meaning clients who buy the exact same fentanyl pills may get wildly different doses from week to week.

He’s never fully disclosed his job to his family, simply saying he’s off to work and then returning weeks later with a lot of cash. He believes the money and the fear evident in his expression deter any questions.

“There is no retirement here,” the cook said, adding that the cartel would likely kill him for trying to stop. “There is just work and death.”

 

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2024/12/26/how-mexican-cartels-test-fentanyl-on-vulnerable-people-and-animals/

__

—
www.drugwatch.org
drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com

Filed under: Crime/Violence/Prison,Fentanyl,Latest News,USA :

Author(s):  Hannah Elmore, PharmD,John Handshaw, PharmD, BCACP  –  December 23, 2024

Pharmacists can help address nicotine addiction by recommending FDA-approved smoking cessation methods and educating on the risks associated with electronic cigarette use.

Electronic cigarettes (E-cigarettes) have emerged as a popular alternative to traditional smoking. This method, known as vaping, involves inhaling an aerosol that contains nicotine, flavorings, and harmful chemicals including carcinogens, toxic substances, and metals. Nicotine is a highly addictive compound that activates the brain’s reward center by increasing dopamine levels, which creates sensations of pleasure and satisfaction. These euphoric feelings are often what leads to nicotine addiction.1

Although vaping is often perceived as a safer option, it actually carries significant health risks similar to those of traditional cigarettes. Pharmacists can play a vital role in educating patients on the dangers of vaping and providing guidance on safe and effective smoking cessation methods.

E-cigarettes trace back to the 1960s when British American Tobacco created a smoking device under the codename Ariel. At that time, researchers were already aware of nicotine’s addictive properties, but new evidence linking smoking to lung cancer prompted cigarette companies to try and explore alternative products with less risks. They aimed to create an inhalation device with filters to reduce carcinogens and tar. However, it was discovered that filtered cigarettes were not a healthier alternative because all components of cigarette smoke have proven to be harmful. Additionally, if the device only contained pure nicotine, it would warrant classification as a drug-delivery system, subjecting it to stricter regulations. The company wanted to avoid this in order to bypass the stringent safety evaluations and extensive clinical trials required by drug delivery systems, which would allow the company to reduce their manufacturing costs, speed up production, and take this device to the market quicker. They were able to produce a product with 24% nicotine, which is 6 times the concentration found in traditional cigarettes. Despite this innovation, Ariel was discontinued to protect the company’s profitable traditional cigarette market. This marked the first instance of companies exploring the manipulative potential of nicotine.2

E-cigarettes were officially authorized for sale by the FDA in 2007 with over 460 brands. The most popular brand is Juul, accounting for nearly 75% of the e-cigarettes on the market.3,4 In 2022, the FDA banned the sale of Juul products due to conflicting evidence regarding its associated risks, including the potential to cause strokes, respiratory failure, seizures, and cases of e-cigarette or vaping-use-associated lung injury (EVALI).4 EVALI is a condition in which the lungs become severely damaged and often results in admission to the intensive care unit (ICU) on mechanical ventilation.3,4

Additionally, there is also a lack of long-term safety data for these products.5 Although originally marketed as a healthier alternative to cigarettes, e-cigarettes have not demonstrated efficacy as a smoking cessation aid and rather, have led to a rise in the youth vaping epidemic.1

There has been a lack of data correlating successful smoking cessation rates among those who use e-cigarettes. There have been a few studies that suggest that vaping may aid in quitting tobacco but is not effective for quitting nicotine use altogether.6 One study found that those who utilized e-cigarettes in combination with nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) and counseling were 24.3% less likely to quit smoking compared to those who used only NRT and counseling. Additionally, those who used e-cigarettes were 15.1% more likely to become dual users utilizing both tobacco and vaping products. Those who are considered dual users are at an even higher risk for health complications including myocardial infarction and a 4-fold increase in developing lung cancer.6

In another survey of 800 people who utilized vaping as a smoking cessation agent, it was reported that only 9% successfully quit when asked 1 year later, compared to 19.8% who utilized NRT.1,7 These findings help highlight that vaping is not a reliable method for eliminating nicotine use entirely and can even lead to utilizing both traditional and electronic cigarette products.8

Vaping is now the most commonly used form of nicotine among adolescents. A study was conducted that showed high schoolers who had used e-cigarettes were 16.7% more likely to start smoking cigarettes within the next year.9 Nicotine’s impact on the developing brain can cause mood disorders, affect attention and learning, and amplify the desire for other mood-enhancing drugs such as cocaine or methamphetamine.1 In 2018, e-cigarette use among high school students increased by 78%, which led the FDA to enforce stricter regulations on the sale of nicotine products. Despite their efforts, vaping remains a leading challenge that teens face today as they have already fallen victim to nicotine addiction.4

The FDA currently lists 7 approved quit aids that are safe and effective for smoking cessation. These include several forms of NRT as well as pharmacologic therapy with bupropion and varenicline. Some of the agents, including the NRT gum, patch, and lozenge, are even available OTC. Pharmacists can play a vital role in smoking cessation, especially in patients who lack access to a primary care provider to obtain prescription medications. Therefore, it is crucial for pharmacists to stay up to date on the current smoking cessation guidelines, dosing recommendations, and counseling points for these agents.

The primary goal of pharmacist-driven smoking cessation should always be to support the patient’s desire to quit smoking. Pharmacists should guide patients toward the FDA-approved agents, either prescription medications through a provider, or OTC therapies in the pharmacy, rather than electronic cigarettes due to lack of supportive data and increased risk for adverse health events. The appropriate selection of FDA-approved agent should be individualized based on the patient’s specific factors, contraindications, and goals of therapy. Pharmacists should educate the patient extensively on the appropriate options for smoking cessation and should not recommend the use of e-cigarettes. However, if a patient decides to use e-cigarettes, pharmacists should still serve as a support system for the patient by being the primary educator and providing extensive counseling on the associated risks of vaping. Patients should be made aware of both the known and unknown adverse reactions associated with electronic cigarettes as well as highlighting that the goal of vaping should be to achieve complete smoking cessation.10

Vaping e-cigarettes has become a popular alternative to traditional cigarettes, with unknown efficacy and safety surrounding these products.10 Pharmacists should continue to stay up to date on new literature published on e-cigarettes and should follow the FDA’s suggestions on smoking cessation methods. Pharmacists are the most widely accessible health care professionals available to patients. Therefore, pharmacists have the power and knowledge to be the most influential providers available to advise patients on the correct paths to smoking cessation. By offering education and support, pharmacists can help patients live healthier lives and take steps towards reversing the youth smoking epidemic one education at a time.

Source: https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/clearing-the-air-the-influence-of-vaping-on-smoking-cessation

Filed under: Latest News,Prevalence,Tobacco, smoking,USA,Vaping :

The stats: Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates there were 94,112 overdose deaths in the year ending July 2024, a 16.9% decrease from the prior year.

  • All states except Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Montana and Alaska saw decreases.

What’s being said:

  • Senior Biden administration officials credited a combination of policies such as higher investment in preventing drug use among young people, making naloxone more accessible, getting more people into treatment early and disrupting the supply of illicit drugs and precursor chemicals.

The details: It is possible the government’s efforts to disrupt drug trafficking and provide improved prevention, harm reduction and treatment services are beginning to achieve their desired effect.

  • The White House’s efforts to distribute naloxone have helped reverse 500,000 overdoses.
  • The administration has been historically supportive of harm reduction, providing support for syringe exchange and drug checking equipment and looking the other way on supervised consumption sites.
  • It has overhauled methadone regulations, eliminated the buprenorphine waiver requirement and expanded access to treatment via telehealth.

But:

  • Other potential reasons for the decline include a change in the drug supply and a shift toward more cautious drug use behavior based on years of experience with fentanyl.
  • Progress could be threatened by the reemergence of carfentanil, which is 100 times more powerful than fentanyl. A CDC study found that overdose deaths with carfentanil remain rare but increased approximately 7-fold from January-June 2023 to January-June 2024.

The larger context: The decrease is the largest in history, but the death toll remains high and disparities persist.

  • The ~94,000 deaths is nearly 40% more than when deaths began rising in Jan. 2019 and about the same as it was in Jan. 2021, when Biden took office.

Source: White House takes credit for a big drop in fatal overdoses (Politico); Biden officials take credit for ‘largest drop’ in overdose deaths. Experts are more cautious (STAT); Future Threats (Politico)

 

Source: https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/policy-news-roundup-december-19-2024/

 

Filed under: Latest News,Prevalence,USA :

Gamblers Anonymous meetings are filling up with people hooked on trading and betting. Apps make it as easy as ordering takeout.

Wall Street Journal      by Gunjan Banerji         Dec. 20, 2024

A new type of addict is showing up at Gamblers Anonymous meetings across the country: investors hooked on the market’s riskiest trades.

At Gamblers Anonymous in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, one man called options “the crack cocaine” of the stock market. Another said he faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in trading losses after borrowing from a loan shark to double down on stocks.  And one young man brought his mom and girlfriend to celebrate one year since his last bet.

They were among a group of about 60 people, almost all men, who sat in rows of metal folding chairs in a crowded church basement that evening. Some shared their struggle with addiction—not on sports apps or at Las Vegas casinos—but using brokerage apps like Robinhood.

Many of the men, and scores of others around the country, discovered trading and betting during the pandemic boom that began in 2020. Some were drawn in by big wins in meme stocks and other viral stock sensations, leading them into even higher-octane wagers that offer the chance to put up a small amount of cash for a potentially mammoth return—or more often, a crushing loss.

Others bought and sold cryptocurrencies on apps that make trading as easy as ordering takeout on Uber Eats or toiletries on Amazon. In an age where sports betting has become an accepted pastime—accessible by the flick of the thumb on an iPhone app—they found the same rush betting on dogecoin, Tesla or Nvidia as wagering on Patrick Mahomes to carry the Kansas City Chiefs to the Super Bowl.

Doctors and counselors say they are seeing more cases of compulsive gambling in financial markets, or an uncontrollable urge to bet. They expect the problem to worsen. The stock market has climbed 23% this year and bitcoin recently topped $100,000  for the first time, tempting many people to pile into speculative trades. Wall Street keeps introducing newer and riskier ways to play the market through stock options or complex exchange-traded products that use borrowed money and compound the risk for investors.

Some who are desperate to stop trading are turning to self-help groups like Gamblers Anonymous. A GA pamphlet advises members to stay away from bets on stocks, commodities and options as well as raffle tickets and office sports pools. Sometimes members hand over retirement accounts to their spouses.

Modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, GA dates back to 1957 and now has hundreds of chapters in every U.S. state. Attendees at local GA meetings from Ponca City, Okla., to Allentown, Pa., subscribe to a 12-step program. It begins with accepting that they are powerless over gambling and can include a financial review in a so-called pressure relief group meeting. New attendees are peppered with calls from others and latch onto veteran members who commit to helping them stay on track.

‘Hi, my name is Mitch’

More than 30 people interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, many of whom regularly attend GA meetings, said they’ve struggled with compulsive gambling in financial markets. At times, the trading led to mood swings, sleepless nights and even depression. Their trades—and spiraling losses—became a shameful secret that they kept from their partners or other loved ones.

I asked Gamblers Anonymous for permission to attend some meetings. Attendees introduced me to the groups at the start of the meetings, and I observed the discussions. Members introduced themselves by their first names, according to GA practices.

“Hi, my name is Mitch, and I’m a compulsive gambler,” one said at a GA meeting this month near Ozone Park, N.Y. “Hi Mitch,” the group responded in unison.

The suburban dad of three, slightly balding with a big smile, stood in front of more than a dozen members in a church basement. He is haunted by the rising price of bitcoin—and the riches that could have been his, he said. Up around 40% since Election Day, bitcoin prices are on a wild ride. What would have happened, he wondered out loud, if he had just left his bitcoin in a digital wallet and handed it over to his wife?

Then he reminded himself and the group that he was never able to just buy and hold. “I needed more and more,” Mitch told the group. “I’m a sick, compulsive gambler. That’s why I keep making these meetings. I don’t trust myself.”

One attendee told him to stop eyeing cryptocurrency prices. Another reminded him of the toll trading had taken on his family and asked: “What’s more important, crypto or your kids?”

The entrepreneur, based in Long Island, N.Y., said cryptocurrencies caught his eye when he was in his late 40s and had gone more than 20 years since placing his last bet. He had sworn off gambling after a penchant for bold bets had led him to Gamblers Anonymous meetings in his early 20s. He invested $100 in bitcoin and watched it soar. He poured thousands of dollars into ether and smaller, more speculative coins. Something kept him from sharing with his GA group that he was trading.

When his portfolio rose above $1 million, he thought to himself, “That’s four Lambos.” He flew to Florida to look at potential vacation homes for his family near Walt Disney World.

Within months, he found himself in a familiar cycle. The rush of adrenaline he got when he bought and sold tokens pushed him to trade more frequently—to the point where he was trading hundreds of times a day—and taking bigger risks. He would wake at 4 a.m. to monitor his portfolio.

He parked his car in the lot of a Long Island shopping plaza near his home to trade in isolation. His neck grew tense from hunching over the screen.

When crypto prices started tumbling, snowballing losses left him sullen. “Sometimes I would get a passing thought as I went to bed: I hope I don’t wake up in the morning,” he said. His portfolio had fallen around $1 million from its peak.

Desperate for a way out, he typed “crypto gambling treatment center” into Google. He confessed to his GA mentors that he had been gambling.

A spiking problem

Pennsylvania’s gambling hotline has fielded more calls tied to gambling in stocks and crypto since 2021 than it did in the prior six years combined. At a New York-based treatment center, Safe Foundation, clinical director Jessica Steinmetz estimates about 10% of patients are seeking help for addictions tied to trading. Before 2020, there were no such patients.

Lyndon Aguiar, a clinical director at Williamsville Wellness, a gambling treatment center in Hanover, Va., said counselors sit down with traders and delete dozens of stock, sports and financial news apps from their phones when they walk in the doors for its inpatient treatment program. The center has seen a 25% increase in gambling tied to markets since 2020, compared with the prior four years. Patients might install Gamban, an app that locks individuals out of gambling on their phones. The app started blocking Robinhood and Webull in July 2021.

A Robinhood spokesperson said it includes “robust safeguards to help customers make informed decisions” and that individuals deserve the freedom to become stewards of their own finances. A spokesperson for Webull said the platform offers educational tools to foster responsible investment decisions.

New patients often suffer from withdrawal symptoms including severe anxiety and depression when they first stop trading, he said. Some start fidgeting or repeatedly tapping their fingers against a table, itching to place a trade.

Abdullah Mahmood, administrative coordinator of a gambling program at the Maryhaven addiction treatment center in Columbus, Ohio, said he has seen several clients enter the treatment center’s doors this year for trading addictions. Options are particularly problematic, he said.

Activity in options is on track to smash another record this year.  Trading in contracts expiring the same day, which are the riskiest, has soared to make up more than half of all trades in the market for S&P 500 index options this year, according to figures from SpotGamma. These trades are more electric than traditional stocks, with the potential to rocket higher or plunge to zero within minutes.

Similar to wagering on how many points Mavericks point guard Luka Dončić will score in the first quarter of an NBA game, traders are increasingly using options to speculate how stocks will fare during the trading session, rather than at the closing bell.

This year, “a client came down to my office, suicidal,” Mahmood said. “He had lost $14,000 in just five minutes in options trading on the app Robinhood.”

Doug Royer, 61, has been attending Mahmood’s  group counseling sessions every Monday.

He initially entered the center’s doors for help with his drinking. Then, he saw signs for a gambling program while walking the halls of Maryhaven’s treatment center. Immediately, the six figures he lost trading came to mind.

After selling his house in 2022, he had poured thousands of dollars into investments like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Lockheed Martin and Texas Pacific Land before amping up the risk with options trading. He traded in and out of companies such as Spirit Airlines and Estée Lauder, while borrowing on margin in an attempt to magnify his bets, brokerage statements show.

Eventually, he said he had almost no money left to trade with after losses in options and lotteries. He said he has been working part-time as a massage therapist near Columbus, Ohio.  “It’s very easy to make a lot of money,” Royer said. “It’s also easy to lose everything really fast.”

Addiction counselors say gambling in financial markets often goes undetected and can be tough to track because individuals confuse their actions with investing. Unlike sports betting apps such as FanDuel and DraftKings, most brokerage apps don’t post warnings about gambling or offer hotlines to seek help. The proliferation of financial instruments, along with flashy brokerage apps that make them easy to trade, has also helped some gamblers convince themselves that they weren’t actually placing bets.

The National Council on Problem Gambling started including questions about investing in its annual survey in 2021, after its gambling hotline received an influx of calls during the meme-stock mania. The council’s executive director, Keith Whyte, said NCPG reached out to apps like Robinhood to suggest they adopt consumer protections ingrained in gambling apps. “In some cases, the consumer protections in the gambling industry exceed that in the financial markets,” Whyte said.

Like the anticipation of sex or delicious food, a financial gamble like an options trade can flood your brain with feel-good chemicals, said Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University. The bigger the financial payout or tastier the dish, the stronger the rush. That anticipation can keep a trader going back to place another bet, forming a reinforcing habit, added Knutson, who has studied risk-taking in financial markets for more than two decades.

“It’s not just the release, per se, of the dopamine, but the speed of the release that’s reinforcing,” Knutson said.

Chris Cachia, a 38-year-old power-plant technician in Ontario, Canada, got swept up with trading during the meme-stock mania in 2021. After turning around 7,000 Canadian dollars into roughly 50,000 trading stocks like GameStop and BlackBerry, he found short-dated stock options when he went hunting for fatter profits. He scored some early wins. Before long, the thousands he made evaporated and his account sank into a deep hole. Yet he said he couldn’t walk away—he was consumed by a fear of missing out on the riches that others boasted about online.

One week while his wife was traveling, he holed up in his home office for days trading. He grew desperate for a win and bet more money than he had in his brokerage account. It didn’t work out.

The subsequent loss left him so depressed that he skipped his brother’s bachelor party. “It was causing erratic changes in my behavior as I got deeper and deeper in,” Cachia said. “I was basically a full-out gambling addict.” He said he tried to quit countless times since his trading ramped up during the pandemic, deleting brokerage and social-media apps from his phone, only to quickly download them again. He wasn’t able to pull away until his wife threatened to leave him. “She gave me an ultimatum: You need to stop this, or I’m done,” Cachia said.

__

Source: More Men Are Addicted to the ‘Crack Cocaine’ of the Stock Market – WSJ

www.drugwatch.org
drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com

Filed under: Addiction,Gambling,Latest News,Mental Health,USA :

 December 19, 2024 / 73(50);1147–1149

Yijie Chen, PhD1; Xinyi Jiang, PhD1; R. Matthew Gladden, PhD1; Nisha Nataraj, PhD1; Gery P. Guy Jr., PhD1; Deborah Dowell, MD1

Summary

What is already known about this topic?

From 2020 to 2022, among overdose deaths with only illegally manufactured fentanyl (IMF) detected, those with evidence of smoking IMF increased by 78.9%, and those with evidence of injection decreased by 41.6%.

What is added by this report?

From July–December 2017 to January–June 2023, the percentage of persons injecting IMF sharply declined across all U.S. Census Bureau regions, with region-specific differences in magnitude; correspondingly, IMF snorting or sniffing increased in the Northeast, and IMF smoking increased in the Midwest, South, and West regions.

What are the implications for public health practice?

Whereas avoiding injection likely reduces infectious disease transmission, noninjection routes might still contribute to overdose. Provision of locally tailored messaging and linkage to medical treatment is important among persons using IMF through non-injection routes.

During 2019–2023, U.S. overdose deaths involving fentanyl have more than doubled, from an estimated 35,474 in 2019 to 72,219 in 2023 (1). From 2020 to 2022, overdose deaths with only illegally manufactured fentanyl (IMF) detected and evidence of smoking IMF increased by 78.9%; deaths with evidence of injection decreased by 41.6% (2). Smoking, however, could not be linked specifically to IMF use when deaths involved multiple drugs (e.g., methamphetamine co-used with IMF). To characterize IMF administration routes among all persons who use IMF, with or without other drugs, IMF administration routes were examined among adults assessed for substance use treatment who used IMF during the past 30 days.

Investigation and Outcomes

The National Addictions Vigilance Intervention and Prevention Program’s Addiction Severity Index-Multimedia Version (ASI-MV) tool* includes a convenience sample of adults aged ≥18 years assessed for substance-use treatment. CDC analyzed treatment assessments conducted between July 1, 2017, and June 30, 2023, which were restricted to 14 states† with at least 100 assessments reporting past 30-day IMF use (16,636)§ and stratified by administration routes (swallowed, snorted or sniffed, smoked, and injected). The percentage of persons reporting each administration route was calculated for 6-month periods by U.S. Census Bureau region.** Significant (p-value <0.05) trends by administration route were identified using Joinpoint (Joinpoint version 5.1.0; National Cancer Institute) and Pearson correlations. This activity was reviewed by CDC, deemed not research, and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.††

In the Midwest, South, and West U.S. Census Bureau regions, increases in smoking (from 7.8% during July–December 2017 to 38.2% during January–June 2023 [Midwest]; from 15.4% during January–June 2020 to 54.0% during January–June 2023 [South]; and from 45.7% during January–June 2018 to 85.7% during January–June 2023 [West]) were strongly negatively correlated with decreases in injection (Pearson correlation coefficient [r] = −0.96; p<0.001 [Midwest]; −0.98; p<0.001 [South]; and −0.74; p<0.01 [West]). Injection decreased from 75.2% during January–June 2020 to 41.2% during January–June 2023 in the Midwest U.S. Census Bureau region; from 54.2% during July–December 2020 to 30.3% during January–June 2023 in the South; and from 65.6% during July–December 2018 to 9.1% during January–June 2023 in the West, but timing of changes across each census region varied (Figure). In the Northeast, increases in snorting or sniffing (from 18.9% during July–December 2017 to 45.5% during January–June 2023) were strongly negatively correlated (r = −0.89; p<0.001) with a decrease in injection (from 83.8% during July–December 2017 to 63.4% during January–June 2023).

Preliminary Conclusions and Actions

Consistent with other fatal overdose investigations (2), the percentage of persons injecting IMF sharply declined across all U.S. Census Bureau regions between 2017 and 2023, although the magnitudes of these declines were region-specific. Some persons who use IMF reportedly believe that smoking is safer than injecting IMF (3). Whereas avoiding injection likely reduces the risk for acquiring bloodborne viruses (e.g., HIV or HCV) and soft tissue infections (2,4), noninjection routes might contribute to overdose or other health problems (e.g., orofacial lesions associated with snorting) (5). Compared with injection, smoking IMF is associated with a higher frequency of use throughout the day and potentially higher daily dosages consumed (3). Substantial shifts to smoking IMF in the Midwest, South, and West, and sniffing or snorting IMF in the Northeast (i.e., Massachusetts) highlight the need to understand local trends in drug use and tailor local messaging, outreach, and linkage to medical care, including effective treatment for opioid use disorder in persons using IMF through noninjection routes.

Corresponding author: Yijie Chen, mns7@cdc.gov.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7350a4.htm?s_cid=mm7350a4_w

1Division of Overdose Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, CDC.

All authors have completed and submitted the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Filed under: Fentanyl,Latest News,Prevalence,USA :

Provided by GlobeNewswire  

Millburn, NJ, Dec. 17, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Thousands of residents from New Jersey and throughout the country, including many health care professionals, are now better informed and prepared to act in the fight against the nationwide opioid crisis thanks to the Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day Learning Series.

The Learning Series’ monthly webinars drew more than 10,000 attendees in 2024, including participants from fields including health care, education and law enforcement, as well as prevention, treatment and recovery professionals Organized by the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey (PDFNJ) in collaboration with the Opioid Education Foundation of America (OEFA) and the Office of Alternative and Community Responses (OACR), the series covers a broad range of topics, from prevention and recovery to trauma, stigma and building resilience in those working on the front lines.

“The attendance represent thousands of people who are now better equipped to make a difference,” said Angelo Valente, Executive Director of PDFNJ.

Beyond educating the general public about the opioid epidemic, the series provided tools and strategies specific to health care workers and other professionals in related fields to help them make informed decisions in their work. Participants earned more than 6,000 continuing education credits, a testament to the program’s commitment to empowering professionals to drive real-world change in their communities.

The Learning Series provided credits for various professions including physicians, dentists, nurses, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, optometrists, social workers, certified health education specialists and EMTs.

In 2024, the webinars brought together experts from various prestigious institutions and organizations, including the New Jersey State Police, the Veterans Affairs Administration, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). These speakers, including Christopher M. Jones, Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention at SAMHSA, shared practical solutions and cutting-edge research, ensuring participants left with insights that could be immediately applied in their communities.

“The Learning Series has grown steadily since it began in 2020, thanks to the incredible speakers and organizations that have shared their time and expertise,” Valente said. “Their contributions have made this series an invaluable resource for professionals in New Jersey and beyond, providing practical strategies and real-world insights to address the opioid crisis.”

The series also serves as part of the annual Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day initiative, held every October 6 to raise awareness about the risks of opioid misuse and educate residents and prescribers statewide. Its growth year over year underscores the need for evidence-based education and practical solutions to combat this epidemic.

The 2025 series will kick off at 11 a.m. on Thursday, January 30, 2025, with a webinar exploring the latest trends in the national opioid crisis. To learn more about Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day and for a schedule of webinars, please visit knockoutday.drugfreenj.org.

Source: https://www.morningstar.com/news/globe-newswire/9320021/2024-learning-series-drives-conversations-and-solutions-in-the-fight-against-opioid-misuse

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Best known for its statewide anti-drug advertising campaign, the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey is a private not-for-profit coalition of professionals from the communications, corporate and government communities whose collective mission is to reduce demand for illicit drugs in New Jersey through media communication. To date, more than $200 million in broadcast time and print space has been donated to the Partnership’s New Jersey campaign, making it the largest public service advertising campaign in New Jersey’s history. Since its inception the Partnership has garnered 230 advertising and public relations awards from national, regional and statewide media organizations.

Filed under: Heroin/Methadone,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

New NIH-funded data show lower use of most substances continues following the COVID-19 pandemic

After declining significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, substance use among adolescents has continued to hold steady at lowered levels for the fourth year in a row, according to the latest results from the Monitoring the Future Survey, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These recent data continue to document stable and declining trends in the use of most drugs among young people.

“This trend in the reduction of substance use among teenagers is unprecedented,” said Nora D. Volkow, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “We must continue to investigate factors that have contributed to this lowered risk of substance use to tailor interventions to support the continuation of this trend.”

Reported use for almost all measured substances decreased dramatically between 2020 and 2021, after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and related changes like school closures and social distancing. In 2022 and 2023, most reported substance use among adolescents held steady at these lowered levels, with similar trends and some decreases in use in 2024.

The Monitoring the Future survey is conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and funded by NIDA. The survey is given annually to students in eighth, 10th, and 12th grades who self-report their substance use behaviors over various time periods, such as past 30 days, past 12 months, and lifetime. The survey also documents students’ perceptions of harm, disapproval of use, and perceived availability of drugs. The survey results are released the same year the data are collected. From February through June 2024, the Monitoring the Future investigators collected 24,257 surveys from students enrolled across 272 public and private schools in the United States.

When breaking down the data by specific drugs, the survey found that adolescents most commonly reported use of alcohol, nicotine vaping, and cannabis in the 12 months prior to the survey, and levels generally declined from or held steady with the lowered use reported over the past few years. Compared to levels reported in 2023, data reported in 2024 show:

  • Alcohol use remained stable for eighth graders, with 12.9% reporting use in the past 12 months. Alcohol use declined among the other two grades surveyed, with 26.1% of 10th graders reporting alcohol use in the past 12 months (compared to 30.6% in 2023), and 41.7% of 12th graders reporting alcohol use in the past 12 months (compared to 45.7% in 2023).
  • Nicotine vaping remained stable for eighth and 12th graders, with 9.6% of eighth graders and 21.0% of 12th graders reporting vaping nicotine in the past 12 months. It declined among 10th graders, with 15.4% reporting nicotine vaping in the past 12 months (compared to 17.6% in 2023).
  • Nicotine pouch use remained stable for eighth graders, with 0.6% reporting use within the past 12 months. It increased among the two older grades with 3.4% of 10th graders reporting nicotine pouch use in the past 12 months (compared to 1.9% in 2023) and 5.9% of 12th graders reporting nicotine pouch use in the past 12 months (compared to 2.9% in 2023).
  • Cannabis use remained stable for the younger grades, with 7.2% of eighth graders and 15.9% of 10th graders reporting cannabis use in the past 12 months. Cannabis use declined among 12th graders, with 25.8% reporting cannabis use in the past 12 months (compared to 29.0% in 2023). Of note, 5.6% of eighth graders, 11.6% of 10th graders, and 17.6% of 12th graders reported vaping cannabis within the past 12 months, reflecting a stable trend among all three grades.
  • Delta-8-THC (a psychoactive substance found in the Cannabis sativa plant) use was measured for the first time among eighth and 10th graders in 2024, with 2.9% of eighth graders and 7.9% of 10th graders reporting use within the past 12 months. Reported use of Delta-8-THC among 12th graders remained stable with 12.3% reporting use within the past 12 months.
  • Any illicit drug use other than marijuana declined among eight graders, with 3.4% reporting use in the past 12 months compared to 4.6% in 2023). It remained stable for the other two grades surveyed, with 4.4% of 10th graders and 6.5% of 12th graders reporting any illicit drug use other than marijuana in the past 12 months. These data build on long-term trends documenting low and declining use of illicit substances reported among teenagers – including past-year use of cocaine, heroin, and misuse of prescription drugs, generally.
  • Use of narcotics other than heroin (including Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet, etc.) are only reported among 12th graders, and decreased in 2024, with 0.6% reporting use within the past 12 months (reflecting an all-time low, down from a high of 9.5% in 2004).
  • Abstaining, or not using, marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine in the past 30 days, remained stable for eighth graders, with 89.5% reporting abstaining from use of these drugs in the past 30 days prior to the survey. It increased for the two older grades, with 80.2% of 10th graders reporting abstaining from any use of marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine over the past 30 days (compared to 76.9% in 2023) and 67.1% of 12th graders reporting abstaining from use of these drugs in the past 30 days (compared to 62.6% in 2023).

“Kids who were in eighth grade at the start of the pandemic will be graduating from high school this year, and this unique cohort has ushered in the lowest rates of substance use we’ve seen in decades,” said Richard A. Miech, Ph.D., team lead of the Monitoring the Future survey at the University of Michigan. “Even as the drugs, culture, and landscape continue to evolve in future years, the Monitoring the Future survey will continue to nimbly adapt to measure and report on these trends – just as it has done for the past 50 years.”

The results were gathered from a nationally representative sample, and the data were statistically weighted to provide national numbers. This year, 35% of students who took the survey identified as Hispanic. Of those who did not identify as Hispanic, 14% identified as Black or African American, 1% as American Indian or Alaska Native, 4% as Asian, 1% as Middle Eastern, 37% as white, and 7% as more than one of the preceding non-Hispanic categories. The survey also asks respondents to identify as male, female, other, or prefer not to answer. For the 2024 survey, 47% of students identified as male, 49% identified as female, 1% identified as other, and 3% selected the “prefer not to answer” option.

All participating students took the survey via the web – either on tablets or on a computer – with 99% of respondents taking the survey in-person in school in 2024. The 2024 Monitoring the Future data tables highlighting the survey results are available online from the University of Michigan.

The 2024 Monitoring the Future data tables highlighting the survey results are available online from the University of Michigan.

Source: https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/12/reported-use-of-most-drugs-among-adolescents-remained-low-in-2024

Filed under: Latest News,Prevalence,USA,Youth :

SAM Drug Report’s Friday Fact report – 11:31 Friday 10th Jan 2025

A study that was published last week in Addictive Behaviors found that alcohol and tobacco are more likely to be used on days when marijuana is used.

The study found that individuals consumed an average of 0.45 more alcoholic drinks on days when marijuana was used, compared to days when marijuana was not used. Similarly, the study found that individuals smoked an average of 0.63 more cigarettes on days when marijuana was used. Both of these findings were statistically significant (p=0.01).

Seeking to explain these findings, the researchers posited that “the impact of cannabis use on the endocannabinoid system may reinforce the use of alcohol and tobacco through mechanisms related to psychological reward.” They added that “bidirectionality must be considered,” given that the use of one substance may influence the effect of an additional substance––it may enhance a high, for example.

The researchers noted that “the observed within-person positive associations between cannabis use and same-day alcohol consumption and cigarettes smoked are consistent with previous research that has shown a tendency for substance use behaviors to co-occur.”

Indeed, cross-tabs from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that those who used marijuana in the past 30 days were three times as likely to have smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days (30.8% vs. 10.4%) and 63% more likely to have used alcohol in the past 30 days (70.7% vs. 43.4%), compared to those who did not use marijuana in the past 30 days.

Source: SAM Drug Report’s Friday Fact report – 11:31 Friday 10th Jan 2025 – The Drug Report’s

 

 

Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) is an alliance of organizations and individuals dedicated to a health-first approach to marijuana policy. We are professionals working in mental health and public health. We are bipartisan. We are medical doctors, lawmakers, treatment providers, preventionists, teachers, law enforcement officers and others who seek a middle road between incarceration and legalization. Our commonsense, third-way approach to marijuana policy is based on reputable science and sound principles of public health and safety.

Filed under: Alcohol,Cannabis/Marijuana,Latest News,Tobacco, smoking,USA :

COMMENT BY NATIONAL DRUG PREVENTION ALLIANCE ON THE ARTICLE BY DREXEL – 15 DECEMBER 2024:

 NDPA has significant reservations about his article. Drexel (a ‘private university’ in Philadelphia) are asserting that all drug use is stigmatised ,and that such stigmatisation as they observe should be negated. But other specialists in the field counter by giving comments on stigma/human behaviour etc, as follows:

  • There is no doubt that language which stigmatises a situation or a person is something to be avoided, and there should be an un-stigmatised opening for people to access healthful interventions, but
  • Drug use and addiction is a ‘chicken and egg’ situation, and
  • Writers like this one start half way through the situation, when a person has made a decision to stop being a ‘drug-free’ person; they are already moving down a path which can lead to consequences which were not what they wanted when deciding to use, so
  • They are already a user, and what one might call the ‘pre-addictive’ stage is ignored. Addicted users are portrayed as no less or more than victims, seduced by profiteering suppliers, which
  • Circumvents the initial chapter in the story i.e. the stage in which a person decides to use a substance which
  • In retrospect ca be seen as a bad decision, which should be the target of productive prevention. This is
  • ‘pre the event’ – the heart of the word ‘prevention’ which in its Latin-base (‘praevenire’) means ‘to come before’ – not to come ‘during’!

Take the following paragraph in this paper:

“Awareness of stigma as an impediment to treatment has grown in the last two decades. In the wake of America’s opioid epidemic — when strategic, deceitful marketing, promotion and overprescription of addictive painkillers resulted in millions of individuals unwittingly becoming addicted — the general public began to recognize addiction as a disease to be treated, rather than a moral failure to be punished — as it was often portrayed during the “War on Drugs” in the 1970s and ‘80s”.

Whilst we can harmonise with the authors of this paper in seeking to remove ‘stigma as an impediment to treatment’, we part company with them when they classify all addicts as ‘unwitting victims of deceitful marketing and promotion’. The simple fact is that they made a bad decision, for whatever reason … in some cases suckered, yes, or in other cases not looking down that road and its consequences on themselves and others around them (‘short termism’) – this was not a ‘moral  wrong’, it was what it was.

Prevention should therefore assist people to make healthful decisions – the kind of decision which countless former users make for themselves, thereby moving themselves off the ‘pre-addictive’ road onto a healthful one.

This paper does not include this wider picture, and is the less for that.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<NDPA>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

DREXEL PRIVATE UNIVERSITY TEXT:

December 11, 2024

Researchers from Drexel’s College of Computing & Informatics have created large language model program that can help people avoid using language online that creates stigma around substance use disorder.

Drug addiction has been one of America’s growing public health concerns for decades. Despite the development of effective treatments and support resources, few people who are suffering from a substance use disorder seek help. Reluctance to seek help has been attributed to the stigma often attached to the condition. So, in an effort to address this problem, researchers at Drexel University are raising awareness of the stigmatizing language present in online forums and they have created an artificial intelligence tool to help educate users and offer alternative language.

Presented at the recent Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), the tool uses large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and Llama to identify stigmatizing language and suggest alternative wording — the way spelling and grammar checking programs flag typos.

“Stigmatized language is so engrained that people often don’t even know they’re doing it,” said Shadi Rezapour, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Computing & Informatics who leads Drexel’s Social NLP Lab, and the research that developed the tool. “Words that attack the person, rather than the disease of addiction, only serve to further isolate individuals who are suffering — making it difficult for them to come to grips with the affliction and seek the help they need. Addressing stigmatizing language in online communities is a key first step to educating the public and reducing its use.”

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, only 7% of people living with substance use disorder receive any form of treatment, despite tens of billions of dollars being allocated to support treatment and recovery programs. Studies show that people who felt they needed treatment did not seek it for fear of being stigmatized.

“Framing addiction as a weakness or failure is neither accurate nor helpful as our society attempts to address this public health crisis,” Rezapour said. “People who have fallen victim in America suffer both from their addiction, as well as a social stigma that has formed around it. As a result, few people seek help, despite significant resources being committed to addiction recovery in recent decades.”

Awareness of stigma as an impediment to treatment has grown in the last two decades. In the wake of America’s opioid epidemic — when strategic, deceitful marketing, promotion and overprescription of addictive painkillers resulted in millions of individuals unwittingly becoming addicted — the general public began to recognize addiction as a disease to be treated, rather than a moral failure to be punished — as it was often portrayed during the “War on Drugs” in the 1970s and ‘80s.

But according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while stigmatizing language in traditional media has decreased over time, its use on social media platforms has increased. The Drexel researchers suggest that encountering such language in an online forum can be particularly harmful because people often turn to these communities to seek comfort and support.

“Despite the potential for support, the digital space can mirror and magnify the very societal stigmas it has the power to dismantle, affecting individuals’ mental health and recovery process adversely,” Rezapour said. “Our objective was to develop a framework that could help to preserve these supportive spaces.”

By harnessing the power of LLMs — the machine learning systems that power chatbots, spelling and grammar checkers, and word suggestion tools— the researchers developed a framework that could potentially help digital forum users become more aware of how their word choices might affect fellow community members suffering from substance use disorder.

To do it, they first set out to understand the forms that stigmatizing language takes on digital forums. The team used manually annotated posts to evaluate an LLM’s ability to detect and revise problematic language patterns in online discussions about substance abuse.

Once it has able to classify language to a high degree of accuracy, they employed it on more than 1.2 million posts from four popular Reddit forums. The model identified more than 3,000 posts with some form of stigmatizing language toward people with substance use disorder.

Using this dataset as a guide, the team prepared its GPT-4 LLM to become an agent of change. Incorporating non-stigmatizing language guidance from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the researchers prompt-engineered the model to offer a non-stigmatizing alternative whenever it encountered stigmatizing language in a post. Suggestions focused on using sympathetic narratives, removing blame and highlighting structural barriers to treatment.

The programs ultimately produced more than 1,600 de-stigmatized phrases, each paired as an alternative to a type of stigmatizing language.

 

destigmatized text

 

Using a combination of human reviewers and natural language processing programs, the team evaluated the model on the overall quality of the responses, extended de-stigmatization, and fidelity to the original post.

“Fidelity to the original post is very important,” said Layla Bouzoubaa, a doctoral student in the College of Computing & Informatics who was a lead author of the research. “The last thing we want to do is remove agency from any user or censor their authentic voice. What we envision for this pipeline is that if it were integrated onto a social media platform, for example, it will merely offer an alternate way to phrase their text if their text contains stigmatizing language towards people who use drugs. The user can choose to accept this or not. Kind of like a Grammarly for bad language.”

Bouzoubaa also noted the importance of providing clear, transparent explanations of why the suggestions were offered and strong privacy protections of user data when it comes to widespread adoption of the program.

To promote transparency in the process, as well as helping to educate users, the team took the step of incorporating an explanation layer in the model so that when it identified an instance of stigmatizing language it would automatically provide a detailed explanation for its classification, based on the four elements of stigma identified in the initial analysis of Reddit posts.

“We believe this automated feedback may feel less judgmental or confrontational than direct human feedback, potentially making users more receptive to the suggested changes,” Bouzoubaa said.

This effort is the most recent addition to the group’s foundational work examining how people share personal stories online about experiences with drugs and the communities that have formed around these conversations on Reddit.

“To our knowledge, there has not been any research on addressing or countering the language people use (computationally) that can make people in a vulnerable population feel stigmatized against,” Bouzoubaa said. “I think this is the biggest advantage of LLM technology and the benefit of our work. The idea behind this work is not overly complex; however, we are using LLMs as a tool to reach lengths that we could never achieve before on a problem that is also very challenging and that is where the novelty and strength of our work lies.”

In addition to making public the programs, the dataset of posts with stigmatizing language, as well as the de-stigmatized alternatives, the researchers plan to continue their work by studying how stigma is perceived and felt in the lived experiences of people with substance use disorders.

 

 

In addition to Rezapour and Bouzoubaa, Elham Aghakhani contributed to this research.

Read the full paper here: https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.516/

This is an RTE component

Contact: Britt Faulstick – 
215.895.2617britt.faulstick@drexel.edu
Source: https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2024/December/LLM-substance-use-disorder-stigmatizing-language
Filed under: Addiction,Cannabis/Marijuana,Culture,Education,Health,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,Social Affairs,USA,Youth :

Few patients know about evidence-based treatment—or have or seek access to it

Fact Sheet 

Projects:Substance Use Prevention and Treatment
Overview

Alcohol is the leading driver of substance use-related fatalities in America: Each year, frequent or excessive drinking causes approximately 178,000 deaths.1 Excessive alcohol use is common in the United States among people who drink: In 2022, of the 137 million Americans who reported drinking in the last 30 days, 45% reported binge drinking (five or more drinks in a sitting for men; four for women).2 Such excessive drinking is associated with health problems such as injuries, alcohol poisoning, cardiovascular conditions, mental health problems, and certain cancers.3

In 2020, many people increased their drinking because of COVID-19-related stressors, including social isolation, which led to a 26% increase in alcohol-related deaths during the first year of the pandemic.4

Figure 1

Alcohol‑Related Deaths Have Increased Since 2016

Growth is driven by increases in both acute and chronic causes of death

Notes: Chronic causes of death include illness related to excessive alcohol use such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke, and diseases of the liver, gallbladder, and pancreas. Acute causes include alcohol-related poisonings, car crashes, and suicide.

Source: Marissa B. Esser et al., “Deaths From Excessive Alcohol Use—United States, 2016-2021,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 73, no. 8154-61, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7308a1.htm#T1_down

© 2024 The Pew Charitable Trusts

Nationwide, nearly 30 million people are estimated to have alcohol use disorder (AUD); it is the most common substance use disorder. AUD is a treatable, chronic health condition characterized by a person’s inability to reduce or quit drinking despite negative social, professional, or health effects.5 While no single cause is responsible for developing AUD, a mix of biological, psychological, and environmental factors can increase an individual’s risk, including a family history of the disorder.6

There are well-established guidelines for AUD screening and treatment, including questions that can be asked by a person’s health care team, medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), behavioral therapies, and recovery supports, but these approaches often are not put into practice.7 When policies encourage the adoption of screening and evidence-based medicines for AUD, particularly in primary care, the burden of alcohol-related health problems can be reduced across the country.8

The Spectrum of Unhealthy Alcohol Use

For adults of legal drinking age, U.S. dietary guidelines recommend that they choose not to drink or drink in moderation, defined as two drinks or fewer in a day for men, and one drink or fewer in a day for women.9 One drink is defined as 0.6 ounces of pure alcohol—the amount in a 12-ounce beer containing 5% alcohol, a 5-ounce glass of wine containing 12% alcohol, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor.10

Consumption patterns exceeding these recommended levels are considered:

  • Heavy drinking, defined by the number of drinks consumed per week: 15 or more for men, and eight or more for women.11
  • Binge drinking, defined by the number of drinks consumed in a single sitting: five or more for men, and four or more for women.12

Alcohol use disorder is defined by The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as having symptoms of two or more diagnostic criteria within a 12-month period.13 The diagnostic criteria assess behaviors such as trying to stop drinking but being unable to, alcohol cravings, and the extent to which drinking interferes with an individual’s life.14 AUD can be mild (meeting two or three criteria), moderate (meeting four or five criteria), or severe (six or more criteria).15

Identifying and preventing AUD

Primary care providers are well positioned to recognize the signs of unsafe drinking in their patients. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that these providers screen adults 18 years and older for alcohol misuse.16 One commonly used evidence-based approach, SBIRT—or screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment—is a series of steps that help providers identify and address a patient’s problematic substance use.17

Using a screening questionnaire, a provider can determine whether a patient is at risk and, if so, can deliver periodic brief behavioral interventions in an office setting. Such interventions have been shown to reduce heavy alcohol use among adolescents, adults, and older adults.18 When a patient meets the criteria for AUD, providers can offer medication, connect them to specialty treatment, refer them to recovery supports such as Alcoholics Anonymous or other mutual-help groups, or all of the above, depending on a patient’s needs and preferences.19 When these interventions are used in primary care settings, they can reduce heavy alcohol use.20

While screening for AUD is common, few providers follow up when a patient reports problematic alcohol use. From 2015 to 2019, 70% of people with AUD were asked about their alcohol use in health care settings, but just 12% of them received information or advice about reducing their alcohol use.21 Only 5% were referred to treatment.22

Emergency departments (EDs) are another important setting for identifying AUD, and to maintain accreditation they are required to screen at least 80% of all patients for alcohol use.23 Alcohol is the most common cause of substance-related ED visits, meaning many people in these settings are engaged in excessive or risky alcohol consumption and could be linked to care.24

The use of SBIRT in the ED can also reduce alcohol use, especially for people without severe alcohol problems.25 Providers who use SBIRT can help patients reduce future ED visits and also some negative consequences associated with alcohol use, such as injuries.26

Commonly cited barriers to using SBIRT in these health care settings include competing priorities and insufficient treatment capacity in the community when patients need referrals. Conversely, SBIRT use increases with strong leadership and provider buy-in, collaboration across departments and treatment settings, and sufficient privacy to discuss substance use with patients.27

Jails and prisons should also screen for AUD, as well as other SUDs, to assess clinical needs and connect individuals with care. However, screening practices may not be evidence based. A review of the intake forms used to screen individuals in a sample of jails in 2018-19 found that some did not ask about SUD at all, and of those that did, they did not use validated tools accepted for use in health care and SUD treatment settings.28

Withdrawal management

Up to half of all people with AUD experience some withdrawal symptoms when attempting to stop drinking.29 For many, common symptoms such as anxiety, sweating, and insomnia are mild.30 For a small percentage, however, withdrawal can be fatal if not managed appropriately.31 These individuals can experience seizures or a condition called alcohol withdrawal delirium (also referred to as delirium tremens), which causes patients to be confused and experience heart problems and other symptoms; if untreated, it can be fatal.32 People with moderate withdrawal symptoms can also require medical management to address symptoms such as tremors in addition to anxiety, sweating, and insomnia.33

To determine whether a patient with AUD is at risk of severe withdrawal or would benefit from help managing symptoms, the American Society of Addiction Medicine recommends that providers evaluate patients with positive AUD screens for their level of withdrawal risk.34 Based on this evaluation, providers can offer or connect patients to the appropriate level of withdrawal management.35

At a minimum, high-quality withdrawal management includes clinical monitoring and medications to address symptoms.36 Providers may also offer behavioral therapies.37 Depending on the severity of a patient’s symptoms and the presence of co-occurring conditions such as severe cardiovascular or liver disease that require a higher level of care, withdrawal management can be provided on either an inpatient or an outpatient basis.38

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Institute of Corrections, jails should also use evidence-based standards of care to address alcohol withdrawal. These standards include screening and assessing individuals who are at risk for withdrawal and, if the jail cannot provide appropriate care, transferring them to an ED or hospital.39

Withdrawal management on its own is not effective in treating AUD, and without additional services after discharge, most people will return to alcohol use.40 Because of this, providers should also connect people with follow-up care, such as residential or outpatient treatment, after withdrawal management to improve outcomes. Continued care helps patients sustain abstinence, reduces their risk of arrests and homelessness, and improves employment outcomes.41

Patients face multiple barriers to this follow-up care, however. For example, withdrawal management providers from the Veterans Health Administration cited long wait times for follow-up care, inadequate housing, and lack of integration between withdrawal management and outpatient services as reasons patients couldn’t access services.42 Patients have also cited barriers such as failure of the withdrawal management provider to arrange continued care, lengths of stay that were too short to allow for recovery to begin, insufficient residential treatment capacity for continued care, and inadequate housing.43

Promising practices for improving care continuity include: providing peer recovery coaches—people with lived expertise of substance use disorder who can help patients navigate treatment and recovery; psychosocial services that increase the motivation to continue treatment; initiating medication treatment before discharge; reminder phone calls; and “warm handoffs,” in which patients are physically accompanied from withdrawal management to the next level of care.44

Treating AUD

In 2023, 29 million people in the U.S. met the criteria for AUD, but less than 1 in 10 received any form of treatment.45 Formal treatment may not be necessary for people with milder AUD and strong support systems.46 But people who do seek out care can face a range of barriers, including stigma, lack of knowledge about what treatment looks like and where to get it, cost, lack of access, long wait times, and care that doesn’t meet their cultural needs.47

For those who need it, AUD treatment can include a combination of behavioral, pharmacological, and social supports designed to help patients reach their recovery goals, which can range from abstaining from alcohol to reducing consumption.48

While for many the goal of treatment is to stop using alcohol entirely, supporting non-abstinence treatment goals is also important, because reduced alcohol consumption is associated with important health benefits such as lower blood pressure, improved liver functioning, and better mental health.49

Services for treating AUD—including medication and behavioral therapy—can be offered across the continuum of care, from primary care to intensive inpatient treatment, depending on a patient’s individual needs.50

Medications

Medications for AUD help patients reduce or cease alcohol consumption based on their individual treatment goals and can help improve health outcomes.51 Medications can be particularly helpful for people experiencing cravings or a return to drinking, or people for whom behavioral therapy alone has not been successful.52 But medications are not often used: Of the 30 million people with AUD in 2022, approximately 2% (or 634,000 people) were treated with medication.53

The FDA has approved three medications to treat AUD:

  • Naltrexone reduces cravings in people with AUD.54 This medication is also approved to treat opioid use disorder, and because it blocks the effects of opioids and can cause opioid withdrawal, patients who use these substances must be abstinent from opioids for one to two weeks prior to starting this treatment for AUD.55 It can be taken daily or as needed in a pill or as a monthly injection.56 Oral naltrexone is effective at reducing the percentage of days spent drinking, the percentage of days spent drinking heavily, and a return to any drinking.57 Injectable naltrexone can reduce the number of days spent drinking and the number of heavy drinking days.58 Additionally, naltrexone can reduce the incidence of alcohol-associated liver disease—an often-fatal complication of heavy alcohol use—and slow the disease’s progression in people who already have it.59
  • Acamprosate is taken as a pill.60 It reduces alcohol craving and helps people with AUD abstain from drinking.61 It reduces the likelihood of a return to any drinking and number of drinking days.62
  • Disulfiram deters alcohol use by inducing nausea and vomiting and other negative symptoms if a person drinks while using it.63 It is also taken as a pill.64 There is insufficient data to determine whether a treatment is more effective than a placebo at preventing relapses in alcohol consumption or other related issues.65 However, for some individuals, knowing they will get sick from consuming alcohol while taking disulfiram can increase motivation to abstain.66 As medication adherence is a challenge for patients, supervised administration of disulfiram by another person—for example, a spouse—can improve outcomes in patients who are compliant.67

Additionally, some medications used “off-label” (meaning they were approved for treating other conditions) have also effectively addressed AUD. A systematic review found that topiramate, a medication approved for treating epilepsy and migraines, had the strongest evidence among off-label drugs for reducing both any drinking and heavy drinking days.68 Like naltrexone, it can reduce the incidence of alcohol-related liver disease.69

Despite the benefits that medications provide, they remain an underutilized tool for a variety of reasons—such as lack of knowledge among patients and providers, stigma against the use of medication, and failure of pharmacies to stock the drugs.70

Behavioral therapies

Behavioral therapies can also help individuals manage AUD, and they support medication adherence:

  • Motivational enhancement therapy focuses on steering people through the stages of change71 by reinforcing their motivation to modify personal drinking behaviors.72
  • Cognitive behavioral therapy addresses people’s feelings about themselves and their relationships with others and helps to identify and change negative thought patterns and behaviors related to drinking, including recognizing internal and external triggers. It focuses on developing and practicing coping strategies to manage these triggers and prevent continued alcohol use.73
  • Contingency management uses positive reinforcement to motivate abstinence or other healthy behavioral changes.74 It can help people who drink heavily to reduce their alcohol use.75

All of these approaches can help address AUD, and no one treatment has proved more effective than another in treating this complicated condition.76 Combining behavioral therapies with other approaches such as medication and recovery supports, as described below, can improve their efficacy.77

Recovery supports

Peer support specialists and mutual-help groups can also help people achieve their personal recovery goals:

  • Peer support specialists are individuals with lived expertise in recovery from a substance use disorder who provide a variety of nonclinical services, including emotional support and referrals to community resources.78 The inclusion of peer support specialists in AUD treatment programs has been found to significantly reduce alcohol use and increase attendance in outpatient care.79
  • Mutual-help groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Self-Management and Recovery Training (SMART), support individuals dealing with a shared problem. People may seek out these groups more than behavioral or medication treatment for AUD because they can join on their own time and at no cost, and they may better cater to people’s needs related to varying gender identities, ages, or races.80 Observational research shows that voluntary attendance at peer-led AA groups can be as effective as behavioral treatments in reducing drinking.81

People with AUD can use recovery supports on their own, in combination with behavioral treatment or medication, or as a method to maintain recovery when leaving residential treatment or withdrawal management.82

While the U.S. records more than 178,000 alcohol-related deaths each year, some populations have a higher risk of alcohol-related deaths, and others face greater barriers to treatment.83

American Indian and Alaska Native communities

Despite seeking treatment at higher rates than other racial/ethnic groups, American Indian and Alaska Native people have the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths.84

Figure 2

American Indian and Alaska Native Individuals Have Persistently Higher Alcohol‑Related Death Rates Compared With Other Racial and Ethnic Groups

Alcohol‑related deaths per 100,000 people

© 2024 The Pew Charitable Trusts View image

Risk factors that impact these communities and can contribute to these deaths include historical and ongoing trauma from colonization, the challenges of navigating both native and mainstream American cultural contexts, poverty resulting from forced relocation, and higher rates of mental health conditions than in the general population.85 Substances, including alcohol, are sometimes used to cope with these challenges.86

However, American Indian/Alaska Native communities also have rich protective factors such as their cultures, languages, traditions, and connections to elders, which can help reduce negative outcomes associated with alcohol use, especially when treatment services incorporate and build on these strengths.87

For example, interviews with American Indian/Alaska Native patients with AUD in the Pacific Northwest revealed that many participants preferred Native-led treatment environments that incorporated traditional healing practices and recommended the expansion of such services.88

To improve alcohol-related outcomes for American Indians and Alaska Natives, policymakers and health care providers must develop a greater understanding of the barriers and strengths of these diverse communities and support the development of culturally and linguistically appropriate services. The federal Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health defines such an approach as “services that are respectful of and responsive to the health beliefs, practices, and needs of diverse patients.”89

People living in rural areas

Rural communities are another group disproportionately affected by AUD. People living in rural areas have higher alcohol-related mortality rates than urban residents but are often less likely to receive care.90 They face treatment challenges including limited options for care; concerns about privacy while navigating treatment in small, close knit communities; and transportation barriers.91

Figure 3

Alcohol‑Related Deaths Have Increased Faster in Rural Areas

2012‑22 change in alcohol‑induced death rate per 100,000 by urban and rural areas

Telemedicine can help mitigate these barriers to care.92 Cognitive behavioral therapy and medications for AUD can be delivered effectively in virtual settings.93 People with AUD can also benefit from virtual mutual-help meetings, though some find greater value in face-to-face gatherings.94

Despite the value of virtual care delivery, people living in rural areas also often have limited access to broadband internet, which can make these interventions challenging to use.95 Because of this, better access to in-person care is also needed.

Next steps

To improve screening and treatment for patients with AUD, policymakers, payers, and providers should consider strategies to:

  • Conduct universal screenings for unhealthy alcohol use and appropriately follow up when those screenings indicate a problem. Less than 20% of people with AUD proactively seek care, so health care providers shouldn’t wait for patients to ask them for help.96
  • Connect people with continued care after withdrawal management so that they can begin their recovery. People leaving withdrawal management settings should have a treatment plan that meets their needs—whether that’s behavioral treatment, recovery supports, medication, or a combination of these approaches.
  • Further the use of medications for AUD. With just 2% of people with AUD receiving medication, significant opportunities exist to increase utilization and improve outcomes.97
  • Address disparities through culturally competent treatment and increased access in rural areas. The populations most impacted by AUD should have access to care that meets their needs and preferences.

AUD is a common and treatable health condition that often goes unrecognized or unaddressed. Policymakers can improve the health of their communities by supporting providers in increasing the use of evidence-based treatment approaches.98

If you are concerned about your alcohol consumption, you can use the Check Your Drinking tool created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess your drinking levels and make a plan to reduce your use.

Source: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/2024/12/americas-most-common-drug-problem-unhealthy-alcohol-use

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Drugs and Accidents,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

PublishedContact:Jared Culligan – jculligan@nahb.org
This December, join NAHB in recognizing National Drunk and Drug Impaired Driving Prevention Month and be aware of the devastating consequences that result from impaired driving.

From 2018 to 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recorded more than 4,700 deaths in drunk driving traffic crashes during the month of December. In addition, a study by NHTSA found more than 54% of injured drivers had some amount of alcohol or drugs in their system at the time of the incident.

Although this month focuses primarily on reducing impaired driving on the road, it’s also crucial to extend this conversation to safety in the workplace and how drunk and drug-impaired driving can impact the construction industry.

What can your organization do to prevent drunk and drug-impaired driving incidents?

  • Provide education and training materials on the effects of certain substances.
  • Perform post-incident drug and alcohol testing and have a recovery-ready workplace to engage and support employees in stopping substance misuse whenever possible.

NAHB has several Video Toolbox Talks available in English and Spanish regarding drunk and drug-impaired driving. Please be sure to check out our content and help spread awareness as we approach the holidays:

In addition, several government establishments are promoting materials during this time of year. Check out their available resources:

If you know of anybody that needs immediate help, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or SAMHSA’s National Helpline, 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

Source: https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/12/promote-safe-driving-resources

 

Filed under: Alcohol,Crime/Violence/Prison,Drug use-various effects,Drugs and Accidents,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

by Brian Anthony Hernandez   

Published on December 28, 2024 08:00AM EST
Teen cigarette use in 2024 was the lowest ever recorded since the Monitoring the Future study started tracking it in the 1970s. A national study discovered that teens in the United States consumed significantly less alcohol and drugs in 2024 compared to past years.

Teen alcohol use has steadily decreased from 2000 to 2024 — falling from 73% to 42% in 12th grade, 65% to 26% in 10th grade and 43% to 13% in 8th grade — according to data from Monitoring the Future (MTF), an annual federally funded study.

<cs-card “=”” class=”card-outer card-full-size ” card-fill-color=”#FFFFFF” card-secondary-color=”#E1E1E1″ gradient-angle=”112.05deg” id=”native_ad_inarticle-1-5c150857-986e-4583-9c28-7eb0a6042d86″ size=”_2x_1y” part=””>

Comfy Men ShoesThe Best Men’s Shoes for Walking and Standing All Day.

Every year, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research uses grant money from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to conduct the MTF main study, which surveys more than 25,000 8th, 10th and 12th graders to monitor behaviors, attitudes and values of adolescents.

Meanwhile, the MTF’s panel study does follow-up surveys with roughly 20,000 adults ages 19 to 65 to continue to track trends over time.

The main study found that aside from the “long-term, overall decline” in teen alcohol use, in 2024, “alcohol use significantly declined in both 12th and 10th grade for lifetime and past 12-month use. In 10th grade, it also significantly declined for past 30-day use.”
Now, 39 states have legalized the drug for medical purposes

Binge drinking, which researchers defined as “consuming five or more drinks in a row at least once during the past two weeks,” among teens also declined in 2024 for all three grades compared to 2023 and the past two-and-half decades.

Since 2000, binge drinking has fallen from 30% to 9% in 12th grade, from 24% to 5% in 10th grade and from 12% to 2% in 8th grade.

Teen cigarette use in 2024 was the lowest ever recorded since the survey started tracking 12th graders in 1975 and 10th and 8th graders in 1991.

“The intense public debate in the late 1990s over cigarette policies likely played an important role in bringing about the very substantial downturn in adolescent smoking that followed,” researchers said, adding that “an important milestone occurred in 2009 with passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate the manufacturing, marketing, and sale of tobacco products.”

<cs-card “=”” class=”card-outer card-full-size ” card-fill-color=”#FFFFFF” card-secondary-color=”#E1E1E1″ gradient-angle=”112.05deg” id=”native_ad_inarticle-2-eae67e9b-d26b-4573-9817-90d877a8ab44″ size=”_2x_1y” part=””>

TLC ElectricalMK Sentry – 100A Main Switch + SPD Standalone Unit

Researchers emphasized that “over time this dramatic decline in regular smoking should produce substantial improvements in the health and longevity of the population.”

Teen marijuana use (non-medical) in 2024 also declined for all three grades, with the percentage of students using marijuana in the last 12 months at 26% in 12th grade, 16% in 10th grade and 7% in 8th grade.

“Levels of annual marijuana use today are considerably lower than the historic highs observed in the late 1970s, when more than half of 12th graders had used marijuana in the past 12 months,” researchers reported.

 

Filed under: Alcohol,Culture,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,Tobacco, smoking,USA,Youth :
NIH/National Institute on Drug Abuse   Dec 30 2024

A study of nearly 10,000 adolescents funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has identified distinct differences in the brain structures of those who used substances before age 15 compared to those who did not. Many of these structural brain differences appeared to exist in childhood before any substance use, suggesting they may play a role in the risk of substance use initiation later in life, in tandem with genetic, environmental, and other neurological factors.

This adds to some emerging evidence that an individual’s brain structure, alongside their unique genetics, environmental exposures, and interactions among these factors, may impact their level of risk and resilience for substance use and addiction. Understanding the complex interplay between the factors that contribute and that protect against drug use is crucial for informing effective prevention interventions and providing support for those who may be most vulnerable.”

Nora Volkow M.D., Director of NIDA

Among the 3,460 adolescents who initiated substances before age 15, most (90.2%) reported trying alcohol, with considerable overlap with nicotine and/or cannabis use; 61.5% and 52.4% of kids initiating nicotine and cannabis, respectively, also reported initiating alcohol. Substance initiation was associated with a variety of brain-wide (global) as well as more regional structural differences primarily involving the cortex, some of which were substance-specific. While these data could someday help inform clinical prevention strategies, the researchers emphasize that brain structure alone cannot predict substance use during adolescence, and that these data should not be used as a diagnostic tool.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open, used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, (ABCD Study), the largest longitudinal study of brain development and health in children and adolescents in the United States, which is supported by the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and nine other institutes, centers, and offices.

Using data from the ABCD Study, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis assessed MRI scans taken of 9,804 children across the U.S. when they were ages 9 to 11 – at “baseline” – and followed the participants over three years to determine whether certain aspects of brain structure captured in the baseline MRIs were associated with early substance initiation. They monitored for alcohol, nicotine, and/or cannabis use, the most common substances used in early adolescence, as well as use of other illicit substances. The researchers compared MRIs of 3,460 participants who reported substance initiation before age 15 from 2016 to 2021 to those who did not (6,344).

They assessed both global and regional differences in brain structure, looking at measures like volume, thickness, depth of brain folds, and surface area, primarily in the brain cortex. The cortex is the outermost layer of the brain, tightly packed with neurons and responsible for many higher-level processes, including learning, sensation, memory, language, emotion, and decision-making. Specific characteristics and differences in these structures – measured by thickness, surface area, and volume – have been linked to variability in cognitive abilities and neurological conditions.

The researchers identified five brain structural differences at the global level between those who reported substance initiation before the age of 15 and those who did not. These included greater total brain volume and greater subcortical volume in those who indicated substance initiation. An additional 39 brain structure differences were found at the regional level, with approximately 56% of the regional variation involving cortical thickness. Some brain structural differences also appeared unique to the type of substance used.

While some of the brain regions where differences were identified have been linked to sensation-seeking and impulsivity, the researchers note that more work is needed to delineate how these structural differences may translate to differences in brain function or behaviors. They also emphasize that the interplay between genetics, environment, brain structure, the prenatal environment, and behavior influence affect behaviors.

Another recent analysis of data from the ABCD study conducted by the University of Michigan demonstrates this interplay, showing that patterns of functional brain connectivity in early adolescence could predict substance use initiation in youth, and that these trajectories were likely influenced by exposure to pollution.

Future studies will be crucial to determine how initial brain structure differences may change as children age and with continued substance use or development of substance use disorder.

“Through the ABCD study, we have a robust and large database of longitudinal data to go beyond previous neuroimaging research to understand the bidirectional relationship between brain structure and substance use,” said Alex Miller, Ph.D., the study’s corresponding author and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Indiana University. “The hope is that these types of studies, in conjunction with other data on environmental exposures and genetic risk, could help change how we think about the development of substance use disorders and inform more accurate models of addiction moving forward.”

Authors: NIH/National Institute on Drug Abuse
Journal reference:

Miller, A. P., et al. (2024). Neuroanatomical Variability and Substance Use Initiation in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence. JAMA Network Open. doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.52027.

Source: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20241230/Structural-brain-differences-in-adolescents-may-play-a-role-in-early-initiation-of-substance-use.aspx

Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Drug use-various effects,Education,Latest News,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :

Sima Patra • Sayantan Patra • Reetoja Das • Soumya Suvra Patra

Published: December 31, 2024

DOI: 10.7759/cureus.76659

Cite this article as: Patra S, Patra S, Das R, et al. (December 31, 2024) Rising Trend of Substance Abuse Among Older Adults: A Review Focusing on Screening and Management. Cureus 16(12): e76659. doi:10.7759/cureus.76659

This is a large article. To access the full document:

  1. Click on the ‘Source’ link below.
  2. An image  – the front page of the full document will appear.
  3. Click on the image to open the full document.

Abstract

There is undoubtedly an alarmingly rising trend of substance use among older adults. This has necessitated a paradigm shift in healthcare and propelled strategies aimed at effective prevention and screening. Age-related physiological changes, such as diminished metabolism and increased substance sensitivity, make older adults particularly vulnerable to adverse effects of substances. This not only has adverse psychological consequences but also physical consequences like complicating chronic illnesses and harmful interactions with medications, which lead to increased hospitalization.

Standard screening tools can identify substance use disorders (SUDs) in older adults. Tools like the Cut-down, Annoyed, Guilty, and Eye-opener (CAGE) questionnaire and Michigan Alcohol Screening Test-Geriatric (MAST-G) are tailored to detect alcoholism, while the Alcohol, Smoking, and Substance Involvement Screening Test (ASSIST) and Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) assess abuse of illicit and prescription drugs. Since older adults are more socially integrated, screening should be done using non-stigmatizing and non-judgmental language.

Prevention strategies include educational programs, safe prescribing practices, and prescription drug monitoring. Detection of substance abuse should be followed by brief interventions and specialized referrals. In conclusion, heightened awareness, improved screening, and preventive measures can mitigate substance abuse risks in this demographic. Prioritizing future research on non-addictive pain medications and the long-term effects of substances like marijuana seems justified.

 

Source: https://www.cureus.com/articles/322781-rising-trend-of-substance-abuse-among-older-adults-a-review-focusing-on-screening-and-management?score_article=true#!/

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Education,Effects of Drugs,Latest News,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,Social Affairs,Treatment and Addiction,USA :
SCOPE was formed in 2019 to help prevent opioid addiction, conducting cutting-edge research and education according to the announcement.

Wednesday, January 1st 2025, 5:00 AM EST By Sarah Robles

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost issued an announcement commemorating Scientific Committee on Opioid Prevention and Education (SCOPE) for reaching its first five years of educating the public of opioids.

SCOPE was formed in 2019 to help prevent opioid addiction, conducting cutting-edge research and education according to the announcement.

“The breakthroughs emerging from SCOPE’s work are paving the way for a future in which fewer families suffer the heart-wrenching loss of a loved one to an opioid overdose,” said Yost.

In addition to the announcement, Yost also shared a five-year report of SCOPE’s impact.

The SCOPE team includes Beth Delaney, Caroline Freiermuth, Tessa Miracle, Rene Saran, Jon E. Sprague, Donnie Sullivan, Julie Teater and Arthur B. Yeh.

The report includes four major sections titled “raising public awareness”, “educating future health-care professionals”, “emphasizing proper drug storage, disposal” and “prioritizing pharmacogenomics”.

Raising Public Awareness

The first section of the report outlines background information on the opioid issue the SCOPE was founded on. It also states that an underlying issue were illicitly manufactured fentanyls (IMFs) that are often added to other drugs.

The report goes on to state that work conducted by the Chemistry Unit in the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s Laboratory found noteworthy comparisons of polydrug samples that included IMFs.

The most present IMFs in the polydrug samples during this study were fentanyl and para-fluorofentanyl.

In 2013, 2.2% of polydrug samples containing heroin and cocaine also contained IMFs. However, in 2022, more than 89% of polydrug samples contained IMFs. This is described as a 335-fold increase according to the report.

Also included in this section of the report was findings the committee reported when they conducted a longitudinal study of opioid overdose data from the Ohio Department of Health death records going back to 2007.

The findings included the fact that the death rate from opioid use per 100,000 reached 14.29 in the second quarter of 2020, the highest statistic to date in Ohio.

 

To help raise public awareness of these statistics and dangers, SCOPE:
  • Created public service announcements
  • Submitted letters to the editors of scientific journals
  • Increased cautioning efforts to health-care professionals and scientists state-wide about the dangers of purchasing illegal drugs on the streets

Educating Future Health-Care Professionals

In December 2019, SCOPE surveyed students enrolled in health-care professional programs at 49 of Ohio’s universities to see how many of these students were learning about “Opioid Use Disorder” (OUD).

The survey reportedly covered four main categories:

  • Initial screening of patients
  • Training in OUD
  • Training in care for patients at high risk for OUD
  • Education in evaluating patients for “Adverse Childhood Experiences” (ACEs)

Results of the survey showed a need for a standardized curriculum discussing OUD.

SCOPE partnered with Assistant Professor Dr. Kelsey Schmuhl of Ohio State University’s College of Pharmacy to develop the “Interprofessional Program on Opioid Use Disorder”.

The more than 2,000 students that completed the course were suggested to understand more about OUD and the factors that contribute to it.

Emphasizing Proper Drug Storage, Disposal

A large danger that SCOPE wanted to address was the potential danger of having unsecured opioids available at home from left over prescriptions.

A study conducted by the Wisconsin Poison Control in which calls were fielded between 2002 and 2016 relating to unintended opioid exposure revealed that 61% of cases involved children aged zero to 5-years-old, and 29% involved teens between 13 and 19 years.

SCOPE partnered with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to create the “Attorney General Drug Dropoff Days” which combine with the DEA’s Drug Take-back Days.

The report reflects on a map depicting a snapshot from the second quarter of 2020, showing that Ohio counties such as Scioto, Fayette and Franklin had the largest amounts of opioid overdose deaths.

Mahoning County and Trumbull County are also listed on this graphic.

With this data in hand, organizers began the Drug Dropoff Day events. In 2020, a snapshot of the collection numbers for all of the counties in the map above. Trumbull and Mahoning Counties had a collection total of 300 pounds.

To date, these events have been held in 11 counties throughout Ohio and have yielded over 2,600 pounds of unwanted and unsecured prescription medications.

Source: https://www.wfmj.com/story/52096722/scope-looks-back-on-the-progress-developments-of-its-past-five-years

Filed under: Latest News,USA :

In 2022 the White House Office of National Drug Control Strategy (ONDCP) published its first National Drug Control Strategy, which outlined seven goals to be achieved by 2025. On December 30, 2024, the ONDCP released the National Drug Control Strategy Performance Review System (PRS) Report—essentially a progress update on the Biden administration response to the overdose crisis between 2020 and 2022.

Though the ONDCP published an updated Strategy in May 2024, the new PRS report is intended to span data through 2022, corresponding to the original version. It has a tendency to veer into data from more recent years, however, which reflect a turnaround in overdose rates and as such look a lot better than the years the report is meant to cover.

The seven goals outlined in the original Strategy contain 25 objectives, most of which are assessed as on track. Five are already completed; five are behind schedule.

Viewed in the context of the recent drop in overdose mortality, the PRS updates would suggest that reducing drug-related deaths doesn’t actually require reducing access to drugs, but that’s probably beyond the scope of the ONDCP’s analysis.

 

Goal 1: Less drug use

The first objective for this goal was to reduce overdose deaths by 13 percent by 2025. The most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show a decrease of 16.9 percent, which according to the report is “[t]hanks in significant part to actions by the Administration.”

The second objective was to reduce prevalence of substance use disorders (SUD) specific to opioids, methamphetamine and cocaine by 25 percent.

The ONDCP attributed cocaine use disorder to 0.5 percent of the population in 2021, based on responses to the 2021 National Drug Use Survey. Which evolved between 2020 and 2021, and identifies different SUD by somewhat convoluted means, but the ONDCP doesn’t acknowledge non-problematic use of those substances and so approached use and SUD as the same thing. It attributed methamphetamine use disorder to 0.6 percent of the population, and opioid use disorder to 2 percent.

Per 2022 data, there’s been no change in baseline use of cocaine and meth. Opioid use increased to 2.2 percent, meaning “accelerated action” would be needed to finish on time.

 

Goal 2: More prevention

While the previous goal applied to ages 12 and up, this goal of ensuring that “Prevention efforts are increased in the the United States,” refers to youth drinking and vaping.

The first objective was to get youth alcohol consumption, measured by past 30-day use, under 6.5 percent by 2025. Data show that between 2021 and 2022 the rate decreased from 7.2 percent to 6.8 percent, which put it on track.

The second objective was to reduce youth use of nicotine vapes by 15 percent by 2025. Data show that in 2021, around 7.6 percent of middle- and high-school students reported having vaped within the past month. In 2022 this rose to 9.4, but the target for 2025 was anything under 11.1, so ONDCP considers this objective already met and the 2022 increase doesn’t change that.

 

Goal 3: More harm reduction

The first objective here was an 85-percent increase in the number of counties disproportionately affected by overdose that had at least one syringe service program (SSP). Data show that in 2020, 130 counties with high overdose death rates had at least one SSP; by 2022 this had increased to 180 counties, which was on track for the ONDCP goal of 241 counties by 2025.

The second objective was a 25-percent increase in SSP offering “some type of drug safety checking support service.” The 2025 target of 21.3 percent had already been met by 2021, but over the next year the number of SSP offering drug-checking services nearly doubled—2022 data show 46.7 percent of SSP met that criteria.

However, “some type” of drug-checking refers largely to fentanyl test strips, which are most useful to people who do not regularly use opioids. The more useful drug-checking service for people who do regularly use opioids—the population that SSP primarily serve—is on-site forensic analysis. This requires more expensive equipment, to which only a handful of SSP have access.

 

Goal 4: More treatment

The first objective was a 100-percent increase in admissions to treatment facilities among people considered at high risk for overdose involving opioids, methamphetamine or cocaine. This doesn’t include methadone maintenance or outpatient buprenorphine prescriptions. In 2021, treatment facilities reported 637,589 admissions among people using primarily opioids, methamphetamine, cocaine or other “synthetics,” which was already about one-third short of the target for that year. In 2022 admissions dropped to 604,096.

The second objective was to ease the shortage of behavioral health providers by 70 percent. The PRS report finds that this been pretty steadily on track and is projected to stay that way.

 

Goal 5: More recovery initiatives

The first objective here is to have at least 14 states operating a “recovery-ready workplace initiative” by 2025. The term refers to a Biden administration push for more equitable employment policies for workers with substance use disorder, which led to the creation of a national Recovery-Friendly Workplace Initiative in 2023. Data show this goal was met in 2022 with 16 states reporting a qualifying initiative, up from 13 in 2021.

The second objective was to increase the number peer-led recovery organizations to at least 194. This has been completed, as there were 232 as of 2022.

The third objective was to increase the number of recovery high schools to at least 47, which was on track with 45 operational as of 2022.

The fourth objective was to increase the number of collegiate recovery programs to at least 165, which was similarly on track with 149 as of 2022.

The fifth and final objective was to have at least 8,600 residential recovery programs operational by 2025. This too was on track as of 2022, with 7,957 programs.

 

Goal 6: “Criminal justice reform efforts include drug policy matters”

Despite the extremely broad title, this goal had pretty narrow objectives. The first was to have 80 percent of drug courts complete equity and inclusion trainings by 2025. As of 2022 we were at 19 percent, considerably behind schedule. The PRS report attributes this to a combination of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and bureaucratic restrictions, which it expects to resolve.

The second objective was a 100-percent increase in access to medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) in federal Bureau of Prisons facilities, and a 50-percent increase for in state prisons and local jails.

The PRS report does not differentiate between access to methadone and buprenorphine, which have been shown to decrease overdose risk, and naltrexone—which has been shown to increase overdose risk, and of the three Food and Drug Administration-approved MOUD is by far the favorite among corrections departments. With that in mind, the ONDCP goal is on track for federal and state prisons.

“Currently, there is no single data source that can be used to track progress in increasing the percent of local jails offering MOUD,” the report states. “For illustrative purposes, [the figure below] shows the estimated percent of local jails offering MOUD in the United States from 2019 to 2022.”

 

 

Goal 7: Less drugs

The first objective for this goal was a 365-percent increase in the “number of targets identified in counternarcotics Executive Orders and related asset freezes and seizures made by law enforcement.” This refers to people and entities associated with transnational drug-trafficking organizations. Per the report, 46 had been identified by 2022, and the administration was on track to identify 96 by 2025.

The second objective was a 14-percent increase in the number of people convicted of felonies as a result of Drug Enforcement Administration investigations using data from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Per the DEA, as of 2022 it had used FinCEN data in investigations that led to the convictions of 6,529 people. This surpassed the goal of 5,775 people convicted by 2025.

The third objective was to have at least 70 percent of the DEA’s active priority investigations “linked to the Sinaloa or Jalisco New Generation cartels, or their enablers.” This was also on track, at 62 percent in 2022.

The fourth objective was to decrease “potential production” of cocaine by 10 percent, and that of heroin by 30 percent.

“The United States Government is internally realigning responsibility for conducting illicit crop estimates. As a result of the change in responsibility, there will be a temporary gap in data for 2022 and 2023,” the report states in reference to both cocaine and heroin. “This gap in data does not reflect a change in priorities.”

Potential cocaine production was decreased only slightly between 2020 and 2021, but was projected to be on track as of 2021.

“[I]t is important to note that provisional estimates of drug overdose deaths involving cocaine for the 12-month period ending in July 2024 were 14.1 percent lower compared to a year prior,” the ONDCP added. “The Administration will continue its efforts to reduce the supply of cocaine.”

Heroin interdiction was not on track, but the ONDCP made the same statement verbatim for heroin-involved deaths.

The fifth objective was to have a total of at least 14 incident reports—like seizures or stopped shipments—involving fentanyl precursors from China or India. From 2021 to 2022 the number dropped from 11 to two, but the ONDCP notes that this data is voluntarily reported by other entities and as such is unreliable. And also that preliminary estimates for 2023 look a lot higher.

Source: https://filtermag.org/ondcp-national-drug-control-strategy/

Filed under: Latest News,Political Sector,Prevention and Intervention,Social Affairs (Papers),USA :
An official website of the United States government
January 03, 2025

DEA Headquarters Division – Public Information Office

Drugs of Abuse Cover 2024

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has released the 2024 edition of Drugs of Abuse, A DEA Resource Guide, which is designed to be a reliable resource on the most commonly used and misused drugs in the United States.

Released on a periodic basis, Drugs of Abuse provides important science-based information about the harms and consequences of drug use, describing a drug’s effects on the body and mind, overdose potential, origin, legal status, and other key factors.  In addition, the guide outlines U.S. drug regulation, including drug scheduling and chemical controls.  The 2024 edition updates the 2022 Drugs of Abuse publication with the most current information on new and emerging trends in drug misuse and abuse, including fentanyl, methamphetamine, marijuana concentrates, vaping, stimulant drugs, and fake pills.       

Because education plays a critical role in preventing substance abuse, this comprehensive guide is intended as a tool not just for medical practitioners and law enforcement officials, but also for educators, families, and communities.  Drugs of Abuse also offers a list of additional drug education and prevention resources, including the DEA websites: www.DEA.gov, www.getsmartaboutdrugs.com for parents, www.justthinktwice.com for teens, www.campusdrugprevention.govfor colleges and universities, and www.operationprevention.com for school and work curriculum.

For more information and to view the 2024 Drugs of Abuse resource guide in both English and Spanish, visit www.getsmartaboutdrugs.com/publications.

DEA Contact Center: (202) 307-1000info@dea.gov

Source: https://www.dea.gov/stories/2025/2025-01/2025-01-03/dea-releases-2024-edition-drugs-abuse-resource-guide

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Latest News,USA :

Updated: Jan. 03, 2025, 12:02 p.m.|

By Julie Washington, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Do music therapy and acupuncture help patients manage pain without opioids? University Hospitals will use a nearly $1.5 million federal grant to find out.

The grant allows UH to develop an Alternatives to Opioids program that educates caregivers about how music therapy and acupuncture can be used to decrease the use of opioids in the emergency department, the hospital system recently announced. The program also includes outpatient follow-up.

The goal is to reduce the use of prescribed opioids in emergency departments, UH said.

“When prescribing opioids there is always the potential for abuse,” said Dr. Kiran Faryar, director of research in the department of emergency medicine. “Data shows both music therapy and acupuncture improve pain and anxiety for patients with short-term and long-term pain. This will be an evidence-based technique we can offer patients without the potential risk of substance use disorder.”

UH’s comprehensive approach to combating the opioid crisis comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 2023 drug overdose deaths in the United States decreased 3% from 2022. It was the first annual decrease in drug overdose deaths since 2018, the CDC said.

The trend was also seen in Ohio.

The number of people who died of drug overdoses in Ohio was 4,452 in 2023, a 9% decrease from the previous year, according to the state’s latest unintentional drug overdose report.

This was the second consecutive year of a decrease in deaths in Ohio. In 2022, overdose deaths declined by 5%, state officials said. Early data for 2024 suggest unintentional drug overdose deaths are falling even further this year.

In November, the state announced that agencies across Ohio would split $68.7 million in grants to combat opioid use and overdoses. The state is distributing the federal funding, part of the fourth round of the State Opioid and Stimulant Response grants, to support local organizations that offer prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and long-term recovery services for Ohioans struggling with an opioid or stimulant use disorder, the state announced.

Julie Washington covers healthcare for cleveland.com.

Source: https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2025/01/can-music-therapy-replace-opioids-for-pain-university-hospitals-investigates-with-15m-federal-grant.html

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Heroin/Methadone,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
By Sherry Larson, People’s Defender –

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Cliché – sure – truthful – absolutely! And when it comes to youth and alcohol, vaping and drug use, it is crucial to begin prevention efforts from an early age.

The Adams County Medical Foundation, under the direction of Sherry Stout, recognized a gap in youth prevention services and applied for a grant that focused on prevention. In 2015, a collective of professionals and retired professionals established a Data Prevention Committee to obtain information regarding youth drug, alcohol, vaping and tobacco usage. The Committee partnered with local schools and the Adams County Health Department to obtain data through surveys, resulting in a detailed database of information, including information on vaping, tobacco, and underage drinking.

The Committee recognized a need for more comprehensive funding to develop prevention strategies. Beginning in 2015, the Committee worked towards growing and qualifying for The Drug-Free Communities (DFC) grant, which supported their plans for future endeavors. “The Drug-Free Communities Support Program was created in 1997 by the Drug-Free Communities Act. Administered by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and managed through a partnership between ONDCP and CDC, the DFC program provides grants to community coalitions to reduce local youth substance use.” (cdc.gov)

In October 2023, the Committee voted to form the Adams County Youth Prevention Coalition to meet the requirements to apply for DFC funds. The Coalition needed to be active for six months before applying for funding. The Coalition was mandated to have representatives from 12 community sectors who were not a part of the Medical Foundation. Those sectors are: Youth, Parents, Businesses Media, School, Youth-serving organizations, Law enforcement, Religious/fraternal organizations, Civic and volunteer organizations, Healthcare professionals, State, local, and Tribal governments and other organizations involved in reducing illicit substance use.

Three individuals will partner with the sectors to facilitate the grant: Tami Graham, Program Director; Billy Joe McCann, leader of the Youth Coalition; and Danielle Poe, the community’s only credentialed prevention professional, to represent education and school data collection through OHYES surveys.

In January 2024, The Adams County Youth Prevention Coalition hired Thrive Consulting to assist with the grant process. The grant application took extensive time and data to complete, resulting in an over 100-page document due and submitted in April 2024. Among demonstrating membership from the twelve sectors, the application required proof of consistent meetings and minutes showing that these representatives were actively working on strategizing prevention. Poe said, “A level of community readiness is expected.” Stout clarified that the funding is a community grant and should be led by the community and not isolated by a committee. Stout explained, “This is the first time Adams County qualified to receive the grant. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where significant funds are available to address prevention issues.”

The Coalition was notified in September 2024 that Adams County would receive the Drug-Free Communities Grant. Graham explained that the grant, which went into effect in October 2024, would reimburse $125,000 a year for 5 years of prevention work. Expecting a successful five years of prevention efforts, the Coalition would be eligible to reapply for a second term.

Poe and Graham discussed plans for the first year of executing the grant. Poe stated that the primary focus will be education, the Coalition’s learning responsibilities, and strategic planning for years two through five.

Carrying on with the Prevention Committee’s concentrations, the Coalition will examine data-proven prevention strategies, media campaigns, and differences between good and bad prevention techniques. In August 2025, the Coalition will submit a yearly progress report to the Drug-Free Communities Grant.

Stout said, “I would encourage widespread involvement of anyone who cares about our youth and their future.” The public is welcome to attend and share comments or concerns at Coalition meetings on the first Monday of every month. The sessions take place at noon in the FRS community room.

Source: https://www.peoplesdefender.com/2024/12/12/drug-free-communities-start-with-youth/

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

CDC warns of carfentanil, an opioid that’s 100 times more potent than fentanyl
by Fox News – Published Dec. 10, 2024, 11:13 a.m. ET
Originally Published by Centers for Disease Control

Fentanyl has made headlines for driving overdose deaths, but the and Prevention (CDC) is warning of the rise of an even deadlier drug.
Last year, nearly 70% of all U.S. overdose deaths were attributed to illegally manufactured fentanyls (IMFs).
One of those was carfentanil, an altered version of fentanyl that is said to be 100 times more potent, the CDC warned in a Dec. 5 alert.
Deaths from carfentanil rose by more than 700% in the past year, according to the same source — there were 29 deadly overdoses between January and June 2023, and 238 in that same time frame in 2024.
This data came from the CDC’s State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS).
The numbers could actually be higher, as the 2024 data is preliminary and not all overdose deaths have been reported, the agency noted.
Since an outbreak of carfentanil-linked deaths in 2016 and 2016, the drug had “largely disappeared” until this recent reemergence, the CDC noted.
Based on the increase in fatal overdoses, the CDC is calling for “rigorous monitoring” of carfentanil and other opioids more potent than fentanyl.
Fentanyl has made headlines for driving overdose deaths, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning of the rise of an even deadlier drug.MOLEQL – stock.adobe.com
As with other illicit drugs, its “high profitability” likely drives its prevalence, according to Dr. Chris Tuell, clinical director of addiction services at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.
“Very small amounts can produce thousands of doses,” he told Fox News Digital.
“Synthetic opioids like carfentanil are relatively easy to manufacture in illicit labs,” Tuell went on. “Since the drug is a synthetic, it is easier to produce — unlike heroin, which is dependent on a plant like opium.”
Why is carfentanil so dangerous?
Carfentanil is 10,000 more times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, Tuell confirmed.
“Even a small amount can be fatal, as it can cause respiratory failure,” he said.
Last year, nearly 70% of all U.S. overdose deaths were attributed to illegally manufactured fentanyls (IMFs).Seth Harrison, The Journal News
One of the major concerns with carfentanil and fentanyl is that they are frequently mixed with other drugs, such as benzodiazepines, cocaine and opioids, which can lead to accidental overdoses, according to Tuell.
“Carfentanil can also resemble cocaine and heroin, so it blends right in with the other drugs,” he warned.
“Even a tiny amount can increase the potency of a drug mixture, leading to a stronger and longer-lasting high.”
Carfentanil often appeals to drug users who have a high tolerance to opioids because they seek a stronger substance, “making the drug attractive despite the risk,” Tuell noted.
How is the drug administered?
Carfentanil can be injected and is frequently mixed with other opioids or heroin, Tuell said. In a powder form, it can be inhaled.
“Inhaling the drug can be quickly risky because it can enter the bloodstream, resulting in an overdose,” Tuell warned. “This can happen intentionally or accidentally, as the drug can become easily airborne.”
Carfentanil can sometimes be in the form of “pressed pills” that resemble prescription medications, the expert said.
“Carfentanil can be lethal at the 2-milligram range depending on the route of administration,” he cautioned.
What parents should know
“Children are now the generation of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, as illicit drugs are posing like regular prescription medications,” Tuell cautioned.
To help protect kids from the dangers of illicit drugs, the expert emphasized the importance of open communication and education.
“Educate your child about the dangers and risks of drug use, including synthetic opioids like carfentanil,” he advised.
Parents should provide monitoring and supervision of their children, be aware of their social circles and limit unsupervised online activities, Tuell recommended.
“I also believe it is important that parents realize that 84% of individuals with a substance use disorder also have a co-occurring mental health issue,” he added.
Carfentanil often appeals to drug users who have a high tolerance to opioids because they seek a stronger substance, “making the drug attractive despite the risk,” Tuell noted.luchschenF – stock.adobe.com
“Seeking out mental health services for your child could help address the underlying issues that may have led to a substance use disorder.”
The CDC called for specific efforts in preventing deaths from illegally manufactured fentanyls, “such as maintaining and improving distribution of risk reduction tools, increasing access to and retention of treatment for substance use disorders, and preventing drug use initiation.”

Source: https://nypost.com/2024/12/10/us-news/cdc-warns-rise-in-opioid-thats-100-times-more-potent-than-fentanyl/

Filed under: Cocaine,Fentanyl,Heroin/Methadone,Latest News,Synthetics,USA :

Dec 9, 2024 8:00 am by Diana Yates  | Life Sciences Editor, U. of I. News BureauLife SciencesSocial Sciences

“I don’t think we’ve had truly robust public policy actions in the U.S. that we can point to that would have resulted in such a sudden and profound downturn in mortality,” says U. of I. health and kinesiology professor Rachel Hoopsick about the recent decline in drug-overdose deaths. “Although fentanyl-only deaths have declined, we’re seeing increases in deaths that co-involve fentanyl and stimulants, like methamphetamine. There have also been increases in nonopioid sedative adulterants, like xylazine.”

  • Preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that drug-overdose deaths declined more than 16% between June 2023 and June 2024, the biggest drop in a decade marked by staggering increases. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign health and kinesiology professor Rachel Hoopsick, an epidemiologist who studies mental health challenges and substance use in populations at risk, spoke with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates about recent drug-use trends.

    Media reports about new data suggest the fentanyl epidemic, which drove a lot of the recent increases in drug-overdose deaths, has peaked and is now in decline. Is this true, and if so, do we know why?

    It’s true that overall, drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have recently declined. At face value, this looks encouraging, but this doesn’t tell the whole story.

    Can leaders point to any public policy actions that are contributing to the decline in fentanyl use or drug-overdose deaths?

    While pundits point to increased law enforcement efforts or strides in prevention and treatment efforts, the reality is that there are multiple explanations for this trend and a number of nuanced factors at play. I don’t think we’ve had truly robust public policy actions in the U.S. that we can point to that would have resulted in such a sudden and profound downturn in mortality.

    What factors might be at play?

    If you ask any epidemiologist about the examination of complex health-related phenomena, you’ll often get the answer: “It depends.” There are several major factors to consider:

    First, whenever we observe sudden and steep changes in overdose mortality — in either direction — we should first look at the toxicity of the street drug supply before assuming that there have been drastic population-level changes in behavior. Some data suggests that there have been recent shifts in the types and concentrations of the substances, called adulterants, that street drugs are “cut” with. Although fentanyl-only deaths have declined, we’re seeing increases in deaths that co-involve fentanyl and stimulants, like methamphetamine. There have also been increases in nonopioid sedative adulterants, like xylazine. This underscores the importance of public health lab research that monitors the pharmacoepidemiology of the street drug supply, which can serve as an early warning system.

    Second, although there have been population-level declines in overdose mortality, these numbers have largely been driven by a steep reduction in overdose deaths among white people, while drug-related deaths in communities of color continue to increase, particularly among Black and Native American adults. This widening disparity isn’t reflected in overall trends.

    Third, it’s a depressing concept, but another factor is what we call “depletion of susceptibles.” In this context, it’s possible that we’re seeing such a decline in overdose deaths because those who were most vulnerable to overdose have already died, meaning that over time, we observe fewer and fewer overdose deaths.

    Tens of thousands of people are still dying each year in the U.S. from preventable drug overdoses. Is the decline just a normal fluctuation in complex data, or might it be a sign of a long-term trend?

    The data suggest that this is more than normal fluctuation, but it remains to be seen whether this trend will continue. Despite the overall downward trend at the population level, the reality for individuals who use drugs is that the street drug supply remains highly toxic, overdose risk remains incredibly high and access to harm reduction and treatment services remains low. I think it’s too early to celebrate the decline in overdose deaths. We shouldn’t accept 100,000 needless deaths a year.

    What policy, harm reduction or treatment approaches might help the trend continue?

    Looking at past data from the U.S. and other countries, we should be wary of the direction of where our drug policies will go from here. The next administration is focused on stricter border control measures and criticizing harm-reduction programs, which have been instrumental in addressing the overdose crisis. Rolling back these programs and doubling down on punitive strategies that have proven ineffective — see The Iron Law of Prohibition: “the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs”— is unlikely to sustain progress or save lives, but rather runs the risk of exacerbating the problem.

    Editor’s notes:
    Hoopsick is lead author of the paper “Methamphetamine-related mortality in the United States: Co-involvement of heroin and fentanyl, 1999-2021.” The study is available online.

    DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2022.307212

    To contact Rachel Hoopsick, email hoopsick@illinois.edu.

    Source: https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/2075718277

Filed under: Drug Specifics,Drug use-various effects,Drugs and Accidents,Latest News,Political Sector,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

EXECUTIVE HIGHLIGHTS
Today’s highly potent marijuana represents a growing and significant threat to public health and safety, a threat that is amplified by a new
marijuana industry intent on profiting from heavy use.
State laws allowing marijuana sales and consumption have permitted the marijuana industry to flourish, and in turn, the marijuana industry has influenced both policies and policy-makers. While the consequences of these policies will not be known for decades, early indicators are
troubling.
This report, reviewed by prominent scientists and researchers, serves as an evidence-based guide to what we currently observe in various states. We attempted to highlight studies from all the “legal” marijuana states (i.e., states that have legalized the non-medical use of marijuana). Unfortunately, data does not exist for several “legal” states, and so this document synthesizes the latest research on marijuana impacts in states where information is available

For more information please read the full information below:

2019LessonsFinal

Source: https://learnaboutsam.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019LessonsFinal.pdf July 2019

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Economic,Global Drug Legalisation Efforts,Health,Latest News,Political Sector,USA :

 JooHee Yoon for Vox

Land of the free, home of the blazed.

How weed became America’s drug of choice | Vox

VOX Writer:  Marin Cogan         Dec 3, 2024

In the last few decades, marijuana’s had a major glow-up.

In 1992, less than 1 million people were using it daily or nearly every day — a low point, according to an analysis of data from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which began surveying Americans in the 1970s. Ten times as many people, meanwhile, reported drinking alcohol daily or almost daily.

In the 1990s, weed was illegal nationally and in every state. But marijuana’s since had a major rebrand: Three decades later, it’s legal for recreational adult use in nearly half of the 50 states. Now, it’s even challenging alcohol for its status as America’s favorite daily intoxicant.In 2022, for the first time, more Americans were using marijuana daily, or near daily, than consuming alcohol at the same rate, according to a study by Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The number of daily or near daily marijuana users has grown from less than 1 million in 1992 to 17.7 million in 2022; in terms of per capita rate, that’s a 15-fold increase.

Marijuana is having a moment just as Americans reconsider their relationship toward alcohol. As public awareness of the toxic effects of even moderate alcohol consumption grows, many people are turning to THC products as an alternative. The THC industry touts its wares as a more natural alternative to alcohol with myriad health benefits, including decreased nausea, pain, and sleeplessness.

The rise in daily smokers (and vapers, and edible enjoyers, if you will) is also driven by the explosion of the industry. Millions of Americans live in cities and counties with retail shops offering a range of products that make the dimebags of yesteryear seem quaint by comparison: vape cartridges, edibles, oils, and waxes, offering more highly concentrated THC doses. The rise of marijuana retail has opened new doors for people who might have once shied away because they didn’t like smoking or were worried about breaking the law.

For many people, the rapid shift toward liberalization of marijuana policy, and the swiftness with which Americans have taken up consumption, has been great. But it’s also caught researchers off guard. Society has moved more quickly than they’ve been able to keep up with. That means millions of daily users are essentially conducting a real-time experiment on their own bodies. Marijuana isn’t benign for everyone, though. Some of the results of the real-time experiment are already becoming apparent, both to regular users and people working in health care.

“It is very desirable to believe that there is a drug that can make you feel good, that can relax you, and has absolutely no negative outcomes,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. “But in biology, there are no free lunches.”

Take the emergence of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition marked by intense and prolonged bouts of nausea and vomiting and brought on by regular, long-term marijuana use. While once extremely rare, some doctors are saying they now see patients with symptoms frequently. “It emerged because people were consuming marijuana regularly with high [THC] content,” Volkow says. “And similarly, there is now evidence that consumption in those patterns is associated with higher risk of stroke or cardiovascular disease.”

Maybe the most worrying studies about frequent, heavy marijuana use involve teens and young adults. (While experts say marijuana use appears to be less risky for middle-aged adults, there’s still a lot they don’t know that needs to be researched further. Some note that more research is needed on older adults in particular.) Studies show regular marijuana use among adolescents and teens can predict increased risk of the development of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Others have shown an increased likelihood of depression and suicidal ideation, disrupted dopamine function, and disruptions in the anatomy of the brain.

And marijuana, contrary to popular belief, can be habit forming. It can also increase the risk of dependence on other substances. A recent analysis by Columbia University for the New York Times estimated that as many as 18 million people in the US may have some form of cannabis use disorder, or addiction.

Getting a handle on who might be harming their health is tricky. Even the findings that point to a major rise in daily users leave a lot of questions unanswered, especially around how often they’re smoking, vaping, or ingesting, and how potent the THC is.

Caulkins, the Carnegie Mellon professor who published the research showing that more Americans are using marijuana daily, says there are different categories of daily or near daily users. There are the people who use marijuana similar to the way someone might pop a melatonin before going to bed at night — a small, daily dose to help with sleep or pain. And then there are those who are more like heavy cigarette smokers, consuming marijuana multiple times a day, morning or night, before or after meals, on breaks from work, or out with friends.

His previous research has found that daily or near daily users are a small portion of overall users, but make up about three-quarters of all marijuana purchases.

But just how many of the 17.7 million daily or near daily marijuana users are truly heavy users remains a mystery, because the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health doesn’t ask about how many times a day someone is using, or what they’re taking.

“We can have people who are using near daily, but they’re taking a puff off their vape pen right before they go to sleep,” says Ziva Cooper, a researcher and director for the UCLA Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids, “versus somebody who’s using daily or near daily and they’re using five to 10 one-gram pre-rolls every day. You can imagine that the health outcomes are going to be quite different.”

It’s not just that researchers are often unsure of how much people are taking. The consumers are also often not sure what they’re putting in their bodies. That’s partly because what’s being sold in stores is way stronger than the weed that millennials and previous generations grew up with. Over the last 25 years, government data shows, the percentage of THC in marijuana seized by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has more than tripled, from 5 percent to 16 percent. And a lot of the products for sale in dispensaries can be even more potent — with vendors selling concentrated products, some claiming 90 or close to 100 percent THC. Some teens who’ve used those products have struggled with vomiting and substance abuse.

Cooper says it’s not uncommon for her to end up on the phone with her patients as they read the label aloud to her and she searches the internet to try to find out what exactly they’re taking.

“As researchers,” Cooper says, “we are trying to catch up with what’s actually happening in the world of cannabis. And we are woefully behind.”

Though humans have been using cannabis for at least 10,000 years — it was widely used for medical purposes in the United States in the late 19th century — the demonization of marijuana under the Nixon administration in the 1970s pushed the plant into the shadows.

Nixon, according to secretly reported tapes, knew at the time that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” But his “war on drugs,” carried on by the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton forced consumers and their providers to stop or risk arrest.

The drug’s public image was less threatening — smoking pot was played for laughs in movies and TV shows — but the reality of its criminalization was much darker. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and incarcerated each year for selling and dispensing marijuana, with the harms falling disproportionately on Black people.

Public awareness of the harms caused by criminalizing marijuana grew, and so too did a movement to raise awareness about the medicinal benefits of its use, especially for chemotherapy and cancer parents, who found marijuana use helpful for combatting nausea. Meanwhile, advocates focused on reducing mass incarceration and addressing racial disparities in the judicial system pushed states to begin decriminalizing marijuana and revising the sentences for people serving time for it. After getting the states to approve marijuana for medicinal purposes, organizations began pushing for it to be legal for all adults. Today, marijuana is legal for medical use in 38 states and for recreational use for adults in roughly half of the states, plus the District of Columbia.

But marijuana is still illegal on the national level, where it is classified as a Schedule I drug — meaning the government doesn’t recognize it for medical use. That’s made getting the safety approvals and government funding necessary to study the drug difficult. Researchers say it’s made it harder to study potential risks of long-term marijuana use. But it’s made it harder to study the potential benefits, too. Earlier this year, the Biden administration proposed changing marijuana to a Schedule III, which will put it in a lower-risk category with drugs like ketamine.

In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act, hoping to reduce some of the federal barriers that have stymied research in the past. The legislation required the DEA to register and approve more researchers, and more manufacturers who can provide them with marijuana or cannabidiol (CBD). In addition to creating more opportunities and resources for researchers, the bill asked the DEA to assess whether there is enough marijuana to meet researchers’ experimental needs, and allowed doctors to discuss the benefits and harms of marijuana with their patients.

The federal government’s approach to marijuana has also meant that each state is doing its own regulation of its markets, without a concrete set of federal safety guidelines. The piecemeal nature of legalization, absence of national regulation, and lack of public awareness has contributed to the uncertainty around marijuana use and its long-term consequences.

The market is also changing rapidly. The 2018 farm bill, for example, legalized hemp, which inadvertently popularized delta-8 THC. Delta-8 THC, which is similar to delta-9 THC, is less potent in its natural form, but producers have been able to extract and synthesize the delta-8 THC in hemp, converting it into more potent concentrates. Manufacturers are now selling products the FDA says have serious health risks. But that isn’t the only thing that the government can and should be doing.

In September, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report outlining what state and federal governments could do to establish better public policy around marijuana and minimize potential negative public health consequences over the next five years.

The report outlined specific actions, such as closing the loophole in the 2018 farm bill that legalized delta-8 THC and clarifying that all forms of THC are subject to regulation under the Controlled Substances Act. More broadly, the report calls for states that have legalized, public health officials, and government agencies like the CDC to come together and establish more unified guidelines for marijuana, working to develop a set of regulations around the production and sale. Marijuana, the report argues, should be regulated the same way as alcohol and tobacco.

The report also recommends that the federal government support more research into marijuana use, along with a public health campaign to educate people about individual risks for different populations, including teens and older people.

It’s a tall order, but even that doesn’t capture everything researchers want to know. Caulkins, for one, has other questions.

“Cannabis intoxication impairs short-term memory formation. When cannabis was only being used as a social drug on weekends, who cares if it reduced effective performance on intellectual tasks?” he says. “Now, roughly half of cannabis is consumed by people who use often enough that they spend perhaps 50 percent of their waking hours under the influence of the drug. A lot of those hours of cannabis intoxication are while people are on the job or in school. How does that impact your functioning, how much you’re learning in college? We underinvest in thinking about the consequences of so many billions of hours of work and school time being, in some form, under the influence.”

It’s a question that might be hard to answer empirically right now. But it matters — maybe most of all for the millions of people taking part in America’s real-time marijuana experiment. “Maybe it’s not a problem,” Caulkins says. “But possibly, it’s affecting people’s abilities to meet their life goals in some subtle ways.”

Source: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/379637/marijuana-daily-drug-americans-alcohol

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Latest News,USA :

Emphatic Rejection by DrugWatch International

COMMENT BY JOHN J. COLEMAN Ph.D, PRESIDENT, DRUGWATCH INTERNATIONAL – 01 December 2024 

From: drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com

The proposal from the Secretary of HHS and the Attorney General to reschedule marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III – responding to President Biden’s request to take a second look at marijuana scheduling – is probably DOA at this point. The hearing at DEA tomorrow is closed except to media and designated participants (apparently, though, it will be online for the public). They may go through some of the motions because that’s what they are supposed to do, but the usual time of several months to go from hearing to Final Order or Final Rule will place the resolution of this matter well into the next administration. When there’s a change of parties, as in this case, the new administration is not eager to adopt or implement the changes or proposals of the old one.

The current move to reschedule marijuana amount to a political hoax because Congress is not about to add the number of federal employees that would be needed to enforce a Schedule III status for marijuana. Every “dispensary” in all the states (est. 38 of 50, plus D,C.) would immediately or within a time set by a Final Rule must register with DEA, pay a registration fee, meet certain requirements, before being able to fill and dispense valid prescriptions for marijuana. The Controlled Substances Act imposes strict controls on imports and exports of controlled substances, as well as its packaging, labeling, distribution, and storage.

The federal government that in 1993 abdicated its responsibility for controlling marijuana (per the infamous Cole Memorandum) has neither the resources nor the desire to enforce new marijuana provisions of the CSA because it no longer enforces even a modicum of the old ones. This is nothing but a cruel joke perpetrated by insincere leaders contemptuous of those who disagree with them. The DEA administrator refused to sign the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking leaving the Attorney General to regain his authority and issue the NPRM in the form of an Attorney General’s Order. That, alone, disqualifies this rescheduling exercise, assuming, that is, that this lunacy ever reaches a judicial review.

As for tomorrow’s meeting at DEA’s administrative law court, I think it will be perfunctory and simply set the agenda for the following two or three months when there may be a hearing. I say “may” because the incoming AG and DEA administrator could very well put the kibosh on this nutty move by the Biden administration. As our late friend and colleague Otto Moulton used to say, “read what the other side is saying!” According to Cannabis.net, a pro-marijuana website, the headline of their alarming article says it all: “Trump’s Not So Cannabis Friendly Cabinet Picks – His VP, AG, Head of the CDC and FDA Nominees all Hate Legal Weed: The cannabis scorecard for Trump’s new cabinet is not shaping up well for legalization fans!”

That pretty much says it all.

John Coleman

************************

Submission by Maggie Petito to DrugWatch International –  mlp3@starpower.net
Sent: Sunday, December 1, 2024 7:21 AM
To: drug-watch-international@googlegroups.com
Subject: Chronister12-1-24

From The Washington Post: “ Chronister would enter an agency that has been roiled by the convictions of several former agents in corruption cases and scrutiny of Milgram’s hiring practices.

The incoming DEA administrator will also helm the agency as it handles a Biden Justice Department proposal to loosen restrictions on marijuana — a measure supported by Trump despite objections from other GOP leaders…

The Justice Department has proposed to reclassify marijuana from a tier reserved for substances such as heroin and LSD. The move to reclassify marijuana would not legalize the drug but would move it to Schedule III, a category that includes prescription drugs such as ketamine, anabolic steroids and testosterone. The proposal met pushback internally at the DEA, which questioned whether reclassification violated international treaty obligations regarding drug control and if a federal health agency used the wrong legal standard in making its determination, according to a Justice Department legal opinion that sided with the Department of Health and Human Services. When officials submitted the proposed rule to reclassify marijuana in April, the paperwork was signed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, not Milgram.

The marijuana proposal will be considered in DEA administrative court; a preliminary hearing is scheduled for Monday, 2nd December 2024.  The proposal, if it goes through, would not be finalized until after Trump becomes president.”

************************

Washington Post     David Ovalle and Anumita Kaur    November 30, 2024                    Hillsborough Sheriff Chad Chronister picked to lead DEA under Trump – The Washington Post

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday tapped Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration, replacing Anne Milgram.

The incoming DEA administrator will also helm the agency as it handles a Biden Justice Department proposal to loosen restrictions on marijuana — a measure supported by Trump despite objections from other GOP leaders.

The Justice Department has proposed to reclassify marijuana from a tier reserved for substances such as heroin and LSD. The move to reclassify marijuana would not legalize the drug but would move it to Schedule III, a category that includes prescription drugs such as ketamine, anabolic steroids and testosterone.

The proposal met pushback internally at the DEA, which questioned whether reclassification violated international treaty obligations regarding drug control and if a federal health agency used the wrong legal standard in making its determination, according to a Justice Department legal opinion that sided with the Department of Health and Human Services. When officials submitted the proposed rule to reclassify marijuana in April, the paperwork was signed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, not Milgram.

The marijuana proposal will be considered in DEA administrative court; a preliminary hearing is scheduled for Monday. The proposal, if it goes through, would not be finalized until after Trump becomes president.

Source: COMMENT BY JOHN J. COLEMAN Ph.D, PRESIDENT, DRUGWATCH INTERNATIONAL

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug Specifics,Drug use-various effects,Latest News,Marijuana and Medicine,Political Sector,USA :

y Dr. Nora Volkow

Such experiences contribute to a feeling that research is a one-way transaction benefiting scientists but giving little back to the community. Lack of meaningful community engagement also compromises the quality of the science by not incorporating the valuable ideas and insights of people who use drugs.

NIDA is committed to improving community engagement in all parts of the research process. For that reason, we have asked the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse (NACDA)—the body of experts that advises on NIDA’s scientific research priorities—to convene a working group to recommend ways to enhance the meaningful engagement of people who have experience with drug use in the research our Institute funds. The workgroup will inform the creation of resources that outline NIDA’s expectations regarding community engagement and help both applicants and community partners navigate this critical work.

NIDA has long encouraged community-engaged research, and it is required element in various NIDA research funding opportunities, including those supported through our Racial Equity Initiative. The evolving opioid overdose crisis has underscored the importance of ensuring that people’s lived experience of substance use is centered in the science we support. For example, one of the pillars of the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative is that research must be relevant and responsive to the individuals, families, and communities it aims to help. One way HEAL studies are doing this is by drawing on the input of community advisory boards to ensure that the research is best tailored to the needs of the people most impacted by it.

The NIDA-funded Harm Reduction Research Network is a nationwide set of projects to enhance the impact of harm-reduction efforts, and its community advisory boards have already helped shape some of the studies. One project involves the development of a survey instrument to capture experiences of people who use drugs, and advisory board members helped tailor the wording of the instrument so that it reflected language more likely to be used by people who use drugs. Another study aimed at reducing overdose and increasing engagement in harm reduction and treatment services had originally been limited to people who use methamphetamine. Based on the input of advisors with more up-to-date knowledge of drug-use in their community, the study was broadened to include people who use cocaine, as that was identified as an emerging stimulant in their area.

The Integrative Management of Chronic Pain and OUD for Whole Recovery (IMPOWR) project is addressing the needs of people with substance use disorders and pain via a network of multidisciplinary team science collaborations. Its community advisory boards weigh in on funding decisions for pilot studies, and some of these studies have included a community partner as a co-investigator. Based on community input about the important role of PTSD and discrimination in healthcare settings in pain and opioid misuse and addiction, IMPOWR researchers added PTSD and stigma/discrimination items to their common data elements (the standardized questions that facilitate data-sharing across studies).

The Native Collective Research Effort to Enhance Wellness (NCREW) Initiative is partnering with Tribal organizations to support community-driven research projects that address opioid misuse and pain in Native communities. By providing needed training, technical assistance, and tools, the NCREW project is building capacity within Native communities to conduct locally prioritized research that incorporates indigenous knowledge and lived experience, with the aim of building effective, sustainable, and strengths-based interventions.

As outlined in NIDA’s Strategic Plan, NIDA is committed to partnering with people with lived and living experience in the development of new treatments for substance use disorder. Consistent with that goal, NIDA is funding four Patient Engagement Resource Centers (PERCs) to test various models of patient engagement that can inform research on SUD treatment services. Each PERC will recruit members of a particular patient population to understand what prevents them from finding or receiving evidence-based treatment services. This information will be used to pilot test patient-informed solutions to these challenges that can ultimately serve as models for the development of interventions in other settings.

There are many other ways that partnering with people with living experience of substance use could benefit both science and the community. Surveillance is one example. The drug market is rapidly changing, and people who actively use drugs and live this reality are best poised to provide information on the drug supply and its effects. And through their engagement in surveillance efforts, participants could gain information on new adulterants and contaminants that could help inform their own decisions.

In these, as with other research efforts, people who use drugs need to be treated with respect, and their confidentiality must be protected. They must also be compensated fairly for their time, their input, and their commuting and childcare costs.

Including people with experience of substance use and addiction in the scientific workforce—and making sure they feel safe and recognized as valuable members of the research team—must also become a priority for our science. As some of my colleagues at NIDA’s Intramural Research Program argued two years ago in the Journal of Addiction Medicine, people with lived and living experience of substance use disorders have unique perspectives that are invaluable in making sure that the right research questions are asked.

These are just some of the possible topics that may be discussed in the new NACDA workgroup. For that group, we are seeking individuals who identify as having experience with substance use or a substance use disorder or as a family or caregiver of someone who does. Participants will meet virtually three or four times during 2025 and potentially early 2026 and will be compensated for their time during the meetings. If you are interested in participating, further information is available on the Council Workgroups page. We are accepting application statements through January 10, 2025.

Associated links:

<https://links-1.govdelivery.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FNIDANIH/1/010001935f514dad-3bc896f6-09a3-4a99-9a57-650fc67cd8ad-000000/gZawcxuqmqpVxlDYl5KRA6aAb0F6qaVMf-PxgI6LnuI=380>  <https://links-1.govdelivery.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fx.com%2FNIDAnews/1/010001935f514dad-3bc896f6-09a3-4a99-9a57-650fc67cd8ad-000000/mpqUEYpIuhc9JFHxEKtJYgd0sO2MkRK2lTyjYLfCx1E=380>  <https://links-1.govdelivery.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fcompany%2Fthe-national-institute-on-drug-abuse-nida/1/010001935f514dad-3bc896f6-09a3-4a99-9a57-650fc67cd8ad-000000/MDAOeV4b9UqgdTQKqsv8NP1IxaNy1-VJZf0pPGIdSLM=380>  <https://links-1.govdelivery.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fuser%2FNIDANIH/1/010001935f514dad-3bc896f6-09a3-4a99-9a57-650fc67cd8ad-000000/XDdTYlTHjOr7nahEQDBsHClsGu3q7NdUBzatmgv6P7E=380>

 

Source: Forwarding Agency:

Herschel Baker, International Liaison Director & Queensland Director

Drug Free Australia

Web: https://drugfree.org.au/

mailto:drugfreeaust@drugfree.org.au

mailto:drugfree@org.au

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Education,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

Policy News Roundup: November 14, 2024

by drugfree.org

The main point: Overall, a Trump administration is likely to be more focused on law enforcement and supply side responses to the overdose crisis, rather than approach the challenge from a public health perspective.

The details:

  • Treatment: We do not expect there will be efforts to remove barriers and expand access to methadone. There could be some efforts to expand buprenorphine (particularly telemedicine models).
  • Harm Reduction: Harm reduction received unprecedented federal support under the Biden administration. It is unlikely that such support will continue. Efforts to expand naloxone distribution may continue, but other harm reduction strategies (e.g., syringe service programs, overdose prevention sites) are not likely to receive support in a Trump administration.
  • Criminal Legal System: The use of Medicaid to provide medications for opioid use disorder in jails/prisons will likely face increased scrutiny. As part of a broader effort to limit Medicaid costs, a Trump administration may push to restrict federal funding for these programs. Drug courts and diversion programs will likely continue to receive support.
  • Insurance: There could be major changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which includes some of the strongest insurance protections available for addiction, and Medicaid, which covers more addiction treatment than any other insurer. The enhanced ACA premium subsidies that led to record levels of insurance enrollment are not likely to be extended after they expire next year, and there may be efforts to slash funding for enrollment outreach, promote short-term health plans with skimpier coverage and allow insurers to charge sicker people higher premiums. Medicaid is likely to be targeted for funding cuts, and the Trump administration is likely to revive efforts to implement work requirements for Medicaid coverage.
  • Marijuana: It is not clear what a Trump administration will mean for marijuana. While previously strongly opposed to easing restrictions, Trump more recently came out in support of the legalization initiative in Florida (his home state) and the Biden administration’s push to reschedule marijuana.
  • Penalties: A Trump administration could push for harsher penalties for drug offenses.
  • Drug Trafficking: Combatting drug trafficking is likely to be the main focus for the administration on this issue. Rhetoric will likely focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, even though evidence has shown that most drugs are brought into the U.S. at legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens. There is likely to be continued pressure on Mexico and China for their role in fentanyl and precursor trafficking.
  • Federal Agencies: If the Trump administration takes action on plans to scale back federal agencies, it could lead to a reduced role for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, potentially in favor of the Department of Justice or Drug Enforcement Administration. Department of Health and Human Services agencies are also likely in for budget cuts and major changes in authority and focus, which could reduce the role of health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration in addressing the addiction crisis and the funding available to do so.

Why it’s important:

  • Federal funding for addiction has remained stable but shifts between law enforcement/interdiction and treatment, depending on the administration’s priorities. An increased focus on law enforcement/interdiction could mean less funding and focus on treatment. Funding for prevention has remained small and relatively the same.

A caveat: It is early. Trump’s campaign did not focus heavily on policy proposals or on this issue, and we do not know yet who will be appointed to top health roles in the administration.

In the states: drug policy backlash

Several states also had drug-related ballot initiatives on their ballots this election.

The main point: In recent elections, ballot measures focused on liberalizing drug policies (e.g., legalizing marijuana, decriminalizing drugs) have passed. This time, however, these types of measures failed, signaling concerns about these drug policies.

The details:

  • Marijuana: Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota all rejected measures to legalize recreational marijuana. Nebraska did approve a measure to legalize medical marijuana, but a judge could invalidate the results due to a pending lawsuit. Opponents cited concerns about crime, addiction and becoming like liberal states that have legalized marijuana. While most Americans continue to support marijuana legalization, the downsides of marijuana production and negative health impacts of high-potency marijuana and teen use have recently been in the spotlight.
  • Psychedelics: Massachusetts rejected a measure to legalize therapeutic use of certain psychedelics (psilocybin, psilocin, DMT, ibogaine, mescaline). Voters in more than a dozen Oregon cities also voted to ban sales and use of psilocybin, after the state approved licensed psilocybin treatment centers four years ago. Psychedelics have gained increased support across the political spectrum, but concerns are growing about allowing psychedelics to proliferate before there has been adequate research.
  • Penalties: California passed a measure to repeal a 2014 ballot initiative that had lessened penalties for certain drug offenses. The new measure reclassifies certain theft- and drug-related crimes as felonies, rather than misdemeanors. It also establishes court-mandated treatment for those with repeat drug offenses. Voters perceive social disruption from public drug use and want more law and order.

Another thing: Daniel Lurie won his race to be mayor of San Francisco, beating incumbent London Breed. Much of the campaign focused on debates about how to address public drug use in the city. Lurie ran on promises to expand police staffing, build more homeless shelter beds and shut down open-air drug markets.

Why it’s important: This is part of the broader recent backlash toward efforts to liberalize drug policies and emphasize treatment and harm reduction over punitive responses.

  • Increases in visible homelessness, mental illness and substance use following COVID, the rise of fentanyl and the continuing high level of overdose deaths have led many to feel that recent efforts are not working. This is exacerbated by rhetoric tying “failed” drug policies to supposed spikes in crime and drug use.

 

California report warns of high-potency marijuana health dangers

What’s new: A report by scientists convened by the California Department of Public Health suggests that state policymakers must do more to warn consumers of the health dangers of high-potency marijuana and deter its use.

The background:

  • Most of the marijuana sold in California is high potency, with a concentration of THC five to ten times greater than the marijuana of the 1970s and 1980s.
  • High-potency marijuana is more likely to be addictive and cause serious health problems, like psychosis or cannabis hyperemesis syndrome.

The takeaways: The authors say policymakers should take lessons from successful campaigns to reduce smoking and drinking. Among other ideas, they recommend:

  • Restricting marijuana advertising, packaging and marketing
  • Barring flavored products that appeal to kids
  • Limiting THC content
  • Raising taxes on high-potency products
  • Launching a public education campaign about high-potency marijuana’s health effects

What’s next: The authors say they are lobbying the California Department of Public Health, the California Department of Cannabis Control, the state legislature and other state agencies to boost regulation.

 

Source: https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/policy-news-roundup-november-14-2024/

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Political Sector,USA :

Workplaces have a unique opportunity to make subtle yet meaningful adjustments to better support employees who may be in recovery or experiencing challenges. When businesses make small changes in their events, management style, and overall culture, they create an environment that respects and uplifts employees facing SUDs. Here are three impactful ways to make the workplace more welcoming:

# 1: Host Inclusive Gatherings with Non-Alcoholic Options

Work events can inadvertently center around alcohol, creating uncomfortable situations for employees who don’t drink and/or are in recovery. Making a few simple shifts can help ensure everyone feels included:
• Avoid holding meetings in bars or pubs. Instead, choose locations that aren’t centered on alcohol, such as coffee shops, casual restaurants, or outdoor spaces.
• Offer a variety of non-alcoholic drinks that are as enjoyable as alcoholic options. These could include mocktails, sparkling water with unique flavors, or other festive drinks. This small touch shows thoughtful consideration and signals that the event is meant for everyone.
• Consider alcohol-free events. Not every event needs to feature alcohol to be fun. Think of team-building activities like escape rooms, game nights, or cooking classes, which naturally focus on engagement without the need for alcohol.

#2: Encourage Supervisors to be Allies

Supervisors play a critical role in creating a compassionate, supportive workplace. By actively supporting employees rather than judging them, supervisors can contribute significantly to a culture of empathy and openness. Here’s how they can help:
• Listen without judgment. If an employee opens up about their challenges, supervisors should approach the conversation with empathy, focusing on support rather than consequences, while of course maintaining safety.
• Respect privacy and confidentiality. Supervisors should reassure employees that their personal issues will remain private and will only be discussed on a need-to-know basis, which helps foster trust.
• Share personal experiences if appropriate. For supervisors in recovery, sharing their stories can inspire others, showing that it’s possible to face challenges and succeed. Authentic, relatable leadership can be incredibly powerful for employees who may feel isolated.

#3: Encourage Coworkers to Support Each Other

Sometimes, coworkers are the first to notice changes in behavior or attendance. They can be crucial sources of support, helping to create a culture that’s proactive and understanding:
• Encourage open, honest communication. Rather than approaching a struggling coworker with judgment, a simple “I’m here if you need anything” can make a huge difference.
• Assist with resources. Coworkers can help each other navigate employment policies, find helpful information, or locate support groups if needed. Being informed and sharing resources can be invaluable.
• Respect boundaries and avoid gossip. Gossip or speculation only adds stigma to those facing SUDs. A culture of respect encourages coworkers to redirect conversations if someone starts gossiping or making assumptions about another’s struggles. For more on the importance of language on stigma, check out the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s resource, Words Matter as well as Drug Free America Foundation’s resource on Stigma here.

These small adjustments—hosting inclusive events, training supervisors as allies, and encouraging a supportive culture among coworkers—can help a business become a welcoming, stigma-free environment for employees with SUDs working towards recovery. By focusing on inclusivity, empathy, and respect, workplaces can create meaningful, positive changes that support both individual well-being and the company’s overall success.

Sources:

Drug Free America Foundation, Inc. “Stigma.” https://www.dfaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Stigma-2024.pdf

O’Connor, P., PhD. (2023, November 23). Human resource departments can help or hinder employees with SUDs. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/philosophy-stirred-not-shaken/202311/substance-use-disorders-and-the-work-place

Words matter: preferred language for talking about addiction | National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2023, November 15). National Institute on Drug Abuse. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/addiction-science/words-matter-preferred-language-talking-about-addiction

 

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Workplace :
One in 3 adults who responded to a new nationwide survey said they had suffered “secondhand harm” from another person’s drinking, and more than 1 in 10 said a loved one’s drug use had harmed them. PHI’s William Kerr shares insights on how secondhand harms from alcohol and drug use can affect families, relationships and communities.

“Think of it as collateral damage: Millions of Americans say they have been harmed by a loved one’s drug or alcohol use.

One in 3 adults who responded to a new nationwide survey said they had suffered “secondhand harm” from another person’s drinking. And more than 1 in 10 said they had been harmed by a loved one’s drug use.

That’s close to 160 million victims — 113 million hurt by loved one’s drinking and 46 million by their drug use, according to the survey published recently in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

There are more harms than people think… They affect families, relationships and communities.William Kerr
Scientific Director, Center Director & Study Co-Author, Alcohol Research Group’s National Alcohol Research Center, Public Health Institute

He said it makes sense that risky drinking and drug use have far-reaching consequences, but researchers only began looking at the secondhand harms of alcohol in recent years. Less has been known about the damage done by a loved one’s drug use.

The new study is based on a survey of 7,800 U.S. adults. They were questioned between September 2019 and April 2020, before the pandemic became a factor in Americans’ substance use.

People were asked if they had been harmed in any of several ways due to someone else’s substance use.

In all, 34% of respondents said they had suffered secondhand harm from someone else’s alcohol use. The harms ranged from marriage and family problems to financial fallout, assault and injury in a drunken-driving accident.

Meanwhile, 14% of respondents said they’d suffered similar consequences from a loved one’s drug abuse.

The two groups overlapped, too — 30% of respondents reporting secondhand harm from alcohol also said they were affected by someone’s drug use.

Kerr said in a journal news release that the differences probably owe to the fact that drinking and alcohol use disorders are more common than drug use and disorders. But, he added, researchers want to learn more and are launching a new survey with more questions about the harms related to individual drugs.”

Source: https://www.phi.org/press/us-news-phi-study-shows-nearly-160-million-americans-harmed-by-anothers-drinking-drug-use/

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,USA :
November 26, 2024

MEDIA ADVISORY

DEA Headquarters Division – Public Information Office

WASHINGTON – Formal hearing proceedings regarding the proposed rescheduling of marijuana will begin on December 2, 2024 at 9:30 A.M. ET in the North Courtroom at DEA Headquarters located at 700 Army Navy Drive, Arlington, VA. This preliminary hearing will serve as a procedural day to address legal and logistical issues and discuss future dates for the evidentiary hearing on the merits.  No witness testimony will be offered or received at this time.

In-person attendance is limited to designated participants and credentialed members of the media who have received confirmation of their in-person attendance.

WHAT:    Commencement of formal hearing proceedings regarding the proposed rescheduling of Marijuana

WHO:    Open to designated participants and designated credentialed members of the media.

WHEN:        December 2, 2024 | 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

WHERE:     DEA Headquarters | 700 Army Navy Drive, Arlington, Va. 22202 | North Courtroom

FOR MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC: Members of the public will have access to the court sessions virtually at www.DEA.gov/live.

FOR NEWS MEDIA: News media wishing to attend in person must RSVP to DEAPress@dea.gov by 10 a.m. on November 29, 2024.  Due to limited capacity, RSVPs will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.

Designated members of the media should arrive no later than 9:00 a.m. on December 2 and follow all security screening procedures. Media credentials are required to be visible while inside DEA Headquarters. Video and audio recordings are not permitted at any time inside the courtroom.

Background:
On May 21, 2024, the Department of Justice proposed to transfer marijuana from schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act to schedule III of the CSA, consistent with the view of the Department of Health and Human Services that marijuana has a currently accepted medical use as well as HHS’s views about marijuana’s abuse potential and level of physical or psychological dependence. The CSA requires that such actions be made through formal rulemaking on the record after opportunity for a hearing. If the transfer to schedule III is finalized, the regulatory controls applicable to schedule III controlled substances would apply, as appropriate, along with existing marijuana-specific requirements and any additional controls that might be implemented, including those that might be implemented to meet U.S. treaty obligations. If marijuana is transferred into schedule III, the manufacture, distribution, dispensing, and possession of marijuana would remain subject to the applicable criminal prohibitions of the CSA. Any drugs containing a substance within the CSA’s definition of “marijuana” would also remain subject to the applicable prohibitions in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. For more information, visit www.DEA.gov.

Source: https://www.dea.gov/stories/2024/2024-11/2024-11-26/dea-hold-hearing-rescheduling-marijuana

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug Specifics,Legal Sector,Marijuana and Medicine,USA :

We targeted drug cartels to stop fentanyl. Now, overdose deaths are dropping. | Opinion

Anne Milgram  |  Opinion contributor

For the past three years, we have fought to protect our communities and save American lives lost at the hands of the drug cartels.

This fight may seem daunting, and it is unbearable for the families who have lost a loved one. The opioid epidemic has led to tragic deaths across the nation for decades.

In recent years, however, we’ve witnessed Americans being poisoned by fentanyl. Two Mexican cartels are responsible for almost all the fentanyl found in the United States. These cartels press fentanyl into pills to look like prescription medications and they hide fentanyl powder in other drugs like cocaine.

This deception drives addiction, leading to more sales and profit. Of the more than 107,000 drug-related deaths last year, 69% of them involved fentanyl. That is about 200 American lives lost every day to fentanyl.

But today, we are making significant progress in this battle.

Drug deaths decline by more than 14%

According to new provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug deaths in the United States have fallen for the first time in five years. The United States has seen a more than 14% decrease in deaths between June 2023 and June 2024.

While several contributors led to the decline, this marks an important milestone in DEA’s fight to save lives.

When I joined DEA more than three years ago, it was clear that this unprecedented threat required a new approach. We transformed our operations to meet the moment and quickly built a plan to attack the cartels.

We launched counter threat teams focused on a whole network approach to disrupt and defeat the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, the Mexican gangs responsible for the deadly influx of fentanyl and methamphetamine into the United States.

While the harm is felt in the United States, the global fentanyl supply chain spans more than 65 countries. Our goal is simple: Take action across the entire supply chain and make it impossible for the cartels to do business.

DEA’s investigations have resulted in charges against Chinese chemical companies and Chinese nationals responsible for the production and sale of chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl; the leaders, money launderers, transporters and enforcers of the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels; thousands of individuals across the United States who work for the cartels and pedal fentanyl on social media and on our streets; and the money launderers moving billions of dollars in drug money across the globe.

DEA is proud to lead this fight to stop deadly drugs from coming into our communities. Our agency has some of the most highly skilled professionals in the world – special agents, intelligence analysts, data scientists, cyber specialists, social media analysts and forensic scientists – working together to take down these multinational criminal drug networks.

Top drug cartel leaders arrested

Working with our law enforcement partners, our approach has led to the arrests of top cartel leaders and record drug and money seizures.

Last year, DEA seized 80 million fentanyl pills and 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder, which is the equivalent to 390 million doses. That is enough to kill every single American.

DEA has disrupted global drug trafficking operations from China to Mexico by arresting and indicting cartel members at the highest levels of leadership ‒ including Joaquin Guzman Lopez, son of notorious drug kingpin “El Chapo,” and Ismael Zambada García, or “El Mayo.”

Surgeons general warning: We can’t defend national security without global health security

Since 2021, four out of the seven top Sinaloa cartel members have been taken into custody, and three will soon face justice in the United States. DEA has also uncovered and taken down significant global money laundering operations, cutting off funding to the cartel’s operations.

Since launching DEA’s One Pill Can Kill campaign in 2021, we have focused on raising awareness about the dangers of fentanyl.

We also have partnered with families who have lost loved ones to fentanyl. This has been a game changer. The families have been key to sharing lifesaving information and resources in communities across the country. These parents, children, grandparents and siblings continue to turn tragedy into action by working to prevent other families from experiencing their pain.

Recently, at the National Family Summit on Fentanyl, I was thrilled to share with the families another major step in our progress in this fight. We have seen a significant drop in the lethality of counterfeit pills seized in our communities this past year. In 2023, DEA found that 7 out of 10 pills contain a deadly dose of fentanyl. Today, 5 out of 10 pills are potentially deadly.

Seeing a decline in the number of deadly pills on the streets of America is further proof that our efforts are working.

While DEA is proud of the progress we are seeing, we are focused on the work that still needs to be done. Every life lost is one too many. DEA and our partners will continue to fight every day to protect our communities and save lives.

This fight is winnable, but it requires everyone pulling in the same direction. We need everyone to educate themselves, their loved ones and their communities on the dangers of fentanyl.

Anyone can use DEA’s One Pill Can Kill resources to spread the message about the dangers of fentanyl and to educate themselves.

DEA also has recently launched a new resource for families. The Together For Families Network will serve as a one-stop shop to connect advocates and share information, because we know each of us can make a difference.

This recent news shows that together we can save lives, and that it takes all of us working together to win this fight.

Anne Milgram is the administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

 

Source: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/11/26/dea-drug-deaths-fentanyl-mexican-cartels/75487168007/

Filed under: Crime/Violence/Prison,Fentanyl,USA :

     Too many families know the pain of losing a loved one to a drunk or drug-impaired driving accident.  Each year, more than 10,000 Americans lose their lives in these preventable tragedies.  During National Impaired Driving Prevention Month, we remind everyone that they can save lives by driving only when sober, calling for a ride, planning ahead, and making sure friends and loved ones do the same.

In 2022, over 13,000 people were killed in drunk-driving accidents.  Still, millions of people drive under the influence each year, not only putting themselves in harm’s way but also endangering passengers, pedestrians, and first responders. Even just one drink or one pill can ruin lives.

My Administration is committed to preventing accidents and impaired driving.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has raised awareness about its risks and consequences through media campaigns, including “If You Feel Different, You Drive Different”; “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over”; and “Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving.”  Furthermore, since the beginning of my Administration, we have dedicated over $100 billion to disrupt the flow of illicit drugs and expand access to the prevention and treatment of substance use disorder.

Reducing fatalities and injuries in impaired driving accidents also means improving the safety of our Nation’s vehicles.  That is why my Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invests in technologies that can detect and prevent impaired driving and requiring new passenger cars to include collision warnings and automatic braking to prevent accidents.  The Department of Transportation also released a National Roadway Safety Strategy to eliminate traffic deaths and make crashes less destructive.

This holiday season, let us recommit to doing right by our neighbors, friends, and families by driving sober.  For those planning on drinking, arrange a sober ride home beforehand — ride-sharing apps are a convenient way to get home safely.  If you have had alcohol or used substances, do not get behind the wheel — one accident can cost someone their life.  If you are responsible for driving yourself or others, stay sober, buckle up, put the phone away, and drive the speed limit.  And if you witness a friend, loved one, colleague, or anyone putting themselves or others in danger, lend a hand to keep them safe. You could save a life.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 2024 as National Impaired Driving Prevention Month.  I urge all Americans to make responsible decisions and take appropriate measures to prevent impaired driving.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-ninth.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

 

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/11/29/a-proclamation-on-national-impaired-driving-prevention-month-2024/

 

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Drugs and Accidents,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

These TC experts emphasize the critical need for a more proactive approach to substance use education

More than 40,000 youth used nicotine pouches last year alone, a staggering increase from 2021. The relatively new and less detectable product’s increasing prevalence among youth underscores an urgent need for informed discussion and intervention regarding adolescent substance use more broadly. Data shows that 59 percent of people 12 or older used tobacco, vaped nicotine, alcohol or illicit drugs in 2023, despite proof that substance use during these formative years poses a severe threat to cognitive function. “Early drug use can impair neurocognitive development and increase youth vulnerability to later use of illicit substances, and even academic failure,” shares John Allegrante, the Charles Irwin Lambert Professor of Health Behavior and Education at Teachers College, who examines the topic in his latest research with an international group of Nordic investigators.“With each generation, the messaging and campaigns around these dangerous products change to target those most vulnerable: our youth. We [educators] need to work with parents to provide more support resources and surveillance during such critical years.”We spoke with Allegrante and other TC experts about the risks and ways educators, parents and communities can address these challenges together.

 

A Call to Action: Reimagining Awareness, Prevention, and Intervention 

While interventions like the “Just Say No” campaign and the D.A.R.E. programs of the ’80s and ’90s have proven to be unsuccessful, the desire for more effective and youth-informed approaches to preventing  substance use among youth in the U.S. continues to grow.

Influencer marketing and social media promotions for e-cigarettes have increased the risk of youth vaping. Studies show that social media platforms often glamorize e-cigarettes with trendy flavors like cotton candy, attracting young users. TC’s Ayorkor Gaba, Assistant Professor of Counseling & Clinical Psychology, notes that there is a rise in innovative approaches, like media literacy education, to help youth critically analyze media and reject harmful messages.

She explains that social media can also share science-based health messages, enhancing prevention and treatment of substance use.  For example, influencers frequently share their lived experience with overdose,  the harmful effects of vaping, and recovery. Though “impactful,” the overall quality, accuracy and reliability of this content posted can be poor. “The lack of evidence-based content on social media reinforces the need for expert involvement (e.g., public health, psychology, etc.) in disseminating evidence-based content on social media,” notes Gaba. “Due to the significant influence of social media on youth, experts and researchers should integrate youth perspectives in developing social media-based intervention and prevention that can reach millions of youth. “

The CDC notes that a high majority of adolescent substance use (81 percent) occurs during socialization with friends. “As teens, we’re all looking to fit in,” adds TC doctoral student Treasure Tannock. “Between ages 15-25, we seek to cling to anything that gives us a better understanding of self-identity. If we can use that same mindset better to reach young people about the dangers of use through a more holistic, relatable lens, we might be able to make progress.”

To start, Tannock recommends getting youth involved in creative outlets that pique their interest, a concept she implemented during her clinical work at Rikers Island. “We asked individuals: Who are you now? Who do you want to be? What obstacles do you face with substance use? And how can you receive support?” explained Tannock, a Clinical Psychology student. “We then collaborated with music and art therapists to help express their stories. Over time, many became open to support and envisioned a new path forward.”

 

How Parents, Schools and Communities Can Help

Although there is much work to be done, parents, communities and educators can start by laying the groundwork for more proactive dialogue and means of support. 

Allegrante explains that during the pandemic, increased supervision at home led to a decrease in adolescent substance use, an observation from his post-pandemic research. “As young people return to school and socialize more, we’re seeing a resurgence in use,” he explains. “Many prevention efforts start too late; by the time we address it, habits are ingrained. We must start these conversations in middle or even elementary school.”

With so much at stake, schools are tasked with a greater responsibility to address the crisis. A recent survey by the American Addiction Centers revealed that schools are the primary setting where youth receive informative substance use education. However, out of the 500 students surveyed, only 75 percent had a substance-use-focused curriculum in their health class. 

“School is still a prime captive audience location for prevention, but it requires an interdisciplinary approach, resources and a theory-driven, evidence-based curriculum across the board,” Allegrante adds. “We need to work with communities, public health agencies and even local government officials to bridge the gap.”

Yet, prevention must extend beyond the classroom. It’s imperative for parents to stay informed about their children’s habits, as research shows that parental involvement is key to mitigating peer pressure and promoting informed decision-making. “Parenting practices (e.g., monitoring, communication) have been linked to youth substance use, yet there are few accessible supports to help the busy parent develop skills in this area. Gaba recommends an app by the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration called “Talk. They Hear You.,” specifically designed to help parents and caregivers turn everyday situations into opportunities to discuss alcohol and drugs with their children. “It gives them the skills, confidence, and knowledge to start and maintain these conversations as their kids grow.”

Gaba also highlights the need to address disparities,  urging, “It’s a matter of life and death.” Between 2018 and 2022, drug overdose deaths among youth more than doubled, particularly impacting Latinx and Black communities. “Many still mistakenly believe opioids do not affect these groups, leading to decreased awareness and access to vital resources like Naloxone (Narcan), which can reverse overdoses,” she notes. “Additionally, substance use is notably higher among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth compared to their non-LGB peers.” To address these challenges, Gaba advocates for culturally tailored interventions that actively involve marginalized youth in the design process and target the social determinants of health that contribute to their elevated risks.

“Community support is also vital,” notes Tannock. “Having safe, accessible community spaces like libraries or after-school programs can make a significant difference. It’s a team effort.” She urges parents to inquire about local prevention resources. 

Although substance use among youth is an ongoing challenge, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH) reports that adolescent substance use continues to fall below pre-pandemic levels, an encouraging statistic.

“If we look at how drastically cigarette smoking has declined as a consequence of culture change, especially in advanced economies of the world, it’s a testament to just how far we’ve come,” concludes Allegrante. “But it took a concerted effort over many years, and we can certainly chart a similar path forward with this next generation.”  — Jacqueline Teschon

Source: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2024/november/why-we-need-to-modernize-substance-use-education/

Filed under: Addiction,Education,Parents,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :
 – PERSPECTIVE

 CO-AUTHORS:

Albert Stuart Reece1,2 | Gary Kenneth Hulse1,2
1University of Western Australia, Crawley,
Western Australia, Australia

2School of Health Sciences, Edith Cowan
University, Joondalup, Western Australia,
Australia

Correspondence:
Albert Stuart Reece, University of Western
Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, WA 6009,
Australia.
Email: stuart.reece@uwa.edu.au

ABSTRACT:

Whilst mitochondrial inhibition and micronuclear fragmentation are well established
features of the cannabis literature mitochondrial stress and dysfunction has recently
been shown to be a powerful and direct driver of micronucleus formation and chromosomal
breakage by multiple mechanisms. In turn genotoxic damage can be
expected to be expressed as increased rates of cancer, congenital anomalies and
aging; pathologies which are increasingly observed in modern continent-wide studies.
Whilst cannabinoid genotoxicity has long been essentially overlooked it may in fact
be all around us through the rapid induction of aging of eggs, sperm, zygotes, foetus
and adult organisms with many lines of evidence demonstrating transgenerational
impacts. Indeed this multigenerational dimension of cannabinoid genotoxicity
reframes the discussion of cannabis legalization within the absolute imperative to
protect the genomic and epigenomic integrity of multiple generations to come.

KEYWORDS:   cannabis, chromothripsis, micronucleus

MAIN ARTICLE TEXT:

Recent papers in Science provide penetrating and far-reaching insights
into the mechanisms underlying micronuclear rupture a key genotoxic
engine identified in many highly malignant tumours.1,2 Reactive
oxygen species (ROS) generated either by damaged mitochondria or
the hypoxic tumour microenvironment were shown to damage micronuclear
envelopes, which made them more sensitive to membrane
rupture. Damage occurred by both increased susceptibility to membrane
rupture and impaired membrane repair. Micronuclear rupture is
known to be associated with downstream chromosomal shattering,
pan-genome genetic disruption by chromothripsis, widespread epigenetic
dysregulation and cellular ageing. Clinical expressions of genotoxicity
are expected to appear as cancer, birth defects and ageing.
CHMP7 (charge multivesicular body protein 7) oxidation caused
heterodimerization by disulphide crosslinking and aberrant crosslinking
with membrane bound LEMD2 (LEM-domain nuclear envelope
protein 2) inducing membrane deformation and collapse. ROS-CHMP7
directly induced chromosomal shattering. Oxidized CHMP7 bound
covalently to the membrane repair scaffolding protein ESCRT-III
(endosomal sorting complex required for transport–III). ROS triggered
homo-oligomerization of the autophagic receptor p62/sequestome
re-routing the CMPH7-ESCRT-III complex away from membrane
repair into macroautophagy via the autophagosome and microautophagy
via lysozomes.1–3 Expected downstream consequences of
micronuclear rupture including chromosomal fragmentation, chromothripsis
and cGAS-STING (cyclic adenosine-guanosine synthase–
stimulator of interferon signalling) activation were demonstrated.
Cancer-related innate inflammation is known to drive tumour progression
and distant metastasis. These principles were tested both in normal
and also numerous malignant (including head and neck squamous,
cervical, gastric, ovarian and colorectal cancers) cell lines.1,2 Similar
processes including DNA damage and epigenomic derangements have
also been identified in TH1-lymphocytes during fever indicating that
mitochondriopathic-genotoxic mechanisms may in fact be widespread
and fundamental.4

Received: 26 September 2024 Accepted: 26 September 2024
DOI: 10.1111/adb.70003
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

 

Addiction Biology. 2024;29:e70003. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/adb
https://doi.org/10.1111/adb.70003

Cannabis has been known to be linked with both micronuclear
development and mitochondrial inhibition for many decades.5,6
All cannabinoids have been implicated in genotoxicity as the moiety
identified as damaging the genetic material is the central olivetol
nucleus on the C-ring itself.7 This finding implicates Δ8-, Δ9-, Δ10-,
Δ11-tetrahydrocannabinol, cannabigerol, cannabidiol and cannabinol
amongst all other cannabinoids.
Historically, the cancer-cannabis link has been controversial. Differing
results in published studies may be attributed to various factors
including multiple exposures (including tobacco), differences in
study design and the rapid rise of cannabis potency. One often quoted
study actually specifically excluded high level cannabis exposure, which
would now appear to have been a major methodological limitation.8 It
is widely documented that there has been a sharp increase in cannabis
concentration from the 1970s to the present day. THC concentrations
of 25%–30% are commonly noted in cannabis herb and flower sold
commercially, and 100% THC concentrations are well known for cannabinoid
based products such as dabs, waxes and ‘shatter’.
In this context, the recent appearance of a series of continentwide
epidemiological, space–time and causal inferential studies in
both Europe and North America is notable for many positive signals
for various cancers including breast, pancreas, liver, AML, thyroid, testis,
lymphoma, head and neck squamous cancer, total childhood cancer
and childhood ALL.9–15 The literature on cannabis and testicular
cancer is almost uniformly positive and has a relative risk of around
2.6-fold,16 this risk factor is now widely acknowledged17–19 and the
effect is quite fast since the median age of exposure may be about
20 years and the median age of testis cancer incidence is only
31 years. Testicular cancer is the adult cancer responsible for the most
years of life lost.17,18,20,21 The inclusion of several childhood cancers
in association with cannabis exposure obviously implicates transgenerational
transmission of malignant mutagenesis.
An intriguing finding in the case report literature is that in many
cases, cancers occur decades earlier and are very aggressive at diagnosis.
22 Mechanisms such as the synergistic mitochondriopathic–
micronuclear axis presently proposed in the recent Science papers1–4
may directly explain this very worrying observation.
Whilst cancer is thought to be a rare outcome amongst cannabis
exposed individuals, ageing effects are not. A dramatic acceleration
of cellular epigenetic age by 30% at just 30 years was recently
reported23 with indications this effect likely rises with age,24 and
the demonstration that cannabis exposed patients had adverse
outcomes across a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes
including myocardial infarction and emergency room presentations.
25 Importantly, the ageing process itself has been shown to
be due to redistribution of the epigenetic machinery in such a manner
as to produce dysregulation (and widespread reduction) of gene
expression and to be inducible by limited genetic damage resulting
from just a handful of DNA breaks.26 Extremely worryingly, agerelated
morphological changes have been described in both oocytes
and sperm.27,28
Epidemiological studies of European and American cannabiscancer
links are supported by epidemiological, space–time and causal
inferential studies of links between cannabis and congenital
anomalies.29–33 Reported congenital anomalies are clustered in the
cardiovascular, neurological, limb, chromosomal, urogenital and gastrointestinal
systems. The fact that all five chromosomal anomalies
studied here are represented in this list, notwithstanding their high
rate of known foetal loss, is strong evidence for chromosomal misegregation
during germ cell meiosis, which is the genetic precursor to
micronucleus development.34,35 The fact that almost identical results
were reported in both the United States and Europe provides strong
external validation to these findings.30
This is consistent with recent press reports of dramatic increases
in babies and calves born without limbs in both France and
Germany36,37 raising the public health spectre of downstream implications
of food chain contamination. Melbourne, Australia, is a multiethnic
city, which heads the global leaderboard for babies born with
the serious limb anomalies amelia and phocomelia.37–40 This pattern
of elevated rates of major birth defects is not seen in the host nations
from which these migrant populations are derived. Cannabis farms are
increasingly common around Melbourne, just as they are in the
French province of Ain, which has similar concerns.37,41–43
Major epigenetic changes have been found in human sperm,44
which have also been identified in exposed rodent offspring.44–46
Indeed, 21 of the 31 congenital anomalies described following prenatal
thalidomide exposure have also been observed epidemiologically
following prenatal cannabis exposure and 12 of 13 cellular pathways
by which thalidomide operates have been similarly identified in the
cannabis mechanistic literature.47 Both human and rodent epigenomic
studies44–46 and epidemiological studies show that adult cannabis
exposure is linked with the incidence of autism48–53 and cerebral processing
difficulties54–57 in children prenatally exposed. Together, this
data is clear and robust evidence for the transgenerational transmission
of major genotoxic outcomes.
Notwithstanding the well-known ambiguities in the epidemiological
literature for cannabis, it is clear from the above brief overview
that there is strong and compelling evidence that cannabis genotoxic
outcomes are well substantiated and form a remarkably congruent
skein of interrelated evidence across all three domains of genotoxic
pathology including cancer, congenital anomalies and ageing.
So too compelling epidemiological, morphological and epigenetic
evidence of transgenerational transmission of cannabinoid genotoxicity
to foetus, egg, sperm and offspring carries far reaching and
transformative implications and indeed reframes the discussion surrounding
cannabis legalization from merely personal-hedonistic to the
protection of the national genomic integrity for multiple subsequent
generations.
The present time therefore represents a watershed moment.
The new profoundly insightful studies from Science point the way and
provide the trigger. Clearly, there is a great need for a new
and updated cohort of epidemiological studies on these issues at the
population level in the modern context of the widespread availability
of much more potent cannabinoid preparations.
However, our first responsibility is to act on the evidence we do
have. Given the uniform picture painted by data from myriad directions.

It can be said that the evidence for cannabinoid genotoxicity
is at once so clinically significant, robust and compelling as to constitute
a resounding clarion call to action: The only outstanding
question is ‘Will we rise to the challenge?’

13691600, 2024, 11, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/adb.70003 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [14/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License

 

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT:
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

ORCID:
Albert Stuart Reece https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3256-720X

REFERENCES

1. Di Bona M, Chen Y, Agustinus AS, et al. Micronuclear collapse from
oxidative damage. Science. 2024;385(6712):eadj8691. doi:10.1126/
science.adj8691
2. Martin S, Scorzoni S, Cordone S, et al. A p62-dependent rheostat
dictates micronuclei catastrophe and chromosome rearrangements.
Science. 2024;385(6712):eadj7446. doi:10.1126/science.adj7446
3. Maddaluno M, Settembre C. Micronuclear collapse mechanisms in
cancer. Science. 2024;385(6712):930-931. doi:10.1126/science.
adr7417
4. Heintzman DR, Sinard RC, Fisher EL, et al. Subset-specific mitochondrial
stress and DNA damage shape T cell responses to fever and
inflammation. Sci Immunol. 2024;9(99):eadp3475. doi:10.1126/
sciimmunol.adp3475
5. Sarafian TA, Kouyoumjian S, Khoshaghideh F, Tashkin DP, Roth MD.
Delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol disrupts mitochondrial function and cell
energetics. Am J Physiol. 2003;284(2):L298-L306. doi:10.1152/
ajplung.00157.2002
6. Hall W, Degenhardt L. Adverse health effects of non-medical cannabis
use. Lancet. 2009;374(9698):1383-1391. doi:10.1016/S0140-
6736(09)61037-0
7. Nahas GG, Morishima A, Desoize B. Effects of cannabinoids on
macromolecular synthesis and replication of cultured lymphocytes.
Fed Proc. 1977;36(5):1748-1752.
8. Hashibe M, Morgenstern H, Cui Y, et al. Marijuana use and the risk of
lung and upper aerodigestive tract cancers: results of a populationbased
case-control study. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2006;
15(10):1829-1834. doi:10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-06-0330
9. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Geotemporospatial and causal inferential epidemiological
overview and survey of USA cannabis, Cannabidiol and
cannabinoid genotoxicity expressed in cancer incidence 2003–2017:
part 3—spatiotemporal, multivariable and causal inferential pathfinding
and exploratory analyses of prostate and ovarian cancers.
Arch Public Health. 2022;80(1):100-136. doi:10.1186/s13690-022-
00812-7
10. Reece AS, Bennett K, Hulse GK. Cannabis- and substance-related carcinogenesis
in Europe: a lagged causal inferential panel regression
study. J Xenobiotics. 2023;13:323-385. doi:10.3390/jox13030024
11. Reece AS, Hulse GK. In: BMartin CR, Preedy V, Patel V, eds.
Cannabis, Cannabinoids and Endocannabinoids. Vol 1. chap. 5. Elsevier;
2023:570.
12. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Geotemporospatial and causal inferential epidemiological
overview and survey of USA cannabis, cannabidiol and cannabinoid
genotoxicity expressed in cancer incidence 2003–2017: part
1—continuous bivariate analysis. Arch Public Health. 2022;80:99-133.
13. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Geotemporospatial and causal inferential epidemiological
overview and survey of USA cannabis, cannabidiol and
cannabinoid genotoxicity expressed in cancer incidence 2003–2017:
part 2—categorical bivariate analysis and attributable fractions. Arch
Public Health. 2022;80(1):100-135. doi:10.1186/s13690-022-
00812-7
14. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Cannabinoid exposure as a major driver of pediatric
acute lymphoid Leukaemia rates across the USA: combined
geospatial, multiple imputation and causal inference study. BMC Cancer.
2021;21(1):984-1017. doi:10.1186/s12885-021-08598-7
15. Baranger DAA, Paul SE, Colbert SMC, et al. Association of Mental
Health Burden With Prenatal Cannabis. Exposure from childhood to
early adolescence: longitudinal findings from the Adolescent Brain
Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. JAMA Pediatr. 2022;176(12):
1261-1265. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.3191
16. Gurney J, Shaw C, Stanley J, Signal V, Sarfati D. Cannabis exposure
and risk of testicular cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
BMC Cancer. 2015;15(1):897-906. doi:10.1186/s12885-015-1905-6
17. Ghasemiesfe M, Barrow B, Leonard S, Keyhani S, Korenstein D. Association
between marijuana use and risk of cancer: a systematic review
and meta-analysis. JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(11):e1916318-
e1916332. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.16318
18. Hanna NH, Einhorn LH. Testicular cancer—discoveries and updates. N
Engl J Med. 2014;371(21):2005-2016. doi:10.1056/NEJMra1407550
19. McGlynn KA, Trabert B. Adolescent and adult risk factors for testicular
cancer. Nat Rev Urol. 2012;9(6):339-349. doi:10.1038/nrurol.
2012.61
20. Reece AS, Hulse GK. State trends of cannabis liberalization as a causal
driver of increasing testicular cancer rates across the USA. Int J Environ
Res Public Health. 2022;19(19):12759-12796. doi:10.3390/
ijerph191912759
21. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Causal inference multiple imputation investigation
of the impact of cannabinoids and other substances on ethnic
differentials in US testicular cancer incidence. BMC Pharmacol Toxicol.
2021;22(1):40-71. doi:10.1186/s40360-021-00505-x
22. Donald PJ. Marijuana smoking—possible cause of head and neck carcinoma
in young patients. Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 1986;94(4):
517-521. doi:10.1177/019459988609400420
23. Allen JP, Danoff JS, Costello MA, et al. Lifetime marijuana use and
epigenetic age acceleration: a 17-year prospective examination. Drug
Alcohol Depend. 2022;233:109363. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2022.
109363
24. Reece AS, Norman A, Hulse GK. Cannabis exposure as an interactive
cardiovascular risk factor and accelerant of organismal ageing: a longitudinal
study. BMJ Open. 2016;6(11):e011891-e011901. doi:10.
1136/bmjopen-2016-011891
25. Phillips KT, Pedula KL, Choi NG, et al. Chronic health conditions,
acute health events, and healthcare utilization among adults over
age 50 in Hawai’i who use cannabis: a matched cohort study. Drug
Alcohol Depend. 2022;234:109387. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2022.
109387
26. Yang JH, Hayano M, Griffin PT, et al. Loss of epigenetic information
as a cause of mammalian aging. Cell. 2023;186(2):305-326.e327. doi:
10.1016/j.cell.2022.12.027
27. Morishima A. Effects of cannabis and natural cannabinoids on chromosomes
and ova. NIDA Res Monogr. 1984;44:25-45.
28. Huang HFS, Nahas GG, Hembree WC. In: Nahas GG, Sutin KM,
Harvey DJ, Agurell S, eds. Marijuana in Medicine. Vol 1. chap. 28.
Human Press Totowa; 1999:359-366.
29. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Cannabinoid- and substance-relationships of
European congenital anomaly patterns: a space-time panel regression
and causal inferential study. Env Epigen. 2022;8(1):1-40. doi:10.1093/
eep/dvab015
30. Reece AS, Hulse GK. In: Martin CR, Preedy V, Patel V, eds.
Cannabis, Cannabinoids and Endocannabinoids. Vol 1. chap. 5. Elsevier;
2022:570.
31. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Effects of cannabis on congenital limb anomalies
in 14 European nations: a geospatiotemporal and causal inferential
study. Env Epigen. 2022;8(1):1-34. doi:10.1093/eep/dvac016
32. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Geotemporospatial and causal inference epidemiological
analysis of US survey and overview of cannabis,
REECE and HULSE 3 of 4
13691600, 2024, 11, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/adb.70003 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [14/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
cannabidiol and cannabinoid genotoxicity in relation to congenital
anomalies 2001–2015. BMC Pediatr. 2022;22(1):47-124. doi:10.
1186/s12887-021-02996-3
33. Reece AS, Hulse GK. European epidemiological patterns of cannabisand
substance- related congenital cardiovascular anomalies: geospatiotemporal
and causal inferential study. Env Epigen. 2022;8(1):1-55.
doi:10.1093/eep/dvac015
34. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Epidemiological overview of multidimensional
chromosomal and genome toxicity of cannabis exposure in congenital
anomalies and cancer development. Sci Rep. 2021;11:13892-13912.
35. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Cannabis- and substance-related epidemiological
patterns of chromosomal congenital anomalies in Europe: geospatiotemporal
and causal inferential study. Int J Environ Res Public
Health. 2022;19(18):11208-11258. doi:10.3390/ijerph191811208
36. Robinson M., C. Health, Ed. (CNN News, 2019), vol. 2019. Agence
France-Presse in Paris, France to investigate cause of upper limb
defects in babies. The Guardian 2018.
37. Bermejo-Sánchez E, Cuevas L, Amar E, et al. Amelia: a multi-center
descriptive epidemiologic study in a large dataset from the International
Clearinghouse for Birth Defects Surveillance and Research, and
overview of the literature. Am J Med Genet C Semin Med Genet. 2011;
157C(4):288-304. doi:10.1002/ajmg.c.30319
38. Bermejo-Sánchez E, Cuevas L, Amar E, et al. Phocomelia: a worldwide
descriptive epidemiologic study in a large series of cases from the
International Clearinghouse for Birth Defects Surveillance and
Research, and overview of the literature. Am J Med Genet C Semin
Med Genet. 2011;157C:305-320.
39. Reece AS. Limblessness: cannabinoids inhibit key embryonic morphogens
both directly and Epigenomically. Br Med J. 2022;376:n3114.
40. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Epidemiological association of cannabinoid- and
drug- exposures and sociodemographic factors with limb reduction
defects across USA 1989–2016: a geotemporospatial study. Spat
Spatio-Temp Epidemiol. 2022;41:100480-100490. doi:10.1016/j.sste.
2022.100480
41. Connexion Journalist, Mayor wants to grow and sell cannabis in
French fields. 2018.
42. Willsher K., Baby arm defects prompt nationwide investigation in
France. Guardian 2018.
43. Le Figaro with AFP, Ain: seizure of 135kg of cannabis. Le Figaro 2018.
44. Schrott R, Murphy SK, Modliszewski JL, et al. Refraining from use
diminishes cannabis-associated epigenetic changes in human sperm.
Env Epigen. 2021;7(1):1-10. doi:10.1093/eep/dvab009
45. Schrott R, Greeson KW, King D, Symosko Crow KM, Easley CA IV,
Murphy SK. Cannabis alters DNA methylation at maternally imprinted
and autism candidate genes in spermatogenic cells. Syst Biol Reprod
Med. 2022;68(5-6):357-369. doi:10.1080/19396368.2022.2073292
46. Schrott R, Modliszewski JL, Hawkey AB, et al. Sperm DNA methylation
alterations from cannabis extract exposure are evident in offspring. Epigen
Chromatin. 2022;15(1):33. doi:10.1186/s13072-022-00466-3
47. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Chapter 3: geospatiotemporal and causal inferential
analysis of United States congenital anomalies as a function of
multiple cannabinoid- and substance- exposures: phenocopying thalidomide
and hundred megabase-scale genotoxicity. In: Reece AS,
Hulse GK, eds. Epidemiology of Cannabis: Genotoxicity and Neurotoxicity,
Epigenomics and Aging. Vol 1. Elsevier; 2025:1-570.
48. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Epidemiological associations of various substances
and multiple cannabinoids with autism in USA. Clin Pediatr:
Open Acc. 2019;4:1-20.
49. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Effect of cannabis legalization on US autism
incidence and medium term projections. Clin Pediatr: Open Acc. 2019;
4:1-17.
50. Reece AS, Hulse GK. Impact of converging sociocultural and
substance-related trends on US autism rates: combined geospatiotemporal
and causal inferential analysis. Eur Arch Psychiat Clin Neurosci.
2022;19:7726-7752.
51. Corsi DJ, Donelle J, Sucha E, et al. Maternal cannabis use in pregnancy
and child neurodevelopmental outcomes. Nat Med. 2020;
26(10):1536-1540. doi:10.1038/s41591-020-1002-5
52. Brents L. In: Preedy VR, ed. Handbook of Cannabis and Related Pathologies:
Biology, Pharmacology, Diagnosis and Treatment. Vol 1. chap. 17.
Academic Press; 2017:160-170.
53. Paul SE, Hatoum AS, Fine JD, et al. Associations between
prenatal cannabis exposure and childhood outcomes: results from the
ABCD study. JAMA Psychiat. 2021;78(1):64-76. doi:10.1001/
jamapsychiatry.2020.2902
54. Fried PA, Watkinson B, Gray R. Neurocognitive consequences of
marihuana—a comparison with pre-drug performance. Neurotoxicol
Teratol. 2005;27(2):231-239. doi:10.1016/j.ntt.2004.11.003
55. Smith AM, Fried PA, Hogan MJ, Cameron I. Effects of prenatal marijuana
on visuospatial working memory: an fMRI study in young
adults. Neurotoxicol Teratol. 2006;28(2):286-295. doi:10.1016/j.ntt.
2005.12.008
56. Smith AM, Longo CA, Fried PA, Hogan MJ, Cameron I. Effects of marijuana
on visuospatial working memory: an fMRI study in young
adults. Psychopharmacol (Berl). 2010;210(3):429-438. doi:10.1007/
s00213-010-1841-8
57. Smith AM, Mioduszewski O, Hatchard T, Byron-Alhassan A, Fall C,
Fried PA. Prenatal marijuana exposure impacts executive functioning
into young adulthood: an fMRI study. Neurotoxicol Teratol. 2016;58:
53-59. doi:10.1016/j.ntt.2016.05.010
How to cite this article: Reece AS, Hulse GK. Key insights into
cannabis-cancer pathobiology and genotoxicity. Addiction
Biology. 2024;29(11):e70003. doi:10.1111/adb.70003

13691600, 2024, 11, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/adb.70003 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [14/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License

Source: ORCID, Inc 10411 Motor City Drive, Suite 750, Bethesda, MD 20817, USA

Filed under: Australia,Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Marijuana and Medicine,USA :

 Supporters of psilocybin expressed dismay at the bans after thousands of people reported benefits from using the psychedelic drug

Oregon Capital Chronicle, November 7, 2024- by Ben Botkin and Lynne Terry.

                                 Image: PIXABAY

 Voters in more than a dozen Oregon cities, including in the Portland area, voted to ban the regulated sales and use of psilocybin mushrooms.

Anti-psilocybin measures were on the ballots in 16 cities and unincorporated Clackamas County, and are passing in coastal communities to urban Portland and central and southern Oregon by 55% to 70% of the vote.

Bans against psilocybin businesses are passing in  Brookings, Rogue River, Sutherlin, Redmond, Lebanon, Jefferson, Sheridan, Amity, Hubbard, Mount Angel, Estacada, Oregon City, Lake Oswego, Seaside and Warrenton. Redmond’s measure would enact a two-year moratorium on psilocybin businesses.

There was one notable outlier. The measure to ban psilocybin could fail in Nehalem, a small community in Tillamook County, according to initial returns. But it is failing by only three votes. The unofficial results on Wednesday were close: 80 voters oppose the ban and 77 voters support.

Comment was not immediately available from psilocybin opponents. Supporters of the drug expressed disappointment with the results Wednesday.

“I think it’s really unfortunate that local communities, often rural communities continue to prevent access to psilocybin services, especially given that we’ve seen over 7,000 people go through the Oregon program, and there’s been so many stories of healing and benefit for those who have done it,” said Sam Chapman, a longtime psilocybin advocate who is policy and development director for the Microdosing Collective, a nonprofit supporting use of the drug in small doses.

Chapman played a big role in getting Oregonians to approve licensed psilocybin treatment centers, facilitators and manufacturers with the passage of Measure 109 four years ago by 56% of the vote. The measure required the Oregon Health Authority to start a program to allow providers to administer psilocybin mushrooms and fungi products to people 21 or older.

To date, the health authority has licensed about 1,000 staff, including 350 facilitators who work directly with clinics while they’re on the hallucinogen. The agency has also licensed 30 psilocybin centers – from the Portland area to Eugene to Ashland and beyond – along with a dozen manufacturers and one lab.

Chapman said these centers give the state another “tool in the toolbox” to treat mental illness, especially depression, anxiety and PTSD, especially for veterans.

“We’re actually seeing the proof of concept for the people who are going through Oregon’s service centers now,” Chapman said. “I think the mental health crisis in rural communities is especially unique in that these rural communities are struggling not just for mental health but economically as well.”

The economy of the psilocybin industry has been soft, caused mainly by the cost of a single session, which can range from hundreds to several thousand dollars, with many customers flocking to Oregon from out of state.

Chapman said rejection of psilocybin is linked to a lack of education about the drug and how the industry works in Oregon. Consumers cannot buy the drug in stores, as they can for marijuana, and treatments are regulated.

“They don’t understand psilocybin. They don’t understand the research and they don’t understand the Oregon program. And so in addition to the lack of that understanding, they make some assumptions. The biggest assumption is that this is just the same thing as cannabis. They assume this is for retail sales, which is not true,” Chapman said.

Healing Advocacy Fund, a nonprofit in Oregon and Colorado, will continue to push for the programs to grow, with state-regulated access to psychedelic healing. Heidi Pendergast, the group’s Oregon director, said the rollout in Oregon has been safe, with only four people needing emergency services out of thousands served.

“So while there may be some concerns, we haven’t seen that play out right now whatsoever in the program,” Pendergast said.

Oregon was the first state to decriminalize psilocybin in licensed settings and Colorado has followed suit. Massachusetts voters rejected a proposal to legalize the mushrooms and allow people to grow small quantities at their homes, National Public Radio reported.

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. 

 

Source: The Lund Report – Latest Headlines | November 7, 2024

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Legal Sector,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

Weekly / November 7, 2024 / 73(44);1010–1012

Alana M. Vivolo-Kantor, PhD1; Christine L. Mattson, PhD1; Maria Zlotorzynska, PhD1

What is already known about this topic?

Expanded availability of ketamine for management of treatment-resistant depression has resulted in increased use.

What is added by this report?

During July 2019–June 2023, ketamine was detected in <1% of overdose deaths and was the only drug involved in 24 deaths. During this period, the percentage of overdose deaths with ketamine detected in toxicology reports increased from 0.3% (47 deaths) to 0.5% (107 deaths). Approximately 82% of deaths with ketamine detected in toxicology reports involved other substances, including illegally manufactured fentanyls, methamphetamine, or cocaine.

What are the implications for public health practice?

Further investigation is needed to better understand the role of ketamine in drug overdoses, particularly when multiple substances are used before death.

Ketamine, a Schedule III controlled substance* that is Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved for general anesthesia, can produce mild hallucinogenic effects and cause respiratory, cardiovascular, and neuropsychiatric adverse events (1). In 2019, a form of ketamine (esketamine) was approved by FDA for use in treatment-resistant depression among adults† (2). Ketamine use, poison center calls for ketamine exposure, and ketamine drug reports from law enforcement have increased through 2019 (3), but recent trends in ketamine involvement in fatal overdoses are unknown. Data from CDC’s State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS) were analyzed to describe characteristics of and trends in overdose deaths with ketamine detected or involved during July 2019–June 2023.

Investigation and Findings

Data on drug overdose deaths with unintentional or undetermined intent come from SUDORS, which includes information from death certificates, medical examiner or coroner reports, and postmortem toxicology reports.§ Data are abstracted on all substances reported to cause death (i.e., involved) and substances detected through toxicology testing. Decedent demographics and other overdose characteristics were analyzed among 45 jurisdictions (44 states and the District of Columbia [DC]),** and trend analyses were conducted among 28 jurisdictions (27 states and DC).†† Analyses were restricted to deaths with toxicology reports or with ketamine listed as a cause of death on the death certificate. Ketamine detection included toxicology results for ketamine or its metabolites.§§ Among deaths with ketamine detected, drug involvement was analyzed to ascertain which drug or drugs caused death. This activity was reviewed by CDC, deemed not research, and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.¶¶

During July 2019–June 2023, a total of 228,668 drug overdose deaths were identified in 45 jurisdictions. Ketamine was detected in 912 (0.4%) overdose deaths, listed as involved in 440 (0.2%) deaths, and was the only substance involved in 24 (0.01%) deaths (Table). A majority of deaths with ketamine detected involved illegally manufactured fentanyls (IMFs) (58.7%), followed by methamphetamine (28.8%) and cocaine (27.2%). Overall, 82.4% of deaths involved either IMFs, methamphetamine, or cocaine. Approximately one third (34.8%) of decedents in whom ketamine was detected were aged 25–34 years, and approximately three quarters were males (71.3%) and non-Hispanic White persons (73.7%).

Among 172,475 overdose deaths in 28 jurisdictions during July 2019–June 2023, <1% had ketamine detected (692 deaths; 0.4%) or were classified as ketamine-involved (348 deaths; 0.2%). The number and percentage of deaths with ketamine detected increased during July 2019–June 2023 from 47 (0.3%) to 107 (0.5%), with notable increases as early as July–December 2020

Conclusions and Actions

During July 2019–June 2023, although ketamine was detected or involved in <1% of all drug overdose deaths, overdose deaths with ketamine detected increased. Almost all overdose deaths with ketamine detected involved other substances, mostly IMFs or stimulants; however, the source of ketamine (e.g., illegally purchased or prescribed) is unknown. Because analyses included a subset of jurisdictions, findings might not be generalizable to the entire United States. In addition, the scope of postmortem toxicology testing varies within and across jurisdictions, and ketamine might not be included in testing panels or be tested for in all postmortem samples (4), which could lead to an underestimation of ketamine detection. Despite the lack of uniform testing, ketamine detection among overdose deaths has increased over time, yet both detection and involvement accounted for a small proportion of overdose deaths. As polysubstance use (5) and use of ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and in compounded formulations*** increase, continued monitoring is needed to identify potential changes in the detection and involvement of ketamine in overdose deaths and to better understand potential drug interactions or circumstances leading to death.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7344a4.htm?s_cid=mm7344a4_w

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Ketamine,Prevalence,USA :

By Gabrielle M. Etzel

November 6, 2024 10:45 am

Voters in the 2024 election dealt a rebuke to drug legalization efforts in four states, a major political development that will shape the future of both marijuana and psychedelic drug policy across the country:

  • Measures to legalize recreational marijuana failed in Florida, North Dakota, and South Dakota, despite record spending from the cannabis industry already operating in those jurisdictions.
  • Support for the Florida constitutional amendment, Amendment 3, to legalize recreational marijuana only received 55.9% of the vote as of 9:49 a.m. Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. A 60% supermajority threshold was necessary to amend the Florida constitution.
  • The “No” vote to the marijuana legalization efforts in both North Dakota and South Dakota received outright majorities.
  • North Dakota’s Measure 5 was voted down 52.5%-47.5% with 99% of the vote counted as of 4:08 a.m. Wednesday. The “No” vote for South Dakota’s Measure 29 received 56.3% of the vote compared to 43.7% in favor with 90.3% of the ballots counted, also as of Wednesday morning.
  • Massachusetts also heartily rejected an effort to legalize the medical and recreational use of psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin and psilocin.
  • According to the Associated Press, the ballot measure was voted down 56.9%-43.1% with 90.3% of the vote counted as of 9:28 a.m. Wednesday.

The legalization effort was dealt a decisive blow in mid-October by the Boston Globe, whose editorial board wrote that the measure “goes too far” despite the therapeutic promise of psychedelics for treating PTSD and other mental health conditions.

“Voters by wide margins rejected the legalization of drugs like marijuana and psychedelics from red Florida to blue Massachusetts,” Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions and Smart Approaches to Marijuana President Kevin Sabet said in a statement on the elections. “We expect this Administration to listen to this message loud and clear: More drugs are not good for any community.”

Nebraska medical marijuana is only victory

The two interrelated ballot initiatives for Nebraska were the only drug legalization amendments to pass on Tuesday night.

The Associated Press declared victory for the ballot measure to legalize medical marijuana, Initiative 437, 70.2%-29.3% with 99% of the votes counted as of 6:52 a.m.

The accompanying amendment, Initiative 438, which established the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission to regulate the medical marijuana program, passed with 67% of the vote, according to Ballotpedia. Results for Initiative 438 were not tracked by the Associated Press.

Nebraska is now one of 39 states that have legalized medical marijuana, which in the past has signaled that a recreational use policy will be introduced in the coming years.

Future of federal drug policy

Cannabis is still classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, along with heroin and ecstasy. Schedule I drugs are determined to have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, and federal penalties for possession and intent to distribute can be severe.

President Joe Biden issued a directive to executive branch agencies in 2022 to begin a review of federal marijuana statutes. The Drug Enforcement Agency this spring started the process of reclassifying marijuana to a Schedule III substance, on par with ketamine and certain anabolic steroids.

Although it was not a major issue in the presidential campaigns, both Vice President Kamala Harris and President-Elect Donald Trump promised to continue with this spirit of drug reform at the federal level.

Trump, a resident of Florida, posted on Truth Social in September that he planned to vote in favor of Amendment 3 because he supported “smart regulations” for cannabis at the state level.

“As President, we will continue to focus on research to unlock the medical uses of marijuana to a Schedule 3 drug, and work with Congress to pass common sense laws, including safe banking for state authorized companies, and supporting states rights to pass marijuana laws, like in Florida, that work so well for their citizens,” Trump said in September.

Trump’s perspective on psychedelic drugs has not been as clear, but he has been a strong supporter of increasing access to clinical trials for experimental treatments for potentially fatal diseases.

Over the past two years, there has been strong bipartisan support in Congress for improving funding for the mental health benefits of psychedelic drug use for patients with severe PTSD, particularly combat veterans at risk of suicide.

Source: CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Legal Sector,USA :

by Chloe Marklay, Katie Amrhein, WKRC

Wed, October 30th 2024 at 10:20 AM

Updated Fri, November 1st 2024 at 10:44 AM
CINCINNATI (WKRC) – A local mother who lost her son to fentanyl has spearheaded an initiative to bring a powerful billboard to Cincinnati.

The billboard is located in the Northgate area. It includes pictures of 20 people who lost their lives to fentanyl, many of whom are local. The billboard reads: “Synthetic opioids kill over 150 people every day” and “fentanyl steals families.”

 

(WKRC)

Tamara Bohl lost her son Brian when he was 33 years old. Bohl wrote a book titled “My Child Died, Now What?” to help parents like her and to honor those who have lost their lives.

“These are real people, not just a statistic—real people that had lives, dreams, aspirations, families, friends, and kids,” said Bohl.

Bohl worked alongside Rachel’s Angels to create the sign and bring it to Cincinnati. The nonprofit is focused on providing drug education, prevention resources, and support to families affected by addiction.

The billboard dedication is set for Wednesday. The event will include speeches from city leaders, the Center for Addiction Treatment, and other parents like Bohl.

Bohl also featured the names of more than 900 people who lost their lives to fentanyl in her poetry book. One of them is Jason Durkin. At 21 years old, Durkin died from the drug in 2018. His mother Jennifer Bishop attended the billboard dedication.

“It’s gut-wrenching to see him up there, but I feel good that I’m putting him out there because he mattered,” said Bishop.

The event will also include the distribution of Narcan kits and educational resources on drug prevention and harm reduction.

Bohl also taped additional photos of fentanyl victims around the billboard pole. The billboard will stay up throughout November.

 

Source: https://local12.com/news/local/fentanyl-steals-families-new-cincinnati-billboard-spreads-awareness-opioid-epidemic-northgate-joseph-chevrolet-tamara-bohl-book-brian-drug-drugs-addiction-education-rachels-angels

Filed under: Fentanyl,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

Cultural, systemic and historical factors have converged to create the perfect storm when it comes to Black overdose deaths.

      By Liz Tung – June 14, 2024 Reporter at The Pulse

In this Jan. 23, 2018 photo, Leah Hill, a behavioral health fellow with the Baltimore City Health Department, displays a sample of Narcan nasal spray in Baltimore. The overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing America’s coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

A recent study from the Pennsylvania Department of Health has found that Black people who died from opioid overdoses were half as likely as white people to receive the life-saving drug naloxone, otherwise known as Narcan. The study also found that Black overdose deaths in Pennsylvania increased by more than 50% between 2019 and 2021, compared with no change in white overdose deaths.

In an email, a representative with the Department of Health said that similar rises in overdose deaths are being seen across the country, especially among Black, American Indian and Alaska Native populations. But researchers are still investigating what’s behind the spike.

“There does not appear to be a single reason why rates are increasing for Black populations and holding steady among white populations,” the statement reads. “The volatile and rapidly changing drug supply certainly has been a challenge as fentanyl is now found in every type of drug. Inequities in terms of treatment for substance use disorder may also play a factor as white people are more likely to have better access to the most evidence-based treatments and are more likely to stay in treatment.”

Fear of arrest

Abenaa Jones, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of human development and family studies at Penn State who was not involved in the study, has conducted similar research in Baltimore. She agreed that fentanyl-contaminated drugs — which are more common in lower-income neighborhoods — and less access to health care are likely factors in the growing number of overdose deaths among Black populations.

Jones said the criminal justice system, and its unequal treatment of Black people, also plays a role.

“We know that the intersection of criminal justice and substance use, and criminalization of drug use and how that disproportionately impacts minorities, can limit the accessibility of harm reduction services to racial-ethnic minorities for fear of harassment by police for drug paraphernalia,” Jones said, adding that even syringes obtained through needle-exchange programs can be considered illegal paraphernalia.

Fear of arrest, in turn, leads more people to using drugs in isolation.

“That may protect you from criminal legal involvement, but then in the event of an overdose, you may not have someone to help you,” Jones said. “So it could be that by the time the EMS come, it’s been too long for them to even consider administering naloxone.”

Contaminated drug supplies

An unexpected observation that Jones made in the course of her research could also be a factor in rising death rates — the fact that many of the Black people dying of opioid overdoses are older.

“For any other racial groups, overdose deaths peak around midlife — 35, 45,” she said. “For Black individuals, it’s more like 55, 64, and we were wondering what was going on with that.”

After investigating that question, Jones and her colleagues formulated a working theory.

“The running hypothesis for us is that this is a cohort effect,” she said. “Individuals who’ve been using drugs over time, particularly Black individuals back from the ‘80s and ‘90s with the cocaine epidemic, never stopped using.”

Those individuals may have remained relatively stable until fentanyl began to contaminate their drug supply without them knowing.

“So whatever harm reduction tools that you were using for so many years that’s been helping you, when fentanyl’s involved, it’s a different game,” Jones said. “You have to use less, but you have to also know that you have fentanyl in your drugs, right?

It’s a problem that Marcia Tucker, the program director of Pathways to Recovery — a partial hospitalization program focused on co-occurring substance use and mental health challenges — sees frequently among their mostly Black clients.

“If you come into treatment saying that I’m a cocaine user, or I’m a crack cocaine user, or I use marijuana, you’re not even thinking that an opioid overdose or fentanyl overdose could possibly happen to you,” Tucker said. “And it does happen.”

Fear, stigma and miseducation

In fact, Tucker said, she’s seen more of these kinds of overdoses over the past two years than in the three decades she’s spent working in addiction treatment. Despite that, there’s still a lack of education — and even stigma — surrounding both medication-assisted treatments (MATs) for opioid addiction, and the use of naloxone.

“I think sometimes culturally with the African American community, as far as MATs are concerned, there are some taboos about getting that extra help when they decide to come into treatment and get clean,” she said. “A lot of people feel like they want to do it from the muscle. They see it as another form of using.”

She said others may not know how to use naloxone, what kinds of effects it has or how to get it.

“I think a lot of folks don’t even know that they can walk into a pharmacy and get naloxone — you don’t have to have a prescription for that,” Tucker said. “And I think that information is just not always presented to communities, especially poor communities that don’t have a lot of resources.”

Other sources of hesitation are more immediate. Aaron Rice, a therapist at Pathways to Recovery, said that many of their clients fear naloxone because of its physical effects.

“I think they associate it with precipitated withdrawal at times,” Rice said, referring to the rapid-onset withdrawal that can cause symptoms including anxiety, pain, seating, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

“The only thing they’re thinking about is feeling better. And that feeling is going to supersede logic at that moment. It always does.”

Overcoming disparities in health care and mistrust of the system

The Department of Health acknowledged that the study only paints a partial picture, as it doesn’t include individuals whose overdoses were reversed by naloxone, and added that during the years of the study (2019–2021), naloxone was available by prescription only — a fact that likely played into the race-based disparity.

“There are recognized inequities in access to health care among persons of color, the concept of which likely extends to access to naloxone,” the Department of Health statement reads. “Historically, many public health materials and messaging more narrowly focused on persons using opioids. With people now taking two or more drugs together (whether intentionally or unintentionally), public health materials and messaging need to be more inclusive of all persons using drugs, regardless of the type.”

The study, researcher Abenaa Jones, Marcia Tucker and Aaron Rice all agreed on at least one intervention that could increase Black people’s access to naloxone — relying on trusted community leaders and institutions, like churches, to help educate residents and distribute the overdose-reversing drug.

“I just can’t stress enough how it’s a lifesaver — it’s the difference between life and death,” Tucker said. “I think people who aren’t medical professionals and find themselves in a situation where it might need to be used would probably be a little fearful — fearful about how to use it or how the person is going to react or whether it’s really going to work — just know that you’re better off with it and trying it. You don’t want to have to second guess yourself later and say, ‘I wish we had it. I wish we had gotten it,’ or, ‘I wish we had used it.’”

Source: https://whyy.org/articles/black-pennsylvanians-overdoses-naloxone-less-likely-to-receive/

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Social Affairs,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

From: thinkon908 via Drug Watch International
Subject: FROM DAVE EVANS WHAT TRUMP GOT WRONG PLEASE WRITE TO SENATOR VANCE ABOUT THIS

In a message dated 9/3/2024 6:52:58 AM Eastern Daylight Time:

President Trump and Senator Vance have recently come out in favor of marijuana legalization. This is a big mistake.

Here is what President Trump had to say

As everyone knows, I was, and will be again, the most respected LAW & ORDER President in U.S. History. We will take our streets back by being tough & smart on violent, & all other types, of Crime. In Florida, like so many other States that have already given their approval, personal amounts of marijuana will be legalized for adults with Amendment 3. Whether people like it or not, this will happen through the approval of the Voters, so it should be done correctly. We need the State Legislature to responsibly create laws that prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat run Cities. At the same time, someone should not be a criminal in Florida, when this is legal in so many other States. We do not need to ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them, and no one should grieve a loved one because they died from fentanyl laced marijuana. We will make America SAFE again!

We will address these four statements made by President Trump.

1. As everyone knows, I was, and will be again, the most respected LAW & ORDER President in U.S. History.

If he supports legalization of marijuana he is not in favor of law and order. Marijuana use causes violence in general and violence against women and children. See the attached paper on marijuana and violence. Data also shows that marijuana use is the primary drug involved with child deaths by their caretakers. See the attached power point on child deaths.

2. We need the State Legislature to responsibly create laws that prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat run Cities.

He got it right that marijuana smoking should be banned in public places including apartment buildings. Attached is the Cannabis Industry Victims Education Litigators paper “Marijuana Smoke Carries High Risks to the Health of Users or to the Health of Other Individuals or of the Community” that was sent to the DEA on the rescheduling issue. It covers the science on topics such as:

Relevant Facts about Marijuana Smoke – 9
Marijuana smoke has dangerous levels of particulate matter – 10
California Environmental Protection Agency Declares Marijuana Smoke a Carcinogen – 11
Marijuana Smoke is More dangerous than Tobacco Smoke – 12
Second Hand Marijuana Smoke Is Dangerous to Individuals and the Community – 13
Cannabis Smoke and Pollen Are Known Allergens – 18
Marijuana Is Addictive and Marijuana Smoke and Odor Can Trigger Relapse – 22
Marijuana Smoke May Trigger Relapse in Those Suffering from Cannabis Use Disorder – 24

3. We do not need to ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.

 

President Trump got that wrong. I have been a criminal defense attorney since 1974. Attached is the AALM paper on social justice and marijuana arrests. It is a myth that there are many minorities in prison due to possession of small amount of marijuana. Most states treat this as a civil offense or a very minor offense and records can be expunged. An arrest can help get marijuana users evaluated and treated. See the attached paper on Compassionate Justice.

4. “no one should grieve a loved one because they died from fentanyl laced marijuana. We will make America SAFE again!

President Trump got that wrong

I was an EMT for 10 years and President of a rescue squad and also an EMT on a mountain fire company. Here is what first responders have to say about “fentanyl laced marijuana” in their Journal of Emergency Medical Services

Fentanyl-laced cannabis products are a malevolent myth that has appeared multiple times in law enforcement press releases and subsequent media reports. These rumors began as early as 2017 when a county coroner in Ohio erroneously stated that he had seen evidence of marijuana laced with fentanyl. It was later determined that his remarks were unsubstantiated and were based on third-hand hearsay. To-date, there are no scientifically verified reports fentanyl contamination of cannabis products. Writer and drug researcher Claire Zagorski notes that in addition to the paucity of evidence associated with the rumors, fentanyl is destroyed and rendered inert when it is burned. Meaning that even if it made its way onto cannabis flower, it would not have any effect on the individuals who inhaled it when smoking. Additionally, fentanyl is not well absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract, which is why there are no oral preparations of the medication which minimizes the risk of its impact if it were to end up in edible products. Finally, it is worth noting that it is possible that fentanyl could be vaporized (heated to its boiling point as opposed to burning). However, it requires much higher temperatures than are found in vaping devices that are used to consume tobacco and cannabis products.

There are, of course, a few different ways to consume cannabis. The method most of us probably think of is smoking. In the case of cannabis flower, smoking involves loading the material into a pipe or roll paper, lighting it on fire, and inhaling the smoke. Burning fentanyl with flame destroys it, so even if someone smoked cannabis contaminated with fentanyl, the fentanyl would not be active in the smoke. In fact, burning drugs in an incinerator is a common way to dispose of them, both for prescription medications and for illegal drugs seized by law enforcement.

David G. Evans, Esq.
www.ncagainstmarijuana.org

Source: www.drugwatch.org

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Fentanyl,Political Sector,USA :

10Sep2024

In this special episode of the Pathways 2 Podcast, recorded live at the National Prevention Network (NPN) Conference, we bring you two insightful conversations with leaders who are making a significant impact in the field of prevention.

First, we sit down with Ben Stevenson, who oversees prevention and harm reduction services for Montgomery County, Maryland, and also runs his own consulting firm, Bess Consulting LLC. Ben shares his innovative approach to integrating youth empowerment with harm reduction, his journey in building a successful Youth Ambassador Program, and the challenges of overcoming stigma and navigating county government to drive meaningful change.

Next, we hear from Steve Miller, a prevention champion, podcaster, and man in long-term recovery. Steve takes us through his personal and professional journey, highlighting the powerful role music has played in his recovery and prevention work. He discusses how music serves as a muse, guiding his work and helping others find their path in prevention.

Whether you’re a prevention professional, a community leader, or simply interested in stories of resilience and innovation, this episode is packed with practical insights, inspiration, and a deep dive into what it takes to make a lasting impact in our communities.

Key Takeaways:

  • The power of youth-led initiatives in prevention and harm reduction.
  • Strategies for overcoming stigma and building community buy-in.
  • How music can influence behavior and serve as a tool for prevention.

Transcript:

Welcome back to another episode of the Pathways to Prevention podcast, where we shine a light on the people stories and strategy’s making a difference in the field of prevention. I’m your host, Dave Closson and today I am excited to bring you to insightful conversations recorded live from the National Prevention Network Conference, where the theme was shining a light on prevention.

In this episode, you’ll hear from two exceptional leaders who are driving impactful change in their communities and beyond. First, we have Ben Stevenson from Maryland who oversees prevention and harm reduction services in Montgomery county. We’ll also running his own consulting firm. Ben shares his experiences, challenges and successes in empowering youth. And integrating prevention with harm reduction in innovative ways. Then. I had the opportunity to sit down with Steve Miller. A true prevention champion. Long-term recovery advocate and fellow podcaster. Steve takes us on a journey through his work in prevention. The powerful role that music has played in his life and in his recovery. And how it continues to inspire his mission to help others. These conversations are full of wisdom, practical insights, and inspiration for anyone involved in prevention work. So let’s dive in. And hear from these incredible prevention leaders.

The Vision, a world where all people live free of the burden of drug abuse. This is the Drug Free America Foundation’s Pathway to Prevention podcast, where we are committed to developing strategies that prevent drug use and promote sustained recovery. Thank you for not only tuning in, but your continued support and efforts to help make this world a better place.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

Alright, so, first off, coming to folks here from the National Prevention Network Conference, would love for you to just introduce yourself.

Okay. All right. So I’m Ben Stephenson from Maryland. So I work in, oversee, prevention of harm reduction services for Montgomery County, Maryland and then I also own a best consulting LLC. All right, rock. And so tell me a little bit about the work that you do, whether it be through your consulting company or the harm reduction work, what do you do?

Sure. So, on the prevention side, oversee, all of our prevention, education and awareness efforts. So that includes community awareness campaigns, efforts around drug take back. Also oversee a youth ambassador program. So, we have used, we pretty much empower young people to use their voice to educate about the dangerous substances, mental health, wellness, and in advocacy, we train them in advocacy.

And then on the harm reduction side, oversee our Narcan training and distribution efforts. A syringe services program as well as our efforts to distribute, fentanyl test strips, xylazine test strips, currently working on expanding harm reduction services into vending machines, and other avenues to try to, you know, meet people where they are and support people until they’re ready to pursue their treatment and recovery.

And then on the consulting side, I’m a SAPS trainer, so I was a part of the consultants that, update the SAPS curriculum. So, now it’s the SPF application for prevention success training versus the substance abuse prevention skills training. I also, also an ethics trainer, and then I also do, you know, conference presentations.

But this week, I decided I just want to be a participant. So, you know, participating in the NPN. Taking it all in. Yeah. All right. You got a lot of work. You’re doing. I can only imagine that through doing that work, getting it started, maintaining, sustaining, growing that work. You’ve encountered some, some challenges or barriers.

What are a couple that come to mind? Yeah, I think that the main challenges you can think of are related to maybe stigma, still stigma around substance use. So people not necessarily understanding, how prevention or how harm reduction works. How they can be married together in a sense to build a stronger system.

I think it’s been a lot of like education on my end and my team’s end to try to educate people on how this, how it could look, how it could work together versus, hey, you have this funding. They have that funding and then you don’t really, you know, communicate. Then of course, you know, me working in county government, sometimes you have some extra hoops and hurdles to work through.

To overcome. Which is of course, you know, a challenge within itself. But, you know, you just still, you get up every day. You fight the good fight and the, and the joy of prevention is that it’s always changing. It’s never the same. So you just adapt to the times and figure out how you can be innovative and help your community.

What are some of those successes that you’ve seen? I think for me as of late, so, we’re moving into our fourth year of having a youth ambassador program. in totality, I’ve been with the county for 10 years. It’s something I’d always wanted to do because I knew the power of the youth voice.

So giving them that space, I think has been very rewarding for me. You know, working with adults, you can kind of burn yourself out, but working with kids, they energize you, right? So I think this past couple of years, you know, the youth really were in tune with, You know, what we’ve been experiencing as a country around opioids and overdose deaths and wanted to do something.

So, you know, I worked with a group of young people who wanted to change policy within the within the school system so that you could carry Narcan within school. So you, you can carry Narcan in our school system without feeling as if they’re going to get punished. Right. Then also all of the schools have are equipped with Narcan all the way down to the elementary school.

Then this past year, youth wanted to actually train their peers on identifying the signs and symptoms of an overdose, how to respond, and how to administer Narcan. So, we trained 11 of our youth ambassadors to train other, their peers, and they trained about 300 youth last year and adults. So, I think, you know, that has been a, a major success because now the school system has seen it and they’re like, Hey, we want to make sure that you have youth ambassadors from every high school in the county where there’s 26 high schools and I’ve had representatives from maybe 11 of them.

So trying to get across the entire county and then build up the infrastructure to where you build a pipeline of those youth having that same message from the middle school level all the way to the high school. So once the high school situation gets solidified, we can filter it down to the middle school level.

I’ll call it a 10 year journey that you’ve been on and still are on to get the youth ambassador program to where it is today What might be some tips or some things you’ve learned that you can share with our listeners? Yeah, I think one challenge that I ran into initially was trying to establish smaller youth ambassador chapters at each school Which of course in those situations Me being in such a large jurisdiction Those situations is hard because you got to have a sponsor at the school to oversee that.

So that was a challenge within itself. So I realized, okay, maybe I need to just pull it back and just do something countywide. knowing that, okay, you got youth from all over the county. How do you want to make sure they have the ability to meet without having to drive somewhere? So, luckily zoom has been, you know, or, you know, I think Google meets all kinds of platforms we use initially.

Have been phenomenal because it helps to keep youth engaged. but then also giving them the power to control it to not just having the voice, but they it’s their baby and let them know that, hey, we’re only going to be successful based off of you. I’m just here to support you and to put some fiscal, you know, money or put something behind you to support the strategies and initiatives you want to do.

So, I think having that youth co-chair model, Having youth officers, them leading the meetings, them pretty much recruiting, doing all those different things has been, you know, phenomenal. I just, I just sit back and just kind of watching it manifest, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, I heard what sounded like a pretty good piece of wisdom, but you kind of just rolled right off your tongue.

You had a vision, the local chapter’s vision, but then you realized that that wasn’t the right path forward and you, you adjusted course. All still within that grander big picture vision of the youth advisory that not afraid to pivot. Right. Of course. And I think I learned that, from, you know, experiences with like larger organizations like CADCA and then seeing other organizations within my state that were doing youth initiatives that were maybe that jurisdiction wasn’t at the size of mine, but saying, Hey, They can do it.

We can do it too. and then just getting, you know, upper leadership to believe that it could be done. And now that they’re seeing it, they’re like, wow, how can we be a part? What can we do to support? Like, what do you need and things like that? And so, I think that has, you know, being able to put prevention in a place of prominence is important.

because you know, we have the, what the Institute of Medicine’s continuum of care. But sometimes people still don’t understand prevention because it’s not providing those immediate results. Right. And so, if you can see, if you can show some, some of those mild substance moments, you know, from, you know, kids sharing their experiences in the program from them sharing what they learn, to, you know, county leadership, seeing them present and articulate themselves in a way that they’re just like, wow, these are some and even trying to get, you know, to the kids who might be on the fence of if I want to use or not, Hey, this seems pretty cool.

And I can get community service hours and, you know, writing recommendation letters for college. And we’ve gotten to a place of giving honor cords for graduating seniors that could wear graduation. So when other kids are seeing it, they’re like, Hey, I want to be a part of that. I think that kind of speaks to.

The importance of like, not only addressing risk factors in our community, but also addressing those protective factors. So that positive opportunity to belong is important because I, I mean, I can see it, you know, I can see the importance of it, right? Yes. So I’ve got, I’ll say I’ve got four questions left.

Okay. You touched on two things that I hear from folks in the prevention field all the time as far as barriers, challenges, or how the heck are we supposed to do that? Yeah. One getting upper leadership on board, but then also the, the buy in and the, the youth taking ownership. Yeah. What kind of insights or experience could you share there for our listeners?

Yeah. So, I learned a lot from, you know, just some time working with, with CADCA and a really good friend of mine oversaw like the youth leadership initiative and that mantra of youth, youth led, but adult guided. And I really believed in that because. I could see how like the, like the youth that were working with, with CACA in those spaces, they were, they were very bright, phenomenal, and they were leading educational sessions, things like that.

And I was like, I know I have kids in my, or youth in my, in my county that can do that same thing. I just have to find them. it’s, it’s initially it kind of happened organically, but then, you know you started reaching out, Hey, I’m doing this project on such and such. And it’s related to fentanyl or whatever.

And I’m like, well, why are you not in my program? Like, what have you been doing? And then they’ll sign on and they like, Hey, I don’t know why I haven’t been here, but I’m happy to be here now. Right. Yeah. So I think really just understanding that it’s not going to happen overnight. You got to just continue to just keep, keep fighting a good fight.

Eventually those things that you want to change and manifest in your community will happen. Like Rich Lucey from DEA says prevention is about the long game. Yes. 10 years running. Yeah. I’m curious if you have a, a good story that really shows the impact of your work with the youth and stigma, whatever it may be. Just a story that talks about the, the impact. Yeah. So I used to get requests to, do presentations at high schools, right? And you never really know, you never really know the impact of those presentations because you might be presenting to like a parent group or something like that.

Right. And so, we eventually got to a place of wanting to train all of our bus operators in the lock zone administration so that they can have Narcan on the bus and things like that. Just in case overdose happens on the bus. Well, not knowing that one of the administrators or one of the managers of supervisors over the transit system was in one of my presentations at the high school because their daughter was a student at the high school.

it was a full circle moment because he basically said to me, he was like, a lot of the things you share that night helped me and my wife because our daughter eventually dealt with substance use disorder. But we knew what to do to help support her and navigate her through that space.

So that really like it was a real like aha moment to me that, you know, what we’re doing is working. And yes, if someone does go down that path, you still want to make sure you give them those tools and maybe you can help bring them back in and keep them safe and keep them alive.

Right. So, I think that was just, I mean, there’s been a lot of moments, literally you thought it gave me goosebumps. I can feel that, one last question, one last, but I promise, I promise, you mentioned earlier, you said it so eloquently about putting prevention in a prominent place.

The theme of this conference is shining a light on prevention. So can you give us, you know, a description of what does that, what does that mean to you? Yeah. I, I really feel like there’s a lot of opportunities for prevention out here, whether it’s through not only, you know, pursuit of grant fund is, but I think that’s mobilizing to say, Hey, you know, block grant funds haven’t changed in the past 20 years.

What? Maybe we need to advocate, you know, to get that shift. But I think making sure that we’re at the tables. of those who are in control of funding, right? And so, I think for me, I’ve been fortunate enough to be at some of those tables where, you know, we are gaining access to some of the, like the opioid abatement funds to build up the infrastructure of prevention in the county and to build up harm reduction in the county and things like that, which, you know, you know, treatment services and crisis services and other service areas, they’ve always had money to do the things that they needed to do.

But prevention never really had that. So I think, you know, continuing to, you know, do the work, advocate, you know, show, you know, positive results and get to those tables is important to help us get to that prominent level that, hey, we’re part of the continuum or the spectrum of services as well. We need to be funded in a way so that we can prevent all those people from having to go to treatment to him and experience recovery.

Right. So I think Not only, you know, advocating for ourselves, but also building up those allies to help us advocate, to show the power of prevention because it’s definitely a place for us. and, you know, we’re all in the same business of trying to, you know, promote optimal wellbeing in our communities, right?

The themes that I heard were persistence, perseverance. together. Yeah. And, and I would say a twofold listening and learning. Yes, of course. Cause I mean, we might be the experts on the process, but of course we’ve got to connect with those and collaborate with those people in the community because they’re the experts on the, on the story of that community.

We can’t really, you know, talking to a lot of my colleagues, we, we talk about shifting from being implementers to coaches or mentors so that, you know, you can sustain some of the efforts and outcomes that are in the communities, you know, so, so that’s the hope and goal, right? Yeah. All right.

What would be one final takeaway call to action to leave our listeners with? Yeah. I’ll just say that, you know, my experience in this field is that It’s important to network because you can always learn from somebody else. Something innovative, something creative that somebody else has done in another part of the country that you could maybe implement in your, your area.

and then always just, just making sure you stay abreast and up on top of, you know, language and evidence based practices and all those different things. Because I’ve only been in the field for 18 years and it’s changed exponentially over the course of that time. So. Just saying, staying abreast of that and staying engaged, mentors, having a mentor, I have multiple.

And if you feel burnt out, make sure you take care of yourself. Mom’s always said, if you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of somebody else. So All right. Folks. That was, was an enlightening conversation with Ben. Who’s truly leading the way. In integrating prevention and harm reduction in his community. And I just loved hearing about his work with youth and this commitment to breaking down barriers is, is inspiring and really does offer us some valuable lessons for, for everyone in the prevention field.

But now we’re shifting gears to another powerful voice in prevention. Steve Miller is not only a longterm recovery advocate, but also someone who’s found a unique way. To incorporate his passion for music into his prevention work. Steve’s insights on the role of music and shaping behavior. And his own journey through recovery are both thought provoking and motivating. So let’s dive into my conversation with Steve Miller.

All right, folks, bringing you another conversation from the NPN conference. Where the theme is shining a light on prevention, and I’m honored to be hanging out here with the one and only Steve Miller, who is a prevention champion, prevention podcaster, man in long term recovery and is sharing his voice, his story, his wisdom to help make positive change in this world.

So without further ado, Steve, great to be talking to you again. Hey, thanks, Dave. I’m glad to be here. Yeah. Oh, all right. So we’re jumping right in. We’re jumping right in. I don’t want to, to really tell your background and why you work in prevention now, but I’m hoping you might be able to, to give us, we’ll say a cliff notes version of highlights real of.

What led you to working in prevention? That’s always an interesting question, Dave. And one of the things that I’ve realized, and this has been in the last couple of years, that I would have said, oh, there’s just been so many random things that have happened in my life. And then when I sat down and kind of looked at them on a timeline, I realized it was actually a straight line.

And it wasn’t something that was so haphazard. It was actually what was intended all along for me to be doing. And, and part of that is, is the natural evolution. As you said, I am a person in, in long term recovery. And so I’ve been working in either the treatment field or some variation of prevention for three decades now.

And so that’s really been my life’s focus is my own recovery. And, and then what I’ve learned in that journey is how do I kind of. Find my work through who I, who I really am. And one of the common denominators through all of this, before I was in recovery, since I’ve been in recovery and now in the prevention field has been this.

I call it the muse leading me through song, if you will, and I had to learn the prevention field. I didn’t know it existed. I didn’t know there was a science. I just kind of fit the description of what they were looking for as a new staff member. And I thought, Oh, I could do that. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that.

My guiding force through prevention is believing that by finding, we find our work through ourselves and when we do that kind of strengthens our commitment to do this kind of work, but it also strengthens the workforce because just like you, you’ve kind of found a path that leads you in the work that you’re doing.

But you started in prevention and I found a path by starting in prevention, learning the science, learning how the strategic prevention framework operates, all that kind of stuff. Then I stood back and I thought, does music belong in? And lo and behold, that’s kind of the answer has been, Oh yeah, it does.

Because it’s been such a powerful force in my life. I thought it’s got to be added into what I’m doing in prevention, added into your story, because like you said, it, it’s been a muse behind that straight line to prevention. So let’s just talk about that. Let’s, let’s go right there and talk about. Music.

You say it’s been your muse. What do you mean by that? How has it been your muse? People ask me when I talk about it, they go, so what instrument do you play? And I’m like, I play the radio really well. And if I want to, I can put a record on the turntable, but I am not a musician. I have been someone who has been an avid consumer of music like a lot of people since I was an adolescent.

And I tell a whole story through a training that I do about how music shaped my life, but how it shapes our lives. And then I just overlay that in the, into the prevention field, because there’s a lot of research that shows how music influences our choices. And when we’re adolescents and we’re trying to figure out who we are and what we want out of life and where we’re going to go, we’re very susceptible to outside stimulus and peer pressure is really what that comes down to.

And music can be a part of that music. Plays a part in helping us form our identity because we have such this creative bond with music. Everybody can think for themselves, what was that song that was the soundtrack to your life as an adolescent? Did you dance to? Who’d you fall in love to? Who’d you hang out with your buddies?

You know, what was the, what was playing in the background? And we all kind of have that somewhere inside of us. My choices happen to be very detrimental and that was a part of my addiction. And then when I found myself in a recovery process, it was music again, that kind of just woke me up and made me realize there are messages in all of these songs that are beneficial to who I am at this particular point in my life.

So that we’re kind of a meditative process. But then when I got into prevention, I started thinking, how could, how could my experience And how could the research that supports my experience be beneficial to a message that would target an audience that’s either adolescents, or I talk about how music is a part of the workforce development in my life, music, really.

I start my day with it and I probably end with it, but I start most days with a song. And I mean, to prove that to you this morning, I woke up with a song in my head. And I sat down in the, before I even really get out of bed, I write kind of a journal entry about that song and what it means to me and how it kind of feels like it’s guiding me for the day, what that intention would happen to be.

And I’ve just followed it because it’s fun. I feel like I’m kind of the only one that does it. I’ve shared these ideas with other people, but been very insightful for me. And, and, I still provide training and technical assistance through prevention to lots of audiences, but there’s this little niche that I talk about where the music kind of fits right in there, I’d like to, to zoom in and.

Wanna really. Invite you to share a great example of, of how music played a part in your addiction. You said you kind of, it kind of kicked you off and had a prominent role there. Can you give us that, that kind of that, that clear example, like what happened? I mean, think, and I was trying to get, we were talking about this for the, for the audience to kind of.

I was how to Get this in their mindset as well. If you think about a song that you hear and when you hear it, you’re kind of transported to a time and place in your life. Now, I have a song that always takes me to exactly the same memory and it’s, it’s uncanny that I actually, it was, it’s, it’s a song by ACDC and it takes me to the lake outside of the town I grew up in.

And it’s not just the song and the, and, and the association of that time in my life. I actually, I’m telling you right now, it’s almost like I can feel the air around the lake on my skin. It, it’s like, It’s being transported to that memory and reliving it again. And that’s how powerful music is. So I ask people all the time, what is that song for you?

And why do you have such a strong association with it? Maybe it’s because you fell in love, you know, that kind of thing. Maybe it’s the first dance you ever had, because I have that story as well. But there was a time in my life when if you’d have said, Oh, Steve, you’ll smoke cigarettes, or you’ll drink alcohol, or you’ll use some kind of substance.

I would have thought you’re, you’re crazy. Cause I was like any other kid that I grew up with. I played sports, hung out with my friends. We rode our bikes everywhere. I grew up in the 1970s. Anybody that’s listening probably knows what that was like. And one day, I mean, I know that it was a Saturday. I know that it was eight minutes after nine o’clock in the morning and an older brother To one of my friends came into the room and put on a song and in that moment, everything about what I thought life was changed.

And the song to me was rock and roll. And I thought it was about something that I wanted to pursue. And it was really about. In that moment, to me, it was about using drugs and alcohol. Now, I had some experience with it before then, but after that moment, everything changed. I mean, it was like a slipper slide.

It went downhill quick. And then years later, when I got curious about this topic we’re talking about, I got to looking at that specific song. And I realized that song is not a pro drug use anthem that I thought it was. It’s actually a very thought provoking message to one of the singer’s bandmates because he was concerned about his own health and his own life because of his substance use.

And I, so I point out to the audience that as adolescents, we kind of make a lot of things up based upon what we want to hear, because we’re looking for that, that identity, who are we, where are we going? How do I feel those kinds of things? And a song can slip right in there. And I’m not unique in that fashion.

I have talked to several people in the last 10 plus years that have told me stories about how they heard a song and made a decision in the moment. And sometimes I’ve stood back and said, you did what, and then they explain it to me and it makes perfect sense because of the time of their life, what they were experiencing, those kinds of things.

And so that song really impacted my life. In a very detrimental way, some people, it impacts their lives in a very positive. And I’ve talked to some that it, a song shaped their life in a way. It is very financially rewarding. So I think it’s across the board. The question is, is do we ever, do we ever really listen to what that song is actually saying to us or how we feel about it or what it means to us?

And I think that’s the key is really being in the moment and aware enough to know that this song may say one thing, but I may take it another way. And then when we’re adolescents, it might behoove us to ask someone, an adult or someone we trust. This is what I hear this song saying, as opposed to this is what I think this song is saying.

So getting some of that feedback and checking that out before I make some sort of a critical life decision. And that’s basically, we talk in prevention about media literacy. So that could be printed or television ads or radio or social media, whatever that looks like. I just put it under the heading of it’s really about music literacy and understanding the impact it has in our lives.

You just made me kind of understand about myself. There’s a lot of songs that I love and they make me feel a way when I hear them and they take me back to those moments like you talked about, but I can’t say I know all the lyrics. I may only know just the chorus or one line, but I love these songs because of the memories I have, the feelings I have associated to them, like the, for my, my wedding.

I asked for a, I call it a secret first dance. I wanted to dance a specific song before we went into the actual like dinner afterwards. And so it was just my wife and I, and the photographer and that’s it. And I don’t know the lyrics to that song. I know the title of it and the artist, but that’s it.

But I love it whenever I hear it. Come on. It takes me right back to that moment. We’re having our moment. Yeah. Yeah. But I don’t know the lyrics. And what’s interesting is I watched it was. A reel on one of the social media channels just in the last couple of days. And it was something that said as a Gen Xer actually listens to the song and, and you can see ’em kind of keying into what the message is and being like, oh, I didn’t realize that’s what that song was saying.

Right? Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. . And, and that, that fits the bill. Some of us know that hook and some of us know just the, the feeling that we get. That’s associated with the song, but there’s a lot of research out there that says, even if we’re not consciously aware of the lyrics, some part of our brain is picking up on the messaging of that.

Now, whether that’s detrimental or whether that’s inspiring or whatever that looks like is different for the individual. No two songs are the same. But like I said, I hear a song and, and the song I heard this morning is one that I really only know the hook to, like you just said, so I Googled the whole lyrics and then I sat down and wrote a little passage about it, but I have had experiences where I woke up and I had that same thought, you know, some, some, some statements going through my head and I’m like, I don’t even know if that’s a song and then I’ll say, I’ll Google lyric and then whatever it is I’m thinking, and if it comes up as a song and I yeah.

I’m amazed. There’s been times when I’ve done that and I swear to you, I have no recollection of ever hearing that song in my life. Now, where did I pick it up? Why did it come to me in my sleep? I don’t know. But I am fascinated by the fact that when I’ve been led to understanding that there’s some something stuck in my subconscious, if you will, and it ekes out when I wake up in the morning and it’s a song that I picked up somewhere along the way, I just don’t know where or when or why, but that’s why the why is like, well, why is this showing up?

And then I try to kind of analyze it, kind of meditate on it, gives me a way to set my intention for the day. And sometimes I might share that with other people if I find it a profound insight in some way or another, I’m going to draw a connection that might not be there or not, but I’m reaching for it.

And I know and trust that you’ll be like, ah, Dave, there’s no connection there. But I talk a lot about the power of storytelling and prevention, treatment, and recovery, both for the, the listeners, but then also for the actual storyteller themselves, but songs. They have the story element, they have the story factor too.

So wouldn’t that be sort of one in the same? I think so. I’ve, I’ve heard people talk about that songwriting really is a gift because I’ve seen interviews with artists or authors that have written books and they’re like, they can tell a story in three and a half, four minutes that takes me a chapter or two to tell, but they can synthesize it down in a way.

And that’s the part like that led up to anything really being, you know, like understanding how music impacts me emotionally as an adolescent, because my parents played music when I was growing up, but the songs that stick with me to this day are the ones that tell a very vivid story. And so I’m kind of a storyteller of sorts myself, but I like a song that tells a really powerful story.

So as an example, The first song that I really can remember, I wanted that song so bad. And it was a, it’s a singer named Jim Croce. And the song is bad, bad Leroy Brown. And I was a nine year old boy. And I mean, bad, bad Leroy Brown was the baddest man in the whole damn town. Badder than old King Kong and meaner than a junkyard dog.

And to a nine year old boy, it’s like. I want to be, you know, like to me, it was like the he’s respected and, you know, he’s a tough guy and, you know, kind of things that as a nine year old boy, you’re playing G. I. Joe and playing army with your buddies. You know, you’re kind of wanting to be that masculine kind of identity.

And that was what bad, badly Roy Brown was. But it’s a very vivid story song. And a lot of Jim’s work is story songs. And so I’ve always sought those out. I like all kinds of music. I don’t pick a genre, but the ones that seem to rise to the top are the ones that tell me a story about something that I don’t understand.

And I’m, as I’m explaining this, I watched a documentary about a group and, and they had on there as a guest, he was a professor of music of some sort from a university. And he said, I had a student that did a, master’s thesis on this particular subject. And he spent all semester long or all year long, however long that takes and wrote this thesis.

And he said, this singer captured the same essence in three and a half minutes. That’s the power of a song. And if you can deliver that and people can really kind of onboard that, it can be powerful in a lot of ways, or it can be, like I said, it can be, it can be harmful in ways. So it just depends on the listener and how you.

How you perceive it, how you receive it and, and how you may or may not act on it. I want to ask about a powerful song that if I remember correctly, as part of your journey as to where you are today. So if I, if I throw out the Beatles song help, where does that take you to in your life? Well, that’s the turning point.

I’ve actually written a short story for a friend of ours that’s doing a collection of legacy stories. And I kind of tell the story through two things, the, the song that was kind of the gateway into substance misuse. And then it was the song by the Beatles help that was kind of the book into it. And it was the one that really kind of illustrated to me that songs spoke to people in very unique ways.

And it was a Catholic priest that was talking about the fact that, the lyrics of a popular song could be the catalyst to get someone’s attention about their addiction. And I remember thinking in that moment, wow, I wonder if that would happen for me. Now, when I look back, the surprise is it was happening to me, right?

But that’s the desperation of, of that point when you’re asking for help in recovery and the Beatles song help is, was the song he illustrated. And if you look at those lyrics. Makes perfect sense. When I was much younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody’s helping. Well, here I am in a institution asking for help and realizing that someone has captured that essence of what I’m going through and put it in a song and it kind of planted that seed like, well, what other songs are in my life that might be signposts and.

Those kinds of things. And, and I was a huge consumer still lamb, but I had more time on my hands when I was younger. I was a huge consumer of music and I worked in television at the time and the general manager’s assistant just one day casually said to me, Steve, how long has it been since you listened to any music?

And I said, it’s kind of a strange question. And she said, your personality is different when you don’t listen to music for a period of time. And that’s another point in my life when I was like. What, what is this all about, you know, and I started at that point, not just listening to like a popular song that I liked, I started like listening to entire albums, like what’s being portrayed here and I read an article and, and the author had said that if you really want to understand The author that writes popular novels or something like that, read everything that they’ve ever written, and you’ll have some understanding of who they are as a person.

And so I started that through the lens of music and started thinking about some of the artists that I was enamored with and started listening to their entire albums and their entire catalogs, just to kind of seek out, like, What has been the path for this person and, and lo and behold, after doing that for years on end, it found its way into the prevention work.

To me, it’s really about following the muse, if you will, or following your own life’s path. And in prevention, that’s kind of where I started in, in prevention. If you stick around here and you find some attraction to it. I think you have to put yourself into the work at some. It has to start becoming a reflection of who you are.

You have to be vulnerable enough to really say, this is this is kind of who I am. And this thing that I do kind of all merged together because for me, prevention and my recovery, but. Prevention is really about people. Somebody I know says prevention is better together, and together we are stronger. And that says everything about prevention.

Because it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You can’t go in and change a community’s rate of underage alcohol consumption just by telling the chief of police or having an article in the newspaper. You have to get people together in a concerted effort. Effort to make a difference. And that’s why I do the work that I do.

And that’s why I’m passionate about bringing the music into it, because I think we all, whether we’re as active in their consumption of music as I am, I think we all have been touched by music or love music in some form or fashion. And if I can just help people to see that maybe those songs are speaking to them about something, then, then that’s, that’s kind of how it’s played out in my life.

I say that I practice a two way communication with music. I listened to the song and then I asked the song, what is it that you want me to hear from this? And then I try to write about it. So I know we could talk for hours. But we’ve got a conference to get back to, so I want to just throw one more thing your way before we wrap up this chat as a to be continued.

But I’m curious, what’s final takeaway if you’re going to leave with one thing, what’s it going to be or call to action for our listeners from around the globe? Well, I love the call to action and it is think about that song. What is that song that stops you in your tracks and takes you to that moment?

And why is it so? Unbelievably powerful in your life. And, and like I’ve already said, think about what it might be saying to you, because it’s unique. I heard Dave Grohl, he’s the lead singer for the band Foo Fighters, and others might know him as the drummer from Nirvana, but he said, the amazing thing is, is he said, I can stand on stage and I know that I am singing this song to 80, 000 people.

But the beauty of music is. 80, 000 people are singing back their own interpretation of that song. To me, that really personalizes all of this in that I think music is a very powerful presence in our lives and it must serve some greater purpose because a question I’ll often ask is. Music doesn’t have to exist, but it does.

Think for a moment that music no longer is a part of your life. And I’ve never met anybody say, well, I won’t miss it. Most people are like, wow, that means there’s, there’s no soundtrack at the movie, the commercials are just talking heads. You don’t even know that birds chirp because that’s music. If all of that was gone from our lives, what a different world it would be.

So I turn it around and say, this must mean that there’s something here. And I would always challenge people just to ask themselves, what is the value that music plays? And with that listeners do some thinking, do some listening and have a conversation with some songs. Steve, thanks for taking time to chat.

Always, always, always a pleasure. Thanks, Dave. Always glad to be here.

That concludes this episode. Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to hit the subscribe button and share this episode with a friend before you leave. And we look forward to seeing you on social media because prevention is better together. Together, we are stronger.

 

Source: Drug Free America Foundation

Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

 

By  BRUCE SCHREINER
 September 10, 2024

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman unveiled plans Tuesday to create a statewide drug prevention program, saying the youth-focused initiative would fill a hole in the Bluegrass State’s fight against an addiction epidemic that has claimed thousands of lives.

Coleman presented the plan’s details to a state commission, which unanimously approved his request for a $3.6 million investment over two years to implement it.

“With over one million Kentuckians under the age of 18, we are going to put every single dollar to good use,” Coleman said. “Our parents and grandparents schooled us that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I fully believe this initiative lives up to that age-old sentiment.”

Substance abuse is a deadly scourge in Kentucky though there are signs of progress in fighting back.

A total of 1,984 Kentuckians died last year from a drug overdose, down 9.8% from the previous year, Gov. Andy Beshear announced in June, citing an annual report. Fentanyl — a powerful synthetic opioid — remained the biggest culprit, accounting for 79% of overdose deaths in 2023, according to the report.

While conceding the fight against drug abuse is far from over, officials credited recent gains on expanded efforts to treat addiction, plus illegal drug seizures by law enforcement.

Source:  https://apnews.com/article/drug-abuse-kentucky-a23d7452851a18aa2420c93ff99cdf34

 

Filed under: Fentanyl,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

Published July 11, 2024

By Andrew Hutchinson

 

X is taking another step in combating the promotion of illegal substances in the app, by signing up to the Prevent Alliance, which aims to establish more definitive rules and approaches to combat synthetic drug promotion within social apps.

Synthetic drugs aim to replicate the effects of more commonly known illicit substances, like cocaine, marijuana and LSD. Arguably, the most notorious synthetic drug is fentanyl, though there are many other dangerous variations of synthetic substances that have now established a market among drug users around the world.

And they can cause serious harm. Research shows that the repeated use of synthetics can cause “long term or irreversible damage to dopaminergic, adrenergic and serotonergic pathways in the brain”.

The more potent mixes can also lead to more serious side effects and harms. As per the CDC, synthetic opioids are now the primary driver of overdose deaths in the United States.

As such, it’s important for X, and indeed all social platforms to crack down on the promotion of synthetics, and this new initiative will ideally help to establish more detection and prevention processes among social apps.

Though, at the same time, X owner Elon Musk himself takes ketamine, a synthetic substance, and his high profile endorsement of this, and other synthetics, could run counter to the aims of this project.

Probably best to view the two in isolation (and Musk, it’s worth noting, uses ketamine in a prescribed capacity), though with Elon’s celebrity, and his desire for attention, that’s increasingly difficult.

Source: www.socialmediatoday.com

Filed under: Ketamine,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
Attorney General Russell Coleman proposed a statewide, youth-focused addiction prevention initiative before the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission Tuesday.

The Commission unanimously approved the two-year, $3.6 million proposal, which is centered around a research-backed youth education campaign.

This campaign, called “Better Without It,” will feature data-driven outreach to engage with young Kentuckians where they are, including on social media, streaming platforms, college campuses and through partnerships with influencers. The campaign will showcase positive, Kentucky-focused messages designed specifically to encourage young people to fulfill their potential.

The Commission and Attorney General’s Office will partner with prevention experts and creative marketing professionals to build the educational campaign that is compelling to young Kentuckians.

“Our kids are growing up with no margin of error. As little as one pill can – and is – killing our neighbors. Today, the Opioid Commission joined with our Office to build a prevention program that will give young people the encouragement that they are better without it,” said Attorney General Coleman “We will reach Kentucky’s young people where they are with a message that resonates. I’m grateful to the Commission for their strong support for this program that can truly save lives.”

In addition to the education campaign, the prevention program will also promote existing school-based programs and amplify the work of the Commission to support youth-focused prevention efforts.

To date, the Commission has distributed more than $55 million to combat the drug crisis, directly helping Kentuckians overcome addiction and promote long-term recovery.

Source: https://nkytribune.com/2024/09/attorney-general-coleman-announces-statewide-youth-drug-prevention-campaign/

Filed under: Addiction,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

RED RIBBON WEEK is Celebrated Annually October 23-31.

Red Ribbon Week highlights the importance of living a drug-free life. It presents an opportunity for parents, educators, and communities to reinforce the drug-free messages they share with their children throughout the year. During Red Ribbon Week, youth and adults around the nation pledge to increase their knowledge by learning more about the destructive effects of drug abuse, including prescription drug misuse, and renew their commitment to live a healthy, drug-free lifestyle.

Source: https://www.dea.gov/redribbon?
Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects on foetus, babies, children and youth,Education,Parents,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

The Pennsylvania State University  Oct 12 2024

Students who feel a sense of belonging at their university are more likely to binge drink than those who do not feel the same connection, according to a new study by researchers at Penn State, the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Oregon.

In the study, published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, scientists -; including researchers in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development -; found that college students with “good” mental health who felt connected to their university were more likely to binge drink than those who did not feel as connected to their university.

Stephane Lanza, professor of biobehavioral health and Edna P. Bennett Faculty Fellow in Prevention Research, studied the topic with Danny Rahal and Kristin Perry when both were postdoctoral trainees in the Penn State Prevention and Methodology Training Program. The researchers examined the ways that both positive and negative aspects of mental health can contribute to the risk of binge drinking, cannabis use and nicotine use.

“In 2021, students at many universities were returning to campus after the COVID-19 shutdown -; and some students were attending in-person college classes for the first time,” said Rahal, lead author of this research and assistant professor of psychology at University of California Santa Cruz.

Data from that time indicated that many students felt disconnected from their school. Universities wanted to foster a sense of connectedness among their students for many good reasons, but we wanted to know if there was something positive -; specifically a sense of belonging -; that is related to substance use. Our study showed that feeling connected to one’s university is associated with higher rates of substance use.”

Danny Rahal, The Pennsylvania State University

The researchers examined data from 4,018 university students collected during the 2022-23 school year. Participants answered questions about substance use, their sense of belonging at their school and their mental health -; specifically about anxiety, depressive symptoms, perceived stress, flourishing in life and confidence in their academic success.

A statistical modeling technique called latent profile analysis allowed the researchers to simultaneously account for all these measures by combining them to identify five profiles of student mental health. In this study, a student was considered to have good mental health if they had lower levels of stress, depressive symptoms and anxiety, as well as higher flourishing and academic confidence than their peers.

 

The researchers said this does not mean that connectedness is bad for students to experience; rather, the results are nuanced.

“We want to cultivate connectedness among students,” said Perry, assistant professor of family and human services at University of Oregon. “Connectedness gets them involved. It can be a really powerful protective factor against negative mental health outcomes and can help keep students in school. But connectedness at school can go hand in hand with binge drinking if there is a culture of drinking at the school.”

Though the researchers said they expected these results about drinking, they were surprised to learn that students with poor mental health who felt connected to their university were more likely to use non-vaped tobacco products than students with poor mental health who did not feel connected to their university. The results around cannabis were less conclusive, but the researchers said the trend was clear.

“Generally, students who felt connected to their university were more likely to use substances than disconnected students with the same level of mental health,” Rahal said.

While a sense of belonging was related to substance use, it could also be part of the solution, according to the researchers.

“Cultivating belonging for all students is an important way that universities can embrace diversity and help all students thrive,” Lanza said.

Though drinking is common on university campuses, many students believe that it is far more common than it is, the researchers explained. In this dataset, slightly fewer than one-third of students reported binge drinking in the last month. Despite the fact that two-thirds of students had not engaged in binge drinking, the researchers also found that students believed a typical student consumed three to five drinks multiple times each week. The researchers said this disconnect between perception and reality points to an opportunity to change the culture -; by creating ample opportunities for all students to socially engage and participate in alcohol-free environments -; so that alcohol feels less central to student life.

Minoritized college students, in particular, often face messages that make them feel unwelcome based on their race, gender, socioeconomic status or other factors, according to the researchers.

“We cannot expect students to stay enrolled unless they are engaged with the campus community,” Lanza continued. “If universities lose students from a specific group, the campus becomes less diverse, and the entire university community becomes less rich. Additionally, when members of those groups leave school, they miss educational opportunities and the earning potential that comes with a college degree. By providing all students with diverse opportunities to build a real sense of belonging at their universities, we can improve campus life while putting people on the path to a healthier life.”

The National Institute on Drug Abuse and Penn State funded this research.

Source: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20241012/New-research-explores-how-campus-belonging-impacts-binge-drinking-and-substance-use.aspxThe Pennsylvania State University
Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Education,Health,Mental Health,USA,Youth :
Posted 
By MARIE GARCEAU

October is National Bullying Prevention Month. Bullying prevention programs begin locally, with communities and the individuals within them creating safe and supportive schools, organizations, neighborhoods and family units.

While this campaign is not as recognized as much as the months dedicated to overdose awareness and suicide prevention, it is equally as crucial. Bullying is linked to drug addiction and suicide. Bullying prevention campaigns help save people from substance abuse and increase awareness in local communities.

According to the PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Center, one in five students report being bullied, but the actual number of bullying incidents can be far more significant. Roughly 41 percent of students who reported being bullied at school indicated that they think the bullying would happen again.

Anyone can be the victim of bullying. A poll conducted by the American Osteopathic Association found that 31 percent of Americans have been bullied as an adult.

The most common reasons for being bullied reported most often by students included physical appearance, race, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion and sexual orientation. The effects of bullying are serious because bullying increases the risk of depression, anxiety, substance use and even suicidal ideation.

According to the NYS Health Department, suicide is the second leading cause of injury-related deaths among New York State residents. National drug abuse statistics coming from the NCDAS show that 8.3 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds reported using drugs in the last month in New York State, and 18- to 25-year-olds are 8 percent more likely to use drugs than the average American. While there are countless reasons why someone would use drugs or alcohol or struggle with suicidal ideation, bullying is often an underlying factor.

National Bullying Prevention Month strives to prevent childhood bullying and promote kindness, acceptance and inclusion. However, anyone can prevent bullying and be part of the solution.

Start by knowing the signs of bullying. This makes it easier to intervene quickly. Generally, you could see shifts in behavior, such as a student becoming more withdrawn. The person could lose self-esteem, become ill, or change eating or sleeping habits. Students begin to lose interest in school and their grades are impacted.

Self-destructive behavior is also typical, such as using drugs or alcohol, or committing self-harm. Parents might see unexplained injuries, or lost or destroyed property as a result of physical bullying. You might also notice the person has become anxious, stressed and even depressed.

Knowing the warning signs is the first step, and the second is intervening. Kids or adults who are being bullied are not quick to talk about it. It’s a good idea to listen to them, assure them you want to help, and let them know it is not their fault this is happening.

Understand that it is painful for anyone to speak up about this, but begin discussing what can be done. Encourage them to speak to someone, such as a teacher, co-worker, friend, counselor or someone in a position of authority who could step in and end the bullying.

Moreover, work to remedy the situation, get people involved and follow up, as bullying does not stop immediately. The bully should also be informed that their behavior is wrong, harmful and, in some instances, illegal; make it known that it will not be tolerated.

Look at some local anti-bullying resources, such as the Advocates for Children of New York, New York State’s Dignity for All Schools Act, and the NYS Center for School Safety.

Early intervention is vital and even more critical if the individual being bullied is using drugs or alcohol to cope. In addition to this, anti-bullying programs are excellent resources for schools, communities and the workplace, and should be implemented. These programs save lives and encourage more people to become aware and help others.

Marie Garceau has been working in the field of substance use and addiction recovery for over a decade. She works at DRS and primarily focuses on reaching out to the community and spreading awareness.

Source: https://riverreporter.com/stories/preventing-bullying-can-prevent-substance-abuse,167846

Filed under: Education,Mental Health,Parents,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

By Brittany Vargas  /  September 30, 2024

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published its first clinical practical guidelines on opioid prescriptions for children with acute pain, outlining 12 evidence-based recommendations for safely and appropriately treating pain in young patients.

The guidelines have been published alongside a technical report in Pediatrics and presented at the group’s 2024 annual meeting.

While not the only set of guidelines of its kind, ”is the first set that is really for anyone who takes care of children, not just surgeons, anesthesiologists, and pain specialists,” said Rita Agarwal, MD, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Stanford University in Stanford, California, who helped write the recommendations.

The opioid guidelines were created to give clinicians a clearer, more objective framework for safe treatment of acute pain in the outpatient setting while mitigating the risk of addiction, overdose, or other harmful effects.

”Most of what we’ve been doing thus far as practitioners has been anecdotal, from experience, or from word of mouth,” said Adaora Gabriellene Madubuko, MBBS, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark.

The AAP advises clinicians to start with the lowest possible dose based on age and weight, to use an immediate-release formula, and provide no more than a 5-day supply, unless trauma or surgery calls for longer-term pain management.

Clinicians should not use opioids as their only strategy for reducing pain in this population. Combining the drugs with other medications can enable prescription of lower doses of opioids and could decrease the side effects of other medications, according to the report. These might include acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Other strategies can include ice or heat, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, age-appropriate relaxation or distraction strategies, and music therapy.

The report also recommends prescribing naloxone alongside each prescription and training caregivers to identify a potential overdose in their child. Clinicians should also provide tips to caregivers about safe storage and disposal of opioids.

The AAP also suggests restricting the use of codeine or tramadol among children under age 12; teens aged 12-18 with obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, or severe lung disease; and patients under age 18 with postsurgical pain after tonsillectomy or adenoidectomy.

Other recommendations include:

  • Use caution in prescribing opioids for children or teens who already are taking sedating medications, such as benzodiazepines.
  • When treating acute, worsening pain in patients with preexisting chronic pain, clinicians should prescribe opioids when indicated and partner with any other opioid-prescribing clinicians involved in the patient’s care and with specialists in chronic pain and other opioid stewardship programs.
  • Do not prescribe codeine or tramadol to patients who are breastfeeding.

Each recommendation included a strength of evidence when available. When randomized controlled trials, diagnostic studies, or observational studies were not available, the AAP based recommendations on case reports or expert opinion.

”A lot of the guidelines are really common sense,” but methodically researched and well-defined recommendations were needed to reduce risks and guide clinicians who may be wary of prescribing the drugs in the wake of the opioid crisis, Agarwal said.

When awareness of the opioid epidemic first started, ”there was very little attention being paid to children,” Agarwal said. ”The thought was, ‘This doesn’t happen to our kids, this isn’t in my backyard.”’

Over time, evidence emerged that children and teens could misuse, abuse, and become addicted to opioids just like adults, said Agarwal. In response, rates of opiate prescriptions for kids dropped off.

”We’ve heard of the horror stories of high school kids sharing and distributing opioids to their friends,” Madubuko said. She has prescribed the drugs ”with great caution. I could count on my hands how many patients I’ve prescribed opioids to over the last couple of years.”

But a decline in opioid prescribing has led to some children lacking adequate pain management and lowering their quality of life, according to the AAP practice guidelines. Underprescribing can particularly impact non-White patients and those in certain ethnic or socioeconomic groups, studies show.

The guidelines bring much-needed objectivity to the prescription process, potentially reducing some of these disparities, Agarwal said.

”By creating a standard that says, these are the things you should look for, these are the things you should treat, we leave less room for saying ‘I think this person is faking,’ or ‘I don’t think they’re having as much pain as they say they are.”’ Agarwal said. ”The guidelines emphasize the fact that if a patient says they’re having a lot of pain, you should believe them first.”

Madubuko is on AAP’s Patient and Family-Centered Care and Neonatal Care Task Forces but was not involved in the creation of the guidelines. 

Brittany Vargas is a medicine, mental health, and wellness journalist.

Source: Medscape Medical News

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects on foetus, babies, children and youth,USA :

October 18, 2024

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration recognizes the Red Ribbon Campaign – the nation’s largest drug prevention effort – throughout the month of October by providing drug prevention, awareness, and education that encourages living healthy and drug-free.

DEA’s Red Ribbon Week is recognized October 23 through October 31 every year and honors the life of Special Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena who was tortured and brutally murdered by drug traffickers in Mexico in 1985.

“DEA honors Red Ribbon throughout the month of October to spread awareness and promote the importance of drug use prevention. We want to save lives by raising awareness about deadly drugs,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram. “The sacrifice DEA Special Agent ‘Kiki’ Camerena made motivates us to continue our important work to save American lives through our enforcement and outreach efforts. We know the work we do today will shape the future of our tomorrows.”

DEA’s Virtual National Red Ribbon Rally premiered on Tuesday, October 8, and is available for viewing throughout the month of October on www.DEA.gov/redribbon and www.getsmartaboutdrugs.com.

The National Red Ribbon Rally includes an opening video by DEA Administrator Anne Milgram; a musical performance by students from Volcano Vista High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the presentation of colors by the Greater Cleveland Color Guard in Cleveland, Ohio; the premiere of the “No Second Chance” fentanyl PSA from students in Tempe, Arizona; and the Red Ribbon Pledge led by students from the Richmond, California, Police Athletic and Activities League. The winners of DEA’s 2024 Community Drug Prevention Awards and Visual Arts Contest will be announced, and viewers will learn many ways community groups and families can get involved in this year’s Red Ribbon Campaign.

As part of the Red Ribbon Week campaign, DEA and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration are sponsoring the 9th Annual Red Ribbon Campus Video PSA Contest. Last year’s winners and information on how campuses can submit a PSA can be found at www.campusdrugprevention.gov/psacontest. DEA is also a co-sponsor of the National Family Partnership’s annual Red Ribbon Week Photo Contest. More information is available at www.redribbon.org.

Red Ribbon Week began in 1985 in Kiki’s hometown of Calexico, California, and quickly gained momentum across the state and then across the rest of the country. The National Family Partnership turned Red Ribbon Week into a national drug awareness campaign, an eight-day event proclaimed by the U.S. Congress and chaired by then President and Mrs. Reagan.  Every year since, Red Ribbon Week has been celebrated in schools and throughout communities.

President Biden has designated October as National Youth Substance Use Prevention Month and the Red Ribbon Resolution for 2024 has been introduced in the U.S. Senate to support the goals and ideals of Red Ribbon Week.

Source: https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2024/10/18/dea-supports-2024-red-ribbon-campaign-promote-healthy-drug-free

Filed under: Education,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

Even as officials hope tech can stem the tide of solitary drug fatalities, they know deploying these warning strategies could face obstacles.

By    and   

They die alone in bedrooms, bathroom stalls and cars. Each year in the United States, tens of thousands of fatal overdoses unfold as tragedies of solitude — with no one close enough to call 911 or deliver a lifesaving antidote.

Technology new and old might save some of those lives.

Motion detectors blare alarms when someone collapses inside a bathroom at a shelter or clinic. Biosensors detect slowed breathing triggered by an overdose and one day may be capable of automatically injecting overdose reversal medication. Simpler approaches — chat apps and hotlines — keep users connected to help if drugs prove too potent.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/10/19/fatal-drug-overdoses-alarms-sensors/
Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

Counties will approach enforcement differently, providing yet another large-scale experiment in drug policy.

by Troy Brynelson|Oregon Public Broadcasting

October 17, 2024

Days after Oregon officially recriminalized drug possession, Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Gomez found himself helping with an arrest.

Officers in the town of Sutherlin stopped a car near a park, he recalled. They spotted fentanyl and methamphetamine inside. He and the officers arrested the man for misdemeanor drug possession.

Recriminalization went into effect Sept. 1. Before that date, drugs would have resulted in far less punishment. Officers would have ticketed the man.

“Now, there’s consequences to the actions,” Gomez said. “He has to face the judge and explain his actions.”

It may have been a different story for the man had he been stopped in a county deploying a new state program called “deflection.” It aims to get people criminally charged for possessing small amounts of drugs into treatment, in lieu of going to court.

Lawmakers over the summer offered counties state dollars in exchange for creating their own deflection programs. More than 20 counties applied, submitting plans that involved activities like establishing shelters and pairing police with substance use experts.

For example, a person in Multnomah County who has drugs, but no outstanding warrants, may be deflected away from the justice system. They go to treatment instead. A successful trip could result in the person never facing a criminal charge.

Other counties, like Douglas, didn’t apply at all.

What’s left is a patchwork of drug enforcement policies across the state. The contrasting approaches may look starkest at the border of Douglas and Lane counties. Both counties straddle Interstate 5 and are planning widely different approaches.

Lane County officials tell OPB they are planning a robust deflection program. Douglas County, on the other hand, plans to try policing illicit substances like the old days.

‘By golly, he‘s going to prosecute them’

In opting out of the state’s deflection program, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin is conscious that the county may look severe. He believes jail and the justice system can turn lives around.

To him, Measure 110, the voter-approved decriminalization of drugs in 2020, failed in its aim to improve drug users’ lives. He and his deputies had few means to get people into treatment without criminal charges looming over their heads.

“Don’t get me wrong; I believe treatment is an extremely important component to this drug problem that we’re dealing with,” Hanlin said. “Treatment works, but only if there are consequences that go along with that.”

While every deflection program will be different, criminal charges can still be leveled against a person if they don’t comply.

Hanlin noted that landing in jail for a drunken incident when he was a teenager proved a wakeup call. He also brought up his 31-year-old son’s ongoing addiction, which has led to a lengthy rap sheet of misdemeanors and felonies in Douglas County.

“If he got arrested and spent a day in jail and got out the next, that wasn’t even long enough for him to realize that he’d done anything wrong,” Hanlin said. Jail is “a necessity if you want to wake them up and get them to think, ‘You know what? I think this problem is getting out of hand.’”

Deputies made nine arrests in September under the new recriminalization statutes, according to a sheriff’s department spokesperson.

Overdose deaths have been rising. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overdose deaths rose from 23 in 2020 to 43 in 2023. That’s less than 4 for every 10,000 people.

The sheriff, first elected in 2008, said it was a joint decision not to participate between himself, District Attorney Rick Wesenberg and the county’s Board of Commissioners. Wesenberg and the county commissioners did not respond to multiple requests for interviews.

Hanlin said he wanted to take a wait-and-see approach with deflection: Let other counties go first with their experiments. He added that the county worried about using one-time state grant dollars without assurances of ongoing funding.

He doubted empowering his deputies to enforce stricter penalties would lead to unintended consequences, such as crowding the jail.

“Most of these cases are going to be cite and release cases,” he said. “But the DA assures me that, by golly, he’s going to prosecute them.”

A drug user’s fate is then up to the courts, Hanlin said. Douglas County does offer diversion programs and a drug court that aim to soften punishment and help drug users get clean.

“I don’t think we can arrest our way out of the drug addiction problem,” Hanlin said. “But I know that, obviously, doing nothing isn’t going to cause the problem to go away either.”

‘A lot of folks just want to see people get help’

Crossing the county line north into Lane County, one will find a completely different approach. Officials there hope to get more people into treatment and keep them away from jail cells and courtrooms as much as possible.

Oregon gave Lane County $2.1 million to assist. That will help pay for housing, officials said, and for a team of substance use specialists, known as navigators, who work with police and decide if a person should be deflected.

Clint Riley, who is leading the program, said he has traveled to the county’s various police agencies to help train them on when to call a navigator.

“That’s a different training that most of us have never been to before,” Riley said. “Maybe five years ago, you would have taken this person to jail. Now, we’re using a different approach. So it’s crucial that the relationship between navigators and law enforcement is good.”

Law enforcement agencies seem to have bought in. Chris Parosa, the Lane County District Attorney, said officers are glad drug laws have more teeth yet they aren’t necessarily being asked to make many more arrests.

“That’s where the opportunity lies for them,” Parosa said. “Instead of having to – prior to ballot Measure 110 – have those people arrested, take them down to jail, fill out probable cause affidavits and immediately begin writing reports because that person is in custody, they can call out a person who is detached from the criminal justice system to take custody and control.”

Lane County is already home to one innovative first-responder program. CAHOOTS launched in the 1970s as one of the first-ever services dispatching mental health specialists through 9-1-1 to help people in crises.

Their deflection plans will effectively turn Riley and the navigator into case managers for low-level drug offenders. Parosa said the navigators will keep informing the county if people are actively pursuing treatment and not skirting responsibility.

“I’m not trained in the realm of substance abuse treatment,” Parosa said. “I’m a criminal attorney. It would be highly inappropriate for me as a criminal attorney to ultimately tell a substance abuse or behavioral health specialist how to do their job or what a person needs.”

Many of the navigators themselves will be ex-addicts, Riley said.

“Some law enforcement in our community might have arrested that navigator 15 years ago, when they were in that situation, and now they’ve completely changed their life,” he said. “They got help, got treatment, and now they’re working as a professional in our community with credentials.”

Lane County saw overdose deaths rise recently, too. From 2020 to 2023, deaths rose from 97 to 212, according to CDC figures. That’s about five-and-a-half deaths per 10,000 people.

The navigator program has not launched yet, according to Riley, but he envisions a system with wide latitude. A person facing criminal charges that aren’t inherently drug related – such as trespassing or theft, for example – may be able to get those charges deflected, too. The victim of a crime would have to agree, too.

“A lot of folks just want to see people get help, if they think it’s going to stop,” Riley said.

He doesn’t criticize counties like Douglas that are not participating in deflection. He acknowledged that many perceive Oregon’s drug decriminalization efforts to have failed. Another experiment can be daunting.

Riley formerly commanded the Lane County Sheriff’s Office jail. He said he saw firsthand that it was treatment, not jail in and of itself, that helped people. He said he helped launch new programs to get people medication and counseling.

“We started seeing people leave the jail in a better space, in a better place,” Riley said. “I’ve seen a lot of people spend a lot of time in jail and prison due to their addiction and, at some point, what stopped their addiction? For most people, they got treatment.”

Hanlin, the Douglas County Sheriff, said they are willing to learn from other counties if their programs succeed.

Source: This article was originally published by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Filed under: Legal Sector,Prevention and Intervention,Social Affairs,USA :

Washington, D.C. – Today, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Director Dr. Rahul Gupta released the following statement on the latest provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), showing drug overdose deaths decreased by 12.7% year-over-year (in the 12-months ending May 2024). This is the largest recorded reduction in overdose deaths, and the sixth consecutive month of reported decreases in predicted 12-month total numbers of drug overdose deaths.

“When President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, the number of drug overdose deaths was increasing 31% year-over-year. They immediately took action: making beating the overdose epidemic a key pillar of their Unity Agenda for the Nation and taking a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to strengthening public health and public safety. As an Administration, we have removed more barriers to treatment for substance use disorder than ever before and invested historic levels of funding to help crack down on illicit drug trafficking at the border. Life-saving opioid overdose reversal medications like naloxone are now available over-the-counter and at lower prices. We are at a critical inflection point. For the sixth month in a row, we are continuing to see a steady decline in drug overdose deaths nationwide. This new data shows there is hope, there is progress, and there is an urgent call to action for us all to continue working together across all of society to reduce drug overdose deaths and save even more lives.”

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/briefing-room/2024/10/16/white-house-drug-policy-director-statement-on-latest-drug-overdose-death-data/

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Health,Treatment and Addiction,USA :
Diana H. Fishbein dfishbein@unc.edu and Zili SlobodaAuthors Info & Affiliations
The recently released National Drug Control Strategy (2022) from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) lays out a comprehensive plan to, not only enhance access to treatment and increase harm reduction strategies, but also increase implementation of evidence-based prevention programming at the community level. Furthermore, the Strategy provides a framework for enhancing our national data systems to inform policy and to evaluate all components of the plan. However, not only are there several missing components to the Strategy that would assure its success, but there is a lack of structure to support a national comprehensive service delivery system that is informed by epidemiological data, and trains and credentials those delivering evidence-based prevention, treatment, and harm reduction/public health interventions within community settings. This paper provides recommendations for the establishment of such a structure with an emphasis on prevention. Systematically addressing conditions known to increase liability for behavioral problems among vulnerable populations and building supportive environments are strategies consistently found to avert trajectories away from substance use in general and substance use disorders (SUD) in particular. Investments in this approach are expected to result in significantly lower rates of SUD in current and subsequent generations of youth and, therefore, will reduce the burden on our communities in terms of lowered social and health systems involvement, treatment needs, and productivity. A national strategy, based on strong scientific evidence, is presented to implement public health policies and prevention services. These strategies work by improving child development, supporting families, enhancing school experiences, and cultivating positive environmental conditions.
Appeared originally in Clin Child Fam Psychol Rev 2023; 26:1–16
Source: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.focus.24022020
Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

In the early 2000s, vaping emerged as a popular alternative to smoking tobacco. E-cigarettes, marketed as nicotine delivery systems without the harmful chemicals found in traditional cigarettes, quickly gained popularity. As vaping technology evolved, so did its applications. By the mid-2010s, the marijuana industry began to adopt vaping as a method for consuming marijuana.

This shift was possibly driven by the increase in legalization across states, the perception that vaping was safer than smoking, and the convenience of discrete portable vapes. However, as the popularity of marijuana vaping grows, so does the rise in its health effects.

By 2019, reports of lung injuries associated with vaping began to surface. Studies found that the combination of vaping marijuana, smoking tobacco and smoking marijuana was linked to younger individuals experiencing lung conditions in a short period. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) then identified a condition known as EVALI (e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury), which was linked to THC containing vape products. A chemical used to dilute THC and create low-cost products contributed to an outbreak of EVALI. CDC reported that as of late 2019, approximately 77% of vaping-related injury cases involved THC-containing products. By February 2020, this number increased to 80%, highlighting a significant association between marijuana vaping and respiratory complications.

The increased access to marijuana through online retailers and the rise in marijuana legalization across states has contributed to the increase in marijuana use by young adults posing new challenges. A 2024 meta-analysis found that the passing of recreational marijuana laws led to an increase in past-month marijuana use of 13% among youth and 22% among young adults. In addition to this analysis, the Monitoring the Future Survey revealed that marijuana and hallucinogen use among 19–30-year-olds remained elevated compared to previous years. When including vaping of either nicotine or marijuana, both trends showed a consistent increase over the past five years and are now at record levels. Specifically, the percentage of 19–30-year-olds who vaped marijuana in the past 12 months rose from 11.5% in 2017 to 22.2% in 2023, while vaping marijuana in the past 30 days increased from 5.9% to 14.4% over the same period. This aligns with the growing perception that vaping is a healthier alternative, leading more young people to experiment with these substances, potentially leading to a higher incidence of lung-related health issues.

The increase in demand for marijuana products has also driven the development of efficient delivery methods, such as online retail, introducing new challenges for regulation. A study highlighting the significant gaps in regulatory compliance among online retailers of flavored tobacco and marijuana vape products showed that, out of 156 purchase attempts, 67.3% were successfully delivered, including to areas with flavor restrictions. Worryingly, only 1% of buyers had their ID scanned successfully by delivery personnel, as required by law, with most deliveries not conducting ID check or interacting with purchaser. These findings underscore the need for better enforcement of age verification and shipping restrictions, especially as youth and young adult use of marijuana vape products increase.

The story of vaping’s evolution from tobacco to marijuana serves as a reminder of the complexities and unforeseen consequences that can arise with new technologies and changing substance use trends. As legalization and acceptance of marijuana continue to grow, so does the need for comprehensive research, clear regulations and widespread education to ensure public safety and prevent unintended consequences.

References:
• Ali, F. (2021). Combination of vaping, cannabis and smoking exposure: shorter time to bullous lung disease and pneumothorax. Journal of Lung Health and Diseases, 5(1), 8-10. doi.org/10.29245/2689-999x/2021/1.1169
• Bando, J. (2024). Impact of marijuana use on lung health. Seminars in Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. doi.org/10.1055/s-0044-1785679
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020). Outbreak of lung injury associated with the use of e-cigarette, or vaping, products. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.htm
• Dai, H. (2020). Self-reported marijuana use in electronic cigarettes among us youth, 2017 to 2018. Jama, 323(5), 473. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.19571
• Harati, R., Ellis, S.E., Satybaldiyeva N., Mejorado, T., Benitez, G., Henriksen, L., Leas, E. (2024). Online Retailer Nonadherence to Age Verification, Shipping, and Flavor Restrictions on E-Cigarettes. JAMA. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.21597
• Friedman, A. and Morean, M. (2021). State marijuana policies and vaping associated lung injuries in the us. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 228, 109086. doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2021.109086
• Malouff, J., Rooke, S., & Copeland, J. (2014). Experiences of marijuana-vaporizer users. Substance Abuse, 35(2), 127-128. doi.org/10.1080/08897077.2013.823902
• Navon, L., Ghinai, I., & Layden, J. (2020). Notes from the field: Characteristics of tetrahydrocannabinol–containing e-cigarette, or vaping, products used by adults — Illinois, September–October 2019. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 69(29), 973–975. doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6929a5
• Pawar, A., Firmin, E., Wilens, T., Hammond, C. (2024). Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis: Medical and Recreational Cannabis Legalization and Cannabis Use Among Youth in the United States. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 63, Issue 11, 1084 – 1113. DOI: 10.1016/j.jaac.2024.02.016
• Patrick, M. E., Miech, R. A., Johnston, L. D., & O’Malley, P. M. (2024). Monitoring the Future Panel Study annual report: National data on substance use among adults ages 19 to 65, 1976-2023. Monitoring the Future Monograph Series. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Available at: https://monitoringthefuture.org/results/annual-reports/

 

Source: Drug Free America Foundation | 333 3rd Ave N Suite 200 | St. Petersburg, FL 33701 US

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

The programs touch on various topics, including drug use and decision-making skills that could help youths avoid behaviors that put them at risk for substance use

NBC Universal, Inc.
Programs educating students about drug abuse and drug overdose prevention are now at San Diego schools, reports NBC 7’s Todd Strain.

Amid a rise in fatal fentanyl overdoses, a San Diego County task force convened to identify substance abuse prevention solutions for local youths. It released a report Monday outlining its recommendations for drug prevention programs at schools.

The report entitled “School-based Interventions for Substance Use and Overdose Prevention” was drafted by the San Diego County Substance Use and Overdose Prevention Taskforce, comprised of members of various entities including the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, San Diego County Office of Education, California National Guard Counterdrug Task Force, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Center for Community Research.

Learn more about the impact of the fentanyl crisis on local communities in NBC 7’s in-depth project “Poison Pill: San Diego’s Battle With the Fentanyl Crisis.” Watch here.

With the goals in mind of preventing juvenile substance use and overdoses, the working group behind the report outlined five prevention programs identified for elementary, middle and high school populations: Positive Action, Project Towards No Drug Abuse, LifeSkills Training, DARE’s Keepin’ It Real, and Project Alert.

The programs touch on various topics, including drug use and decision-making skills that could help youths avoid behaviors that put them at risk for substance use.

Three other programs the report states may be instrumental to prevention efforts include:

  • Operation Prevention San Diego, a free DEA program with resources for educators that the report states “integrate seamlessly into classroom instruction.” The program addresses the impacts of drugs to the brain and body. The program is available to schools upon request or at operationprevention.com
  • I Choose My Future, a program offered by the San Diego County Office of Education that highlights substance abuse dangers and impacts at the individual, family, school, city, nation and global levels
  • A recommendation that all schools serving grades 6-12 have adequate supplies of naloxone, which the report states “has demonstrated effectiveness in reversing opioid overdoses and is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a successful strategy for preventing an opioid overdose”

The task force says the recommendations have already been adopted by around two dozen San Diego County schools.

“It’s critical that we educate our youth through compelling and effective curriculum, giving them the tools they need to stay healthy and make decisions that can literally save their lives,” San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan said in a statement.

Source: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/san-diego-county-task-force-drug-prevention-programs-schools/3654778/
Filed under: Education,Fentanyl,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :
     While schools nationwide emphasize the importance of drug prevention, students at Watson Elementary took the lesson beyond textbooks.
By Madison Smith
Published: Oct. 28, 2024 at 9:21 AM CDT

HASTINGS, Neb. (KSNB) – While schools nationwide emphasize the importance of drug prevention, students at Watson Elementary took the lesson beyond textbooks and into the realm of costumes.

“It’s such a prevalent thing especially now going even younger with the older kids in fourth and fifth grade,” said Chris Hollister, a teacher at Watson. “So bringing that awareness to the kids, knowing that they have the power and the will to say no so it’s just a fun, good way to learn about something important but also have fun doing it.”

The Red Ribbon campaign has provided drug prevention education for children since the 1980s, with one of its most popular events, Red Ribbon Week, celebrated annually. This year, Watson Elementary marked the occasion with themed dress-up days.

“You don’t have to wear normal clothes to school,” said Ruby, a student at Watson.

“I think it’s just fun seeing how everyone dresses up different and see what everyone’s favorite movie character is,” said Chloe, another student.

“Yeah it’s fun to ask people like ‘what are you?’ and the other days were really fun too, just getting to put on something wacky is fun,” said Elijah, who is also a student.

“With elementary kids they love to do these crazy wacky dress up days, and they’re all kids at heart even the teachers that are here we’re all still big kids at heart,” said Hollister. “I tell myself I’m still a kid, even though I’m 36 years old, so it’s just fun to let them express themselves.”

As much fun as it was for the kids to dress up, Hollister said the teachers enjoyed getting to see what they came dressed as.

“It’s interesting just to see what all they come up with because like today. I had a kid that dressed up like ‘The Fonz’ and he’s in the fifth grade and that show was prevalent in the 70s and 80s,” said Hollister. “We have Marty McFly, we have TV characters, we have movie characters, it’s just cool to see the ways they take it to make it a fun day.”

‘What’s Cool in Your School?’ is sponsored by Hastings College Watch it Sunday night and Monday morning on Local4. If you have something or someone ‘cool in your school’ you’d like us to highlight, let us know by clicking here.

Source: https://www.ksnblocal4.com/2024/10/28/watson-elementary-uses-red-ribbon-week-teach-about-drug-prevention-fun-way/?outputType=amp

Filed under: Education,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

At a glance

  • Cherokee Nation Action Network is using culture as prevention for youth substance use in Oklahoma.
  • The leading principle is “Walking in Balance,” which emphasizes balancing traditional Cherokee culture with modern contemporary culture in their everyday lives.

Cherokee Nation Community Action Network

The Cherokee Nation Community Action Network (CAN) coalition was originally developed in 2006 and became a Drug-Free Community coalition in 2018. The CAN uses culture as a strategy to prevent and reduce substance use in Cherokee communities. They partner with Sequoyah School, a tribal school in Tahlequah that young people can attend from anywhere within the reservation. The reservation includes some very rural and isolated communities with limited resources.

To increase community connectedness, the coalition teaches a National Association for Addiction Professionals-certified curriculum based on the book Walking in Balance by Abraham Bearpaw. Bearpaw was raised in one of the Cherokee Nation communities and, after coping with alcohol use for several years, decided it was time for a change. He reconnected with his culture by prioritizing mindfulness, health, and trust and has been in recovery for 12 years. He partners with different communities to teach his curriculum to young people in hopes of reducing the likelihood of them engaging in substance use. The curriculum includes 12 weekly lessons that teach students how to reconnect with culture, manage stress, and care for themselves. The leading principle is “Walking in Balance,” which emphasizes balancing traditional Cherokee culture with modern contemporary culture in their everyday lives.

The CAN coalition initially faced challenges with young people’s willingness to return to the ceremonial grounds. Due to some forbidden traditional practices, they felt they were too far removed. However, the coalition encouraged them to attend to learn and reconnect with their roots. Of the 100 young people living in the current town they serve, 75 showed up to participate in the curriculum. The day-to-day traditional and cultural activities include the making of clay beads, ribbon skirts, corn-bead necklaces, basket weaving, and stickball. The community activities are a source of Cherokee knowledge-building, sharing, and resiliency that helps build a culture of connectedness. The instructor teaches ceremonial values of youth and elder interaction, respect for ancestors, and the importance of taking care of the land. One community member said, “Our tribe has long known that building a sense of belonging, helping youth grow a connection to community, and cultural identity helps them grow into healthy adults.” The Cherokee Nation CAN will continue to foster safe and healthy environmental conditions, providing social support, encouraging school connectedness, and creating safe and caring communities on the reservation to improve the lives of those living there.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/php/drug-free-communities/cherokee-nation.html

Filed under: Culture,Drug use-various effects,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,Social Affairs,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :

Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press by CARMEN PAUN – 10/27/2024 04:00 PM EDT

 

Traffickers are to blame, the candidates say. Virtually no one’s talking about treatment.

The Harris and Trump campaigns said the presidential candidates are talking about drug treatment, albeit more quietly than they are border security. |

There’s a rare point of agreement among Republican and Democratic candidates this election year: America has a drug problem and it’s fentanyl traffickers’ fault.

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, are hammering Democrats over border policies they say have allowed fentanyl to surge into the country. Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, respond that they, too, have cracked down on traffickers and want stricter border enforcement.

The consensus reflects the resonance of border control among voters — most of the country’s fentanyl comes from Mexico — and a hardening of the nation’s attitude toward addiction. Troubled by drug use, homelessness and crime, voters even in the country’s most progressive states favor cracking down. Politicians from Trump and Harris on down the ballot say they will.

“It’s one of those things that people don’t want in their community,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Democrat running for a fourth term representing a district including suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, and rural areas to their west, of illicit drugs. “They want a tough-on-crime stance on it. They want it to go away. They’re afraid for their families, they’re afraid for their children.”

That view worries public health experts and treatment advocates, who see a backsliding toward the law enforcement focus that once looked futile in the face of Americans’ insatiable appetite for drugs. They fear it bodes ill for additional efforts from Washington to expand addiction care.

“There are a lot of things that both parties can point to, as far as progress that’s been made in addressing overdoses: We’ve seen bipartisan efforts to expand access to treatment, to expand access to health services for people who use drugs, and I wish they would talk about that more,” said Maritza Perez Medina, federal affairs director at Drug Policy Action, an advocacy group that opposes the law enforcement-first approach.

Six years ago, when a bipartisan majority in Congress passed the SUPPORT Act to inject billions of dollars into treatment and recovery services, and then-President Trump signed it, the vibes in Washington around drug use were more empathetic.

President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency in October 2017. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images But after it passed, fatal drug overdoses driven by illicit fentanyl skyrocketed, hitting a record 111,451 in the 12 months ending in August 2023 before starting to recede. Homelessness, sometimes tied to drug addiction, also spiked.

When the SUPPORT Act came up for renewal last year, Congress wasn’t as motivated. The Democratic Senate hasn’t voted on a bill, while a House-passed measure from the chamber’s GOP majority offers few new initiatives and no new money.

Attitudes are similar in the states. Oregon, where voters legalized drugs for personal use in 2020, reimposed criminal penalties this year after its largest city, Portland, was overrun with homeless drug users. Polls indicate California voters, frustrated, too, by homelessness and crime, are likely to boost penalties for drug users by ballot initiative next month.

Candidates aim to prove they share voters’ frustration.

Republicans have spent more than $11 million on TV ads in the past month attacking Democratic opponents on fentanyl trafficking, according to a tally by tracking firm AdImpact. And Democrats have spent nearly $18 million defending themselves, mostly by highlighting their efforts or plans to provide more resources and personnel to combat trafficking.

“It’s an easy shortcut in a 30-second commercial to tie a broader issue to one that has an easy explanation,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, a professor of government at Wesleyan University who directs a project analyzing political advertising.

Trump’s not talking about the SUPPORT Act, one of his most consequential legislative successes. Vice President Kamala Harris is not touting the treatment policies of the president she serves, Joe Biden, who expanded access to medications that help people addicted to fentanyl, as well as to drugs that can reverse overdoses. Some public health specialists credit increased access to the drugs with reducing overdose death rates in the past 12 months after years of grim ascent.

Trump used his first anti-Harris ad this summer to blame her for the more than 250,000 deaths from fentanyl during the Biden-Harris administration.

Vice President Kamala Harris met state attorneys general in July 2023 to discuss possible actions against fentanyl. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Harris responded by touting her prosecution of drug traffickers when she was California’s attorney general and a promise to strengthen the border.

“Here’s her plan,” a deep-voiced narrator intoned in Harris’ ad: “Hire thousands more border agents, enforce the law and step up technology — and stop fentanyl smuggling.”

‘A political cudgel’

Similar attacks and responses have played out in Senate and House races across the country.

In the tight Arizona race to replace Sen. Kirsten Synema (I-Ariz.), Republican Kari Lake has accused her opponent, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, of empowering drug cartels to import fentanyl by supporting Biden-Harris administration border policies.

“We’re losing an entire generation of people, and you should know better, Ruben,” Lake told Gallego in a debate earlier this month, referencing the deaths of teens who took counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl.

Gallego, who was elected to Congress in 2014 as a progressive but has shied from that label in his Senate run, responded by touting bills he’s supported or introduced to fund more technology at the border and track fentanyl money flows across Mexico and China, where chemicals to make the drug are manufactured.

A mother visit her son’s grave, who died of a fentanyl overdose at 15. | Jae C. Hong/AP In Colorado’s hotly contested 8th congressional district, which encompasses Denver suburbs and rural areas to the north, Republican state Rep. Gabe Evans has blamed the incumbent, Democrat Yadira Caraveo, for the fentanyl crisis.

“This is our reality now: a 100 percent increase in fentanyl deaths because liberals open the border, legalize fentanyl and let criminals out of jail,” says a police officer in an ad for Evans. “And Yadira Caraveo voted for it all,” Evans adds.

Caraveo defended herself in a debate with Evans earlier this month, noting the bill he’s referring to was state legislation that “tried to balance the need to punish drug dealers and cartels but not incarcerate every single person that is addicted.”

In Connecticut, the National Republican Congressional Committee attacked Hayes for voting against a bill to permanently subject fentanyl to the strictest government regulation, reserved for those drugs with high likelihood of abuse and no medical uses.

Hayes said she opposed the bill because it included mandatory minimum prison sentences for people caught with drugs and no provisions supporting prevention, treatment or harm reduction.

“I hate that this is being used as a political cudgel because we’re missing out on an opportunity to say: ‘How do we address the root causes?’” Hayes said in an interview.

Hayes said she has responded to the attacks on the campaign trail and talked to constituents about the need for treatment, despite some advice to the contrary.

“Even amongst Democrats, there were people who were like: ‘You don’t want the headache, you don’t want people to think that you’re soft on crime or soft on drugs.’ And I was like: ‘This has to be about more than optics if we truly are trying to save people’s lives,’” Hayes said. ‘If we don’t keep the momentum going’

Oregon, where voters legalized drugs for personal use in 2020, reimposed criminal penalties this year after its largest city, Portland, was overrun with homeless drug users. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images The lesson the Drug Policy Action’s Medina takes from the campaigns is that talking about drug treatment doesn’t sell in American politics.

“People are struggling. Social services aren’t where they need to be, health services aren’t where they need to be,” she said. “It’s easier to run a fear-based campaign rather than talking about really tough issues,” like breaking the cycle of addiction.

Ironically, the tough talk on the border comes as policymakers, for the first time in years, have evidence that the tide of fatal drug overdoses is receding.

The CDC estimates that overdose deaths, most caused by fentanyl, declined by nearly 13 percent between May 2023 and May 2024, to just under 100,000.

Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, mentioned the dip during his debate with Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, earlier this month.

The number is now about where it was when Biden took office, though still 50 percent higher than when Trump did in January 2017.

Expanding access to treatment, the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to make the opioid-overdose-reversal medication naloxone available over the counter last year, increased fentanyl seizures at the border, and the arrest and sanctioning of Mexican drug cartel leaders have contributed to the recent drop, Biden said last month.

Advocates for drug treatment say that’s all good cause for candidates to tout their access-to-treatment efforts and promise to expand them.

“The worst outcome for overdose prevention coming out of this election would be if we don’t keep the momentum going,” said Libby Jones, who leads the Overdose Prevention Initiative, an advocacy group.

But there’s not the groundswell of interest on Capitol Hill that there was in 2018, when Congress passed the SUPPORT Act.

Congress has continued to fund opioid treatment authorized in that law, but it mostly hasn’t taken the law’s 2023 expiration as an opportunity to increase funding or try big new ideas.

The Food and Drug Administration decision to make the opioid-overdose-reversal medication naloxone available over the counter last year has contributed to a drop in fatal overdoses over the past year, President Joe Biden said last month. | Diane Bondareff/AP The 2024 federal funding law Congress passed in March included some minor changes in the form of bipartisan legislation to require state Medicaid plans to cover medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorder. It also created a permanent state Medicaid option allowing treatment of substance use disorder at institutions that treat mental illness, in an effort to expand access to care.

But bipartisan legislation approved by the Senate committee responsible for health care to make it easier for others to gain access to methadone, a drug effective in helping fentanyl users, hasn’t gone to the floor and faces opposition from key Republicans in the House.

The Harris and Trump campaigns said the presidential candidates are talking about drug treatment, albeit more quietly than they are border security.

Vice President Harris’ campaign pointed to her web site, where she touts her prosecution of drug traffickers and the Biden-Harris administration’s investment in “lifesaving programs.”

Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly said “President Trump is uniquely able to connect with families combating addiction,” pointing to times when he’s talked about his brother’s struggles with alcohol use disorder and to his administration’s efforts to contain the opioid crisis.

But she added that the tough talk on the border is relevant: “Combating fentanyl is a public health issue and stopping it begins with securing the border.”

 

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/27/fentanyl-drugs-elections-00185576

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Economic,Health,Political Sector,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

 

“Smart Choices, Safe Workplaces: Educate on Drug Risks”
National Drug Free Work Week 2024

 

 

This file was produced in relation to Join the National Drug Free Workplace Alliance (NDWA) in recognizing the Drug Free Work Week 2024 which ran from October 14th through 18th!

Check out these resources that provide essential information on the effects of various drugs and their potential impact on workplace dynamics and safety. Each resource breaks down the signs, symptoms, and behavioral changes associated with substance misuse, helping you recognize warning signs early. With this knowledge, you can better protect and support your employees, fostering a healthy work environment where risks are minimized, and everyone feels valued and safeguarded. These one-pagers are also a useful tool for reinforcing drug-free policies and engaging employees in health and wellness conversations. Resources can be found here.

 

NATIONAL DRUG-FREE WORKPLACE ALLIANCE

As the workplace division of Drug Free America Foundation, NDWA’s mission is to be a national leader in the drug-free workplace industry by directly assisting employers and stakeholders, providing drug-free workplace program resources and assistance, and supporting a national coalition of drug-free workplace service providers.

For more information and drug-free workplace resources, visit NDWA at www.ndwa.org.

Source: www.dfaf.org

Filed under: Drugs and Accidents,Education,Health,USA,Workplace :

An overview of federal and state laws and legal issues impacting physicians, non-physician practitioners (NPPs), and health care facilities that treat patients with opioids for pain management and opioid use disorders (OUDs).

Practical Law Health Care

  • Federal and state governments impose restrictions on both physician and non-physician opioid prescribers
  • To dispense opioids, federal law requires licensed physicians to register with DEA, have an active license, and fulfill educational and training requirements
  • All states have licensing and registration requirements for providers who prescribe opioids

To help combat the ongoing opioid crisis, the federal government and many state governments have enacted statutes to help health care practitioners, including physicians, qualified NPPs, such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants (PAs), and health care facilities, respond to OUDs. These statutes establish protocols for handling pain management and OUDs, which address, among other things, treatment plans and the relationship between health care providers and patients.

This article highlights key federal and state legislation governing health care practitioners and facilities treating patients with opioids for pain management and OUDs, focusing on states with greater opioid misuse.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/practical-law-the-journal/legalindustry/opioid-crisis-issues-health-care-providers-2024-11-01/

Filed under: Health,Heroin/Methadone,USA :

“When President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, the number of drug overdose deaths was increasing 31% year-over-year. They immediately took action: making beating the overdose epidemic a key pillar of their Unity Agenda for the Nation and taking a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to strengthening public health and public safety. As an Administration, we have removed more barriers to treatment for substance use disorder than ever before and invested historic levels of funding to help crack down on illicit drug trafficking at the border. Life-saving opioid overdose reversal medications like naloxone are now available over-the-counter and at lower prices. We are at a critical inflection point. For the sixth month in a row, we are continuing to see a steady decline in drug overdose deaths nationwide. This new data shows there is hope, there is progress, and there is an urgent call to action for us all to continue working together across all of society to reduce drug overdose deaths and save even more lives.”

Filed under: Drug Specifics,Effects of Drugs,Health,Prevalence,Social Affairs,USA :
Marsha F. Lopez, Ph.D., M.H.S. marsha.lopez@nih.gov, MeLisa R. Creamer, Ph.D., M.P.H., and Erin M. Parker, Ph.D.Authors Info & Affiliations  Publication: FOCUS – Volume 22, Number 4   Published Online: 15 October 2024

Abstract

In the 50 years since its establishment, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has made significant investment and strides toward improving individual and public health. Epidemiology serves as the foundation for understanding the how many, why, how, where, and who of drug use and its consequences, and effective epidemiology research and training are geared toward actionable findings that can inform real-world responses. Epidemiologic findings enhance clinicians’ ability to provide ongoing care by incorporating information about the patterns and outcomes of drug use that their patients may experience. The goal of this article is to provide a context for epidemiology of substance use as a foundation for prevention, with examples of how epidemiology can provide targets for prevention, and to set the stage for addressing the importance of prevention in clinical settings.
Source: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.focus.20240018
Filed under: Health,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

This is the opening of a submission by Dr Stuart Reece to the FDA relating to the re-scheduling of cannabis:

 

“I am very concerned about the potential for increased cannabis availability in USA implied by full drug legalization; however, a comprehensive and authoritative submission of the evidence would take weeks and months to prepare. Knowing what we know now and indeed, what has been available in the scientific literature for a growing number of years concerning a myriad of harmful effects of marijuana, marijuana containing THC should not be reclassified. These effects that are now well documented in the scientific literature include, alarmingly, harm involving reproductive function and birth anomalies as a result of exposure to or use of marijuana with THC.

In addition to all of the usual concerns which you will have heard from many sources including the following I have further particular concerns:
1) Effect on developing brains
2) Effect on driving
3) Effect as a Gateway drug to other drug use including the opioid epidemic
4) Effect on developmental trajectory and failure to attain normal adult goals(stable relationship, work, education)
5) Effect on IQ and IQ regression
6) Effect to increase numerous psychiatric and psychological disorders
7) Effect on respiratory system
8) Effect on reproductive system
9) Effect in relation to immunity and immunosuppression
10) Effect of now very concentrated forms of cannabis, THC and CBD which are widely available
11) Outdated epidemiological studies which apply only to the era before cannabis became so potent and so concentrated 

These issues are all well covered by a rich recent literature including reviews from such major international authorities as Dr Nora Volkow Director of NIDA at NIH, Professor Wayne Hall and others “

 

The full text can be read here

Source: Letter from Dr Stuart Reece to FDA April 2018

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Global Drug Legalisation Efforts,Legal Sector,Political Sector,USA :
Marsha F. Lopez, Ph.D., M.H.S. marsha.lopez@nih.gov, 
MeLisa R. Creamer, Ph.D., M.P.H., and 
Erin M. Parker, Ph.D.Authors Info & Affiliations
In the 50 years since its establishment, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has made significant investment and strides toward improving individual and public health. Epidemiology serves as the foundation for understanding the how many, why, how, where, and who of drug use and its consequences, and effective epidemiology research and training are geared toward actionable findings that can inform real-world responses. Epidemiologic findings enhance clinicians’ ability to provide ongoing care by incorporating information about the patterns and outcomes of drug use that their patients may experience. The goal of this article is to provide a context for epidemiology of substance use as a foundation for prevention, with examples of how epidemiology can provide targets for prevention, and to set the stage for addressing the importance of prevention in clinical settings.
Source: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.focus.20240018 
Filed under: Addiction,Brain and Behaviour,Mental Health,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

Armed with knowledge and tools, parents are making a big difference in local school districts  

by  Emily Green   February 1, 2024

  Mila Priest, 8, focuses on computer playing the PAX Good Behavior Game during class at Fern Hill Elementary School in Forest Grove, OR, Nov. 9, 2023.
Holly Pearce, 18, deploys a strategy at the West Linn High School club fair. If prospective members join her in-school club, she tells them, they need do little more than show up while receiving free food and an honors cord for their gown at graduation. What she doesn’t lead with is that it’s a drug and alcohol prevention club.

“The free food,” she said “that’s what gets people there in the first place.”

Once students are in the door, she said, it’s her mom, Pam, who gets them to stay.

Pam Pearce has been in recovery for 28 years. During lunchtime club meetings, she often shares her personal story with club members, she said, and she tells it to them straight.

She grew up nearby in Lake Oswego and attended the University of Southern California. The photos she displays of smiling youths from her high school and college years look much like the club members she shares the photos with.

“The only honors I had was biggest partier and best dressed,” she said. “And I like to say it because the end of the story is: that almost killed me.”The point is to dispel the myth that addiction only affects “other” people. It can be anyone, she said, and it can be the teens in the club or one of their friends.

A concerned parent pushing for prevention, Pam Pearce is part of an emerging trend in Oregon, where, according to federal data, at least 354 youths have died from drug overdoses since the start of 2018 as fentanyl has spread through the drug supply.

Oregon schools enjoy wide autonomy in what they teach, and that includes their substance use prevention strategies. A recent six-month investigation into prevention in Oregon classrooms from The Lund Report found that many schools rely on little more than a chapter in a health textbook to get the job of prevention done.

The state provides little support or accountability when it comes to in-school prevention, records and interviews show. So in districts where more robust prevention is happening, it’s often parents and individual teachers who drive it.

Mother of lost son becomes activist

In Oregon City, Michele Stroh began pushing for prevention after she lost her son, Keaton Stroh, 25, to a fentanyl-laced pill in July 2020.

“I didn’t know about fake pills; I didn’t know about any of that. And I got angry,” Stroh said. “So I ran for the Oregon City School Board.”

She wanted the district to be more proactive in the fentanyl crisis, she said. So she recruited speakers to talk at assemblies at all the Oregon City School District high schools, middle schools and charter schools. She organized a parent education night, and her efforts resulted in the overdose reversing drug Narcan being placed in all the schools, sports facilities and school buses.

“We were the first school district in Clackamas County to have a Narcan policy,” she said.

She’s approached other districts but found them to be more hesitant.

“I think it helps, the fact that the district knows me, and the teachers know me — and they knew my son,” Stroh said.

  

Jon and Jennifer Epstein were also pushed into action after losing their son Cal Epstein, 18, to a fentanyl-laced counterfeit pill in December 2020. They began advocating for fentanyl education and awareness in the Beaverton School District, where their sons attended school and Jon Epstein had taught for 10 years. The district worked with them to create a program called “Fake and Fatal,” which teaches youths about the dangers of fentanyl and counterfeit pills. Since then, at the Epsteins’ urging, Oregon legislators passed a bill to take fentanyl education statewide, and Oregon’s congressional delegation has introduced national legislation.

While some parents, such as Pearce in West Linn, had to investigate to figure out what prevention is happening at their kids’ schools, The Lund Report created a data portal that makes that information easily accessible for the first time — including what top prevention scientists say about the efficacy of programs in use at each district.

Pearce’s club at West Linn High School has grown to nearly 200 student members. The teens also advise their community prevention coalition, which Pearce — known for her advocacy — was recruited to lead. And they visit middle schools to talk to younger kids about what to expect in high school.

What teens say

The Lund Report recently sat down with some teenagers who participate in the prevention club. They said the club creates a safe space where kids can talk honestly about drugs — or go to when they don’t want to be around teens who are using.

“My view immediately changed as I set foot in this club,” said the club’s president, Jonathan Garcia, 17. “I listened to Pam in that first meeting, and I was just like, ‘Oh, my God — what have I been taught?’ It was like, number one, I haven’t been taught anything compared to what I just learned, and I’ve been taught all the wrong things.”

The club discusses topics like why a person might turn to drugs and alcohol in the first place. Some of the teens said it was the first time they learned about addiction’s root causes.

“Nothing was sugar coated,” said Aidan Sauer, 15. “Everything was just to the point.”

Growing the club at her daughter’s high school is just one way Pearce promotes prevention in the West Linn-Wilsonville school district, where all three of her kids were students.

She sends teachers information about prevention-related tools and lessons. And she lobbied her district until it agreed to participate in the state’s Student Health Survey. The survey asks students in the sixth, eighth and 11th grades about their substance use and well-being. Pearce said she “was on a mission” after she found out her local district didn’t administer the free survey.

“It also allows young people to share with you what’s happening in their environment. Like — how else are they going to tell you what’s happening?” she said.

Starting this year, every Oregon school is required to take part in the survey for the first time. Prevention scientists say the data can help districts to understand whether or not their prevention efforts are working. Many prevention programs, including clubs like the one at West Linn High School, aren’t well-researched. Others might not work in every setting and for every group of kids, so tracking the outcomes is important, experts say.

In 2020, Pearce also co-founded the first high school in Oregon for students in recovery from addiction, located in Lake Oswego.

Teaching kids self-regulation in Washington County

A prevention program called the PAX Good Behavior Game doesn’t teach kids anything about drugs and alcohol, but prevention scientists at Oregon Research Institute and Washington State University’s IMPACT Research lab contend it’s one of the best evidence-backed approaches to substance use prevention at the elementary school level.

Today, the program is in wide use across Washington County, and its successful implementation there can be traced to the efforts of a former third grade teacher at Joseph Gale Elementary School and a concerned mother who happens to work for the county.

On a foggy morning this past November, third graders in a second-floor classroom at Fern Hill Elementary in Forest Grove focused intently — and quietly — on their arithmetic. With a handful of unfamiliar adults watching the lesson, there were plenty of distractions that day. But the 8- and 9-year olds seemed un-bothered as they completed math problems on their Chromebooks.

Helping them focus was the PAX Good Behavior Game, also known as PAX. It’s a program that gives teachers a menu of techniques for helping kids self-regulate and practice self control.

At the core of the system is a game, and in some studies, playing that game in elementary school reduced substance use and other problems among students years later.

The teacher sets a length of time the game will be played, and if kids are able to stay on task, they’re rewarded a goofy dance or some other non-material prize when the time is up. While the clock was ticking, third grade teacher Kayla Davidson walked around the classroom observing the students work. If someone got up or lost focus, she would give their table — not the individual student — what’s called a “spleem,” which is basically a negative point. At the end of the game, tables had the opportunity to explain collectively how they might avoid getting a spleem next time.

Before PAX, Davidson said she was more reactive in her approach to disruptive behavior. She might call a student’s parent or call out a child for their behavior in front of the class. “That could really be hurtful and harmful to the student, if they’re just being called out for bad behavior constantly,” she said.

“A lot of them are bringing things with them. It could be things like hunger or worrying about which parent they’re going with today,” Davidson said. The game gives the kids “a space and a strategy” for not having to worry about those things so they can focus on their work, she added.

Third graders in Davidson’s classroom told The Lund Report that, for the most part, they really like playing the game. For 8-year-old Aubrey Stone, “the best part about it is that you’re growing your brain.”

About 13 years ago, Kirstina Meinecke brought PAX to the Forest Grove School District when she got a job as a third grade teacher there. She had learned how to use the game when teaching in Washington on the Yakima Indian Reservation. Other teachers took interest, and it began to spread. Today, PAX is incorporated into every elementary school classroom in the Forest Grove district, and into teachers’ ways of conducting their classrooms. Meinecke’s job with the district now is primarily to provide teachers with PAX training and ongoing support as a coach.

In Oregon, parents and teachers catalyze drug prevention in schools

Forest Grove is one of four districts in Washington County that uses the PAX Good Behavior Game. While PAX was spreading there, a public health program supervisor at Washington County, Rebecca Collett, started working to spread the program into other county schools. She’d noticed a need for better classroom management while volunteering at her son’s school in the Tigard-Tualatin district.

Collett remembers asking, “Why are we doing so many programs, when there’s one evidence-based program that prevents suicide, prevents drug and alcohol use, prevents dysregulation in the classroom, prevents all this?”

Since then, the county has helped school districts fund the implementation of the PAX Good Behavior Game through a mix of county, state and federal funds. The county has trained nearly 800 teachers at 51 schools on how to use PAX since 2014.

“Once it started working, we didn’t have to sell it,” Collett said. “The teachers started sharing how well it was working in their classroom, how much healthier they were, how much easier classroom behaviors were, and management.”

The county estimated it saves $83 for every $1 spent, and the cost is about $13 per student.

Tools for parents

Pearce encourages other concerned parents to take action if they want to see better prevention programs in their kids’ schools.

“People talk, but they don’t act,” she said. “We need to stop talking, and we need to start doing.”

She said parents should start by reaching out to their county health departments to see if there is a local prevention specialist or prevention coalition they can connect with, and they should attend school board meetings, ask questions and advocate. They can even start a club like the one she leads, she said.

Parents also can share evidence-based practices and materials with their districts and teachers they know, she added.

Figuring out what prevention programs are supported by validated research can be tricky, but there are several online registries that parents and community groups can use to learn more about programs. The online database published by The Lund Report used expert ratings from these clearinghouses to rate districts’ programs.

Source: https://www.thelundreport.org/content/oregon-parents-and-teachers-catalyze-drug-prevention-schools?

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Education,Parents,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :
By Native News Online Staff  / 

This week, beginning today, Sunday, August 25 through Saturday, August 31, is being recognized as Overdose Awareness Week. This year’s international theme is “Together we can.”

The substance use crisis in America has had a devastating impact on our tribal communities, families, and individuals. In Indian Country, overdoses from fentanyl, opioids, and other deadly drugs such as “tranq” are leading to loss of life as well as a steep decline in the health and well-being of tribal communities. In addition, the epidemic is contributing to the spread of infectious diseases, such as HIV and hepatitis C.

On Friday, the White House released a presidential proclamation for Overdose Awareness Week, 2024. In the proclamation President Joe Biden says: “even one death is one too many, and far too many Americans continue to lose loved ones to fentanyl.”

Overdose Awareness Week Proclamation, 2024

During Overdose Awareness Week, we mourn those who have lost their lives to overdose deaths. We acknowledge the devastating toll the opioid epidemic has taken on individuals, families, and communities across America. We reflect on the progress we have made so far in reducing the number of annual overdose deaths and protecting American lives — and how much more there is to do. And we reaffirm our commitment to doing more to disrupt the supply of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids and support those who suffer with substance use disorder and their families in all of our communities.

My Administration made beating the opioid epidemic a key priority in my Unity Agenda for the Nation, calling for Republicans and Democrats to work together to stop fentanyl from flowing into our communities, hold those who brought it here accountable, and deliver life-saving medication and care across America.

We are working to tackle this crisis through a comprehensive approach, including by expanding access to evidence-based prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery support services as well as reducing the supply of illicit drugs. We have expanded access to life-saving treatments, like medications to treat opioid use disorder, and have increased the number of health care providers who can prescribe these medications by 15 times.  In February 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule to comprehensively update the regulations governing Opioid Treatment Programs for the first time in 20 years — removing barriers to the treatment of substance use disorder and expanding access to care. My Administration has made historic investments in the State Opioid Response and Tribal Opioid Response programs to improve prevention; expand treatment; and deliver free, life-saving medications across America. Already, this program has delivered nearly 10 million kits of opioid overdose reversal medications, such as naloxone.

We also continue to fight the stigmatization that surrounds substance use and accidental overdose so that people feel comfortable reaching out for help when they need it.  Naloxone is now available over-the-counter for people to purchase at their local grocery stores and pharmacies.  We also launched the White House Challenge to Save Lives from Overdose and several awareness campaigns, raising awareness and securing commitments from local governments and cross-sector organizations to increase training on and access to opioid overdose reversal medications in schools, worksites, transit systems, and other places where overdose may occur in our communities. My Fiscal Year 2025 Budget requests $22 billion to expand substance use treatment and help more Americans achieve and stay in recovery.

Under my Administration, Federal law enforcement agents are keeping more deadly drugs out of our communities than ever before. We are seizing deadly drugs at our borders so that illicit drugs never reach our neighborhoods. Officials have stopped more illicit fentanyl at ports of entry over the last 2 fiscal years than in the previous 5 fiscal years combined. The Department of Justice has prosecuted leaders of the world’s largest and most powerful drug cartel along with thousands of drug traffickers. The Department of the Treasury has sanctioned more than 300 people and organizations involved in the global illicit drug trade. I have also deployed cutting-edge drug detection technology across our southwest border, and I continue to call on the Congress to strengthen border security, increase penalties on those who bring deadly drugs into our communities, and close loopholes that drug traffickers exploit. And in July 2024, I issued a National Security Memorandum that calls on all relevant Federal departments and agencies to work collaboratively to do even more than they are already doing to stop the supply of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into our country.

I am also committed to working with partners across the globe to address this crisis. Last year, I negotiated the re-launch of counternarcotics cooperation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — which has led to increased law enforcement coordination, increased efforts to tackle illicit financing of drug cartels, and increased regulation of certain precursor chemicals. I have increased counternarcotics cooperation with other key foreign governments; launched the Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats, which brings together more than 150 countries in the fight against drug trafficking cartels; put in place new initiatives between the United States, Mexico, and Canada targeting the supply of illicit drugs; and made countering fentanyl and other synthetic opioids a key priority of the G7.

Now for the first time in 5 years, the number of overdose deaths in the United States has started to decline. But even one death is one too many, and far too many Americans continue to lose loved ones to fentanyl.

Today I grieve with all the families and friends who have lost someone to an overdose. This is a time to act.  And this is a time to stand together — for all those we have lost and all the lives we can still save.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim August 25 through August 31, 2024, as Overdose Awareness Week. I call upon citizens, government agencies, civil society organizations, health care providers, and research institutions to raise awareness of substance use disorder so that our Nation can combat stigmatization, promote treatment, celebrate recovery, and strengthen our collective efforts to prevent overdose deaths. August 31 also marks Overdose Awareness Day, on which we honor and remember those who have lost their lives to the overdose epidemic.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-third day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-ninth.

​​​​​​JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

Source: https://nativenewsonline.net/health/president-biden-s-overdose-awareness-week-proclamation-2

Filed under: Fentanyl,Political Sector,Synthetics,USA :
Tulsa World
Aug 25, 2024

The Cherokee Nation’s approach to substance abuse recovery is harm reduction, which has drawn criticism from some who work in addiction recovery.

“Harm reduction is a pretty controversial topic. A lot of people feel it can be enabling drug users. It can feel counterproductive and counter intuitive,” said Jennifer Steward, director of the University of Tulsa’s Behavioral Health Clinic.

In a Tulsa World interview, Steward said the controversial aspect comes from the fact that harm reduction does not encourage abstinence from drug use, which makes it different from traditional substance abuse rehabilitation programs. Harm reduction instead focuses on keeping active drug users alive, with considerations for their health and safety.

The Cherokee Nation harm reduction program utilizes a mobile unit that brings supplies to drug-users on the streets: clean needles, cotton swabs and Narcan, which can reduce cravings and combat a potentially fatal overdose.

Steward said many harm reduction programs also provide a safe, clean environment to partake in drug use, free of disease such as HIV or hepatitis C, with staff ready to assist in case of overdose.

Cherokee Nation prevention specialist Coleman Cox said that his tribe recognized the potential for addiction among the Cherokee people after being exposed to the opioid epidemic is “far reaching and the latest in a long line of injustices brought upon indigenous peoples.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2021 the highest rate of drug overdose deaths was in American Indian and Alaskan Native individuals. Data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration indicates 5.1% of Natives have misused opioids, which can include prescribed pain-relief medications, hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl and heroin.

“We bent the opioid industry to a settlement for the harm it inflicted, and we are making the opioid industry help pay for every single penny of this facility,” said Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. in reference to their treatment facility they broke ground for Thursday morning.

The Cherokee Nation received a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration grant last year for harm-reduction services. They now operate a storefront at 214 N. Bliss Ave. in Tahlequah. It is open not only to tribal members but also to the public, and all participants can remain anonymous.

The new facility that the tribe broke ground on this week is a $25 million dollar addiction treatment center just outside of Tahlequah.

The Cherokee Nation’s Public Health and Wellness Fund Act of 2021 dedicated $100 million in settlement funds from opioid and e-cigarette lawsuits for a variety of public health programs.

Cox said harm reduction meets people where they are at in their addiction. This means that if the user does not want to seek rehabilitative services, they do not have to. Rehabilitation services may be recommended, but they are not a requirement.

“Harm reduction is more than Narcan and clean needles. It’s treating others how they want to be treated — with dignity, respect and value, without conditions,” said Cox.

Evan White, a member of the Absentee Shawnee tribe, is the director of Native American research at Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa. He has worked with various tribal behavioral health programs through his research.

“Harm reduction is a model that has a strong evidence base for good outcomes,” he said, “especially in substance use disorders.”

White believes harm reduction could be attractive to Native communities as it values a person’s autonomy.

“I see a consistent value of a person as an individual within Native communities. Healing is an important part of the process in these cultural spaces, even though there is a lot of stigma around substance abuse in our broader society,” he said.

For Native individuals with substance abuse issues, White said participating in cultural activities may enhance self-control and mindfulness.

The Cherokee Nation’s program provides opportunities for Native people in recovery to partake in cultural activities.

“We planted a Three Sisters Garden: corn, beans and gourds,” said Cox. “Corn provides the bean a pathway for growth. Beans give back by imparting nitrogen to the soil. Gourd provides protection and covers the ground. Three different things working in harmony. Body, mind and spirit.”

Members of the program get to adopt a plant, name it and tend to it. Cox said the vegetables are not for eating, however.

“They are meant to harvest seeds for the future bounty, beyond what we can see now. Just like when our members come to us for whatever kind of help, we plant a seed that one day they will harvest a healthier life,” he said.

Cox said the harm reduction staff launched a new chapter of “wellbriety movement” that they call “recovery rez.” It’s a cultural approach to the traditional 12-step recovery plan.

“At Recovery Rez they begin with prayer and fellowship meal, then smudge and hold a talking circle guided by the passing of an eagle feather from speaker to speaker. They close out the evening with a drum circle and singing. All are welcome, and citizens don’t need to be in recovery to benefit from the cultural protective factors,” said Cox.

Steward said it can be difficult to view harm reduction as a substance abuse program because harm reduction focuses on the long-term.

“The goal is to help someone be ready to engage in rehabilitation later on, but in order to do that, they have to be alive,” she said.

According to Cherokee Nation spokeswoman Julie Hubbard, the tribe’s harm reduction program has had 3,099 encounters for service, and it has 1,049 members currently. The number of people who still inject drugs within the program is 743. The amount of lives saved at the program from Narcan distribution is 44.

Source: https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/indigenous/cherokee-nation-takes-long-term-approach-to-substance-abuse-recovery-via-harm-reduction/article_290c6be4-60a1-11ef-ab14-934bc604a21b.html
Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Harm Reduction including HIV (Papers),Needle Exchange,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

BY Lindsey Leake

August 27, 2024
While the modern marijuana consumer may be shedding that lazy stoner stereotype, new research shows that employees who use and abuse the drug are more likely to miss work.

The findings were published Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

For the study, researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and the New York University Grossman School of Medicine analyzed data from the 2021–22 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on 46,500 adults employed full-time in the U.S. Recent and frequent cannabis use, as well as cannabis use disorder (CUD), they found, was associated with greater workplace absenteeism.

Work absences included days missed due to illness or injury in addition to skipped days when employees “just didn’t want to be there.” Respondents were a majority or plurality white (62%), male (57%), ages 35 to 49 (35%), married (52%), had at least a college degree (42%), and had an annual household income exceeding $75,000 (55%). About 16% of employees had reported using cannabis within the last month, with about 7% of whom meeting CUD criteria (mild: 4%; moderate: 2%; severe: 1%).

People who said they had never used cannabis missed an average 0.95 days of work in the past 30 days due to illness/injury and skipped 0.28 days. Cannabis users, by comparison, recorded the following absences:

  • Past-month use: 1.47 illness/injury, 0.63 skipped
  • Mild CUD: 1.74 illness/injury, 0.62 skipped
  • Moderate CUD: 1.69 illness/injury, 0.98 skipped
  • Severe CUD: 2.02 illness/injury, 1.83 skipped

The results also showed that people who used cannabis most frequently skipped the most work. For instance, those who consumed it once or twice per month skipped 0.48 days, while those who consumed it 20 to 30 days per month skipped 0.7 days. People who used cannabis three to five days per month had the highest prevalence of missed days due to illness/injury (1.68). Cannabis use longer than a month ago had no bearing on employee absence.

“These findings highlight the need for increased monitoring, screening measures, and targeted interventions related to cannabis use and use disorder among employed adults,” researchers wrote. “Moreover, these results emphasize the need for enhanced workplace prevention policies and programs aimed at addressing and managing problematic cannabis use.”

Researchers said that while their latest work supports much of the existing literature on cannabis use and workplace absenteeism, it also contrasts with other studies. One previous study, for example, showed a decline in sickness-related absences in the wake of medical marijuana legislation, while another found no link between the two.

One limitation of the new study, the authors note, is that it relied on participants’ self-reported answers. In addition, the data don’t reflect whether cannabis was used for medicinal or recreational purposes, whether it was consumed during work hours, or address other factors that may have affected a person’s cannabis use patterns.

What are the signs of cannabis use disorder?

That marijuana isn’t addictive is a myth. People with CUD are unable to stop using cannabis even when it causes health and social problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Cannabis consumers have about a 10% likelihood of developing CUD, a disorder impacting nearly a third of all users, according to previous research estimates. At higher risk are people who start using cannabis as adolescents and who use the drug more frequently.

The CDC lists these behaviors as signs of CUD:

  • Continuing to use cannabis despite physical or psychological problems
  • Continuing to use cannabis despite social or relationship problems
  • Craving cannabis
  • Giving up important activities with friends and family in favor of using cannabis
  • Needing to use more cannabis to get the same high
  • Spending a lot of time using cannabis
  • Trying but failing to quit using cannabis
  • Using cannabis even though it causes problems at home, school, or work
  • Using cannabis in high-risk situations, such as while driving a car
  • Using more cannabis than intended

In addition to interfering with everyday life, CUD has been linked to unemployment, cognitive impairment, and lower education attainment. People with CUD often have additional mental health problems, including other substance abuse disorders. In this study, for example, 14% of respondents reported having alcohol use disorder within the past year.

 

Source:  https://fortune.com/well/article/marijuana-abuse-cannabis-use-disorder-workplace-absenteeism-sick-days/

Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Economic,Mental Health,USA,Workplace :

Suicide prevention is a high priority for SAMHSA and a key area of focus in SAMHSA’s 2023-2026 Strategic Plan. Below is more information about SAMHSA’s suicide prevention initiatives.

Funding and Grant Programs

SAMHSA’s Suicide Prevention Branch funds discretionary grant programs focused on suicide prevention, early intervention, crisis support, treatment, recovery, and postvention for youth and adults, including:

  • Garrett Lee Smith State/Tribal: Community-based suicide prevention for youth and young adults up to age 24. This program supports states and tribes with implementing youth suicide prevention and early intervention strategies in educational settings, juvenile justice and foster care systems, substance use and mental health programs, and other organizations to: (1) increase the number of organizations that can identify and work with youth at risk of suicide; (2) increase the capacity of clinical service providers to assess, manage, and treat youth at risk of suicide; and (3) improve the continuity of care and follow-up of at-risk youth.

    • “It has been wonderful work made possible through the SAMHSA grant and we are thrilled each chance we get to share these programs with others to help support other grants and especially our youth.” – S/T Grantee

  • Garrett Lee Smith Campus: Suicide prevention initiatives for students on college campuses. This program supports a comprehensive, evidence-based public health approach that: (1) enhances mental health services for students, including those at risk for suicide, depression, serious mental illness / serious emotional disturbances, and/or substance use disorders (SUDs) that can lead to school failure; (2) prevents and reduces suicide, mental illness, and SUDs; (3) promotes help-seeking behavior; and (4) improves the identification and treatment of at-risk students so they can successfully complete their studies.

    • “This marks 3 years of enhanced mental health and wellbeing support for students. We’ve learned that high usage of after-hour support for students through our program lowers the barriers that may otherwise prevent students from seeking help.” – GLS Campus Grantee

  • Native Connections/Tribal Behavioral Health: Community-based suicide prevention for American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth through age 24. The purpose of this program is to prevent suicide and substance misuse, reduce the impact of trauma, and promote mental health among AI/AN youth. It aims to reduce the impact of mental health and substance use disorders, foster culturally responsive models that reduce and respond to the impact of trauma in AI/AN communities, and allow AI/AN communities to facilitate collaboration among agencies to support youth through the development and implementation of an array of integrated services and supports with the involvement of AI/AN community members in all grant activities.
  • National Strategy for Suicide Prevention: Community suicide prevention for adults 18 and over. The purpose of this program is to implement suicide prevention and intervention programs for adults (with an emphasis on older adults, adults in rural areas, and AI/AN adults) that help implement the 2021 Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Implement the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (PDF | 708 KB). This program uses a broad-based public health approach to suicide prevention by enhancing collaboration with key community stakeholders, raising awareness of suicide prevention resources, and implementing lethal means safety.

    • “The NSSP grant has not only allowed us to sustain our efforts to prevent suicide by expanding our capacity to engage in lethal means safety, connectedness, economic stability, education, and follow-up efforts across the state, but also given local partners resources to implement innovative strategies for suicide prevention.” – NSSP Grantee

  • Zero Suicide: Suicide prevention framework to implement within Health and Behavioral Health Care Systems for adults 18 and older. The purpose of this program is to implement the Zero Suicide intervention and prevention model—a comprehensive, multi-setting suicide prevention approach—for adults throughout a health system or systems. Recipients are expected to implement all seven elements of the Zero Suicide framework—Lead, Train, Identify, Engage, Treat, Transition, and Improve—incorporating health equity principles within the framework in order to reduce suicide ideation, attempts, and deaths.

    • “Emphasis of Zero Suicide has created an environment where more and more individuals are talking openly about suicide, and it is helping to shatter stigma that surrounds suicide.” – Zero Suicide Grantee

  • Community Crisis Response Partnerships: Mobile crisis units serving youth and adults across the lifespan. The purpose of this program is to create or enhance existing mobile crisis response teams to divert people experiencing mental health crises from law enforcement in high-need communities, where mobile crisis services are absent or inconsistent, most mental health crises are responded to by first responders, and/or first responders are not adequately trained or equipped to diffuse mental health crises. Grant recipients use SAMHSA’s National Guidelines for Behavioral Health Crisis Care: Best Practice Toolkit (PDF | 2.2 MB) as a guide in mobile crisis service delivery.

    • “The CCRP grant has allowed our agency to expand our mobile crisis services to a 24/7/365 program, setting us apart as the first in our state to offer around the clock mobile response. This has greatly reduced the instances of unnecessary involvement with Law Enforcement and EMS, expediting the appropriate mental health service, directly to the client.” – CCRP Grantee

  • Suicide Prevention Resource Center: Funded by SAMHSA’s Suicide Prevention Branch, SPRC is a national resource center devoted to advancing the implementation of the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention. SPRC advances suicide prevention infrastructure and capacity building through technical assistance, training, and resources to states, Native settings, colleges and universities, health systems, and other organizations involved in suicide prevention. Visit SPRC to learn more about suicide and a comprehensive approach to suicide prevention; access a searchable online library, Best Practices Registry, and set of online trainings and webinars; request technical assistance with your suicide prevention efforts; or sign up for SPRC’s weekly newsletter.

SAMHSA Initiatives in Action

  • SAMHSA’s Black Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative: Created by SAMHSA’s Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) to address the growing rate of suicide deaths among Black youth and young adults. Utilizing mechanisms within and external to SAMHSA, the goal of the Black Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative is to reduce the suicidal thoughts, attempts, and deaths of Black youth and young adults between the ages of 5-24 across the country.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is a free, confidential 24/7 phone line that connects individuals in crisis with trained counselors across the United States. There are also specialized lines for both Veterans and the LGBTQIA+ population.

You don’t have to be suicidal or in crisis to call the Lifeline. People call to talk about coping with lots of things: substance use, economic worries, relationships, sexual identity, illness, abuse, mental and physical illness, and loneliness. Here’s more about the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline:

  • You are not alone in reaching out. In 2021, the Lifeline received 3.6 million calls, chats, and texts.
  • The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is a network of more than 200 state and local call centers supported by HHS through SAMHSA.
  • Calls to the Lifeline are routed to the nearest crisis center for connections to local resources for help.
  • Responders are trained counselors who have successfully helped to prevent suicide ideation and attempts among callers.
  • Learn what happens when you call the Lifeline network.
  • Frequently asked questions about the Lifeline.

Suicide-Related Survey Data

Data collected via SAMHSA’s National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) provide estimates of substance use and mental illness at the national, state, and substate levels; help identify the extent of these issues among different subgroups; estimate trends over time; determine the need for treatment services; and help inform planning and early intervention programs and services. NSDUH also collects data about the prevalence of suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts among adolescents aged 12-17 and adults aged 18 or older, described in the NSDUH national releases.

Last Updated: 08/27/2024
Source: https://www.samhsa.gov/mental-health/suicide/prevention-initiatives
Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Mental Health,Social Affairs,USA,Youth :

TogetherWeCan_InternationalOverdoseAwarenessLogo

Perhaps we’re finally turning a corner when it comes to lowering overdose deaths. While the number of people dying as a result of an overdose remains frighteningly high, a new report signals modest progress in efforts to reduce fatalities.

Updated figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found fatal drug overdoses fell 2.4% from 2022 to 2023. The toll from the overdose crisis reached 108,317 lives last year, according to data the CDC posted Aug. 4. While that’s lower than the 111,029 overdose deaths in 2022, it still represents a massive number of preventable deaths, and there’s yet more we can do to ensure that fatalities continue to decline.

That is one of the goals of International Overdose Awareness Day, observed on August 31.

In recognition of the day, the National Council has created an informative new video to help people understand how to administer naloxone. Naloxone (often known by the brand name Narcan) is a medication that reverses opioid overdoses. It is quite literally a lifesaver.

The lower number of overdose fatalities in 2023 may be related to the Food and Drug Administration’s March 2023 decision to make naloxone available over the counter, a decision we applauded. But having naloxone available doesn’t mean everyone who may need it has access to the drug. And it doesn’t mean that everyone knows how to administer naloxone.

Let’s hope the modest drop in overdose fatalities last year was an early indication that we’re finally flattening the curve of overdose deaths.

That’s exactly why we made this video.

Everyone should carry naloxone, especially those who work with the public — whether as a teacher, ambulance driver, librarian, coach or in some other capacity.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) continues to promote naloxone distribution through state opioid response (SOR) grants. Naloxone distribution and saturation planning is a federal-state partnership (of sorts) to optimize naloxone distribution.

States are required to create distribution and saturation plans as part of their SOR grant; every state is required to make one. The purpose is for states to meaningfully plan and coordinate their naloxone distribution based on data and input from impacted community partners so they optimize reach, including focusing distribution efforts to those most likely to experience and/or witness an overdose.

Substance use isn’t going away anytime soon. July’s release of the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health provides important new data about substance use challenges and the nature of substance use among people of all ages. For instance:

70.5 million

Among people aged 12 or older in 2023, 70.5 million people (24.9%) had used illicit drugs in the past year, up from 70.3 million people in 2022 and 61.2 million in 2021.

48.5 million

In 2023, 48.5 million people 12 or older (17.1%) had a substance use disorder in the past year, down slightly from 48.7 million in 2022.

8.9 million

In 2023, 8.9 million people 12 and older (3.1%) used opioids in a non-prescribed way in the past year, compared to 8.9 million in 2022 and 9.4 million in 2021.

This data shows us that no one is immune from a substance use challenge.

We can’t turn our backs on people with a substance use disorder or ignore the tragic consequences of substances, whether they’re considered illicit or socially acceptable, like alcohol. To support people with a substance use disorder or their loved ones, the Start With Hope project also recently published many new resources, including:

The Start With Hope project was started in November 2023 by The Ad Council, in partnership with the CDC, the National Council and Shatterproof to deliver a message of hope to those living with substance use disorders as well as those at risk of developing one.

Let’s hope the modest drop in overdose fatalities last year was an early indication that we’re finally flattening the curve of overdose deaths. When it comes to lives lost, we can’t be satisfied with modest improvements. Let’s ensure continued progress by spreading the word about lifesaving resources.

Check out our new video, and let us know what you’re doing in your communities to reduce overdose deaths and provide resources to those with a substance use disorder.

We can and will learn from one another on how to best support people and communities.

Author

Charles Ingoglia, MSW
(he/him/his) President and CEO
National Council for Mental Wellbeing
 
Source:  https://www.thenationalcouncil.org/lowering-overdose-deaths-naxolone-how-to/
Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :

With the increasing legalization of recreational marijuana across various states, employers need to proactively prepare for the changes and their implications on the workplace. As more states allow adults to legally purchase and possess marijuana, it’s essential for employers to review and update their workplace policies to ensure compliance and maintain a safe work environment.

Despite legalization, employers can still prohibit marijuana use that leads to impairment at work, akin to alcohol restrictions. Recent legal decisions, such as White v. Timken Gears & Servs., Inc. in Illinois, reinforce that a positive drug test for marijuana while working, even if used recreationally off-duty, can justify termination if it violates a reasonable and consistently applied workplace policy. This underscores the importance of clear, fair, and legally sound drug and alcohol policies to ensure workplace safety.

  • The first step is to reevaluate your drug testing protocols. Ensure they align with both state and federal regulations, particularly if your industry is governed by specific mandates, such as those from the Department of Transportation. Consider your agreements with insurance carriers, as marijuana testing might be a condition of coverage or discounts.
  • Testing for marijuana presents unique challenges due to the limitations of current testing methods. Talk with your testing laboratory to understand the differences between qualitative and quantitative tests and determine which best supports your workplace policies.
  • Evaluate whether to implement second chance agreements for employees who test positive for marijuana. Additionally, consider providing access to substance abuse programs. These measures can help manage employees who might struggle with marijuana use while offering them a chance to comply with workplace policies.
  • Update your policies in your employee handbook, workers’ compensation policies, and other relevant documents to clearly state that while marijuana may be legal, it is prohibited in the workplace. Clearly outline that possession or use of marijuana at the worksite is forbidden and that employees are not permitted to use marijuana during lunch or other breaks. Specify the consequences of violating these policies to ensure there are no ambiguities.
  • Hold meetings to communicate the company’s stance and expectations regarding marijuana use to all employees. Transparency is key; ensure employees understand the policies, the reasons behind them, and the consequences of non-compliance. Clear communication helps in setting the right expectations and reduces misunderstandings.
  • Conduct comprehensive training sessions for HR professionals, managers, and supervisors on the company’s policies regarding marijuana use. Ensure that all managerial staff understand the testing protocols and disciplinary policies. Training should also cover how to handle conversations with employees about marijuana use, ensuring consistency and sensitivity. Equip your managers with the skills to recognize signs of impairment at work. Understanding how to identify and address employees who might be under the influence of marijuana is crucial for maintaining workplace safety. Provide clear guidelines on the steps to take if impairment is suspected. Check out our trainings here!

The increasing state legalization of recreational marijuana marks a significant change for employers. By proactively updating your drug testing protocols, policies, training programs, and communication strategies, you can effectively manage the impact of this new legislation on your workplace. Staying informed and prepared will help you navigate this evolving landscape while ensuring a safe and compliant work environment.

Sources:

Federal court rules employer did not violate Illinois privacy law for firing worker testing positive for cannabis. (2024, July 30). JD Supra. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/federal-court-rules-employer-did-not-4849901/

 

NATIONAL DRUG-FREE WORKPLACE ALLIANCE

As the workplace division of Drug Free America Foundation, NDWA’s mission is to be a national leader in the drug-free workplace industry by directly assisting employers and stakeholders, providing drug-free workplace program resources and assistance, and supporting a national coalition of drug-free workplace service providers.

Source:  www.ndwa.org

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Legal Sector,USA,Workplace :

DENVER (AP) — Simon Rubick had lost almost everything to decades of alcoholism and drug addiction.

In 2022, he found himself without a vehicle and without a home, which forced his two teenage children to move in with friends. He had burned bridges with friends and family and it took a drug-induced stint in the hospital for him to realize his cocaine addiction was going to be a “death sentence.”

Rubick, who lives in the Denver suburb of Arvada, Colorado, knew he needed help. But first he had to figure out what to do with one of the only sources of unconditional love and support he had left: his beloved German shepherd rescue, Tonks.

Most residential rehab centers in the United States don’t allow patients to bring their pets along, said Rubick, 51. So when his brother could no longer help care for the dog, Rubick thought he would have to make the excruciating decision to give up Tonks.

“It basically came down to being able to take care of my dog or being able to take care of myself,” he said.

Rubick — who has been sober for more than two years and is now an addiction recovery coach — was connected to the group PAWsitive Recovery, which fosters animals while their owners receive treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, and for people dealing with domestic violence or mental health crises.

“People that are trying to get into recovery sometimes have lost their families, their children, any kind of support system that they have had,” said Serena Saunders, the organization’s program manager. “You’re not going to compound trauma that you’ve already had by giving up the one thing that hasn’t given up on you, and that’s people’s animals.”

Saunders founded PAWsitive Recovery in Denver three years ago. Since then, it’s helped more than 180 people and their pets, and Saunders said the group has looked to expand nationally after it became a part of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International. The organization, whose largest foster network is in Colorado but accepts applications nationwide, is one of just a few programs in the U.S. that cares for the pets of people seeking treatment for substance abuse.

Saunders’ own experience with drug and alcohol addiction has helped her tailor the program. She said she had a “pretty broken childhood,” with her mother being schizophrenic and addicted to methamphetamine and her father also struggling with addiction. She sought comfort in alcohol when she was about 12 and was using hard drugs by the time she was 14.

“Addiction just gave me trauma after trauma,” said Saunders, now 41.

Saunders was seeing a therapist for her depression and PTSD when a fortuitous session planted the seed of PAWsitive Recovery. With a background in veterinary and shelter medicine, which focuses on caring for homeless animals, she told her therapist she wanted to incorporate her love of dogs in her recovery.

“And that’s what we did,” said Saunders, who fostered Tonks for several months while Rubick was in treatment and facilitated visits between the two best friends.

“To see a broken person when we’re meeting them in a parking lot, when they have nothing left to live for but their animal. And to see how broken and how desperate they are in that moment, and then to circle back around six months later and see them completely turn their lives around is just so special. It’s amazing,” said Saunders, who has been sober for 3 1/2 years.

That sentiment is echoed by the organization’s volunteer foster families, some of whom are drawn to the program because of their own experiences with addiction.

Denver resident Ben Cochell, 41, who has been sober from alcohol for more than seven years, has two dogs of his own and has fostered several more.

“One of my favorite parts about fostering in this program is the ability to teach my kids some life lessons in how to help others and how to care for animals and be kind, be loving. And to just give of yourself,” he said. “That’s what you have. Your time and your energy. And you can give that away freely.”

If not for PAWsitive Recovery, Rubick said he probably would have ended up living on the streets with his dog and trying to figure out recovery on his own. But as it turned out, by being able to keep his rescue dog, Tonks ended up rescuing Rubick, he said.

“It’s that connection, caring for another creature and having something else care for you the way that animals do,” Rubick said. “It’s just unconditional, and sometimes that’s one of the things that people in recovery really need to be able to feel.”

Associated Press writer Colleen Slevin contributed to this report.

Source:  https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/giving-up-pets-to-seek-rehab-can-worsen-trauma-a-colorado-group-intends-to-end-that/
Filed under: Animals,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

By Caroline Spikes

Published: Sep. 1, 2024

Aug. 31 is known as International Awareness Day the department wanted to spread awareness about the crisis of drug overdoses.

During this event, people gathered at the city hall and lit candles to remember lost lives or loved ones.

The South Carolina Department of Alcohol and other Drug Abuse Services states the number of overdoses has been increasing for the past 10 years.

Organizations and community members came together to learn more about how to spot an overdose and the importance of Narcan nasal sprays.

Thomas Young, a Charleston County support specialist, said his overdose was a wake-up call to get the help he needed.

“I was basically dead on arrival and it took six Narcan to get me awake,” Young said.

There have been between 100-120 incidents regarding overdoses with 20 of those fatal within the first six months of this year according to the North Charleston Police Department.

In 2022 alone, there were 437 opioid-related deaths in the Lowcountry and over 1,800 throughout the whole state, according to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Opioid prevention coordinator Shelbey Joffrion said she thinks substance abuse disorder is important for people to know and how it touches to have someone by them during difficult times.

“I just think it’s important that everyone knows the substance abuse disorder touches everyone,” Joffrion said. “I have not met anyone who says they have not had their friend or family in their circle. It touches all of us.”

Young explains he never thought it be sober ever again and how it takes a team to overcome a drug addiction.

“I never I never thought I’d be sober, ever,” Young said. “It’s basically a miracle that I’m sober because I was a glorified drug user for many years. Nobody can really get clean by themselves, no matter how much they try. We kind of need everybody in this together.”

Click this link for more information regarding the South Carolina Department of Alcohol and other Drug Abuse Services.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Source: https://www.live5news.com/2024/09/01/north-charleston-hosts-first-overdose-awareness-day-event/

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Education,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

By Luke Niforatos

Recognizing Overdose Awareness Day on Aug. 31, the Denver City Council passed a proclamation that called for numerous radical, unproven drug policies. The most notable of these was “safe supply,” a misnomer that provides free, pharmaceutical, addictive opioids to those with an opioid addiction. If it sounds like a bad idea, that is because it is.

Even worse, absent from the discussion is a promotion of evidence-based treatment and prevention services that prioritize recovery.

Denver’s proclamation encourages “prioritizing harm reduction initiatives such as naloxone, fentanyl testing strips, syringe services programs, overdose prevention sites, and a safe supply.” By lumping in these interventions together, radical extreme drug policy and harm reduction advocates are hoping we don’t notice some of these unproven policies that are nothing more than slippery slopes to full drug legalization.

Case in point: British Columbia, Canada, has already focused its attention almost exclusively on all of these harm reduction initiatives while reducing focus on prevention, treatment, and recovery.

The result? Overdose deaths have continued to rise in that province and it leads North America in its rate of overdose mortality. Focusing on harm reduction alone has not delivered on its promise as a solution to the drug crisis.

The most troubling of these proposals is “safe supply.” Anything but what its name suggests, “safe supply” provides opioids to people who use drugs on the premise that a medical-grade drug supply is better than one that may be mixed with other substances in the illicit market. It’s like giving away free booze to alcoholics in the hopes that they drink less.

In essence, Denver’s City Council members are echoing the calls of radical activists in proposing to give people in active addiction their drugs directly — and for free.

A recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine reviewed British Columbia’s so-called “safe supply” program. The researchers found that just as many people died from overdoses as before the policy took effect. Additionally, the “safe supply” drugs are often sold on the black market so those users can obtain what they really want — usually fentanyl. Even extreme harm reduction supporters in British Columbia have recognized its shortcomings. But instead of backtracking, they are doubling down on this unproven approach.

Dr. Bonnie Henry, the provincial health officer in British Columbia, recently called for the province to “enable access to non-prescribed alternatives to unregulated drugs.” In effect, they know the medical model of safe supply, also known as “prescribed alternatives,” has not worked, so they want to increase access to legalized drugs in retail stores, clubs, and community centers. They’d place life-threatening drugs in neighborhoods across the province.

Denver’s City Council could be headed down this path.

Instead, we should wake up — and favor an evidence-based approach that is comprehensive: both supply reduction, which includes enforcing the law on open-air drug markets and dealers, and demand reduction, which includes prevention, treatment, and recovery services. Of course, harm reduction interventions like naloxone have a role to play, but they cannot be the only leg of the stool.

Prioritizing a comprehensive approach will send a clear message that in Denver we actually want to achieve something in honor of the many victims of overdose.

Many readers may be shocked to learn that the proclamation in Denver overlooked many of these common-sense interventions.

The word “treatment” was referenced only once. The concept of “drug use prevention,” such as empirically proven programs discouraging use among minors and non-users, was completely absent. And the word “recovery” was not referenced at all.

Many recognize the tragedy of the drug crisis, which took the lives of more than 100,000 Americans in 2022. To overcome this crisis, policymakers must support a comprehensive approach that favors a wide range of responses, including demand reduction, supply reduction, and harm reduction. Denver’s City Council has chosen to proclaim the extreme proposals of activists over real solutions.

Let’s hope they reverse course soon.

Yes, we should meet people where they are in their addiction. But we cannot leave them there.

Luke Niforatos is the executive vice president of the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions and an international drug policy expert.

Source: https://gazette.com/opinion/safe-supply-only-will-deepen-denver-s-drug-crisis/article_65ce5e4c-6705-11ef-997f-6f63e2ef75a3.html
Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
(Spectrum News/Vania Patino)

By Vania Patino Los Angeles

Sep. 02, 2024

LOS ANGELES — Facing peer pressure can be hard, but teens at the Boys and Girls Club in Monterey Park are learning to say no to drugs and alcohol together.

 

What You Need To Know

    • The Boys and Girls Club in Monterey Park offers a drug and alcohol prevention program for youth called Brent’s Club
    • Participants are drug tested at random every week and rewarded through activities, trips and scholarships for saying no to drugs
    • Earlier this year, a group of students traveled to Washington D.C to participate at the Boys & Girls Clubs of America’s Summit for America’s Youth
    • The students were able to speak with elected officials about the need for continued funding toward drug prevention resources

 

Victoria Perez is one of the high school students who chooses to spend her afternoons at the Brent’s Club chapter offered at the Boys and Girls Club.

“I thought maybe it would just be lessons of drug and alcohol awareness, but it just it’s so much bigger than that,” Perez said.

Perez and the other participants soon realized they were not just gaining knowledge about the dangers of drugs, but were also being rewarded for actively taking those lessons into their daily decision making.

The program takes their commitment to staying drug free serious, and it’s why every week participants are drug tested at random.

So far, director of the Brent’s Club, Angel Silva, says they have not had any test results come back positive.

The deal is that those who remain drug free are rewarded through field trips, activities and also become eligible for a full four-year scholarship or partial renewable scholarships.

“Like our Maui trip that we do every summer, where we go, and we do a service project on the island of Maui,” Silva said.

The approach was designed by the Brent Shapiro Foundation, which was created by Brent’s parents after losing their son to addiction. The hope was to prevent this from happening to any other families and help reduce the risks of falling into substance abuse among youth.

This year, some participants created the TLC or Think, Lead, Create Change mental health project to advocate for continued funding toward drug use prevention, treatment and recovery resources.

Perez was one of the participants and, along with her team, was able to attend the Boys & Girls Clubs of America’s Summit for America’s Youth in Washington, D.C.

This was the first time flying for many of the participants and the first time at D.C. for all the students.

It’s experiences like those that Silva says these students would otherwise not have access to without the program.

Perez says it took a lot of preparing and researching to create the project, but was all worth it when they were able to present it to elected officials and share why this cause means so much to them.

“It was such an amazing opportunity, especially for advocating for not just alcohol and drug abuse, but for mental health and how those things merge together,” Perez said.

The advocacy and awareness the students are helping create comes as a time when fentanyl continues to be the most common cause of accidental drug overdose deaths in Los Angeles County.

“We were learning and teaching at the same time very much, because we thought we knew everything about fentanyl, but it decided to change the whole game,” Silva said.

Although, it can be tough to keep up, he says the ever-changing substance landscape makes their efforts that much more important.

Something Perez’s mother, Monica Vargas, agrees with and why she says the program has given her a peace of mind although the idea was jarring at first.

“It was a little shocking because where I come from, I’m a first generation, so we tend to come sometimes from very close or conservative families. So we think out of sight, out of mind. We don’t talk about it,” Vargas said.

However, she knew it was important for parents to communicate with their children, and this program was the perfect way to do it.

“If those additional incentives help, especially with so much pressure out there for these teens, by all means, I’m all for it. I’m 100% for it,” Vargas said.

Along with the incentives, Silva says the students have also become each other’s support system, which itself is a way to reduce the risk of substance abuse among youth.

“That’s the great part. You know, it’s not just within the clubhouse, they all go to the same school, and they hold each other accountable,” Silva said.

Source: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/southern-california/health/2024/09/02/teens–drug-and-alcohol-prevention-

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Education,Fentanyl,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

By  Charlotte Caldwell

September 6, 2024

LIMA — The Lima Police Department recently posted on its Facebook page about an increase in overdoses in Lima over the past few weeks.

With September being National Recovery Month, where organizations try to increase public awareness about mental health and addiction recovery, local organizations and law enforcement agencies shared their experiences with addiction and overdoses and the help that is available.

The problem

Lima Fire Chief Andy Heffner said his department responded to 85 overdoses so far this year. He said the overdose numbers have risen and fallen throughout the year, with about one-week breaks in between. He believed the numbers were based on the drugs available in the area.

Project Auglaize County Addiction Response Team Project Coordinator/Peer Support Specialist Brittany Boneta spoke on the reason for the overdose spikes.

“When it comes to overdoses, one is too many,” Boneta said. “I think the number of overdoses comes in waves. There could be a really bad batch of heroin or fentanyl that gets distributed throughout the county that could lead to a spike in overdoses.”

Heffner cited the Drug Enforcement Administration’s website, which said seven out of every 10 pills seized by the DEA contain a lethal dose of fentanyl. The website also said 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be enough to kill someone.

“It only takes one time when Narcan is not available that you could lose your life. If you get clean, you will never have to worry about an overdose, and neither will the people that love you,” Heffner said.

Bath Township Fire Chief Joe Kitchen said his department used Narcan 21 times on patients from August 2023 to August 2024. The department also distributes Narcan to families just in case an overdose occurs.

“Although we have only left behind a few kits so far, I think it gives the family of a known addict some peace of mind that they could assist them in the event of an OD prior to EMS arrival,” Kitchen said.

Another problem is a tranquilizer called Xylazine is being mixed with fentanyl, which does not respond to the usual methods of reversal.

“There are always new drugs/drug combinations being introduced on the streets that make it difficult for those in the treatment world to keep up with and know how to effectively treat,” said Jamie Declercq, the vice president of clinical operations for Lighthouse Behavioral Health Solutions. “Right now, we are seeing an increase in substances (such as Xylazine) across the county which does not respond to Narcan, so that is likely one reason for the increase in overdose deaths.”

Their stories

Boneta was addicted to opiates and crack cocaine over a seven-year period, and her addiction journey started when she was prescribed Percocet by a cardiologist for a heart condition when she was 18.

“There wasn’t a drug I wouldn’t use,” Boneta said. “I was an honor roll student in high school with more trauma than almost anyone I know, and when I went off to college I wasn’t educated on the true dangers of drugs, the thirst to fit in, and all of my trauma stuffed down.”

When her doctor stopped prescribing Percocet, she bought them from drug dealers, not knowing they were laced with heroin.

“When the drug supply of the fake Percocet ran out, I was just buying actual heroin. The heroin was starting to have fentanyl added to it, and before long that was all I was consuming,” Boneta said.

Boneta was eventually sent to prison for drugs, and during that time her 6-year-old son was involved in a house fire and suffered serious injuries.

“I was transported from the prison, in my orange jumpsuit and shackles on my wrists and ankles, to say my goodbyes to my son. I think seeing him lying there in a coma covered in bandages was something so soul-shaking that I knew this was my rock bottom,” Boneta said.

“My son had countless surgeries and was getting better and stronger as the months went by, so I decided I was going to completely reset my life and work my butt off just as hard,” Boneta continued. “I completed as many recovery groups and classes as possible and started learning coping skills and tools to use when I was released from prison. I knew that I wanted to help other people like me and show them that people can understand what they are going through and not have judgment towards them.”

Diane Urban, of Delphos, the founder/president of the Association of People Against Lethal Drugs, started APALD because her youngest son died from a fentanyl overdose. Her older son is also a former addict, and her niece is in active addiction.

“He was clean for the last nine months of his life, he came to live with me, and he relapsed due to an ingrown wisdom tooth that was coming in, his face was swelling up, and because he had Medicaid, we couldn’t find him any help anywhere except for a place in Van Wert, and it was a two-week out appointment. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me, he relapsed, and I found him dead in his bedroom from a fentanyl overdose,” Urban said.

Challenges to get help

Transportation, not enough of a variety of local recovery options available and financial barriers were all cited as issues addicts face when they decide to get help.

“For peers that are needing inpatient treatment or sober living, we have to send them to other counties for help,” Boneta said. “There is definitely a need for more substance abuse treatment in our county.”

Declercq said Allen County also has a need for inpatient or residential treatment, and people who need that care have to go to one of the major cities nearby.

Urban dealt with having to go outside the area when her son got help.

“Seven years ago when I had to get help for my son, we had to go to Columbus. There was no help to get in right away because (Coleman Health Services) was so backed up,” Urban said. “There can never be enough resources because what happens is all these resource centers and rehabilitation centers, they keep you for a period of time then they release you, and a lot of people when they get released like that, they don’t have adequate support for more of a long-term stay, more of them tend to relapse.”

Urban said her son got treatment for free with Medicaid, but in her experience, organizations prioritize people who have insurance.

Auglaize County Sheriff Mike Vorhees also mentioned a challenge with people not having a way to get to treatment.

“We don’t provide transportation yet, but that’s something that we’re working on,” Vorhees said in regard to the services Project ACART provides. “It depends on who it is. If it’s an elderly person, we can work with the Council on Aging; if it’s a veteran we go through Veterans Services.”

Financially, Declercq said Lighthouse Behavioral Health Solutions’ case managers help people apply for Medicaid, or the local mental health board has options for those who don’t qualify for Medicaid.

“One of the most frustrating barriers for seeking treatment is those with commercial insurance or Medicare, as those companies only pay for very limited services,” Declercq said. “Commercial plans typically pay for a short detox stay and limited individual/group counseling sessions, but do not pay for the intensive level of treatment that a program like Lighthouse offers.”

“Thirty days of treatment and/or 10 individual counseling sessions are not enough to truly treat a person who has been in active addiction for years,” Declercq continued. “Oftentimes even one year of intense treatment only touches the surface of the issues that someone in addiction needs to address.”

Available help

Project ACART has only been around about a year, and Boneta is working part-time and is the only employee. She has reached out to 19 people so far, and only two have denied treatment. She put together a resource guide in 2023 including mental health and substance abuse centers; residential detox treatment centers; 24/7 support services; substance use support groups; where to find Narcan; food pantries, hot meals and clothing; housing assistance and shelters; and low income and subsidized housing.

Boneta received help from peer support specialists through Coleman Health Services during her addiction. Now, as a peer support specialist, she uses a combination of her own experiences and formal training. She equated her role to being like a cheerleader. She is available to clients day and night to connect them to agencies to get help or just talk about their struggles.

“I meet people where they’re at and treat every situation differently. Some of the things I do are assessing needs and struggles, setting goals, advocating for my peers, giving resources, facilitating engagement with my peers and their families or service providers, and encouraging and uplifting them,” Boneta said.

Project ACART’s services are also free because of an Ohio grant.

“Many people in active addiction do not have housing, food, clothing, money or insurance, but they should still have the opportunity to get the help they need,” Boneta said.

Declercq said Lighthouse Behavioral Health Solutions also recently opened a peer support center in Lima for clients to have a place to go for sober activities.

“Downtime/boredom is often a trigger for people who are early in recovery, so this gives them a place to fill that time in a positive way,” Declercq said. “Our peer supporters offer a unique support system to our clients because they are people with past lived experience in addiction who are able to show them that life beyond addiction is achievable and fulfilling.”

Coleman’s seemed to be the go-to choice for law enforcement referrals, and Urban also directs people to the organization.

“My oldest son was a success story, he went to Coleman’s, got treatment, got on the MAT (medication-assisted treatment) program, Suboxone, and he’s thriving today. Owns his own house, owns his own business, married, doing absolutely wonderful. He’s like eight years clean,” Urban said.

Ohio Department of Commerce Division of Securities Recovery Within Reach program also provides a list of recovery resources and offers ways to pay for treatment.

 

Source: https://www.limaohio.com/top-stories/2024/09/06/local-organizations-share-addiction-experiences-challenges-resources/

Filed under: Addiction,Crime/Violence/Prison,Drug use-various effects,Fentanyl,Prevalence,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

Posted By: Staff September 9, 2024

By Marcel Gemme

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. During this month, prevention organizations, survivors, mental health advocates, and community members unite to promote suicide prevention and awareness.

One important aspect of suicide prevention is recognizing the connection between substance use and suicide. Drug addiction prevention campaigns are always working hand-in-hand with suicide prevention campaigns in local communities.

Drug and alcohol addiction, such as alcohol and opioid use disorders, for example, significantly increases the risk of suicidal ideation, attempts, and death. These are generally the two most implicated substances in suicide risk.

The risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior is elevated with acute alcohol intoxication and chronic alcohol use or dependence. The same applies to opioid use, as it can increase the risk of suicide and unintentional overdose caused by opioids alone or polysubstance use.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the 9th leading cause of death in Arizona. It is the second leading cause of death among those aged 10 to 34 in the state. Unfortunately, 91% of communities in Arizona did not have enough mental health providers to serve residents in 2023. It’s estimated that almost four times as many people died by suicide in Arizona than in alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents.

Fortunately, prevention campaigns work and increase awareness surrounding substance use and suicide. Anyone can take action today by knowing simple things, such as dialing 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, a 24-7 free and confidential support for people in distress.

Locally, there is an Arizona Statewide Crisis Hotline, where anyone can phone 1-844-534-HOPE(4673) or text 4HOPE(44673).

We must all work to change the conversation from suicide to suicide prevention. There are actions that anyone can take to help and give hope to those who are struggling. Consider some of the following pointers.

Ask, do not beat around the bush, but ask that person how they are doing and if they are thinking about suicide. Acknowledging and talking about suicide reduces suicidal ideation. Be there for that person, and they will feel less depressed, less suicidal, and less overwhelmed.

Keep them safe and help them stay connected. When lethal means are made less available or less deadly, the frequency and risks of suicide decline. Moreover, the hopelessness subsides when you help that person create a support network of resources and individuals.

Most importantly, maintain contact, follow up, and see them in person as frequently as possible. This is a critical part of suicide prevention, along with always learning more about prevention and awareness.

However, this process is not bulletproof, and we must recognize there are countless instances of individuals taking their lives and giving no indication or red flag they were suicidal. But if we can keep changing the conversation, breaking down the walls of stigma, and making the resources accessible, more people may ask for help before it is too late.

Marcel Gemme is the founder of SUPE and has been helping people struggling with substance use for over 20 years. His work focuses on a threefold approach: education, prevention, and rehabilitation.

Source: https://gilavalleycentral.net/suicide-prevention-is-an-important-part-of-drug-education/

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Mental Health,USA :

Cryptocurrency Tether enables a parallel economy that operates beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement

Wall Street Journal     Angus Berwick  and Ben Foldy       Sept. 10, 2024

A giant unregulated currency is undermining America’s fight against arms dealers, sanctions busters and scammers. Almost as much money flowed through its network last year as through Visa cards. And it has recently minted more profit than BlackRock, with a tiny fraction of the workforce. Its name: tether. The cryptocurrency has grown into an important cog in the global financial system, with as much as $190 billion changing hands daily.

In essence, tether is a digital U.S. dollar—though one privately controlled in the British Virgin Islands by a secretive crew of owners, with its activities largely hidden from governments.

Known as a stablecoin for its 1:1 peg to the dollar, tether gained early use among crypto aficionados. But it has spread deep into the financial underworld, enabling a parallel economy that operates beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.

Wherever the U.S. government has restricted access to the dollar financial system—Iran, Venezuela, Russia—tether thrives as a sort of incognito dollar used to move money across borders.

Russian oligarchs and weapons dealers shuttle tether abroad to buy property and pay suppliers for sanctioned goods. Venezuela’s sanctioned state oil firm takes payment in tether for cargoes. Drug cartels, fraud rings and terrorist groups such as Hamas use it to launder income.

Yet in dysfunctional economies such as Argentina and Turkey, beset by hyperinflation and a shortage of hard currency, tether is also a lifeline for people who use it for quotidian payments and as a way to protect their savings.

Tether is arguably the first successful real-world product to emerge from the cryptocurrency revolution that began over a decade ago. It has made its owners immensely rich. Tether has $120 billion in assets, mostly risk-free U.S. Treasury bills, along with positions in bitcoin and gold. Last year it generated $6.2 billion in profit, outearning BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, by $700 million.

Tether’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino, boasted earlier this year that, with under 100 employees, it earned more profit per person than any company ever.

Tether wants “to build a fairer, more connected, and accessible global financial system,” Ardoino said in a May press release. He claims over 300 million people are using the currency.

With sanctions, Washington can cut adversaries off from the dollar and thus much of the global trading system, since all dollar transactions involve U.S. regulated banks. Tether’s popularity subverts those powers.

“We need a regulatory framework that doesn’t allow offshore dollar-backed stablecoin providers to play by a different set of rules,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told The Wall Street Journal. Adeyemo singled out tether in April testimony before Congress.

For this article, the Journal spoke with tether users, researchers and officials, and reviewed messages exchanged between intermediaries, court and corporate records, and blockchain data.

Tether didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company said in May it collaborates with law enforcement and was upgrading its capacity to monitor transactions for sanctions evasion. Tether voluntarily freezes digital wallets used to transfer its tokens that were connected with sanctioned entities, it says. Ardoino said Tether has a “proactive approach to safeguarding our ecosystem against illicit activities.”

How Tether works: The company behind tether, Tether Holdings, issues the virtual coins to a select group of direct customers, mostly trading firms, who wire real-world dollars in exchange. Tether uses those dollars to purchase assets, mostly U.S. Treasurys, that back the coin’s value.

Once in the wider market, tether can be traded for other tokens or traditional currencies through exchanges and local brokerages. In Iran, for example, a crypto exchange called TetherLand allows Iranians to swap rials into tether.

Tether vets the identities of its direct customers, but much of its vast secondary market goes unpoliced. The tokens can be pinged near-instantaneously along chains of digital wallets to obfuscate the source. A United Nations report this January said tether was “a preferred choice” for Southeast Asian money launderers.  The company says it can track every transaction on public blockchain ledgers and can seize and destroy tether held in any wallet.

But freezing wallets is a game of Whac-A-Mole. Between 2018 and this June, Tether blacklisted 2,713 wallets on its two most popular blockchains that had received a total of about $153 billion, according to crypto data provider ChainArgos. Of that massive sum, Tether could only freeze $1.4 billion because the rest of the funds had already been sent on.

Tether’s founders—a group that included a former plastic surgeon called Giancarlo Devasini—created the currency back in 2014. Uptake for a stable token was initially slim. The prospect of profiting from billions of accumulated dollars was a “fantasy,” said William Quigley, an investor who was part of the founding team.

He and other co-founders sold their stakes soon after to Devasini, who has run Tether ever since, according to people familiar with the company. The reclusive billionaire lives at a modernist villa in the French Riviera enclave of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, corporate records show. Ardoino, a fellow Italian, has become Tether’s public face.

Tether’s entry into the crypto mainstream came during the market’s 2020-2021 bull run, as traders used tether to buy and sell out of risky bets. Its market capitalization exploded from $4 billion to almost $80 billion.

The dollar for all: In Venezuela, financially isolated by sanctions and economic mismanagement, Tether found a ready user base.

President Nicolás Maduro’s government was under siege in 2020 from U.S. measures that targeted state oil firm Petróleos de Venezuela, or PdVSA. That October, Maduro’s parliament passed an “Anti-Blockade Law” that authorized the government to use crypto to protect its transactions.

PdVSA began demanding payment for oil shipments in tether, according to people familiar with its activities and transaction records. Purchase orders authorized by PdVSA often instructed buyers to transfer tether to a certain wallet address. Another method was for intermediaries to swap deliveries of cash for tether and load the tokens onto prepaid travel cards, which enabled holders to use crypto for purchases. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s parliament passed a law allowing the government to use crypto to protect its transactions. The company’s adoption of tether was so pervasive it had another effect: instead of sending oil revenues back to the government, the middlemen that PdVSA used for the sales diverted funds for themselves, leading to a scandal that toppled the oil minister.

“This cryptocurrency’s use only has served to perpetuate gigantic levels of corruption,” Rafael Ramírez, a former oil minister under Maduro, said in an interview.

Venezuela’s government didn’t respond to requests for comment. The country’s attorney general said in April that middlemen’s use of crypto made the stolen funds “undetectable” for authorities.

For regular Venezuelans, tether became a lifeline, too. Inflation that reached 2 million percent wiped out savings held in bolivars. Currency controls made bank transfers abroad impractical.

Guillermo Goncalvez, a 30-year-old Caracas graduate, runs a platform called El Dorado that offers Venezuelans peer-to-peer tether trading, which links buyers and sellers directly.  El Dorado has over 150,000 users, who pay fees that are a fraction of what traditional money remitters charge: local stores converting daily revenues into tether, Venezuelan migrants sending money back to families, and freelancers receiving salaries in USDT, as tether is also known. “USDT is the digital dollar for all Venezuelans,” Goncalvez said.

Enough money to fill a plane: In Russia, tether is a vital payment channel, the Journal has previously reported.

A confidential report drawn up this year by a government-backed Russian research center identified tether as one of the most popular ways for importers to convert rubles into foreign currencies. Major institutions are involved, too: Rosbank, a Russian lender, arranges tether transfers for clients to pay suppliers abroad, according to a company presentation circulated in June. Rosbank spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment.

It is also the go-to currency for Russia’s elite.

A glamorous fixer called Ekaterina Zhdanova told associates in Telegram messages in 2022 and 2023 that she was arranging huge ruble-for-tether deals for clients. Digital wallets she shared had transferred over $350 million in tether, according to blockchain data.

Born in a Siberian village, Zhdanova, 38 years old, ran a concierge service to help wealthy Russians get foreign visas, and a travel agency that organized luxury cruises. Her ex-husband was a top lieutenant for a billionaire Russian real-estate developer.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions amplified demand for her services.

Two months into the war, Zhdanova relayed a request from a client to a group of large Russian crypto traders, according to chats on Telegram. The client, who she said had their own bank, wanted to buy about $10 million of tether each month, needing $300 million’s worth in total, in exchange for cash that would be handed over in the United Arab Emirates or Turkey.

After finding a trader willing to accept the deal, Zhdanova told the group she could coordinate the cash’s collection. “They will use planes to pick up the cash,” she said.

Treasury sanctioned Zhdanova late last year, accusing her of transferring crypto on behalf of unnamed oligarchs. Police in France detained her around that time at an airport there as part of a separate French money laundering investigation, people familiar with her arrest said. She remains in custody. A lawyer for Zhdanova declined to comment.

‘Everything. Everywhere.’: Tether is now investing in startups that use tether for everyday payments. The more Tether can encourage its usage, the more tokens it needs to issue, and so the more dollars it will have to put to work.

In Tbilisi, Georgia, a popular landing spot for Russian émigrés, the token’s symbol—an encircled green “T”—glimmers outside money-change shops with blacked-out windows. Cash machines advertise that users can deposit bills for the stablecoin.

Ardoino, the Tether CEO, visited Georgia last year and approached government officials with an offer to help expand the local crypto economy. They signed a cooperation deal that Ardoino said would make the former Soviet republic a flourishing payments hub. Tether invested $25 million in local startups, according to Georgia’s innovation agency.

The main recipient of Tether’s financing, CityPay.io, has rolled out tether-payment systems for thousands of Georgian businesses. Hotels including Tbilisi’s downtown Radisson Blu Iveria have CityPay point-of-sale terminals, and it has joined with a property venture there to sell premium apartments in tether.

CityPay also facilitates international payments in tether for companies, totaling as much as $50 million a month, according to Eralp Hatipoglu, its Turkish CEO. He said the pressure the U.S. applied on the global banking system created these opportunities. Companies exporting from Turkey to Georgia get hammered with questions from correspondent banks, he said, and wire transfers take days. CityPay’s website advertises “100% anonymous transactions,” though Hatipoglu said they check clients’ identities against sanctions lists and don’t accept Russian businesses.

Tether has said it aims for CityPay to expand into other emerging markets. At a crypto conference in a Tbilisi skyscraper this June, sponsored by Tether and attended by its head of expansion, banners promoted the currency’s use for daily payments on CityPay. Guests queued to buy coffee in tether. “Pay with USDT,” read one sign. “Everything. Everywhere.”

 

Source: Tether: The Cryptocurrency Fueling the Financial Underworld – WSJ

Filed under: Australia,Canada,Crime/Violence/Prison,Drug Specifics,Economic,Europe,New Zealand,Others (International News),Prevalence,UK,USA :

Past-year use of cannabis and hallucinogens stayed at historically high levels in 2023 among adults aged 19 to 30 and 35 to 50, according to the latest findings from the Monitoring the Future survey. In contrast, past-year use of cigarettes remained at historically low levels in both adult groups. Past-month and daily alcohol use continued a decade-long decline among those 19 to 30 years old, with binge drinking reaching all-time lows. However, among 35- to 50-year-olds, the prevalence of binge drinking in 2023 increased from five and 10 years ago. The Monitoring the Future study is conducted by scientists at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Ann Arbor, and is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

 

Source: https://monitoringthefuture.org/

Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Cannabis/Marijuana,USA :

September 16, 2024

Filed under: Education,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

Prevention typically consists of methods or activities that seek to reduce or deter specific or predictable problems. It protects individual well-being and promotes desired behaviors.

Education is a key element of prevention. To understand how to contribute to the prevention of substance use disorders, all individuals need to know two important facts:

Substance use disorders are diseases. They are progressive, chronic, and fatal. They are classified as primary diseases, meaning they are caused by something else, such as an emotional problem or poor choices. Substance use disorders are medical conditions of the brain.

Substance use disorders are treatable. Just as heart disease or diabetes can be treated, so can substance use disorders. In addition to medication, effective treatments usually involve therapy and connecting to community support.

Sharing these facts helps remove stigma around substance use and makes people more comfortable talking about it. This opens up opportunities to:

  • Increase collaboration among state agencies, community organizations, and special populations
  • Develop culturally appropriate strategies and implement plans to reduce risks and increase protective factors across the state and in specific communities
  • Expand citizen participation in community activity

The most promising way to reduce alcohol and drug problems is to use a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach to prevention. There are evidence-based tools that organizations and communities can use to guide these efforts. For example, organizations that adopt a Strategic Prevention Framework and develop logic models are more likely to achieve positive outcomes.

Experts Dedicated to Building Healthy Communities

The RAAD campaign is coordinated by DAABHS (rhymes with “abs”). That’s our abbreviated way of saying the Arkansas Department of Human Services Division of Aging, Adult and Behavioral Health Services the Substance Abuse Prevention team.

The DAABHS team is passionate about uniting individuals and communities in prevention efforts. Each member of the team contributes unique skills and energy to advance the RAAD mission.

They are receptive to questions and ideas and can connect you to existing programs or provide guidance to help you launch new prevention initiatives in your area.

Source: https://humanservices.arkansas.gov/divisions-shared-services/shared-services/office-of-substance-abuse-and-mental-health/prevention-ar/

Filed under: Education,Health,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

 

Substance use and mental health are topics that touch nearly every community, with millions across the world affected each year. In 2022 alone, approximately 168 million Americans used some type of substance such as tobacco, alcohol or illicit drugs with 48.7 million reporting suffering from a substance use disorder (SUD). Among illicit drugs, marijuana was the most used, with approximately 22% of people aged 12 or older using it in the past year. But behind these numbers are real lives impacted by a complex relationship between drug use and mental health. For instance, nearly one million adolescents were found to have co-occurring major depressive disorders (MDE) and SUDs, while 21.5 million adults struggled with both a mental illness and SUD.

 

As marijuana use becomes more normalized it is important to consider the consequences on our mental well-being. Research has shown that past-year marijuana use is a significant risk factor for suicidal thoughts and behaviors among adolescents with the risks increasing as the frequency of use rises. In addition, following legalization in the state of Washington, the prevalence of marijuana use among 8th and 10th graders increased compared to pre-legalization levels. This presents further concern given the link between high potency marijuana and psychosis—a known predictor of suicidal behavior. Additionally, studies show that adolescents who recently used marijuana had nearly twice the odds of attempting suicide compared to non-users. Similar risks are present in those using amphetamines, cigarettes, and alcohol, especially when substance use begins at an early age.

 

Further research supporting these concerns have consistently found that individuals who engage in substance use are at an increased risk for suicidal ideation attempts. For example, studies suggest that drug use can impair judgement and diminish impulse control, making users more vulnerable to suicidal thoughts and behaviors. This is further supported by findings showing that individuals with substance use disorders are six times more likely to attempt suicide compared to those who do not use substances. The combination of altered brain chemistry, mental health struggles, and poor decision-making can create a dangerous spiral, leading to devastating outcomes.

 

As substance use and suicide remain closely intertwined, with research consistently showing a strong correlation between the two, it becomes essential to raise awareness, promote early interventions, and ensure access to comprehensive treatment so we can help save lives and provide hope to those in need.

 

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use or suicidal thoughts, please reach out for help. The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 at no cost, call 988 if you need to talk to someone. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) offers a helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

 

Source: Drug Free America Foundation | 333 3rd Ave N Suite 200 | St. Petersburg, FL 33701 US
Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Mental Health,USA :

UC expert joins WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition roundtable discussion

Featured photo at top of an officer speaking with children at school. Photo/SDI Productions/iStock.

headshot of Tim TedeschiBy Tim Tedeschi
             September 30, 2024

The Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission recently announced a new three-year drug prevention initiative, funded by grants from the state’s opioid settlement fund for prevention, enforcement, treatment and recovery efforts.

The University of Cincinnati’s LaTrice Montgomery joined WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition to discuss youth drug prevention programs and what research says about the most effective approaches.

The popular DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program that began in the 1980s originally featured a uniformed officer speaking to kids in a lecture style on how to “just say no” to drugs.

“As we now know, that lecture style doesn’t always resonate with youth,” said Montgomery, PhD, adjunct associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience in UC’s College of Medicine and a licensed clinical psychologist. “So we’ve learned it needs to be much more interactive and include not only drug resistance skills but social and emotional skills.”

As research has progressed, Montgomery said DARE is still around but features a different approach that includes the REAL (Refuse, Explain, Avoid and Leave) method.

Chris Evans, executive director of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, told WVXU their team is using a research-based approach to tailor their programs to what will be most effective.

“It’s really designed to encourage young people to make positive life choices and help build up their resilience,” he said. “What this program does is really shine a light again on those strengths of kids and finding a way for them to identify and strengthen what’s going on with them. And we’ve seen the studies have indicated that is a better approach to dealing with kids nowadays in terms of getting them to be educated and to listen and to make positive choices in this space.”

Source: https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2024/09/are-teen-just-say-no-campaigns-effective.html

Filed under: Education,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

Rocky Herron, a former DEA agent, interacting with students after
his drug prevention presentation. (Photo: Business Wire)
Business Wire
 4 min read

CARLSBAD, Calif., October 01, 2024–(BUSINESS WIRE)–In response to the growing crisis of synthetic drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine, Hopeful Life is proud to announce a vital new initiative in the fight against youth substance abuse. As our nation continues to grapple with the devastating rise of synthetic drugs, there remains a critical gap in educating our youth about the dangers of substance abuse before they make life-altering, or even life-ending, decisions.

Young lives are at risk, and many of them are not fully aware of the dangers. Tragically, drug prevention education is still not a national priority, and our hardest-hit communities often lack the resources to address this crisis head-on. Without proper education, substance abuse continues to destroy futures. This must change. We have partnered with Rocky Herron, a former DEA agent with 31 years of experience, to bring his life-saving drug prevention education directly to schools and communities across the country.

This partnership marks a new chapter for Hopeful Life, as we formally introduce Rocky’s powerful presentations, I Choose My Future, into our comprehensive approach to combating substance abuse. Rocky has successfully engaged over 250,000 youth in 17 countries, transforming the way students think about drugs and their long-term impact. His emotionally charged presentations go beyond raising awareness—they inspire change. Rocky’s presentations connect with students on a personal level, showing them the real-world consequences of drug abuse. His message empowers them to make choices that protect their health and future. As one student shared, “students often comment that they have been told many times that drugs are ‘bad’ but I Choose My Future made them understand why.”

Rocky’s presentations don’t just raise awareness—they change lives. In a recent survey of students in Montana, 64.6% of respondents reported knowing someone personally affected by drug use. After attending Rocky’s presentation, 79.8% of students expressed deeper concern about drug use in their communities, and a remarkable 90.1% felt more comfortable seeking help for themselves or others, a profound shift in understanding and behavior (Rocky Herron Survey Results).

Rocky’s message cuts through the statistics and connects with students on a personal level. They don’t just hear about drug dangers, they see the real-world consequences and are empowered to make choices that shape their futures. As one student shared, “This presentation gave me even more reason to stay away from drugs”​ (Survey).

For adults, Rocky’s presentations provide valuable insights into the connection between substance abuse and mental health, equipping parents and educators with the tools they need to support their children. His sessions cover urgent topics such as fentanyl, synthetic drugs, and vaping, offering practical prevention and intervention strategies.

Hopeful Life believes in creating sustainable, community-wide impact. Our mission is to enhance individual, organizational, and community health through cutting-edge insights and solutions powered by the latest advances in science, technology, and policymaking. We provide comprehensive analytics that measure substance abuse trends and identify correlations at both local and national levels, ensuring our efforts are data-driven and effective. By partnering with Rocky Herron, we amplify his life-changing message where it is needed most, providing critical support to expand his outreach to more schools, more communities, and more at-risk youth.

We don’t just support Rocky’s efforts—we make sure they reach the students who need them most. Through our multidisciplinary approach, we help communities access the life-saving knowledge they need to prevent substance abuse and create lasting change.

The stakes are high. Our youth deserve a chance at a drug-free future, and with your support, Hopeful Life can continue bringing essential education to schools and communities. Every donation helps us reach more students and potentially save lives.

Through our partnership with Rocky Herron, Hopeful Life is expanding its reach to provide more students with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed decisions. Our mission is to enhance community health through education, science, and data-driven solutions. By introducing Rocky’s program, we’re bringing a proven, life-saving message to the forefront of our fight against substance abuse.

Together, we can combat the drug abuse crisis and empower the next generation to make better choices. Please consider donating to Hopeful Life today to support our life-changing mission.

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hopeful-life-introduces-life-changing-012400527.html?

Filed under: Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

October 1, 2024

By Nora Volkow, MD, Director, and Rita Valentino, Ph.D., Director, Division of Neuroscience and Behavior, NIDA

This blog was originally posted on the The BRAIN Blog.

The BRAIN Initiative is marking a milestone—10 years of advancing neuroscience and neurotechnology research by funding innovative projects. As part of a rotating series of blog posts, the directors of the BRAIN Initiative-partnering Institutes and Centers share their voice and perspectives on the impact BRAIN has made on their respective missions—and vice versa.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The research NIDA has funded and conducted over five decades has greatly advanced the biomedical understanding of addiction as a treatable condition involving brain systems governing reward, emotion, stress, and self-control. NIDA research has helped pave the way for effective prevention, treatment, and harm reduction approaches, and opened up new pathways to recovery.

NIDA has been a key player in the BRAIN Initiative, as our Institute continues to apply these new tools and emerging knowledge to inform research about the science of drug use and addiction. As the United States continues to face a devastating overdose epidemic fueled in recent years by an influx of illicit fentanyl, NIDA’s scientific efforts are ever more important. Central to those efforts is our significant investment in basic neuroscience research. Since its launch a decade ago, the BRAIN Initiative has greatly aided and accelerated that research. Tools developed through the BRAIN Initiative are catalyzing scientists’ ability to precisely monitor and manipulate brain activity at multiple scales, giving us an ever more fine-grained understanding of the brain mechanisms underpinning drugs’ effects and suggesting potential avenues for mitigating, preventing, or reversing those effects to heal the brain.

The BRAIN initiative has transformed neuroscience research at many levels. It has created a culture of team science that has led to development and dissemination of new tools that have been used to characterize gene expression with cellular resolution across multiple species, tools that allow visualizing and manipulating neural circuits, as well as new approaches to data science and computational modeling. Our staff who work on BRAIN Initiative program teams get a unique exposure to these approaches and technologies that will critically shape our Institute’s research in future years.

Advances made possible through the BRAIN Initiative will transform translational research by improving the validity and innovation of the models we use to probe mechanisms underlying substance use and use disorders—enriching our research community’s capacity to innovate. NIDA participation in the BRAIN Initiative provides opportunities to accelerate the application of these advances among the researchers who focus on these questions. And it enables NIDA to promote areas of focus where our Institute has been at the forefront, including investigation of non-neuronal cells (glia) and developmental studies that dovetail with the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.

How has NIDA participated in the NIH BRAIN Initiative?

Several of NIDA’s scientific staff are members of BRAIN Initiative program teams, and our Institute leads or co-leads some key BRAIN projects. NIDA co-leads the team that is managing the Data Science and Informatics project, which is creating the informatics infrastructure needed for storing, sharing, and interpreting the vast quantities of data gathered by the BRAIN Initiative. NIDA also co-leads the Tools and Technologies for Brain Cells and Circuits research program, which is creating brain cell atlases of the neuronal and glial cells in the brain. This fundamental knowledge will be used to build viral vectors to monitor and manipulate brain function at the cellular level.

We are also a major supporter of the Brain Behavior Quantification and Synchronization Program (BBQS). This uniquely transdisciplinary program, which was just launched in 2022, is supporting the development and validation of novel tools and methods for quantifying complex behaviors and simultaneously recording brain activity. This program promises to transform behavioral and cognitive neuroscience by supporting research that will generate high-resolution tools for analyzing behavior and new computational and theoretical approaches for understanding behavior as a complex system. NIDA leads the BBQS emphasis area on organismal behavior.

Although it was just launched two years ago, the BRAIN BBQS concept has influenced multiple NIDA initiatives, including Translating Socioenvironmental Influences on Neurocognitive Development and Addiction Risk (TransSINDA), Mechanistic Studies on Social Behavior in Substance Use Disorder (in both humans and animal models), and the NIDA Animal Genomics Consortium. These initiatives support research that identifies cause-and-effect relationships between socioenvironmental factors and brain function that guide behavior.

Toward advancing the emergence of common marmosets as a promising animal model in neuroscience, NIDA has also played a leadership role in BRAIN’s transgenic marmoset initiative. This set of projects is aimed at developing novel tools and techniques for marmoset genome editing and male germline editing to facilitate research on genetic underpinnings of brain health and disease, as well as assisted reproduction techniques to increase the efficiency of these procedures.

What major BRAIN-funded scientific advancements or conversations has NIDA been a part of?

As one of the Institutes co-leading the BRAIN Initiative’s Tools and Technologies for Brain Cells and Circuits research program, NIDA has been closely involved in shaping and supporting the inventory and molecular mapping of cell classes across the whole mouse brain, and there are ongoing plans to accomplish the same in human and nonhuman primate brains.

A component of this program is the Cell Census Network, and among the brain regions of central interest in this project are the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia comprise the reward pathway and other circuits that play a major role in substance use disorders. Scientific staff at NIDA and several NIDA-funded grantees are participating in the effort to create a systematic map of this region to enhance our knowledge of its cellular and molecular architecture. This research could potentially lead to tools that could selectively target the basal ganglia’s cellular constituents, which would be a game changer for NIDA science.

Through BRAIN Initiative programs like BBQS mentioned above, NIDA has been co-leading discussions about advancing cause and effect relationships in human neuroscience research. We now have large neurocognitive datasets that can be mined and analyzed using large-scale network approaches, such as those generated by the Human Connectome Project and the ongoing ABCD study. These databases have enabled novel insights about fundamental brain function and neurocognitive dysfunction. For instance, ABCD is deepening our understanding of how environmental exposures affect neurocognition including revealing factors like economic disadvantage and social discrimination that can be targeted in prevention efforts. But while these datasets are excellent for identifying associations between network structure/function and behavior, they generally cannot help us establish causal relationships, leaving a gap in our ability to translate findings to clinical application.

Data derived from new methods and approaches like systematic circuit perturbation in combination with neural recordings in a behavioral context hold potential to fill this gap and significantly advance our understanding of these important cause and effect relationships in human neuroscience.

How has the BRAIN Initiative advanced or shaped NIDA’s mission?

Many tools developed through the BRAIN Initiative are helping NIDA scientists understand how drugs affect the brain, from cellular to circuit levels. For example, NIDA’s BRAIN-inspired research programs are already producing exciting findings. One of them is NIDA Single Cell Opioid Response in the Context of HIV, or SCORCH, which is applying single-cell sequencing-based approaches to inventory the cellular targets of drugs and the changes in those targets that drugs induce. A NIDA-funded team has recently identified a group of neurons in the dorsal peduncular nucleus, a brain region central to emotional regulation, reward, and motivation, that act as a master regulator of opioid reward.

Another NIDA initiative inspired by BRAIN is the Neural Ensembles and Used Substances (NExUS) Collaboratory, which seeks to integrate molecular information from cell taxonomies with measurement of neuronal population dynamics in behaving animals. NExUS aims to decipher how activity within the mosaic of brain cells “encode” particular properties of misused substances, such as the analgesic versus addictive properties of opioids. A NIDA-funded team has also recently used a mouse model to identify a brain circuit that mediates placebo pain relief.

In its 10 years, the BRAIN initiative has provided tools to visualize, monitor, and manipulate brain activity from molecular to network levels and has led to an exponential growth in understanding of how the brain functions. NIDA has been a key player in this effort, and our Institute continues to apply these new tools and emerging knowledge to inform research on urgent questions under its mission to advance the science of drug use and addiction.

Source: https://nida.nih.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2024/10/brain-10-view-national-institute-drug-abuse

Filed under: Addiction,Brain and Behaviour,USA :
: CAPT Christopher Jones, Pharm.D., Dr.P.H., M.P.H., Director, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention

In October, SAMHSA celebrates Substance Use Prevention Month — an opportunity for the prevention field and prevention partners to highlight the importance and impact of prevention. And given the substance use and overdose challenges facing our country, prevention has never been more important. This month, each of us can inspire action by sharing how prevention is improving lives in communities across our nation.

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Overdose Prevention Strategy, along with SAMHSA’s Strategic Plan, our prevention efforts aim to prevent substance use in the first place, prevent the progression of substance use to a substance use disorder, and prevent and reduce harms associated with use. Our grantees across the country are doing just that every day. Here are just a few quick stories of our grantees in action.

Pueblo of Zuni – Zuni Tribal Prevention Project
Zuni, New Mexico
(Strategic Prevention Framework-Partnerships for Success grant awardee, FY 2020)

In 2021, Pueblo of Zuni (Zuni Tribal Prevention Project) developed a Family Wellness Kit program to strengthen family communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Family bonding, parent-child communication, and cultural identity (PDF | 818 KB) are protective factors against substance use and other youth risk behaviors.

The kits included culturally relevant family cohesion activities, and a new type of kit was distributed monthly (over 18 months) with:

  • Four activities (one for siblings; one for grandparents; one for the entire family; and one for siblings, grandparents, or family).
  • One activity guide with instructions.
  • Activity supplies.
  • One debrief guide with discussion prompts.
  • One parent/caregiver skill development guide on active listening, validation, effective communication, family engagement, positive discipline, and setting boundaries.

Staff follow-up every three months to check-in with the families: 72 activities had been developed, and 85 percent of 102 registered families completed the program. Families appreciated the integration of Zuni culture in the kits and enjoyed completing the activities together. They also reported spending more quality time together, growing closer, and communicating more.

A participant described the benefit as, “…being together as a family and just having more conversations; we even show more affection, like giving hugs and saying, ‘I love you.’” Families also said that they continued using the activities and created more family routines such as family nights and putting away cell phones during family times like dinner.

Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, Prevention and Health Promotion Division – Know Ur Vape
(Substance Use Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Services Block Grant recipient)

In 2022, the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) Prevention and Health Promotion Division partnered with Connecticut Clearinghouse and Connecticut’s Tobacco Enforcement division to develop a vaping prevention campaign.

Launched in 2023, Know Ur Vape leverages the power of social media influencers and the social media trend of “unboxing” videos to reach youth and young adults. The campaign seeks to prevent vaping initiation among teens and young adults and encourage quitting among those who vape.

Each video starts out in a familiar way, then features a surprising plot twist, and concludes with a health message and a resource. Each influencer receives one of three themed boxes: sports, beauty, or mystery. As they open the box and interact with the contents, their reactions indicate excitement, confusion, concern, and then displeasure. The videos demonstrate the negative effects of vaping, including its addictive and disruptive nature, impairment to athletic performance, and harmful effects on skin and physical appearance.

Influencers include University of Connecticut athletes. As part of the campaign, television personality Nia Moore sat down with Megan Albanese of Southington STEPS coalition on Instagram Live to discuss her negative experiences with vaping.

In the campaign’s first three months, the videos were viewed 177,656 times on social media, with 18,905 likes and 776 comments. On TikTok, the videos received 113,904 views and on Instagram, one post received 24,600 views. The campaign was featured on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Just Think Twice website and the CADCA website.

West Virginia Departments of Health and Human Services – Overdose Prevention and Response
(First Responders – Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act grant awardee, FY 2022)

The Police and Peers Initiative in the Fayette, Kanawha, Monongalia, Nicholas, and Preston counties of West Virginia places Peer Recovery Support Specialists (PRSS) with law enforcement to enhance care for people in crisis. The initiative established partnerships with local Quick Response Teams, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion teams, and others in the community.

PRSS provide opioid reversal, case management, and motivational interviewing services; linkage to addiction treatment, social services, support programs; and customized action plans based on the individual’s self-identified needs. This enhances quality of care and services and reduces the burden on law enforcement officers (who can then focus on public safety).

Since 2022, the program has linked 120 people to treatment and 110 to psychosocial support services (housing, clothing, basic needs, employment, etc.) as well as distributed 262 naloxone kits and 780 fentanyl test strips.

Early in the initiative, a Fayette County Sheriff’s Deputy contacted a PRSS about an overdose incident. The PRSS met with the individual, who chose to enroll in an outpatient Medication for Opioid Use Disorder program. This person has now sustained over eight months of recovery, gained employment, reinstated their driver’s license, and bought a vehicle.

During an Oak Hill Police Department callout, a PRSS de-escalated a disturbance. The peer connected three people to treatment — all of whom completed treatment — and one person was reunited with their children while maintaining recovery.

With the Kingwood Police Department (starting in April 2024), PRSS activities include collaborating with the municipal court, training the fire department on naloxone administration, participating in ride-alongs, attending coalition meetings, and developing a street outreach plan.

Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation – Walking in 2 Worlds
Mayetta, Kansas
(Tribal Behavioral Health grant awardee)

Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation hosted a two-day workshop to help human services professionals support the Native Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (2SLGBTQ) population. The “Walking in 2 Worlds” event educated professionals and community members about the struggles and complexities of 2SLGBTQ adults and youth across Indian Country.

Issues for these individuals include isolation; homelessness; job insecurity; racism; stigma; and increased risks of substance use, substance use disorders, overdose, violence, suicide, and human trafficking victimization. Many cases of violence and human trafficking go unreported, due to multiple (and intersecting) barriers faced by this population, and a lack of supportive services tailored to address their unique needs.

The workshop benefitted from speakers who shared personal stories, documentary films, and technical assistance from SAMHSA’s Native Connections training and technical assistance.

Resources to Tell Your Prevention Story

Prevention has never been more important. As a nation, we continue to face significant substance use and mental health challenges, especially among youth and young adults. Prevention works and helps us get ahead of these challenges so that youth, families, and communities can thrive.

Prevention Month is a key opportunity to elevate the national conversation and showcase prevention’s positive effects on communities across the country. Here are ideas and resources for you to tell your prevention story.

To Tell Your Story During Prevention Month:

  • Download the Substance Use Prevention Month toolkit — which includes social media messages, graphics, email signature graphic, virtual meeting background, and resources.
  • Share your #MyPreventionStory on social media.

To Get Involved Year-round:

To Put Prevention Science into Practice:

In determining which grantees to highlight for this blog, SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention staff (including government project officers) looked across CSAP’s prevention portfolio to identify grantees that represent the scope of our prevention portfolio and would reflect: diversity in population served or population of focus (e.g., age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social context of family or individual), geographic diversity of the programs (e.g., rural, urban, and regions), outcome of focus (e.g., upstream prevention or preventing a downstream outcome such as overdose), and diversity in prevention strategies implemented (e.g. social media and public messaging, naloxone distribution and training, individual programs, family programs).

Source: https://www.samhsa.gov/blog/substance-use-prevention-month-telling-prevention-story

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
by Lauraine Langreo, Writer,  Education Week

August 28, 2024

 

There have been “promising” declines in high school students’ overall use of illicit substances, concludes a report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since 2013, the percentage of students who reported drinking alcohol, using marijuana, or using select illicit drugs at any point has decreased. Since 2017 and 2019, respectively, the percentage of students who had ever misused or currently are misusing prescription opioids decreased, according to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

That survey draws on data collected every two years among a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students. The 2023 survey had more than 20,000 respondents and was conducted in the spring.

Still, many students continue to use substances and the lack of progress in some areas is concerning, according to the report.

The findings come as schools continue to face challenges in curbing students’ substance abuse, which could negatively affect learning, memory, and attention, according to experts. It could also be a sign of mental health challenges.

                                                                                                                   

 

While student substance abuse isn’t a new challenge for school districts, the substances that adolescents are experimenting with now are much more dangerous, said Darrell Sampson, the executive director of student services for the Arlington public schools in Virginia.

“It’s not necessarily that more kids are using substances than in prior years,” Sampson said. “It’s the lethality of the substance itself that has caused higher levels of concern.”

 

Research has shown rising overdose deaths among teens even as their substance use is declining. Those deaths have been linked to the increase in illicit fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. School districts have been pursuing several strands of legal action against companies that manufactured and marketed addictive opioids that have led to tens of thousands of deaths and countless more addiction struggles in the last two decades.

Beyond the legal actions, schools also continue to provide prevention and education programming for students and families, Sampson said. There’s “a glimmer of hope” that those measures are working, he said, based on the declines in the CDC data.

Experts recommend starting education about substance abuse as early as possible

In the Arlington, Va., district, students in grades 6 through 10 learn about substance abuse challenges as part of the health curriculum, Sampson said. The district has also slowly expanded that program to 5th and 4th grades and are looking into whether there’s capacity to start that education as early as 3rd grade.

“We know that the more we can at least open that conversation with our families and our students, the better off our students are going to be,” Sampson said. “It’s not just a message [they’re hearing] starting in middle school, but it’s a message [they’re hearing] over time.”

The district is expanding programming with 11th and 12th graders, too, because the information they got when they were in 10th grade could be outdated by then, Sampson said.

In addition, the district has substance abuse counselors who meet with students and try to explore the reasons they might be using substances, Sampson said.

Experts say it’s also important to think about how to incorporate student voice in any prevention or intervention programming.

Teens are more than twice as likely to go to their friends or peers for help or support when experiencing distress from their substance use than they are to go to a behavioral health provider or a family member, according to a survey from the Bipartisan Policy Center conducted in June among 932 teens (13- to 17-year-olds) and 1,062 young adults (18- to 26-year-olds). More than a quarter of teens said they didn’t go to anyone for help or support when they experienced distress from substance use.

Sophie Szew, a junior at Stanford University and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s mental health and substance use task force youth adviser, said those survey results “really underscore the importance of investing in those peer support networks and resources.”

DATA SOURCE: Bipartisan Policy Center

Source: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/teen-substance-use-is-declining-but-more-dangerous-drug-abuse-is-emerging/2024/08

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,USA,Youth :

by Perkins and Ranalli, ETR. Aug 28, 2024

ABOUT THE EXPERTS

Laura Perkins, MLS (she/her/hers) is a Product Editor at ETR and has over 20 years of experience in editorial content and health literacy.

Lauren Ranalli, MPH (she/her/hers) is the Director of Communications and Public Affairs at ETR and has over 20 years of experience in public health and adolescent health services.

Source: https://www.physiciansweekly.com/addressing-prescription-drug-misuse-among-adolescents/

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prescription Drugs,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

Oct 29, 2014

The last week of October is Red Ribbon Week, celebrating a drug-free life (redribbon.org). It’s also the culmination of National Substance Abuse Prevention Month.

So why is substance abuse prevention important? According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Acting Director Michael Botticelli, “Preventing drug use before it begins – particularly among young people – is the most cost-effective way to reduce drug use and its consequences.” This matters to us as members of our community and our society.

But as parents, friends, family members – human beings – it’s not all about the money. Botticelli recognizes the cost of drug abuse is far-reaching beyond just our wallets. He goes on to say, “The best approach to reducing the tremendous toll substance abuse exacts from individuals, families and communities is to prevent the damage before it occurs.”

Parents want to help their kids avoid this “tremendous toll,” which could involve their health (physical or mental), family, other relationships, schooling, employment – the list goes on. Parents, however, often find themselves learning about a new drug trend and feel it’s just “one more thing to worry about.” One example would be the current heroin epidemic, especially among people who may have become addicted to prescription pain killers.

The good news is that parents don’t have to resort to worrying. Research has shown repeatedly that parents are a key factor in preventing drug abuse. When parents have open two-way communication with their kids and seek to provide accurate information, many are surprised to discover how much influence they can actually have. And young people are less likely to abuse drugs when they know their parents care, and that they have specific rules or expectations regarding drug use.

Some websites with helpful information on heroin and other drugs, as well as tips for talking to kids, include: www.fda.gov; www.cdc.gov; www.drugfree.org; teenshealth.org/teen; www.drugfreeactionalliance.org/know; combatheroin.ny.gov; and www.drugabuse.gov.

Even when there has been substance abuse with resultant problems, it’s never too late to seek help. People recover from addiction every day and lead healthy, productive lives.

HFM Prevention Council, Johnstown

Source: https://www.dailygazette.com/leader_herald/opinion/letters/prevention-is-important/article_c5769b46-83c7-5907-a49b-bb4cf191f7aa.html?=/&subcategory=640%7CConcert

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN  / Sat August 10, 2024

Using marijuana daily for years may raise the overall risk of head and neck cancers three- to five-fold, according to a new study that analyzed millions of medical records.

“Our research shows that people who use cannabis, particularly those with a cannabis use disorder, are significantly more likely to develop head and neck cancers compared to those who do not use cannabis,” said senior study author Dr. Niels Kokot, a professor of clinical otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Cannabis use disorder is diagnosed when a person has two or more of such symptoms as craving weed, becoming tolerant to its effects, using more than intended, using marijuana even though it causes problems in life, using it in high-risk situations, experiencing withdrawal and being unable to quit, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“While our study did not differentiate between methods of cannabis consumption, cannabis is most commonly consumed by smoking,” Kokot said in an email. “The association we found likely pertains mainly to smoked cannabis.”

Some 69% of people with a diagnosis of oral or throat cancer will survive five years or longer after their diagnosis, according to the National Cancer Institute. If the cancer metastasizes, however, that rate drops to 14%. About 61% of people diagnosed with cancer of the larynx will be alive five years later — a rate that drops to 16% if the cancer spreads.

The study used insurance data to look at the association of cannabis use disorder with head and neck cancers, said Dr. Joseph Califano, the Iris and Matthew Strauss Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Head and Neck Surgery at the University of California, San Diego. He was not involved in the study.

“The researchers used a huge, huge dataset, which is really extraordinary, and there is enormous power in looking at numbers this large when we typically only see small studies,” said Califano, who is also the director of UC San Diego’s Hanna and Mark Gleiberman Head and Neck Cancer Center.

“On average, people with cannabis use disorder smoke about a joint today and do so for at least a couple years, if not longer,” said Califano, who coauthored an editorial published Thursday in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery in conjunction with the new study.

However, he added, the study does not find an association between “the occasional recreational use of marijuana and head and neck cancer.”

Just like tobacco, smoking marijuana raise the risk of head and neck cancers, experts say.

Causes of head and neck cancers

In the United States, head and neck cancers make up 4% of all cancers, with more than 71,000 new cases and more than 16,000 deaths expected in 2024, according to the National Foundation for Cancer Research.

Tobacco use, which includes smoking cigarettes, cigars, pipes and smokeless tobacco, and the use of alcohol are the two most common causes of head and neck cancers, experts say. Other risk factors include poor oral hygiene;gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD; a weakened immune system; and a diet low in fruits and vegetables. Occupational risk factors include exposure to asbestos and wood dust.

A growing number of head and neck cancers are due to infection with the human papillomavirus or HPV, or the Epstein-Barr virus, or EBV, which are DNA viruses that affect genes, making them susceptible to malignancies.

Epstein-Barr virus is linked to infectious mononucleosis, also called the “kissing disease,” as well as various cancers. Researchers estimate that 90% of the world’s population is infected with EBV.  A vaccine is available for HPV, which is linked to a high risk of developing cervical cancer and some non-Hodgkin lymphomas.

It’s possible to be infected with both viruses at once, and that combination is responsible for 38% of all virus-associated cancers, according to research.

How might cannabis cause cancers?

The study, published Thursday in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery, analyzed a database of 4 million electronic health records and found more than 116,000 diagnoses of cannabis use disorder among people with head and neck cancers. Those men and women, whose average age was 46, were then matched with people who also had head and neck cancers but were not diagnosed with cannabis use disorder.

The analysis showed that people with cannabis use disorder were about 2.5 times more likely to develop an oral cancer; nearly five times more likely to develop oropharyngeal cancer, which is cancer of the soft palate, tonsils and back of the throat; and over eight times more likely to develop cancer of the larynx. The findings held true for all age groups, according to the study.

Smoke is one key reason for the association between smoking weed and head and neck cancers, experts say. Smoking tobacco doubles the risk of developing head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, which makes up 90% of all head and neck cancers.  Heavier tobacco use leads to even higher risk, and when alcohol is added, the risk is even greater.

Due to the way marijuana is smoked — unfiltered and breathed in deeply and held in the lungs and throat for a few seconds — the risk from cannabis smoke could be even greater, experts say.

Another key to the puzzle of how cannabis causes cancer: Research has found a link between various cannabinoids and tumor growth. There are more than 100 cannabinoids — biological compounds in the cannabis plant that bind to cannabinoid receptors in the human body, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. All told, there are about 540 chemicals in each marijuana plant.

Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the substance that makes one euphoric, while cannabidiol, or CBD, has been shown to have medicinal uses for childhood seizures and epilepsy.

“Part of the research we have already published shows that THC or THC-like compounds can certainly accelerate tumor growth,” Califano said. “We also have some data to show that cannabinoids enhance the growth of HPV-related throat cancers.”

With the use of marijuana rising, there is concern that diagnoses of head and neck cancers could increase in coming years, Kokot said.

“Especially as (marijuana) becomes more widely legalized and socially accepted, we may see a corresponding rise in head and neck cancer cases if the association is confirmed,” he said.

“This underscores the importance to inform people about the potential risks and conduct further research to understand the long-term impacts of cannabis use on cancer development.”

Source:  https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/08/health/marijuana-head-and-neck-cancer-wellness/index.html

 

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Health,USA :

by Dan Krauth WABC logoabc Channel 7

Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Dan Krauth has the details on a new and potentially lethal narcotic that is creeping into the NYC area from Latin America.

NEW YORK (WABC) — There’s a new mystery drug that’s hitting the club scene in New York City and the ease of how it’s pouring into the area may surprise you.

It’s called pink cocaine.

While its bright color from food coloring stays the same, what’s inside can change from day to day and from dealer to dealer.

“You have no idea what you’re taking,” said NYC Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan. “I’ve never seen the drug supply as lethal as the one we’re in today.”

In cases the Special Narcotics Prosecutor and DEA have seen, when its lab tested, it actually has very little to no cocaine in it at all. Instead they’re finding cheaper manmade drugs from ketamine to ecstasy. It can be a dangerous and even deadly mixture of uppers and downers.

“When you see that mixture of your body being pulled in two directions, being amped up with a methamphetamine or cocaine and being sedated with something like ketamine, that’s a recipe for a terrible, terrible effect on the body,” said Brennan.

The Special Agent in Charge of the DEA in New York said in some cases the deadliest of drugs, fentanyl, is also getting mixed in, where even a tiny amount can be lethal.

“They’re mixing fentanyl in because they want to increase addiction, they want to increase their customer base they want more people to come back and buy their drug and it’s something every parent should be concerned about,” said Frank Tarentino, Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Division.

The drugs aren’t being sold in shady places or dark street corners as you might imagine. Prosecutors busted a New York City woman this summer for allegedly selling pink cocaine, and other drugs, over a messaging app on her cell phone. She’s accused of then shipping the drugs through the mail to customers. She has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“You have this criminal underworld that has weaponized social media to push their poison to the far corners of the United States and across the world,” said Tarentino.

According to law enforcement sources, with the use of technology and social media, the mystery mixtures are easier to get than ever before and there are more drug overdose deaths reported than ever before. They say there’s no longer any such thing as safe experimentation, no matter how colorful the drug might be.

Pink cocaine also goes by the name Tusi.

Prosecutors say it’s a drug that’s difficult to track but was first spotted in the New York City area in January of 2023.

Source: https://abc7ny.com/post/pink-cocaine-nyc-new-mystery-drug-hitting-club-scene-new-york/15176935/

Filed under: Cocaine,Drug use-various effects,Fentanyl,USA :
Dr. Robert DuPont (NIDA, USA) shifted the paradigm from demonization to treatment of users.

Key points

  • In the 1970s, people addicted to opioids were demonized, considered hopeless. Some still believe this.
  • Setting high standards and following addicted patients for five years helps doctors know what treatments work.
  • Prevention is key to success in substance abuse, and it’s important to encourage non-use among teens.
In the United States, people addicted to opioids were once demonized as hopelessly bad, and treatment was virtually nonexistent. No one may have done more to change both matters than psychiatrist Robert DuPont, M.D, who, in 1969, during an unexplained surge in crime in the nation’s capital, was working with prisoners in the District of Columbia Department of Corrections. DuPont decided to test incoming inmates for drugs and was shocked to learn that nearly half (45%) were addicted to heroin. Desperate for heroin, they turned to crime for money.

At the behest of the district’s mayor, DuPont developed a D.C.-based clinic, the Narcotics Treatment Administration. It treated more than 15,000 heroin addicts over the next three years, and the D.C. crime rate plummeted by 50%, in a direct correlation.

Helping Medical Professionals Do Better

Robert L. “Bob” DuPont, born in 1936, graduated from Emory University and Harvard Medical School and completed his psychiatric training at the National Institutes of Health. He became the first director of the newly-created National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), where he created a first-of-its-kind comprehensive training program for doctors, nurses, and counselors working in addiction treatment programs. Drug overdose deaths began declining, from from 6,413 to 2,492 by 1980.

In 1978, DuPont left government service to create the Institute for Behavior and Health (IBH), a think tank focusing on drug policy. Dupont has published more than 400 journal articles and 15 books, most recently Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addictions and Stopping the Drug Epidemic (2018).

The IBH conducted the first national study of doctors dependent on drugs and alcohol, their treatment, and five-year outcomes. “Physicians are given a comprehensive assessment by a team of professionals and get treatment for comorbidities, but the focus is on their addictions. They typically attend a month or more of residential treatment and, as outpatients, are monitored for five years with random drug and alcohol testing. If they miss a scheduled test or test positive for any drug, including alcohol, they are taken out of their practice again, assessed, and sent back to treatment.”

DuPont points out that many doctors who entered the program were initially resentful because they didn’t think there was anything wrong with them—typical of individuals with substance use disorder from all walks of life. Yet, most physicians greatly value their medical license, and the overwhelming majority cooperated because participation and success meant they could continue to practice medicine.

His study of nearly 1,000 drug-addicted physicians closely monitored for five years showed what is possible for the rest of the population. Seventy-eight percent never tested positive for drugs or alcohol, an excellent record. In addition, of those who did have a positive or missed drug test, nearly two-thirds never had a second positive test.

A follow-up study of physicians who successfully completed treatment and monitoring contracts five or more years ago showed that more than 95% were still in recovery. Physicians rated the treatment they had received as important to their recovery but said the most valued part of their care was involvement in the 12 steps.

Lessons Learned About Substance Abuse

DuPont says many people don’t realize that it’s rarely just one drug abused by most problematic substance users. And that is particularly true of individuals who die from drug overdoses, in whom two or more drugs are often identified post-mortem.

He also notes that many drugs used today are not in their natural forms but instead are ultra-potent synthetics, like fentanyl. In 2022, about 111,000 people died, and in 2023, about 108,300 people died of drug overdose. .

Early diagnosis and treatment is key

The earlier patients are diagnosed and treated, the better their chances of achieving and sustaining recovery, says DuPont. Many people can stop using substances for some period. However, the real problem is not drug withdrawal, as many people believe, but, instead, the repeated relapses. Yet he has known many individuals with seemingly hopeless drug or alcohol issues who emerged sober and productive. He largely credits organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.

Prevention is best

Whenever possible, prevention of drug use is best, particularly among young people. Not only is adolescence a time when most addictions begin, it’s also a time when the brain is uniquely vulnerable..

DuPont now focuses on youth substance-use prevention: no alcohol, nicotine, marijuana/THC, or other drugs by those under age 21. He notes that the percentage of 12th graders who report never using in their lifetime has increased from around 26% in 2018 to 32% in 2023. The trend is also evident in younger students. DuPont emphasizes, “This trend is key to reversing decades of pain, suffering, and addictions.“

At age 88, Robert DuPont, M.D., advocates for treatment research, long-term treatment with outcome reporting, mental health treatment parity (as important as physical health), and prevention. Recovery, he insists, is possible.

About the Author

Mark S. Gold, M.D., is a pioneering researcher, professor, and chairman of psychiatry at Yale, the University of Florida, and Washington University in St Louis. His theories have changed the field, stimulated additional research, and led to new understanding and treatments for opioid use disorders, cocaine use disorders, overeating, smoking, and depression.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/addiction-outlook/202408/a-front-row-change-agent-of-the-drug-epidemic
Filed under: Addiction,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :
Bethesda, Maryland  / Monday, August 19, 2024

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a programme that will support Native American communities to lead public health research to address overdose, substance use, and pain, including related factors such as mental health and wellness. Despite the inherent strengths in Tribal communities, and driven in part by social determinants of health, Native American communities face unique health disparities related to the opioid crisis. For instance, in recent years, overdose death rates have been highest among American Indian and Alaska Native people. Research prioritized by Native communities is essential for enhancing effective, culturally grounded public health interventions and promoting positive health outcomes.

“Elevating the knowledge, expertise, and inherent strengths of Native people in research is crucial for creating sustainable solutions that can effectively promote public health and health equity,” said Nora D. Volkow, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “As we look for ways to best respond to the overdose crisis across the country, it is crucial to recognize that Native American communities have the best perspective for developing prevention and therapeutic interventions consistent with their traditions and needs. This programme will facilitate research that is led by Native American communities, for Native American communities.”

Totaling approximately $268 million over seven years, pending the availability of funds, the Native Collective Research Effort to Enhance Wellness (N CREW) Programme will support research projects that are led directly by Tribes and organizations that serve Native American communities, and was established in direct response to priorities identified by Tribes and Native American communities.

Many Tribal Nations have developed and continue to develop innovative approaches and systems of care for community members with substance use and pain disorders. During NIH Tribal Consultations in 2018 and 2022, Tribal leaders categorized the opioid overdose crisis as one of their highest priority issues and called for research and support to respond. They shared that Native communities must lead the science and highlighted the need for research capacity building, useful real-time data, and approaches that rely on Indigenous Knowledge and community strengths to meet the needs of Native people.

The N CREW Programme focuses on: Supporting research prioritized by Native communities, including research elevating and integrating Indigenous Knowledge and culture; Enhancing capacity for research led by Tribes and Native American Serving Organizations by developing and providing novel, accessible, and culturally grounded technical assistance and training, resources, and tools; Improving access to, and quality of, data on substance use, pain, and related factors to maximize the potential for use of these data in local decision-making.

“Native American communities have been treating pain in their communities for centuries, and this programme will uplift that knowledge to support research that is built around cultural strengths and priorities,” said Walter Koroshetz, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “These projects will further our collective understanding of key programmes and initiatives that can effectively improve chronic pain management for Native American and other communities.”

The first phase of the programme will support projects to plan, develop, and pilot community-driven research and/or data improvement projects to address substance use and pain. In this phase, NIH will also support the development of a Native Research Resource Network to provide comprehensive training, resources, and real-time support to N CREW participants.

The second phase of the program, anticipated to begin in fall 2026, will build on the work conducted in the initial phase of the program to further capacity building efforts and implement community-driven research and/or data improvements projects. Additional activities that support the overarching goals of the N CREW Programme may also be identified as the program develops.

The N CREW Programme is led by the NIH’s NIDA, NINDS, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), with participation from numerous other NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices. The N CREW Program is funded through the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative (or NIH HEAL Initiative), which is jointly managed by NIDA and NINDS. For the purposes of the N CREW Programme, Native Americans include American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. Projects will be awarded on a rolling basis and publicly listed.

This new programme is part of work to advance the Biden/Harris Administration’s Unity Agenda and the HHS Overdose Prevention Strategy.

Source: https://www.pharmabiz.com/NewsDetails.aspx?aid=171961&sid=2
Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

Tricia Otto’s son, Calvin, will forever be 29 years old. That’s because he lost his life to fentanyl poisoning at age 29 in April of last year.

“He was funny. He had an amazing sense of humor. He was thoughtful. He was kind. He always worried about how other people were feeling. Um, he struggled with addiction for about 14 years, but he fought really hard against that,” Tricia Otto explains. “He always talked about wanting to be a fireman … And instead of fighting fires, my son spent his time fighting demons.”

In 2023 alone, there were over 1, 200 drug overdose deaths from fentanyl in Colorado.

That’s according to the Common Sense Institute. That equates to roughly three deaths per day on average. This upcoming Wednesday, August 21st, is National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day. It was started by the nonprofit Facing Fentanyl. They’re organizing a takeover of Times Square in New York City this week.

Here in Colorado, there will be a Candlelight Vigil at the Denver City and County Building this Wednesday at 7 p. m. (flyer posted below).

Tricia Otto, in addition to being Calvin’s mom, is the Drug-Induced Homicide Foundation Colorado Chapter State Representative. She joined KGNU’s Jackie Sedley to discuss how important it is to talk about fentanyl poisoning, to use language that takes blame off of those with substance use disorder, and to hold those who sell illicit substances accountable.

“Referring fentanyl poisoning as an accidental overdose diminishes the calculated greed and disregard for human life that led to this tragic, tragic passing,” Otto says. “Those struggling with substance abuse disorder are targeted and exploited by drug dealers and others who stand to profit from their vulnerability. Calling it an accident ignores the deliberate actions of those that prey on the addicted, pushing dangerous substances for their own gain. This is not an unfortunate mishap. It’s a calculated act of malice that leads to the death and devastates families.”

Source: https://kgnu.org/fentanyl-overdose-prevention-awareness-triciaotto-calvinotto/

Filed under: Fentanyl,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,USA :
by Zachary Pottle |- Addiction Center

Remaining Sober In College

With August underway, many college students will be heading back to campuses across the country for another school year. For many, college is an exciting experience where young adults can learn, make friends, grow into their own, and of course attend the occasional party. However, for some students, returning to campus can present a host of challenges, especially those in recovery who may be worried about maintaining their sobriety.

It’s no secret college students experiment with substances. Now more than ever, college campuses are filled with drugs and alcohol. According to the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 45.3% of male and 48.5% of female full-time college students ages 18 to 22 drank alcohol in the past month. Additionally, roughly 40% of both male and female college students said they had tried an illicit substance within the past year; with the most common being marijuana, cocaine, hallucinogens, and prescription drugs.

If you’re a student dealing with addiction, you might worry about being pressured to use drugs, attend parties where alcohol is prevalent, or spend time with people who engage in substance use. However, college doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By taking proactive steps to avoid substance use temptations, you can still enjoy your college experience.

Tips For Staying Sober On Campus

For students who are entering back into the college space after receiving treatment or in the earlier stages of recovery, campuses can be a stressful environment. Learning how to guard your sobriety while in environments ripe with drug and alcohol use can be hard, but fortunately many colleges have resources available to help keep you sober and engaged with your peers.

Avoid Popular “Party” Spots

While it likely goes without saying, avoiding places where drugs and alcohol are likely to be present is one of the best ways to stay sober in college. Many colleges have places that are synonymous with these types of activities; like popular local bars, fraternity or sorority houses, and other similar spaces. If you know that exposure to drugs or alcohol may trigger cravings or put your sobriety at risk, avoiding these spaces is key.

However, avoiding these places doesn’t mean that you have to have a “boring” college experience. For every bar or nightclub there’s an equal amount of spaces where social gatherings happen free of drugs and alcohol. Libraries, activity centers, sports facilities, and other places on campus are all great for avoiding triggers while also being a part of campus life.

Join A Club Or Campus Organization

While Greek life organizations are often associated with drug and alcohol use, many are involved in campus life and hold fundraisers, events, and other activities for all students on campus. Joining a fraternity or sorority can also be a great way to meet and connect with others, especially groups that focus on campus life and academic performance.

Many colleges also have a plethora of clubs and organizations for students to join. These include groups like student government, intramural sports, arts clubs, cultural clubs, and community service groups. Joining a group is a great way to stay involved with campus life while remaining sober.

Start An Exercise Routine

One of the most beneficial things you can do for your health is to exercise. Exercise can be especially helpful for those struggling with cravings or mental health conditions like anxiety or depression, both of which can be common for young adults struggling with their sobriety. Research shows that people who exercise regularly have better mental health and emotional wellbeing, and lower rates of mental illness.

Exercise doesn’t have to be strenuous or take a long time. Studies show low or moderate intensity exercise is enough to make a difference in terms of your mood and thinking patterns. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends young adults aged 18-25 engage in 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week. This can also be 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity physical activity. For additional benefits, the CDC recommends an extra two days of muscle-strengthening each week.

Utilize Campus Resources

Safeguarding your sobriety can be difficult, especially when your mental health is lacking. Without proper mental health care, depression, anxiety, stress or other mental health concerns can lead even the strongest of those in recovery into relapse. As our understanding of the importance of mental health has increased over the years, so too has our access to mental health care across the country.

Many colleges, especially larger state-sponsored schools with large student bodies, have counseling and other psychological services free of charge for enrolled students. Colleges that offer these types of services typically do so either online or in-person, and usually operate on a scheduling basis. If you’re unsure about whether or not your college offers counseling services, contact your admissions office or campus resource center to find out more.

Additional Resources For College Students In Recovery

While counseling services and campus organizations can both be beneficial to students in recovery, the reality is that many people experience relapses. Studies show that between 40 to 60 percent of individuals in treatment for substance abuse will relapse. It’s important to remember; however, that a relapse is not a sign of failure. Rather, relapses are a part of the recovery process.

Relapses can be a slight “bump in the road” for some, while for others relapses may require a bit of extra help to get them back on track. Treating chronic diseases requires changing long-established behaviors, and relapse doesn’t signify failure. When someone in recovery from addiction relapses, it’s a sign that they should consult their doctor to restart treatment, adjust it, or explore other options.

For students who may need extra resources, services like outpatient rehab may be a viable option to help keep you in school while also addressing relapse concerns. Outpatient programs provide young adults with the flexibility to receive treatment for part of the day while returning to campus each night. These programs vary, including day programs, intensive outpatient programs (IOP), and continued care. An addiction specialist can help determine which option best suits your needs.

Finding Help

Addiction is often seen by many as a lifelong disease; one that requires constant dedication, mindfulness, and strength. You should never be ashamed of needing support, regardless of how much or how frequent it is. If you’re struggling to stay sober, reaching out for help is always better than sacrificing your hard-earned sobriety. For additional resources and support, contact a treatment provider today to learn about your options.

Source: https://www.addictioncenter.com/community/stay-sober-college/

Filed under: Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Drug use-various effects on foetus, babies, children and youth,Education,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

by    Youth Today magazine

Posted on 
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Summary

“The Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report provides data on health behaviors and experiences of high school students in the United States. Data highlight students’ behaviors and experiences in 2023, changes from 2021 to 2023, and 10-year trends. The report focuses on six key areas:

  1. Sexual behavior
  2. Substance use
  3. Experiences of violence
  4. Mental health
  5. Suicidal thoughts and behaviors
  6. Other important issues, like social media use

Key Findings

  • In 2023, female students and LGBTQ+ students experienced more violence, signs of poor mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors than their male and cisgender and heterosexual peers.
  • From 2021 to 2023, there were early signs that adolescent mental health is getting better. There were also concerning increases in students’ experiences of violence at school.
  • From 2013 to 2023, 10-year trends were similar to what data showed in 2021. There were decreases in students’ use of substances. There were increases in students’ experiences of violence, signs of poor mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Students’ sexual activity decreased, but so did their protective sexual behaviors, like condom use.”

Read Full Report →

[Related report: 2024 U.S. national survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people]

[Related: As more youth struggle with behavior and traditional supports fall short, clinicians are partnering with lawyers to help

Source: https://youthtoday.org/2024/08/youth-risk-behavior-survey-2013-2023/

Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Crime/Violence/Prison,Drug use-various effects on foetus, babies, children and youth,Mental Health,Sexual Behaviour,USA :

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released the results of the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which shows how people living in United States reported their experience with mental health conditions, substance use and pursuit of treatment. The 2023 NSDUH report includes selected estimates by race, ethnicity and age group. The report is accompanied by two infographics offering visually packaged highlight data as well as visual data by race and ethnicity.

“Each year, data from the annual NSDUH provides an opportunity to identify and address unmet healthcare needs across America. We’re pleased to see that more people received mental health treatment in 2023 than the previous year,” said Miriam E. Delphin-Rittmon, Ph.D., HHS Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use and the leader of SAMHSA. “Also, to build upon increasing accessibility to data, this year’s release features two infographic reports: one focusing on race and ethnicity and one highlighting selected overall data.”

The 2023 NSDUH Report includes the following selected key findings.

Mental Health:

  • Among adults aged 18 or older in 2023, 22.8% (or 58.7 million people) had any mental illness (AMI) in the past year.
  • 4.5 million youth (ages 12 to 17) had a major depressive episode in the past year, of which nearly 1 in 5 also had a substance use disorder.
  • Among adults aged 18 or older in 2023, 5.0% (or 12.8 million people) had serious thoughts of suicide, 1.4% (or 3.7 million people) made a suicide plan, and 0.6% (or 1.5 million people) attempted suicide in the past year.
  • Multiracial adults aged 18 or older were more likely than adults in most other racial or ethnic groups to have AMI, serious mental illness (SMI), and serious thoughts of suicide.
  • Estimates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among adults in 2023 were comparable to 2022 and 2021.

Substance Use:

  • In 2023, 3.1% of people (8.9 million) misused opioids in the past year, which is similar to 2022 and 2021 (3.2% and 8.9 million, 3.4% and 9.4 million respectively).
  • Among the 134.7 million people aged 12 or older who currently used alcohol in 2023, 61.4 million people (or 45.6%) had engaged in binge drinking in the past month.
  • Marijuana was the most commonly used illicit drug, with 21.8% of people aged 12 or older (or 61.8 million people) using it in the past year.
  • American Indian or Alaska Native and Multiracial people were more likely than most other racial or ethnic groups to have used substances or to have had an SUD in the past year.
  • In 2023, 9.4% of people aged 12 or older vaped nicotine in the past month, up from 8.3% in 2022.
    • In the past year, more people initiated vaping (5.9 million people) compared to any other substance.
    • Nicotine vaping estimates from 2021 are not comparable with estimates from 2022 and 2023.

Services and Recovery:

  • 31.9% of adolescents aged 12 to 17 (or 8.3 million people) received mental health treatment in the past year, an increase of more than 500,000 from 2022.
  • 23.0% of adults aged 18 or older (or 59.2 million people) received mental health treatment in the past year, an increase of 3.4 million from 2022.
  • Among people aged 12 or older in 2023 who were classified as needing substance use treatment in the past year, about 1 in 4 (23.6% or 12.8 million people) received substance use treatment in the past year. People were classified as needing substance use treatment in the past year if they had a substance use disorder (SUD) or received substance use treatment in the past year.
  • 30.5 million adults aged 18 or older (or 12.0%) perceived that they ever had a substance use problem. Among these adults, 73.1% (or 22.2 million people) considered themselves to be in recovery or to have recovered.
  • 64.4 million adults aged 18 or older (or 25.3%) perceived that they ever had a mental health issue. Among these adults, 66.6% (or 42.7 million people) considered themselves to be in recovery or to have recovered.
  • There were no racial ethnic differences among adults aged 18 or older in 2023 who perceived that they ever had a substance use problem or problem with their mental health who considered themselves to be in recovery or to have recovered from their drug or alcohol use problem or mental health issue.

About the National Survey on Drug Use and Health

Conducted by the federal government since 1971, the NSDUH is a primary source of statistical information on self-reported substance use and mental health of the U.S. civilian, noninstitutionalized population 12 or older. For the 2023 NSDUH national tables and some reports, statistical testing was conducted between estimates from different years (e.g., past month alcohol use in 2023 vs. the estimate in 2022). Where testing involved 3 years of comparable data for 2021 to 2023, pairwise testing was conducted between estimates in these years (i.e., 2021 vs. 2022, 2021 vs. 2023, and 2022 vs. 2023). Statistical tests for overall trends from the baseline year to the current year will not be conducted until four comparable NSDUH data points are available. The NSDUH measures include:

  • Use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol, and tobacco,
  • Substance use disorder and substance use treatment,
  • Major depressive episodes, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and other symptoms of mental illness, mental health care, and
  • Recovery from substance use and mental health disorders.

Addressing the nation’s mental health crisis and drug overdose epidemic is a top priority of the Biden-Harris Administration and are core pillars of the Administration’s Unity Agenda. The President’s Unity Agenda is operationalized through the HHS Overdose Prevention Strategy, the HHS Roadmap for Behavioral Health Integration, and the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. To learn how to get support for mental health, drug or alcohol issues, visit FindSupport.gov. If ready to locate a treatment facility or provider, go directly to FindTreatment.gov or call 800-662-HELP (4357).

 

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is the agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that leads public health efforts to advance the behavioral health of the nation. SAMHSA’s mission is to lead public health and service delivery efforts that promote mental health, prevent substance misuse, and provide treatments and supports to foster recovery while ensuring equitable access and better outcomes.

Last Updated:
Source: https://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/press-announcements/20240730/samhsa-releases-annual-national-survey-drug-use-and-health
Filed under: Addiction,Alcohol,Cannabis/Marijuana,Cocaine,Heroin/Methadone,Mental Health,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

Background: Most violent crimes (52 %) are committed by adults aged 18-34, who account for 23 % of the US population and have the highest prevalence of cannabis use and cannabis use disorder (CUD). We examined whether and how associations of cannabis use, use frequency, and CUD with violent behavior (i.e., attacking someone with the intent to harm seriously) vary by sex in U.S. young adults.

Methods: Data were from 113,454 participants aged 18-34 in the 2015-2019 US National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, providing nationally representative data on cannabis use, CUD (using DSM-IV criteria), and violent behavior. Descriptive analyses and bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were conducted.

Results: Among U.S. adults aged 18-34, 28.9 % (95 % CI = 28.5-29.2 %) reported past-year cannabis use (with/without CUD), including 20.5 % (95 % CI = 20.2-20.8 %) with non-daily cannabis without CUD, 4.7 % (95 % CI = 4.5-4.8 %) with daily cannabis use without CUD, 2.1 % (95 % CI = 1.9-2.2 %) with non-daily cannabis use and CUD, and 1.7 % (95 % CI = 1.5-1.8 %) with daily cannabis use and CUD. Past-year adjusted prevalence of violent behavior was higher among males with daily cannabis use but without CUD (2.9 %, 95 % CI = 2.4-2.7 %; adjusted prevalence ratio (PR) = 1.7, 95 % CI = 1.3-2.2) and males with daily cannabis use and CUD (3.1 %, 95 % CI = 2.3-4.0 %; adjusted PR = 1.8, 95 % CI = 1.3-2.4) than males without past-year cannabis use (1.7 %, 95 % CI = 1.6-1.9 %). Adjusted prevalence of violent behavior was higher among females with cannabis use regardless of daily cannabis use/CUD status (adjusted prevalence = 1.6-2.4 %, 95 % CIs = 0.9-3.2 %; adjusted PRs = 1.6-2.4, 95 % CI = 1.3-3.2) than females without past-year cannabis use (1.0 %, 95 % CI = 0.9-1.1 %).

Conclusions: Research is needed to ascertain the directionality of the associations between cannabis use and violent behavior and underlying sex-specific mechanism(s). Our results point to complex sex-specific relationships between cannabis use frequency, CUD, and violent behavior and highlight the importance of early screening for and treatment of CUD and of preventive interventions addressing cannabis misuse.

Keywords: Attacking someone with the intent to seriously hurt them; Cannabis use; Cannabis use disorder; Violent behavior.

Similar articles

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38677161/
Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Cannabis/Marijuana,Mental Health,Prevalence,USA,Youth :
12 Aug 2024

Substance abuse disorders are on the rise among young people. The American Addiction Center reports one in seven young adults are affected. Crisis coach Scott Silverman and youth drug prevention educator Rocky Herron joined the CBS 8 Morning Show with details.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6BYoWOnAG8

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects on foetus, babies, children and youth,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Youth :

Children exposed to substances during pregnancy are at high risk of facing a range of negative health outcomes, including neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). This condition, where a baby is born experiencing withdrawal symptoms from drugs they were exposed to in utero, imposes a significant burden on the child, the family, and the healthcare system. In the United States, between 2009 and 2016, the costs associated with birth admissions for NAS tripled, jumping from $731.8 million to $2.5 billion.

A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics sheds light on the longitudinal impact of prenatal substance exposure. Researchers examined the relationship between maternal use of tobacco, alcohol, illicit drugs, and the misuse of prescription drugs during pregnancy, focusing on how these factors influence out-of-home care, hospital utilization, length of hospital stay, and healthcare costs from birth through young adulthood. By analyzing over 1.6 million healthcare records in New South Wales (NSW), the study found that prenatal substance use contributed to an excess of $84 million in hospital costs. These increased costs were driven by longer hospital stays, a greater need for special or intensive care, and later hospitalizations, commonly due to respiratory illnesses and mental health or behavioral disorders.

Tragically, this study found that children with prenatal substance exposure were more likely to be readmitted to the hospital by one year of age for reasons such as neglect, maltreatment, and misuse. Those born with NAS were particularly vulnerable, as they faced a two-fold higher risk of later hospitalization for mental health issues. Moreover, their hospital admission costs at birth were $12,000 higher compared to children without such exposure.

This study also highlighted that although one in four children with prenatal substance exposure entered out-of-home care by six months of age, this intervention reduced healthcare costs by $16 million and lowered the risk of hospital readmission for children with NAS by almost 30%. Out-of-home care, in this context, refers to the court-ordered placement of a child under 18 in foster care, relative care, adoption, or residential care due to safety risks in their biological home.

These findings underscore the importance of comprehensive drug policies that emphasize prevention and supportive services for pregnant mothers and families struggling with substance use. By intervening early and providing targeted support, we can mitigate the long-term effects of prenatal substance exposure, help keep families together, and reduce the burden on the healthcare system.

 

Source: https://www.saveoursociety.org/news-articles/breaking-the-cycle-the-impact-of-prenatal-substance-exposure-on-children-and-the-healthcare-system/

Filed under: Drug use-various effects on foetus, babies, children and youth,USA :

One of the most pressing issues for businesses in states where marijuana use is legal is determining employee impairment before taking any adverse action. Unlike alcohol, where a simple breathalyzer test can gauge impairment, marijuana’s effects vary significantly based on consumption method, strain, and user tolerance.

Studies have shown that THC—the psychoactive compound in cannabis—and its metabolites can linger in the body long after the “high” has worn off. Recognizing this, many states have enacted laws requiring employers to prove impairment, not just the presence of THC. Traditional drug tests like urinalysis, oral fluid tests, hair tests, and even emerging breath THC tests only indicate prior use, not current impairment.

This means that zero-tolerance policies based solely on the detection of THC metabolites are no longer viable in many states. Instead, employers must place more focus on assessing fitness for duty through reasonable suspicion training for supervisors and consider adopting impairment detection technology.

Given that measuring THC levels cannot be the sole indicator of impairment, new tools have emerged to detect impairment from drug and alcohol use. Advanced impairment detection technologies offer more accurate insights into an employee’s current state of impairment. These devices measure psychological and/or physical indicators, allowing employers to make informed decisions about workplace safety. Leading solutions are portable, scientifically defensible, and provide results within minutes.

However, these technologies alone are not enough. Supervisors play a crucial role in identifying and documenting impairment. Proper training in recognizing the signs of impairment and documenting these observations is essential. Supervisors must be equipped to take appropriate action based on their assessments, ensuring that safety and performance standards are upheld. We here at NDWA can help provide trainings for your supervisors – find out more here.

Employees must understand that they are not exempt from workplace safety regulations regardless of their state’s marijuana laws. Being under the influence at work can endanger themselves and their colleagues, and impact work quality and efficiency. It is the responsibility of employees to ensure their marijuana use doesn’t impair their fitness for duty. They must arrive at work sober and ready to perform.

Advanced impairment detection technology is promising, but isn’t a singular solution. By training supervisors to document regular behavior and performance, businesses can maintain safe and productive work environments.

 

Source:  NATIONAL DRUG-FREE WORKPLACE ALLIANCE

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Prescription Drugs,Prevention and Intervention,USA,Workplace :

Effort aims to elevate Indigenous knowledge and culture in research, to respond to the overdose crisis and address related health disparities

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a program that will support Native American communities to lead public health research to address overdose, substance use, and pain, including related factors such as mental health and wellness. Despite the inherent strengths in Tribal communities, and driven in part by social determinants of health, Native American communities face unique health disparities related to the opioid crisis. For instance, in recent years, overdose death rates have been highest among American Indian and Alaska Native people. Research prioritized by Native communities is essential for enhancing effective, culturally grounded public health interventions and promoting positive health outcomes.

“Elevating the knowledge, expertise, and inherent strengths of Native people in research is crucial for creating sustainable solutions that can effectively promote public health and health equity,” said Nora D. Volkow, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “As we look for ways to best respond to the overdose crisis across the country, it is crucial to recognize that Native American communities have the best perspective for developing prevention and therapeutic interventions consistent with their traditions and needs. This program will facilitate research that is led by Native American communities, for Native American communities.”

Totaling approximately $268 million over seven years, pending the availability of funds, the Native Collective Research Effort to Enhance Wellness (N CREW) Program will support research projects that are led directly by Tribes and organizations that serve Native American communities, and was established in direct response to priorities identified by Tribes and Native American communities.

Many Tribal Nations have developed and continue to develop innovative approaches and systems of care for community members with substance use and pain disorders. During NIH Tribal Consultations in 2018 and 2022, Tribal leaders categorized the opioid overdose crisis as one of their highest priority issues and called for research and support to respond. They shared that Native communities must lead the science and highlighted the need for research capacity building, useful real-time data, and approaches that rely on Indigenous Knowledge and community strengths to meet the needs of Native people.

The N CREW Program focuses on:

  1. Supporting research prioritized by Native communities, including research elevating and integrating Indigenous Knowledge and culture
  2. Enhancing capacity for research led by Tribes and Native American Serving Organizations by developing and providing novel, accessible, and culturally grounded technical assistance and training, resources, and tools
  3. Improving access to, and quality of, data on substance use, pain, and related factors to maximize the potential for use of these data in local decision-making.

“Native American communities have been treating pain in their communities for centuries, and this program will uplift that knowledge to support research that is built around cultural strengths and priorities,” said Walter Koroshetz, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “These projects will further our collective understanding of key programs and initiatives that can effectively improve chronic pain management for Native American and other communities.”

The first phase of the program will support projects to plan, develop, and pilot community-driven research and/or data improvement projects to address substance use and pain. In this phase, NIH will also support the development of a Native Research Resource Network to provide comprehensive training, resources, and real-time support to N CREW participants.

The second phase of the program, anticipated to begin in fall 2026, will build on the work conducted in the initial phase of the program to further capacity building efforts and implement community-driven research and/or data improvements projects. Additional activities that support the overarching goals of the N CREW Program may also be identified as the program develops.

The N CREW Program is led by the NIH’s NIDA, NINDS, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), with participation from numerous other NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices. The N CREW Program is funded through the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative (or NIH HEAL Initiative), which is jointly managed by NIDA and NINDS. For the purposes of the N CREW Program, Native Americans include American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. Projects will be awarded on a rolling basis and publicly listed.

This new program is part of work to advance the President’s Unity Agenda and the HHS Overdose Prevention Strategy.

Source:  https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/08/nih-launches-program-to-advance-research-led-by-native-american-communities-on-substance-use-and-pain

Filed under: Addiction,Education,Health,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

Dr. David R. Holtgrave, Ph.D., Joins the Department of Health as Senior Policy Advisor to the Commissioner to Enhance the Department’s Mission to End the Opioid Epidemic

ALBANY, N.Y. (August 15, 2024) – The New York State Department of Health is pleased to welcome nation-leading public health, prevention and substance use policy expert Dr. David R. Holtgrave, Ph.D., to the executive leadership team as Senior Policy Advisor to the Commissioner. Dr. Holtgrave joins the State Health Department with more than 35 years of public health experience, including serving in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2022-2024.

“Dr. Holtgrave is a national leader in drug prevention programs and a public health expert who comes to the State Health Department to help our fight against the overdose epidemic,” State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said. “I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Holtgrave to the executive leadership team, as we continue to rebuild the Department and hire experienced, compassionate public health experts.”

Dr. Holtgrave joins the Department with decades of experience addressing urgent public health issues, demonstrated by his development of an evidence-based national response plan to confront the emerging challenge of fentanyl combined with xylazine in the illegal drug supply, his rapid research to inform COVID-19 clinical decision making and his transitional work in addressing HIV-related health inequities in the U.S.

At the Department of Health, Dr. Holtgrave is charged with a range of activities all with the common theme of translating data into the best possible public health programs and policies for the residents of New York. In particular, he will focus on facilitating the substance use work in the Department to ensure that it is as coordinated, evidence-based and impactful as possible.

“I am honored and humbled by Commissioner McDonald’s invitation to join in the impactful work being done at the Department of Health,” Senior Policy Advisor to the Commissioner Dr. David Holtgrave said. “As the Department is committed to improving the health and well-being of all New Yorkers and building health equity across the State, I am delighted to be able to serve on this incredible team.”

Prior to his service in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Dr. Holtgrave served as the Dean of the University at Albany School of Public Health and worked in close partnership with the New York State Department of Health.

From 2005 to 2018, he was the Chair of the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and served as a member and then Vice-Chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). His experience includes service as the Director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention – Intervention Research & Support at the U.S. Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and as Professor and then Vice-Chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health.

A first-generation college student, Dr. Holtgrave earned his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign in Quantitative Psychology and immediately thereafter held a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Interdisciplinary Programs in Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Source: https://www.health.ny.gov/press/releases/2024/2024-08-15_executive_leadership.htm

Filed under: Addiction,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

BY JULIA MARNIN –  AUGUST 02, 2024

 

A New Jersey man caused the diversion of a flight due to his dangerous behavior and was arrested when the plane landed, feds say. Jan Rosolino via Unsplash An American Airlines passenger forced a Dallas-bound flight to land in a different city because of his “violent” and dangerous behavior, including repeated attempts to open the plane’s doors and his assault on a flight attendant, federal prosecutors said. The flight crew and passengers had to restrain Eric Nicholas Gapco’s hands and feet with flexible restraints until the flight from Seattle landed in Salt Lake City on July 18, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah. Gapco, 26, of Delanco, New Jersey, was arrested when the flight landed, according to prosecutors. Gapco continued “to engage in violent and erratic behavior” at the Salt Lake City International Airport, where he smashed the glass door of a holding cell, court documents say. He denied consuming illegal drugs or prescription medication, but later told his arresting officers he ate “approximately ten marijuana edibles,” according to a motion for his detention. Gapco said he didn’t know how much THC, a psychoactive component of the cannabis plant, was in each edible, the motion says. Gapco was indicted July 31 on charges of interference with a flight crew and attempted damage to an aircraft, the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a news release. His federal public defender didn’t immediately respond to McClatchy News’ request for comment on Aug. 1. On the July 18 flight, prosecutors said Gapco wouldn’t stay in his seat, tried to take a flight attendant’s seat, “propositioned a flight attendant for sex,” was loud, yelling, vaping and disrupting others. He also locked himself in a plane bathroom, went on to try to open the flight’s doors and is accused of trying to hand another passenger a bag of pills, according to prosecutors. Gapco “assaulted and intimated a flight attendant and aircraft crew members,” prosecutors said. “The safety and security of our customers and team members is our top priority,” American Airlines told McClatchy News in a statement on Aug. 1. “We thank our team members for their professionalism and our customers for their understanding.” American Airlines didn’t immediately respond to McClatchy News’ request for comment on Aug. 1. After Gapco broke a glass door at the Salt Lake City airport following his arrest, Gapco was taken to a hospital to be medically evaluated, according to prosecutors. “He continued to be belligerent” and “combative with medical staff and the police,” prosecutors wrote in the motion for his detention. “At one point, he spat on an officer.” Galco’s temporary detention was granted on July 23, court records show. He is due to appear for his initial appearance in court the afternoon of Aug. 1, prosecutors said.

Source: https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article290654789.html

 

Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Cannabis/Marijuana,Crime/Violence/Prison,Drug use-various effects,USA :

Suicide rate among Native American population is second-highest in the state

By  | byarbrough@scng.com | San Bernardino Sun
UPDATED: 

In 2020, Assemblymember James C. Ramos, D-San Bernardino, celebrated the creation of the state’s new Office of Suicide Prevention.

Four years later, more work remains to be done, he and other Native American leaders say.

Despite making up only 3.6% of Californians in 2020, American Indians or Alaskan Natives made up 9.8% of those who killed themselves that same year, according to the California Department of Public Health. Nationally, Native American populations are more than twice as likely as Black or White populations to die due to deaths of “despair” — suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholic liver disease — according to a UCLA Health survey released in April.

On Wednesday, July 17, Ramos — author of  Assembly Bill 2112, which created the Office of Suicide Prevention — gathered with representatives of Inland Empire tribes at the Morongo Band of Mission Indians’ Tribal Council Chambers in a roundtable to discuss the need for more help preventing suicide among Native Americans.

“We’ve had incidents where young members have taken their lives,” said Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians Chairperson Isaiah Vivanco. “Life is so precious, and when we have young ones taking their own lives, it has to be (a warning), it has to be an issue.”

Tribal leaders said that, too often, health professionals don’t understand native culture, and end up pushing those who need help away.

“Culture is healing as well,” said Soboba tribal secretary Monica Herrera. “Sometimes (mental health) facilities don’t recognize that (patients) are Native American and that sweat lodge or praying or some type of cultural healing is not encouraged. ‘We can’t take you to the sweat lodge; it’s against our policies.’ “

California health officials vowed to do better at the meeting.“Our traditional behavioral health system has woefully failed Native American populations,” California Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary of Behavioral Health Stephanie Welch told the tribal leaders. “There are high rates of suicide, there are high rates of self-harm as I have heard in the room, and there are high rates of drug misuse and overdose.”

Native communities aren’t using existing mental and behavioral health resources, state officials reported.

“When I see statistics around low utilization of behavioral health services, that’s on us,” Welch said. “Behavioral health services has not traditionally reflected the acceptance of (the) cultural, linguistic and geographical diversity that’s needed to address the needs of Native Americans communities.”

The department knows that it isn’t reaching many groups that need its mental health services and has embarked on a new initiative, “Mental Healthcare for All,” she said.

“And that truly means all of us and it needs to be inclusive of California Native Americans,” Welch said. “Everybody should have access to affordable, equitable, and most importantly, culturally responsive mental health and substance use disorder (treatment).”

As part of the effort, the state is investing in mobile clinics to bring services directly to tribal communities.

Within five years, Welch said, her agency hopes to have culturally appropriate mental health counselors available on mental health crisis lines in the state. In the meantime, her team is examining gaps in existing services when it comes to meeting the needs of California’s Native American population, along with identifying barriers that prevent the community from accessing healthcare options.

More mental health resources should be on the way.

Voters approved Proposition 1 in the March 5 primary election this year, authorizing a nearly $6.4 billion bond for facilities for mental health or substance abuse treatment.

“We want to make sure that California’s first people are not left out of that equation,” Ramos said.

Source: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2024/08/04/california-needs-to-do-more-to-prevent-suicide-among-native-americans-tribal-leaders-say/

Filed under: Addiction,Brain and Behaviour,Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,USA :

August 4, 2024

Conferences|ASPC: American Society for Preventive Cardiology

Lifestyle changes—including eating fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—can help patients, especially those with diabetes or hypertension, improve outcomes.

Robert Ostfeld, MD, ScM, director of preventive cardiology at Montefiore Health System and professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York sat down with Drug Topics ahead of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology Congress on CVD Prevention to discuss the role that dietary patterns and nutrition decisions play in living a healthful lifestyle.

Drug Topics: What specific nutrients or dietary patterns have been shown to benefit patients with hypertension and diabetes, and how can this information be incorporated into patient counseling?

Robert Ostfeld, MD, ScM: That’s a very important question. A healthful diet, of course, can very positively impact cardiometabolic health—including blood pressure, diabetes, [and] lipids—and cardiovascular health and overall health in general.

Reassuringly, there is broad [alignment] in terms of what defines a healthful dietary pattern. For example, multiple medical societies—like the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American Society for Preventive Cardiology, the Canadian Cardiovascular Society, the European Society of Cardiology—are all broadly aligned; consuming more plant-based nutrition, less ultra-processed foods, less red and processed meats, is helpful both cardiometabolically and [for] cardiovascular health overall.

Unfortunately, that recommendation hasn’t necessarily percolated down well, at least into the US. There was an interesting recent analysis where from the NHANES database—the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey database—published in 2021, where they looked at a little over 11,000 people…where they used 5 elements to define diet. One element was consuming at least 4 and a half servings of fruits and vegetables a day, at least 3 servings of whole grains each day, low sugar or sweetened beverage consumption, low salt consumption, and 2 servings of fatty fish each week. If you had 0 or 1 of those, then they felt you had a poor diet; 2 or 3 an intermediate [diet], and 4 or 5, an ideal dietary pattern. About 75% of the US has a poor, 0 to 1 of those [elements] dietary pattern; 25% [have] intermediate, and 0.7% of the US has an ideal dietary pattern.

READ MORE: Food Is Medicine: Pharmacists Can Advance Policies for Healthier Communities

There’s a huge gap between where we are and where we could. You could ask, “Does it even really matter?” Of course it does. In this study, they modeled if everyone adopted an ideal dietary pattern—so 4 or 5 of those 5 elements—for 1 year, what would happen? Well, it was estimated that cardiovascular event rates would fall by about 42%. The gap matters. There’s randomized prospective cohort data that eating a healthful dietary pattern, more plant based [and] aligned with American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association recommendations, can also be helpful for high blood pressure, particularly the DASH [Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension] dietary pattern for high cholesterol, the dietary portfolio pattern, which is a high fiber plant based diet, and also, similar recommendations broadly for diabetes.

What I should reinforce is, it’s not really that there’s 1 diet for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. They’re really broadly aligned that consuming more healthful, plant-based foods—fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, lentils—less ultra-processed foods and less red and processed meats, is helpful for all of the above: cardiovascular health and cardiometabolic health.

Drug Topics: How can patients be supported in overcoming common barriers to healthy eating, such as budget constraints and limited access to nutritious foods, in the management of hypertension and diabetes?

Ostfeld: Helping the individual patient in the office embrace a more healthful diet can be a challenge. Society does not make…it easy for the healthy choice to be the easy choice. And behavior change, getting someone to change how they eat, how they live, can be very, very difficult. These are big hurdles that we face.

As an individual practitioner, it can be overwhelming to overcome some of these things; at least we can try and start. As an individual [health care provider], you’ll have your team around you who can support you and reinforce your message. Nurses, support staff, and registered dietitians can be incredibly helpful to reinforce and educate about this topic.

In the clinic specifically, I will try to find a specific reason that the patient may be interested in living more healthfully. Maybe they want to lose weight or improve their skin complexion, maybe they want to lower their blood pressure, lower their cholesterol, come off a medication… Whatever the case may be, I try to highlight how consistently eating more healthfully can address that particular issue. I will give them some very specific steps—some simple specific steps, because everyone’s busy and there’s so much information to take in—that they can hopefully do when they get home to live more healthily. I have a handout that I give them that I try to keep very simple.

Sometimes in clinic, because we’re all so busy, I’ll just say, “Let’s just start with 222.” [That’s] 2 servings of green leafy vegetables a day, 2 servings of fruit each day, 2 servings of other vegetables each day: 222. I’ll do that a little bit weirdly, deliberately, so they’ll remember it. Then when they go home, depending on where they live, there may be more or [fewer] access or cost issues. [I’ll explain that] for ease, [they] could cook in bulk; we certainly don’t have to buy, you know, organic green juices. You can get frozen vegetables, frozen fruits, big sacks of potatoes, oatmeal, and beans, and those things can be much less expensive and more doable.

Another way to help patients adopt a more healthful lifestyle is—there may be the hurdle of costs here—but there are services that can deliver meals, healthful meals, to patients; they may be able to access registered dieticians, and of course there are multiple online resources that are free for patients. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has a 21-day kickstart for more plant-based nutrition should, the [health care provider] feel that that’s appropriate for the patient. There are a variety of resources that people can have access to; some may cost a little bit more, but some are also free. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine also has multiple online resources.

Source: https://www.drugtopics.com/view/q-a-examining-the-key-drivers-of-a-healthful-lifestyle

Filed under: Education,Health,Prevention (Papers),Prevention and Intervention,USA :

BMC Public Health volume 24, Article number: 2103 (2024) Cite this article

Abstract

Background

Black individuals in the U.S. face increasing racial disparities in drug overdose related to social determinants of health, including place-based features. Mobile outreach efforts work to mitigate social determinants by servicing geographic areas with low drug treatment and overdose prevention access but are often limited by convenience-based targets. Geographic information systems (GIS) are often used to characterize and visualize the overdose crisis and could be translated to community to guide mobile outreach services. The current study examines the initial acceptability and appropriateness of GIS to facilitate data-driven outreach for reducing overdose inequities facing Black individuals.

Methods

We convened a focus group of stakeholders (N = 8) in leadership roles at organizations conducting mobile outreach in predominantly Black neighborhoods of St. Louis, MO. Organizations represented provided adult mental health and substance use treatment or harm reduction services. Participants were prompted to discuss current outreach strategies and provided feedback on preliminary GIS-derived maps displaying regional overdose epidemiology. A reflexive approach to thematic analysis was used to extract themes.

Results

Four themes were identified that contextualize the acceptability and utility of an overdose visualization tool to mobile service providers in Black communities. They were: 1) importance of considering broader community context; 2) potential for awareness, engagement, and community collaboration; 3) ensuring data relevance to the affected community; and 4) data manipulation and validity concerns.

Conclusions

There are several perceived benefits of using GIS to map overdose among mobile providers serving Black communities that are overburdened by the overdose crisis but under resourced. Perceived potential benefits included informing location-based targets for services as well as improving awareness of the overdose crisis and facilitating collaboration, advocacy, and resource allocation. However, as GIS-enabled visualization of drug overdose grows in science, public health, and community settings, stakeholders must consider concerns undermining community trust and benefits, particularly for Black communities facing historical inequities and ongoing disparities.

Peer Review reports

Background

The overdose crisis poses an unrelenting public health threat in the U.S. with fatal drug overdoses reaching a record high of over 100,000 in 2021 [1]. Record highs are especially prominent for Black individuals, who outpaced other racial/ethnic groups in rates of fatal drug overdose during the first two decades of the 2000s [2, 3] experiencing the highest increase in rate of overdose death from 2015–2020 [4]. Relative to White individuals, these disparities have continued to widen since the COVID-19 pandemic. American Indian/Alaska Native and Black populations have faced the highest rates of fatal drug overdose of all U.S. racial/ethnic groups since 2021 [5]. Disproportionate increases in fatal drug overdose rates among Black individuals coincide with the introduction of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and its analogues to the drug supply [2, 3] though fatal overdoses involving heroin and cocaine have also disproportionately increased among this group [6, 7]. Although racial disparities in fatal overdose are driven by the increasingly adulterated drug supply, they are exacerbated by social determinants of health (SDOH), including drug criminalization and inequitable enforcement by law enforcement [8, 9], racial residential segregation that contributes to Black neighborhood disinvestment [10], racialized service access that limits treatment options for Black individuals [11, 12], and inequitable availability of overdose prevention (e.g., naloxone) [13]. Indeed, fentanyl-related overdose deaths tend to cluster in low treatment-density, high-deprivation neighborhoods where residents are predominantly Black [14,15,16], emphasizing the impact of place-based SDOH on increasing racial inequities in the overdose crisis.

Racial inequities in overdose are generally attributed to SDOH, including features of one’s geographic location or built environment that impact well-being, such as aspects of neighborhood deprivation [17]. Black people in the United States are more likely than their White counterparts to live in neighborhoods that face high deprivation, including socioeconomic (e.g., high rates of poverty and unemployment) and physical deprivation (e.g., the deterioration of building structures and vacancies) due to policies that contribute to residential segregation and neighborhood disinvestment [18]. Both socioeconomic and physical deprivation are associated with fentanyl availability, drug overdose [11, 14, 19], and lower access to treatment and overdose prevention [13, 20, 21]. Predominantly Black neighborhoods are particularly vulnerable to overdose in the face of deprivation [11] with higher racial residential segregation (i.e., higher Black-to-White resident ratios) also predicting fatal overdose [15]. These racialized neighborhood-level inequities are not only associated with overdose, but also substance use treatment access. As the proportion of Black residents in an area increases, the proportion of substance use treatment facilities decreases [22], especially those providing medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) [23,24,25].

To mitigate the impacts of racialized SDOH on drug overdose in Black neighborhoods, community-based efforts have used mobile outreach to service areas with low treatment access. Often these efforts dispatch peers, community health workers, and/or other lay advocates to provide harm reduction tools, overdose education, and service linkage [26,27,28,29]. Outreach services provided by peers and lay health workers with similar lived experiences (i.e., racial and/or drug use) not only address geographic barriers to treatment access, but also mitigate justifiable mistrust of systems that Black individuals in disinvested communities develop as a function of their experience with persistent systemic disinvestment [30,31,32]. Accordingly, drug-related outreach efforts have shown promising rates of engagement and follow-up with Black individuals in particular [26, 28, 29]. For example, one study found that a mobile unit providing MOUD enrolled a greater proportion of Black individuals relative to fixed-site clinics [33].

Overdose prevention outreach is typically limited by convenience- or funding-based location targets, rather than data-driven targets [26, 29]. This is despite extensive research using maps produced with geographic information systems (GIS) to characterize and visualize the epidemiology of drug overdose–with over 181 articles published on this topic since 2017 [34]. Indeed, GIS has been used to identify target populations and neighborhoods for health and social services [35,36,37], identify naloxone-distributing pharmacies that require improved pharmacist education [38], and inform location targets for overdose prevention services [39, 40]. However, few of these studies discuss implications for outreach or address how spatial data visualization (i.e., via maps) translates to organizations and individuals conducting outreach.

The present study takes the first step toward addressing the gap between research and community praxis by examining the acceptability and appropriateness of GIS to facilitate data-driven outreach for reducing overdose inequities facing Black individuals. We convened a focus group of community stakeholders leading overdose prevention outreach programs in Black communities in St. Louis, MO to assess how GIS tools can best characterize and visualize overdose to reflect practitioner needs. This formative study leveraged existing community partnerships to inform both the aims and recruitment with the goal of conducting a focus group that would guide the development of future community-engaged research adopting GIS in outreach settings. The aims were to 1) examine systemic and cultural barriers to implementing a GIS-facilitated overdose visualization tool among outreaching health workers and 2) understand the extent to which outreaching health workers would find such a tool acceptable and appropriate for overdose prevention.

Methods

Setting

Participants were stakeholders invited to participate due to their leadership role in organizations that conducted outreach in the neighborhoods of St. Louis, MO, locally referred to as “North City.” North City refers to the area of St. Louis City bordered by St. Louis County to the West, the Mississippi river to the East and North, and the east–west Delmar Blvd to the south. The latter is infamously called the “Delmar Divide” as it divides St. Louis City not only racially and socioeconomically but also in terms of health, with those neighborhoods north of the Divide having a higher concentration of Black residents and poverty, but a significantly lower life expectancy than those south of it [41]. St. Louis’s current racial and socioeconomic segregation is an enduring product of redlining and other segregationist policies of the mid-twentieth century [42], that contribute not only to economic and health inequities but also specifically to overdose inequities [43]. For example, from 2015 to 2021, drug-involved deaths among Black residents of St. Louis City and County increased at a rate eight times that of White residents, with overdoses among both races increasingly clustering in North City Black neighborhoods [43, 44]. Like others across the country, social service nonprofits and grassroots community organizations in and around North City St. Louis responded by launching or expanding existing services to include overdose prevention outreach.

Participants and procedures

Participants were recruited from partner agencies known to the research team funded by the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s State Opioid Response (Missouri SOR) to provide substance use services via outreach in North St. Louis neighborhoods. In 2021–2022, several agencies and funders inquired about the potential to visualize substance use/harm reduction service access (e.g., via Google Maps) and overdose risk (e.g., zip code-based heat maps) via mapping. However, some community partners and research staff were concerned that making these data public may attract bad actors and disproportionately negatively impact Black communities. These conversations led to the current research questions.

Using purposive convenience sampling, 17 potential participants from 11 organizations were emailed to provide a description of the study and invited to participate. Six of these organizations were current collaborators on other academic-community initiatives emerging in response to increasing overdose in North St. Louis, and thus also engaged with the research team on various other activities, including providing harm reduction resources and education, sharing data, conducting program evaluation, and co-engaging in legislative, funding, and media advocacy. The five other agencies were known entities in the community funded to provide substance-related services in predominantly Black neighborhoods, but not currently engaged with the research team. All potential participants were contacted over email with standardized information about the study; those who did not respond were followed up with by phone.

Enrolled participants (N = 8) were predominantly Black (88%); 50% were women and 50% were men (n = 4 each). Participants represented 7 organizations ranging from grassroots neighborhood nonprofits to large, regional social service and treatment agencies; 4 agencies were connected with the research team in other capacities and 3 agencies were new connections. All participants had an operational or supervisory role in their organization’s adult substance use treatment or harm reduction programming. People with these roles were sampled to speak to the acceptability and appropriateness of a GIS tool in the context of current organizational and program barriers and decision-making processes; however, all were experienced conducting street outreach.

Before the focus group, two staff met individually with each participant to obtain informed consent. The focus group was conducted in-person at a local university by MP, who was assisted by a notetaker and observer. It lasted approximately 120 min and was audio recorded. The focus group protocol was developed for the current study based on questions that emerged internally among the research team during initial work creating preliminary maps and a review of the available literature. The protocol included a semi-structured discussion of current outreach efforts to address overdose and attitudes toward mapping efforts in St. Louis [See Supplemental Materials: Appendix A]. Participants also provided feedback to preliminary maps created in Esri’s ArcGIS Online, including an overdose heat map by census tract, a substance use treatment and service map, and a map demonstrating individual overdose locations that could be filtered by race and other overdose characteristics (see Fig. 1). Participants responded to prompts focused on accessibility of the spatial information and usability to their work. Participants were provided $50 in compensation. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board.

The focus group was transcribed verbatim by a professional transcription service. Three members of the research team (DEB, MP, and RG) read the transcript and notes taken by an observer and met several times to generate organizing codes that represented recurring concepts arising from different participants. Using an inductive reflexive approach to thematic analysis [45] informed by contextualism (a relativist perspective) [46], two coders independently coded the transcript semantically (MP, RG) in ATLAS.ti and met with the first author (DEB) to address any discrepancies, reaching consensus on 13 codes. Finally, MP organized codes into 4 preliminary themes by creating a visual table; themes were based on keyness (the ability of the theme to answer the research question) and meaningfulness (themes that identify underlying conceptualizations, not simply topical descriptions). The coding team met to review themes for internal homogeneity and external heterogeneity and check coherence with data before drafting the following results.

Results

We identified four themes that contextualize the acceptability and utility of an overdose visualization tool among community stakeholders providing services in Black communities. They were 1) importance of considering broader community context; 2) data manipulation and validity concerns; 3) potential for awareness, engagement, and community collaboration; and 4) ensuring data relevance to the affected community. Each is described below with illustrative quotes from respondents (expanded in Table 1).

Importance of broader community context

Although the researchers’ intent was to discuss a mapping tool, participant conversations frequently emphasized the context underlying racism-related SDOH in St. Louis’s Black neighborhoods. Specifically, participants discussed how current and historic policies have detrimentally impacted Black communities in the region, leading to striking disparities between White and Black communities in St. Louis with the latter seen as “depletion zones.” Participants highlighted the difference between White-majority communities that have “access to everything within five minutes” (Participant #1) including education, healthcare, and opportunities for physical activities and Black-majority communities, in which “weeds is high, vacant buildings” (Participant #2) and “you got to drive five miles to pick up lunch” (Participant #3). As one participant stated about the condition of Black neighborhoods: “That’s enough to make a person not see a future” (#2).

Participants reinforced an increasing need for substance use intervention in Black-majority communities due to the high community-level access to drugs paired with the unpredictable drug supply following the rise of synthetic opioids. They noted that open air-drug markets are disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods in St. Louis due to persistent neighborhood deprivation. Thus, illicit fentanyl can freely flow into North St. Louis while other resources such as nutritious food are unavailable. However, participants felt that overdose is just one manifestation of the impact of systemic racism on health:

In our community, it’s not just drugs, it’s not just bullets. From the day you’re born, you are faced with reasons and that manifests in so many things. It’s a struggle, honestly is a struggle to be Black in America. (Participant #4)

Ultimately, participants felt that until the disparities in SDOH related to systemic racism are more directly addressed, advocates such as themselves could never “get to the core or root of the problem [of overdose in] low-income minority communities” (#1).

This theme derived in part from participants’ previous experiences with initiatives that used mapping to visualize other health disparities (e.g., sexually transmitted infections [STIs]) that ended up stalling or having limited impact on the community due to SDOH-related barriers that made it difficult to implement change or access services. Thus, participants emphasized that a mapping tool must not only show overdose, but also the SDOH that must be mitigated to effectively redress overdose, such as “the lack of quality services” (#4) ranging from addiction treatment to public transportation. Emphasizing specific SDOH that would put overdoses in Black neighborhoods in context, one participant stated, “Are there banks nearby? Are there businesses nearby? Are there grocery stores? Are there restaurants? Are there schools?” (#3).

Data manipulation and validity concerns

Decades of disinvestment and gentrification in St. Louis’s Black communities, led to concerns that organizations from outside of these communities may perpetuate similar harms. This included some skepticism about an overdose visualization tool created by an academic institution. Participants were concerned that a map highlighting a majority-Black area as a “high crime, high overdose neighborhood” may lead to further disinvestment and increased law enforcement presence. They described how a map could be used to justify and encourage gentrification and the displacement of Black residents rather than improving their circumstances, citing previous instances of entities using spatial data to do just that:

I lived for 30 years in the central corridor in the 17th ward…once [a local university] wanted our neighborhood, it was over with. We had really high rates of everything you can think of. And the population was 70:30, 70 African American, 30 White. Now it’s flipped. And what happened was [the university] wrote a bunch of grants showing that the demographics needed this money[, then] used that money to wipe that demographic out. (Participant #5)

Participants were also apprehensive about the validity of the overdose data that the visualization tool would display. They doubted whether the data would accurately represent the Black people who use drugs they work with, many of whom are unhoused and face other structural barriers that may leave them “invisible to the system.” One participant stated, “Usually with overdoses, people go to the hospital. African American brothers do not go to the hospital” (Participant #6), emphasizing the perception that many Black people die alone and are thus, not accurately represented in overdose surveillance. Thus, it was important for participants to understand who compiled overdose data and how it was gathered as they tended to trust first-hand experiences and local anecdotal information over overdose data. One participant shared, “I see 200 people a week and that number isn’t going down. If anything, it’s going up. So even if you brought me all kinds of statistics that said [drug overdose] was decreasing … I’m still seeing the same or more.” Despite this, they still saw an overdose visualization tool as something they could use to supplement first-hand experience:

It’s helpful in the sense that I can go now, myself, and see if [the data are] true. So, I don’t just take it at its face value, I go now to experience it for myself…The numbers showed us that these were the places that we needed to be for a lot of reasons. But I don’t just take a map at face value like, “Okay, that’s the way it is, let’s go see parts of it,” but let me check that, check that skepticism, take that and go learn from there. (#3)

Awareness, engagement, and community collaboration

Despite concerns about displaying overdose data using GIS, participants endorsed potential compatibility of an overdose visualization tool with current service and community needs, describing its appropriateness for supplementing their own service provision as well as for advocacy toward greater resources and systems change. Participants noted ways in which an overdose visualization tool could be appropriate for guiding their overall service provision, targeting specific overdose prevention resources, and collaborating with agencies that provided complementary resources (e.g., social services). A map would help them choose places to conduct outreach based on “where the most overdoses were taking place in these communities (#3). Mapping could help target specific resources, for example, to people who use stimulants, who several participants noted were “getting pushed to the side” (#6) in the context of a worsening opioid crisis.

However, participants most strongly viewed an overdose visualization tool as an advocacy tool at individual, organizational, and policy levels. At the individual level, they imagined using the tool to increase general awareness of overdose within the neighborhoods they work. They did not imagine the mapping tool as one they would use in the office, but instead in the community doing street outreach and engaging with community members (e.g., on a mobile phone or tablet). They cited drug stigma and a lack of knowledge within North St. Louis as a barrier to providing needed resources. Specifically, participants described how many community members they interacted with seemed to ignore or deny drug-related deaths in their own neighborhoods. Some attributed this to “old school…generations” who “don’t talk about stuff” (#6) like drug use and the overdose crisis, and thus, were unwilling to support the needed harm reduction services participants’ organizations provided. One participant was particularly frustrated with community members’ rejection of their harm reduction outreach services, stating, “You might choose to put your nose up to it, or blind yourself to it, but it’s real” (#3). Thus, this participant valued the potential of a map displaying fatal overdose to help increase understanding about the impact of the overdose crisis on the Black community and to generate collective action toward mitigating it:

There’s situations where we pull up in a place and they’re like, “we don’t want you here.” Well okay, but let me show you why I’m here. I can use that map to show there’s a reason why. “I came because look at these numbers right here”… Now I can get the whole community involved, in a way that I couldn’t before … because the communities we go to right now don’t acknowledge that there’s an [overdose] issue in their community. (#3)

In their positions as not only service providers, but also advocates for a severely under-resourced community, participants hoped an overdose visualization tool could increase community awareness of available services since they found residents and providers often unaware of them. Participants felt strongly that outreach efforts must connect residents affected by drug use to resources beyond treatment services to address the full range of health and social consequences of neighborhood deprivation. Thus, they saw potential for improved collaboration and referral across organizations and discussed how an overdose visualization tool could be used for community advocacy, problem solving, and planning across organizations:

With the mapping… [local government could] utilize the community organizations within those zip codes to be at the table to resolve problems in that zip code versus making their own plan of what they think is going to work … bring those people to the table, because those are the people that see and know that community. (#1)

At the policy level, an overdose mapping tool was also seen as a strategy to advocate for increased funding within their communities and for their organizations specifically. For example, they described how GIS data visualizations could be incorporated into grant applications to demonstrate the need for the services their organizations provide. They also hoped a mapping tool could help facilitate overall increased investment in North St. Louis, including for additional outpatient and inpatient treatment options, affordable housing development, and HIV/STI clinics.

Ensuring data relevance to the community

Participants stressed the importance of including people with lived experience in the development of any overdose mapping tool. People who use drugs and providers who serve them in communities targeted by the tool should be consulted during its development. Although participants valued spatial data, they believed that it should be paired with narrative data and storytelling. Focus group participants generated ideas such as including stories of how the overdose crisis has affected community members or testimonials of people who achieved recovery within the tool, emphasizing that “maps without a story are meaningless to the community” (#3). They also saw this mixed methods strategy as vital for framing the maps so that they do not perpetuate stigma toward people who use drugs or serve as a rationale for bad actors to further disinvest in Black-majority areas with high overdose rates.

Participants also reinforced that each neighborhood they work within is unique with different community assets, challenges, and histories. Regional, county, and city-level maps had much less perceived utility to this group than a tool that could examine neighborhood-level geography:

Each community has its own different thing that’s going to work. Baden, what works in Baden ain’t going to work in Hyde Park. Two totally different communities, even though they may be structured similar, … same thing is not going to work in those communities. (#1)

Discussion

The current qualitative study examined the acceptability and potential utility of using GIS to facilitate data-driven mobile outreach services for overdose prevention. Participants from organizations providing outreach services in predominantly Black neighborhoods pointed to the potential for a GIS tool displaying locations of drug overdose to inform their service provision and referrals, improve awareness of the Black overdose crisis among both community members and funder-stakeholders, and facilitate collaboration among service providers. Participants’ ability to resist a conversation focused solely on the GIS tool resulted in one that highlighted the importance of understanding the context of opioid use in St. Louis’s Black neighborhoods and the need to elevate community voice, both in features of and in the use of the tool.

Citing manifestations of systemic racism that have led to neighborhood-level inequities in SDOH–and in turn, drug overdose–findings also highlight that such a tool could be limited by data validity and misrepresentation. Participant recommendations for mitigating these concerns included making a mapping tool more relevant to Black communities by including qualitative data, such as storytelling, and involving stakeholders from those communities to incorporate hyper-local knowledge. Participants also noted ways that the GIS tool could be used to communicate with government officials and across community organizations, increase advocacy, and gain resource investments that mitigate SDOH contributing to overdose rates.

Our findings are aligned with previous research demonstrating that community organizations conducting overdose prevention via outreach see the benefit of mapping to inform linkages to treatment and related resources [39, 40]. Although previous research has pointed to the utility of GIS data for agencies conducting outreach to “underserved communities with high overdose burdens” (40 p. 1761), this study included voices from grassroots organizations with lived experience working in those communities. A unique contribution of including voices was discussion of how GIS could be used not only for targeted tertiary prevention, but also for more advocacy to address what participants saw as the “root cause” of the Black overdose crisis: racism related SDOH. As such, participants suggested GIS tools include historical and current characteristics associated with systemic racism and racialized neighborhood segregation (e.g., food deserts, vacancies, and limited access to health services). GIS is already used to identify environmental manifestations of racism impacting social, mental, and physical health disparities. Research has demonstrated how racialized health disparities derive from economic SDOH like poverty and unemployment, environmental SDOH like noise pollution and poor walkability, and historical SDOH like redlining [47, 48]. Using GIS to visualize manifestations of racism may be a promising strategy for educating the public about the source of health disparities and advocating for equity-focused funding and intervention [49].

Participants also suggested that GIS can be used to directly mitigate overdose by improving community awareness of the opioid crisis, helping to reduce stigma and empower residents in areas with high overdose burdens to recognize and respond to overdose. This may be particularly useful in racially minoritized communities who have been impacted by the false racialization of substance use or “double stigma” at the intersection of racial and drug-related discrimination [50, 51]. For example, in New Mexico, ethnically and culturally matched community health workers are dispatched to Latinx communities to provide overdose education, but also to reduce mental health and substance use related stigma, incorporating culturally-relevant concepts such as whole person health [52]. Such interventions provided by culturally congruent lay health workers and peers could be supplemented by local data visualization using GIS in Black communities overburdened by overdose.

Despite identified benefits of GIS, findings suggest community ambivalence about mapping. Previous research among research and clinician stakeholders have pointed to the potential for big data related to overdose to be framed or used to perpetuate inequities, including socioeconomic disinvestment [53, 54]. Like previous research, the result of this ambivalence tended to skew towards potential benefits rather than concerns [54]. Specifically, the devastation of the overdose crisis was perceived to be so severe that it was better to use the data in the hopes of attracting more awareness and resources:

We’ve got to recognize that [bad actors are] an inherent risk and roll with it, but there’s also so many benefits. We’ve all talked about all the different ways we can use this [mapping tool] and we’ve got to think about those more than we think about the harmful. (#3)

However, given the stigmatization of those affected by overdose, future spatial epidemiology and surveillance of the problem must consider integrating qualitative data and citizen science. Community-engaged approaches that incorporate the perspectives of people with lived experience with drug use and/or racism can highlight cultural strengths of underserved communities, mitigate racialized stigma, and provide practical recommendations to avoid data being used to perpetuate the deficit narrative. In the context of technology like GIS, one promising approach is digital storytelling, a researcher-facilitated process of capturing lived experience in multimedia formats often used for health promotion in marginalized groups [55, 56]. Digital storytelling has been integrated with GIS, exemplified by ArcGIS’s own “Story Maps” tool, but has been little used in geospatial science and drug surveillance. Integrating big data via GIS and qualitative lived experience via digital storytelling may help scientists, public health officials, and community members better understand and solution social and economic inequities driving the drug overdose crisis in Black communities [57].

Although not mentioned by those participating in the focus group, the inclusion of community voice might also enhance community trust of researchers and research institutions through the experience of authentic inclusion and elevation of community voice [54]. Community-engaged and GIS methods have been combined to identify areas for public health intervention for problems including chronic disease and nutrition [53, 58]. These participatory mapping approaches incorporate local knowledge into geospatial indices that may predict health outcomes and identify SDOH beyond those traditionally discussed [59, 60]. Thus, in addition to building trust toward and engagement with opioid big data, community-engaged approaches to opioid surveillance in Black communities may also improve scientific and applied outcomes, contributing to increased health equity.

Given increasing use of GIS in drug overdose epidemiology and research by local public health agencies, community organizations, and researchers alike, future GIS research should increase its public health application. The current study raises several implementation questions for future research. For example, participants suggested that a mobile tool could help supplement overdose education during outreach whereas a tool displaying drug trends (e.g., stimulant versus opioid-involved death) could help them target specific harm reduction resources. Thus, research involving the adoption of a GIS tool into outreach and other community-based interventions could examine the feasibility of mobile tools and the fidelity of community-based organizations to providing resources aligned with the drug trends observed. Consistent with participant recommendations from this project, adoption of GIS tools should include the ability to examine data at smaller levels of analysis (i.e., at the address level) to identify neighborhood-level gaps in overdose prevention and related services [61]. Future research should extend findings on acceptability of overdose mapping tools by evaluating the effectiveness of such maps for outreach. Although several studies have used GIS as a tool to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of outreach services, very few studies have evaluated how GIS tools can be used to improve such services. One recent study evaluated the implementation of GIS tools to target outreach services for opportunity youth (i.e., youth not engaged in school or work) in the Phoenix, AZ area [36]. The authors describe how three GIS-derived maps increased agency referrals and led to the opening of satellite centers to increase access in high need areas. Next steps include examining whether GIS can similarly facilitate the needed increase in resources, collaboration, and awareness to address the opioid crisis in Black communities.

This report must be considered given its limitations. The most significant limitation is that results are based on one focus group as the study was practically limited by the limited number of organizations conducting outreach in North St. Louis and recruitment challenges. These challenges included generating interest in research participation among potential participants and coordinating schedules for focus groups due to lack of capacity for staff coverage within many of the organizations. Although the group was homogenous given participants’ similar roles, conducting only one group certainly limited variability in perspectives as well as in thematic analysis. As participants were recruited from known partners, many were familiar with the focus group facilitator (MP). This may have enriched the conversation due to increased trust and rapport with the facilitator, but also could have biased the conversation toward participants who were more familiar with her. We also must acknowledge that the research team are culturally distinct from participants and hold relatively privileged social locations, despite some investigators sharing characteristics like racial and regional origin. Although our analysis approach was inductive, the current interpretation is limited as we are not members of the affected community of Black people who use drugs. Results also have limited transferability to other communities given the focus on the needs of North St. Louis. However, racialized neighborhood disinvestment is common in many cities and concerns about using big overdose data to perpetuate racist policies has been documented in previous research [54, 62]. Thus, the current study may inform future GIS-related research and practice focused on racial disparities in drug overdose.

Conclusions

The current study highlighted the potential utility of GIS to facilitate data-driven outreach for drug overdose prevention in underserved Black neighborhoods. As data visualization of overdose explodes in science, public health, and community settings, stakeholders must consider validity concerns that may undermine benefits and limit community trust. Those using GIS to illuminate service inequities and gaps in overdose among marginalized groups must consider the historical community context, minimize opportunities for data manipulation and misinterpretation, and seek to garner the knowledge and trust of affected communities.

Availability of data and materials

The data generated and analyzed during the current study are not publicly available as they reasonably be shared without compromising the privacy and confidentiality of participants. However, certain sections of the data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Source: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-024-19541-3

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,USA :

In 2023, 1.5 million adolescents aged 12 to 17 initiated nicotine vaping in the past year.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released the results of its annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which shows how people living in America reported about their experience with mental health conditions, substance use, mental health and pursuit of treatment in 2023. The report includes selected estimates by race, ethnicity, and age group. The 2023 sample size was 67,679 and used varied collection methods in gathering data from respondents who are noninstitutionalized and age 12 or older.

Key findings of people aged 12 or older who used tobacco products or vaped nicotine in the past month:

  • Among people aged 12 or older- 22.7 % (or 64.4 million people) was highest among young adults aged 18 to 25 – 30.0 % or 10.2 million people
  • Adults aged 26 or older -23.4% or 52.3 million people
  • Adolescents aged 12 to 17 – 7.4% or 1.9 million people
  • Higher among American Indian or Alaska Native (34 %) or Multiracial people (30.6 %) than among White (24.7%), Black (24.2%), Hispanic (17.9%), or Asian people (10.3%)
  • The percentage of people who vaped nicotine was higher among young adults aged 18 to 25 (24.1% or 8.2 million people) than among adults aged 26 or older (7.4% or 16.6 million people) or adolescents aged 12 to 17 (6.8% or 1.8 million people)

Legislation in December 2019 raised the federal minimum age for sale of tobacco products (along with e-cigarettes) from 18 to 21 years.25 All 50 states and the District of Columbia prohibit the sale of tobacco products to people younger than 21.

  • In 2023, 1.5 million adolescents aged 12 to 17, 1.4 million young adults aged 18 to 25, and 3.1 million adults aged 26 or older initiated nicotine vaping in the past year.
  • About two thirds (62.5%) of the 5.9 million people in 2023 who initiated nicotine vaping in the past year did so at age 21 or older (3.7 million people) compared with 37.5 percent (or 2.2 million people) who did so before age 21.

It is evident that several safety and mental health concerns have arisen due to the growing popularity of e-cigarettes. E-cigarettes heat liquids known as vape juices or e-liquids and transform them into an inhalable vapor containing nicotine and other hazardous compounds. It has been purported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), that Vaping, which was originally marketed to quit smoking, has become a problematic behavior in itself. Vaping can be harmful to a person’s physical and mental health, self-control, mindfulness, and other interventions can help people resist the lure of vaping.

Vaping can be especially dangerous for young people because their brains are still developing. Nicotine is highly addictive and can harm brain development until around age 25 and can negatively impact a developing brain in terms of mood/impulse control disorders, interference with memory and attention processing and negatively affect planning and decision-making.

Find out what’s happening in Glen Covewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

As individuals, being mindful, prevention education and making health choices and cultivating self-control can play an important role safeguarding our well-being. At the societal level, grassroot efforts for increased regulation over entities seeking to profit from harmful products and promote interventions that are accessible and beneficial to all is most effective. There is a large body of research that tackling nicotine dependence with vaping with the same vigor as combustibles is a growing need.

According to SAFE, the best method of protecting is prevention education and encouraging a goal to “Live SAFE” and substance free and changing the societal norms regarding these products to help curb youth initiation and a lifelong nicotine addiction.

For information on how to quit smoking or vaping tobacco or nicotine, the NYS Smoker’ provides free and confidential services that include information, tools, quit coaching, and support in both English and Spanish. Services are available by calling 1-866-NY-QUITS (1-866-697-8487), texting (716) 309-4688, or visiting www.nysmokefree.com, for information, to chat online with a Quit Coach, or to sign up for Learn2QuitNY, a six-week, step-by-step text messaging program to build the skills you need to quit any tobacco product. Individuals aged 13 to 24 can text “DropTheVape” to 88709 to receive age-appropriate quit assistance.

SAFE, Inc. is the only alcohol and substance abuse prevention, intervention, and education agency in the City of Glen Cove. The Coalition is concerned about all combustible and electronic products with marijuana and tobacco. The Agency is employing environmental strategies to educate and update the community regarding the negative consequences in collaboration with Carol Meschkow, Manager- Tobacco Action Coalition of Long Island. To learn more about the SAFE Glen Cove Coalition please follow www.facebook.com/safeglencove or to learn more about electronic products visit the Vaping Facts and Myths Page of SAFE’s website to learn more about how vaping is detrimental to your health www.safeglencove.org.

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Education,Health,Prevalence,USA,Youth :

Aug 5 2024

Drug-involved overdose deaths increased by over 500 percent in 2022 according to a study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, with trends attributed to synthetic opioids. National data shows that fentanyl and heroin in particular attributed substantially to the rise particularly since 2014. However, the study also reports that income protection policies, can have a supportive role in preventing fatal drug overdoses. The findings are reported in the International Journal of Drug Policy.

Over 73,000 people died from an overdose in 2020, which subsequently increased to 106,699 people in 2021, a record for the highest number of overdose deaths in one year.

And in fact, more recently, we entered a fourth wave of the overdose crisis, characterized by fatal overdoses in the context of polysubstance use.”

Silvia Martins, MD, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Public Health

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated economic hardship; and as a result, the U.S, government enacted income protection programs in conjunction with existing unemployment insurance (UI) to dampen COVID-19-related economic consequences.

“In the context of financial and economic stressors which are known to increase overdose risk we hypothesized that we would observe lower levels of overall overdose and opioid deaths given that robust unemployment insurance benefits could be a buffer,” said Martins., who is also director of the Substance Use Epidemiology Unit of the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia.

The researchers used data based on responses of 89,914 individuals 18 years of age or older from the pooled 2014 – 2020 Detailed Restricted Mortality files for all counties from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aggregating at the county-quarter level. Included were deaths from any drug overdose, any opioid overdose, and any stimulant overdose. Data on unemployment insurance were obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor as well as statutes by the individual states.

Data from 30 states collected by the CDC indicate rates were persistently stable or even increasing, suggesting that increases in overdose deaths observed after the start of the pandemic show minimal signs of abating. “In fact, treatment disruptions and closures of harm reduction organizations in compliance with social distancing ordinances may have also contributed to worsening substance use morbidity and mortality during this period,” noted Martins.

“We also theorized that states and counties with limited safety net policies may increase an individual’s social, psychological, and biological vulnerability to develop a drug use disorder, including opioid and stimulant use disorders. Such policies likely play a significant role in substance use initiation and subsequent development of substance use disorders as well as treatment access for such disorders,” Martins noted.

An earlier study that examined the relationship between state-level UI robustness and fatal opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2012 support the current findings although the research used data from earlier in the overdose epidemic and also different methods were used.

“While their earlier analysis shows that, between 1999 to 2012, UI was associated with lower rates of opioid overdoses, our study builds and expands on findings from that research, as we examined the relationship between UI and any drug-involved mortality — including all other drug overdoses and stimulant overdoses — during the 4th wave of the epidemic intertwined with the COVID-19 period,” observed Martins. In addition, the earlier study only examined fatal overdoses among “prime-age” people aged 25-54, whereas Martins and her team expanded our inclusion criteria to include everyone ages 18 and older.

“Our results therefore reinforce the notion in a call for a broader discussion on the protective role of the safety net programs to buffer drug-related harms,” stated Martins.

Co-authors are Luis E. Segura, Megan E. Marziali, Emilie Bruzelius,Natalie S. Levy, Sarah Gutkind, and Kristen Santarin, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health; Katherine Sacks, Milken Institute; and Ashley Fox, University at Albany, SUNY.

The study was funded by the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Calderone Health Equity Award and NIH-NIDA grants R01DA059376 and T32DA031099.

Source: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240805/Study-Drug-involved-overdose-deaths-increased-by-over-50025-in-2022.aspx

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,USA :

As the new school year starts, officials are alerting parents to be vigilant of innovative ways kids might conceal drugs, such as in candy boxes and soda cans

Published August 12, 2024

With the onset of the new school year, there’s a growing concern among school officials about the creative methods some students might use to conceal drugs. Parents are being asked to stay alert to the possibility of everyday items being used for these purposes.

Creative Concealments

During a recent awareness campaign, officials highlighted how items that appear mundane, like candy boxes, soda cans, and water bottles, can actually be specialized containers designed to hide drugs. “At first glance, these items might look like ordinary snacks or drinks, but they’re increasingly being used to conceal substances,” noted a spokesperson from the organization SCAN, which is dedicated to substance abuse prevention.

Types of Disguised Containers

The variety of containers mentioned includes those designed to look like everyday objects. Water bottles, soda containers, and even chip bags can be modified with hidden compartments. These products are often marketed discreetly and can be easily overlooked by the untrained eye.

Signs of Substance Abuse

In addition to being aware of potential hidden containers, officials are advising parents to watch for changes in their child’s behavior which may indicate substance abuse. “Changes in attitude, energy, and social circles can be red flags,” the spokesperson added, emphasizing the importance of open communication and observation.

Community and School Involvement

Schools are working closely with local law enforcement and organizations like SCAN to provide resources and education to parents. Workshops, informational meetings, and resource materials are being offered to help parents and guardians recognize both the signs of drug use and the unlikely places drugs might be hidden.

Call to Action

Parents and guardians are encouraged to engage with their children about the dangers of drugs and the pressures they may face. By maintaining an open dialogue and staying informed about the latest drug concealment methods, parents can play a crucial role in preventing drug abuse.

For more tips on how to detect hidden drug containers and support children in staying drug-free, stay with Fox News Rio Grande Valley and follow us on your favorite social network.

Source: https://foxrgv.tv/hidden-in-plain-sight-officials-warn-parents-of-disguised-drug-containers/

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Education,Others (International News),Prevalence,USA,Youth :

As marijuana policies change across the nation, the conversation around its impact often centers on human health. However, it is critical to consider the impact on animals as a new study published in the Journal of the American Veterinarian Medical Association sheds light on the concern of marijuana toxicity in dogs.

Currently, the gold standard confirmatory testing for THC toxicity in dogs is costly, not easily accessible, and takes time to receive results. Thus, veterinarians often use the human urine multidrug test (HUMT) for point-of-care testing, which is unfortunately, unreliable in dogs. To rule out serious and severe conditions, HUMT is done in conjunction with additional tests such as bloodwork and advanced imaging.

To understand the history, physical, neurological, and clinical-pathological findings associated with marijuana toxicity in dogs, this study analyzed the medical records of 223 dogs diagnosed with THC toxicity between January 2017 and July 2021 from a university teaching hospital.

Key findings include:

  • Demographics: The median age of the exposed dogs was 1 year, and the breeds varied, with mixed breeds being the most common.
  • Owner Denial: Most dog owners denied the possibility of marijuana ingestion. Common stories reported were that their dog began “acting abnormal after going outside or to a public space” and when asked about marijuana being in the home, 55.6% claimed “absolutely no marijuana is in the house”.
  • Clinical Signs: Most dogs developed clinical signs of toxicity within four hours of ingestion. Common clinical signs included ataxia (88.3%), hyperesthesia (75.3%), lethargy (62.8%), urinary incontinence (45.7%), and vomiting (26%). The majority (70.4%) experienced both ataxia (abnormal movement/lack of coordination) and hyperesthesia (increased sensitivity).
  • Vitals and Bloodwork: While most dogs had normal vitals like heart rate, respiratory rate, and body temperature, common abnormalities included systemic hypertension (60.7%), tachycardia (37%), and hyperthermia (22.6%). Common electrolyte abnormalities included mild hyperkalemia (51.3%) and mild hypercalcemia (79.1%), with the researchers noting that this study was the first to report such abnormalities in dogs.
  • Prognosis: Fortunately, all dogs survived; however, 22% were hospitalized.

The denial of dog owners in disclosing the possibility of marijuana exposure can lead to delays in diagnosis and treatment, resulting in needless testing, increased costs, and undue stress. Educating pet owners on the risks and signs of marijuana exposure and ensuring veterinarians are equipped with the tools and resources to diagnosis marijuana toxicity, are critically needed. These findings underscore the need for policies to prioritize the health and safety of pets, especially considering that many of these cases occurred within the same year as legalization in the area where the university hospital is located, as the researchers point out.

Source: Save Our Society From Drugs | 333 3rd Ave N Suite 200 | St. Petersburg, FL 33701 US

 

Filed under: Animals,Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,USA :

The implications of these findings on the propagation of cannabis genotoxicity and epigenotoxicity to the next generation extremely significant.

Prior to this research, the field was aware of the effects in the male but the work in females is more recent.

 

To access the full document:

  1. Click on the link below.
  2. An image  – the front page of the full document will appear.
  3. Click on the image to open the full document.

 

HUMAN REPRO AND GENOTOXICITY ARTICLE

Filed under: Drug use-various effects on foetus, babies, children and youth,Genes,Health,USA :
A recent poll, conducted by Gallup, found that there has been a shift in public opinion regarding marijuana.

This is SAM’s  The Drug Report’s Friday Fact report
 

The first asked the question, “What effect do you think the use of marijuana has on most people who use it – very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative or very negative?” Gallup focused on several demographic subgroups and found that all of them were less likely in 2024 than in 2022 to say that marijuana had a positive effect on users. Here’s a breakdown for each subgroup:
This poll revealed a 12% drop among Independents, a 7% drop among young adults,  and a 13% drop among nonreligious people. Likewise, as the percentage of Americans that say marijuana has a positive effect on most people who use it has declined, there has been an increase in the percentage that say it has a negative effect on them. This increased from 45% in 2022 to 51% in 2024, with the remainder answering that they had “no opinion.” A majority of Americans now recognize that marijuana has harmful effects on users, which include cannabis use disorder, depression, anxiety, and impairment, among others.

 

A second question asked, “What effect do you think the use of marijuana has on society – very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative or very negative?” It found that the percentage of Americans that thought it was “very negative” or “somewhat negative” increased from 50% in 2022 to 54% in 2024, as the percentage that thought it had a “very positive” or “somewhat positive” effect declined from 49% to 41%.

 

More and more Americans are waking up to the harmful effects of marijuana. Now a majority of Americans believe that marijuana is harmful for both users and society. Public opinion is clearly shifting as more families have seen first-hand the results of marijuana use.

Source: Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) – Friday Fact – Fri 30/08/2024
Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,USA :

With the increasing legalization of recreational marijuana across various states, employers need to proactively prepare for the changes and their implications on the workplace. As more states allow adults to legally purchase and possess marijuana, it’s essential for employers to review and update their workplace policies to ensure compliance and maintain a safe work environment.

Despite legalization, employers can still prohibit marijuana use that leads to impairment at work, akin to alcohol restrictions. Recent legal decisions, such as White v. Timken Gears & Servs., Inc. in Illinois, reinforce that a positive drug test for marijuana while working, even if used recreationally off-duty, can justify termination if it violates a reasonable and consistently applied workplace policy. This underscores the importance of clear, fair, and legally sound drug and alcohol policies to ensure workplace safety.

  • The first step is to re-evaluate your drug testing protocols. Ensure they align with both state and federal regulations, particularly if your industry is governed by specific mandates, such as those from the Department of Transportation. Consider your agreements with insurance carriers, as marijuana testing might be a condition of coverage or discounts.
  • Testing for marijuana presents unique challenges due to the limitations of current testing methods. Talk with your testing laboratory to understand the differences between qualitative and quantitative tests and determine which best supports your workplace policies.
  • Evaluate whether to implement second chance agreements for employees who test positive for marijuana. Additionally, consider providing access to substance abuse programs. These measures can help manage employees who might struggle with marijuana use while offering them a chance to comply with workplace policies.
  • Update your policies in your employee handbook, workers’ compensation policies, and other relevant documents to clearly state that while marijuana may be legal, it is prohibited in the workplace. Clearly outline that possession or use of marijuana at the worksite is forbidden and that employees are not permitted to use marijuana during lunch or other breaks. Specify the consequences of violating these policies to ensure there are no ambiguities.
  • Hold meetings to communicate the company’s stance and expectations regarding marijuana use to all employees. Transparency is key; ensure employees understand the policies, the reasons behind them, and the consequences of non-compliance. Clear communication helps in setting the right expectations and reduces misunderstandings.
  • Conduct comprehensive training sessions for HR professionals, managers, and supervisors on the company’s policies regarding marijuana use. Ensure that all managerial staff understand the testing protocols and disciplinary policies. Training should also cover how to handle conversations with employees about marijuana use, ensuring consistency and sensitivity. Equip your managers with the skills to recognize signs of impairment at work. Understanding how to identify and address employees who might be under the influence of marijuana is crucial for maintaining workplace safety. Provide clear guidelines on the steps to take if impairment is suspected. Check out our trainings here!

The increasing state legalization of recreational marijuana marks a significant change for employers. By proactively updating your drug testing protocols, policies, training programs, and communication strategies, you can effectively manage the impact of this new legislation on your workplace. Staying informed and prepared will help you navigate this evolving landscape while ensuring a safe and compliant work environment.

Source: 

  • Drug Free Foundation AMERICA, Inc.
  • National Drug-Free Workplace Alliance
Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Economic,Legal Sector,USA,Workplace :

Vaping among younger adults and binge drinking among mid-life adults also maintained historically high levels, NIH-supported study shows

August 29, 2024

 

Past-year use of cannabis and hallucinogens stayed at historically high levels in 2023 among adults aged 19 to 30 and 35 to 50, according to the latest findings from the Monitoring the Future survey. In contrast, past-year use of cigarettes remained at historically low levels in both adult groups. Past-month and daily alcohol use continued a decade-long decline among those 19 to 30 years old, with binge drinking reaching all-time lows. However, among 35- to 50-year-olds, the prevalence of binge drinking in 2023 increased from five and 10 years ago. The Monitoring the Future study is conducted by scientists at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Ann Arbor, and is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Reports of vaping nicotine or vaping cannabis in the past year among adults 19 to 30 rose over five years, and both trends remained at record highs in 2023. Among adults 35 to 50, the prevalences of nicotine vaping and of cannabis vaping stayed steady from the year before, with long-term (five and 10 year) trends not yet observable in this age group as this question was added to the survey for this age group in 2019.

For the first time in 2023, 19- to 30-year-old female respondents reported a higher prevalence of past-year cannabis use than male respondents in the same age group, reflecting a reversal of the gap between sexes. Conversely, male respondents 35 to 50 years old maintained a higher prevalence of past-year cannabis use than female respondents of the same age group, consistent with what’s been observed for the past decade.

“We have seen that people at different stages of adulthood are trending toward use of drugs like cannabis and psychedelics and away from tobacco cigarettes,” said Nora D. Volkow, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “These findings underscore the urgent need for rigorous research on the potential risks and benefits of cannabis and hallucinogens – especially as new products continue to emerge.”

Since 1975, the Monitoring the Future study has annually surveyed substance use behaviors and attitudes among a nationally representative sample of teens. A longitudinal panel study component of Monitoring the Future conducts follow-up surveys on a subset of these participants (now totaling approximately 20,000 people per year), collecting data from individuals every other year from ages 19 to 30 and every five years after the participants turn 30 to track their drug use through adulthood. Participants self-report their drug use behaviors across various time periods, including lifetime, past year (12 months), past month (30 days), and other use frequencies depending on the substance type. Data for the 2023 panel study were collected via online and paper surveys from April 2023 through October 2023.

Full data summaries and data tables showing the trends below, including breakdowns by substance, are available in the report. Key findings include:

Cannabis use in the past year and past month remained at historically high levels for both adult age groups in 2023. Among adults 19 to 30 years old, approximately 42% reported cannabis use in the past year, 29% in the past month, and 10% daily use (use on 20 or more occasions in the past 30 days). Among adults 35 to 50, reports of use reached 29%, 19%, and 8%, respectively. While these 2023 estimates are not statistically different from those of 2022, they do reflect five- and 10-year increases for both age groups.

Cannabis vaping in the past year and past month was reported by 22% and 14% of adults 19 to 30, respectively, and by 9% and 6% of adults 35 to 50 in 2023. For the younger group, these numbers represent all-time study highs and an increase from five years ago.

Nicotine vaping among adults 19 to 30 maintained historic highs in 2023. Reports of past-year and past-month vaping of nicotine reached 25% and 19%, respectively. These percentages represent an increase from five years ago, but not from one year ago. For adults 35 to 50, the prevalence of vaping nicotine remained steady from the year before (2022), with 7% and 5% reporting past-year and past-month use.

Hallucinogen use in the past year continued a five-year steep incline for both adult groups, reaching 9% for adults 19 to 30 and 4% for adults 35 to 50 in 2023. Types of hallucinogens reported by participants included LSD, mescaline, peyote, shrooms or psilocybin, and PCP.

Alcohol remains the most used substance reported among adults in the study. Past-year alcohol use among adults 19 to 30 has showed a slight upward trend over the past five years, with 84% reporting use in 2023. However, past month drinking (65%), daily drinking (4%), and binge drinking (27%) all remained at study lows in 2023 among adults 19 to 30. These numbers have decreased from 10 years ago. Past-month drinking and binge drinking (having five or more drinks in a row in the past two week period) decreased significantly from the year before for this age group (down from 68% for past month and 31% for binge drinking reported in 2022).

Around 84% of adults 35 to 50 reported past-year alcohol use in 2023, which has not significantly changed from the year before or the past five or 10 years. Past-month alcohol use and binge drinking have slightly increased over the past 10 years for this age group; in 2023, past-month alcohol use was at 69% and binge drinking was at 27%. Daily drinking has decreased in this group over the past five years and was at its lowest level ever recorded in 2023 (8%).

Additional data: In 2023, past-month cigarette smoking, past-year nonmedical use of prescription drugs, and past-year use of opioid medications (surveyed as “narcotics other than heroin”) maintained five- and 10-year declines for both adult groups. Among adults 19 to 30 years old, past-year use of stimulants (surveyed as “amphetamines”) has decreased for the past decade, whereas for adults 35 to 50, past-year stimulant use has been modestly increasing over 10 years. Additional data include drug use reported by college/non-college young adults and among various demographic subgroups, including sex and gender and race and ethnicity.

The 2023 survey year was the first time a cohort from the Monitoring the Future study reached 65 years of age; therefore, trends for the 55- to 65-year-old age group are not yet available.

“The data from 2023 did not show us many significant changes from the year before, but the power of surveys such as Monitoring the Future is to see the ebb and flow of various substance use trends over the longer term,” said Megan Patrick, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan and principal investigator of the Monitoring the Future panel study. “As more and more of our original cohorts – first recruited as teens – now enter later adulthood, we will be able to examine the patterns and effects of drug use throughout the life course. In the coming years, this study will provide crucial data on substance use trends and health consequences among older populations, when people may be entering retirement and other new chapters of their lives.”

View more information on data collection methods for the Monitoring the Future panel study and how the survey adjusts for the effects of potential exclusions in the report. Results from the related 2023 Monitoring the Future study of substance use behaviors and related attitudes among teens in the United States were released in December 2023, and 2024 results are upcoming in December 2024.

 

Source:  https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Methamphetamine/GHB/Hallucinogens/Oxycodone,Prevalence,USA :

By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDReviewed by Benedette Cuffari, M.Sc.  Aug 28 2024

How can modern psychedelic research and traditional approaches integrate to address substance use disorders and mental health challenges?

A recent study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs discusses the history and current state of psychedelic research for the treatment of substance abuse disorders (SUDs).

Psychedelics

Psychedelics are consciousness-altering drugs, some of which include lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin, and mescaline. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and ketamine are also considered psychedelics; however, these drugs have different mechanisms of action.

Although psychedelics have been exploited for centuries to induce altered states of consciousness, their use, as opposed to their abuse, has largely been unexplored in modern medicine. In fact, several studies have indicated the potential utility of psychedelics for individuals who have mental illness due to traumatic experiences, false beliefs, and unhealthy behavioral patterns, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.

The recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to global changes in the use of methamphetamine, alcohol, and cannabis, as well as a significant increase in opioid overdoses in the United States. Thus, another promising application of psychedelics is their potential use for treating SUDs.

However, restrictive policies, poor funding, lack of equitable and diverse recruitment and access, as well as the multiplicity of small-scale psychedelic research programs have prevented researchers from effectively investigating the effects of psychedelics in the treatment of SUDs.

Overview

Over the past seven decades, researchers have become increasingly interested in examining the potential use of psychedelics in traditional medicine. Despite federal policies banning recreational drug use, researchers have elucidated some of the biological effects of psychedelics on the central nervous system (CNS) and their potential role in the treatment of SUDs. Nevertheless, there remains a lack of well-controlled multi-center trials and systematic reviews in this area.

As researchers continue to examine the pharmacological potential of these drugs, it is crucial to address their addiction and abuse potential, the legalization of recreational drugs, and the attempts of pharmaceutical companies to introduce high-selling psychedelics as therapies for mental illness.

History and current use of psychedelics

Psychedelics like ayahuasca, Peyote, and psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used throughout history by traditional healers and indigenous communities for both spiritual and health purposes. By recognizing these contributions, researchers can benefit from the potential benefits of traditional usage patterns while investigating the use of these drugs for treating SUDs and other mental health disorders.

For example, a hybridized SUD therapy program in Peru utilizes ayahuasca to treat alcohol and drug use. At one year following treatment, reduced depression and anxiety, higher quality of life, and reduced severity of addiction have been reported.

One notable contribution is the acknowledgment that key experiences of treatment participants might provide more insight than the search for putative “active ingredients” of interventions as complex as psychedelic-assisted treatment.”

Purging in psychedelic treatment

Psychedelic use, specifically ayahuasca use, is closely linked to vomiting as a means of purging the body. This is reported to have spiritual, Amazonian, and clinical benefits.

Conclusions

The optimal approach to psychedelic-assisted treatment involves mutual respect for and recognition of the value of both traditional and modern applications. Thus, mixed-methods research is crucial, as traditional approaches may help identify a better therapeutic agent or program than traditional approaches to identifying and isolating active ingredients.

However, it is essential to evaluate and quantify the success rates of traditional approaches to psychedelic use, as well as elucidate the biological mechanisms that may contribute to their therapeutic effects. Researchers must recognize and credit traditional history and practices throughout these efforts to protect these cultures from being exploited, ignored, and suppressed by pharmaceutical industries.

The rush to patent processes in psychedelic treatments of addiction and other psychiatric conditions reflects the enormous greed of private commercial entities to benefit financially from vulnerable patients in need of effective therapies.

Thus, regulatory control of psychedelic therapies is vital to establish rigorous research standards that can lead to the generation of sufficient evidence in this area. Without this type of overview, private corporate interests may seek to exploit governmental support for crucial research needed to address these mental health issues.

Source:  https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240828/Psychedelics-A-new-hope-for-substance-abuse-treatment.aspx

Filed under: Brain and Behaviour,Drug use-various effects,Health,Methamphetamine/GHB/Hallucinogens/Oxycodone,Prevention and Intervention,Psychiatric drugs,USA :
By Lauraine Langreo, Staff Writer,  Education Week — August 28, 2024  

There have been “promising” declines in high school students’ overall use of illicit substances, concludes a report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since 2013, the percentage of students who reported drinking alcohol, using marijuana, or using select illicit drugs at any point has decreased. Since 2017 and 2019, respectively, the percentage of students who had ever misused or currently are misusing prescription opioids decreased, according to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

That survey draws on data collected every two years among a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students. The 2023 survey had more than 20,000 respondents and was conducted in the spring.

Still, many students continue to use substances and the lack of progress in some areas is concerning, according to the report.

The findings come as schools continue to face challenges in curbing students’ substance abuse, which could negatively affect learning, memory, and attention, according to experts. It could also be a sign of mental health challenges.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Teen substance use

Percentage of high school students who ...

*Question introduced in 2017.
**Question introduced in 2019.

DATA SOURCE: CDC

____________________________________________________________________________

While student substance abuse isn’t a new challenge for school districts, the substances that adolescents are experimenting with now are much more dangerous, said Darrell Sampson, the executive director of student services for the Arlington public schools in Virginia.

“It’s not necessarily that more kids are using substances than in prior years,” Sampson said. “It’s the lethality of the substance itself that has caused higher levels of concern.”

Research has shown rising overdose deaths among teens even as their substance use is declining. Those deaths have been linked to the increase in illicit fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. School districts have been pursuing several strands of legal action against companies that manufactured and marketed addictive opioids that have led to tens of thousands of deaths and countless more addiction struggles in the last two decades.

Beyond the legal actions, schools also continue to provide prevention and education programming for students and families, Sampson said. There’s “a glimmer of hope” that those measures are working, he said, based on the declines in the CDC data.

Experts recommend starting education about substance abuse as early as possible

In the Arlington, Va., district, students in grades 6 through 10 learn about substance abuse challenges as part of the health curriculum, Sampson said. The district has also slowly expanded that program to 5th and 4th grades and are looking into whether there’s capacity to start that education as early as 3rd grade.

“We know that the more we can at least open that conversation with our families and our students, the better off our students are going to be,” Sampson said. “It’s not just a message [they’re hearing] starting in middle school, but it’s a message [they’re hearing] over time.”

The district is expanding programming with 11th and 12th graders, too, because the information they got when they were in 10th grade could be outdated by then, Sampson said.

In addition, the district has substance abuse counselors who meet with students and try to explore the reasons they might be using substances, Sampson said.

Experts say it’s also important to think about how to incorporate student voice in any prevention or intervention programming.

Teens are more than twice as likely to go to their friends or peers for help or support when experiencing distress from their substance use than they are to go to a behavioral health provider or a family member, according to a survey from the Bipartisan Policy Center conducted in June among 932 teens (13- to 17-year-olds) and 1,062 young adults (18- to 26-year-olds). More than a quarter of teens said they didn’t go to anyone for help or support when they experienced distress from substance use.

Sophie Szew, a junior at Stanford University and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s mental health and substance use task force youth adviser, said those survey results “really underscore the importance of investing in those peer support networks and resources.”

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Teenagers who have experienced distress from substance use

Who have teens gone to for help/support when experiencing distress from substance use?

Category Percent

Friend/peer                                                             43

Behavioural health provider                                 19

Parent, care givers, other family members        18

Primary care provider                                              9

Religious/spiritual leader                                       9

School counsellor                                                     8

Teacher                                                                       6

Coach/mentor                                                           6

Crisis services (988, crisis text line)                     5

Virtual app or website services                             4

Other adult n the community                               8

Other                                                                         2

No one                                                                    27

____________________________________________________________________________
Source: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/teen-substance-use-is-declining-but-more-dangerous-drug-abuse-is-emerging/2024/08

Filed under: Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Education,Prevalence,USA,Youth :

NIH:       National Institute on Drug Abuse

Premium Reports August 27, 2024 Updated:August 28, 2024

Officials are finding houses riddled with residual nerve agent pesticides from China that aren’t in any U.S. chemical library …

LOS ANGELES—On a recent summer morning, a caravan of unmarked state police vehicles and white hazmat trucks crept past strip malls and wide intersections, making its way toward a pair of modest homes in a remote suburb north of Los Angeles.

A command came from the officers in the front of the black-and-white: “Seat belts off—in case we start taking fire.”

But there was no shootout. Just a tense half hour as a phalanx of two dozen state police—agents from the Department of Cannabis Control (DCC)—kept snipers trained on the house, waiting for the second of two suspects to emerge.

When she finally did, petite and barefoot in a black dress, the effect was mercifully anticlimactic.

Police officers arrest people while raiding an illegal cannabis site in Lancaster, Calif., on Aug. 14, 2024.

John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Illegal cannabis cultivation operations, or “grows,” are a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry in California, dominated by a mix of transnational criminal organizations that authorities believe are symbiotic, if adversarial.

When agents serve a warrant, they often find human trafficking victims, automatic weapons, booby traps and, increasingly, banned toxic pesticides smuggled from China.

This particular raid, in Lancaster, netted around 1,020 plants—a modest haul compared with the herculean grows that have become common across California’s booming black market.

But such mild suburban tableaus belie a sleeping, sinister threat.

“What we have right now is organized criminal enterprises literally destroying the city building by building as they modify them for illegal cultivation,” Mike Katz, a Lancaster code enforcement officer who heads the city’s cannabis unit, told The Epoch Times.

“They’re endangering the families who will occupy those buildings in the future, they are lowering the value of neighboring properties and dragging the whole community down,” he said.

‘Super Toxic’

Buildings contaminated by illegal grows are dangerous because the harsh pesticides growers use permeate every surface—ceilings, walls, floors, vents and drywall.

Toxic black mold blooms in the 75 percent humidity needed to grow marijuana. The massive amounts of water and electricity required to sustain an operation can result in structural damage to vents and sunken floors, overloaded transformers and corroded wiring just itching for a fire.

Katz, whom the city’s chief of police refers to as the department’s “Swiss Army knife,” has been a firefighter, reserve police officer, and now, an unarmed code enforcement official. He approaches the job with a certain zeal, devouring scientific studies and how-to books on cultivation, and generally making it his mission to stop grow houses from slipping through the cracks.

Owners can often get away with making cosmetic fixes—“candy coating,” as one inspector puts it—if local governments don’t intervene before they start concealing the damage.

Working and middle-class families migrate to bedroom communities like Lancaster, where you can still find a single-family home with a backyard for around $500,000—about half the median price in Los Angeles, according to Redfin. You may find one for even less if a grower has been busted and is offloading at a discount.

The injustice of it rankles Katz. He imagines families struggling to buy a home, and their toddlers probing surfaces tainted with insecticides—potent carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, nerve agents and others no one even knows how to identify.

“They are super toxic, but very effective,” he said. “One we just learned of last week has a 14-year half-life. We did a search warrant back in January and didn’t get test results until this week. I’m having to tell all the detectives and everyone involved that we were exposed to these chemicals.”

Low-cost housing also attracts sophisticated criminal enterprises looking for ways to launder money and turn a profit. Often, illegal growers can do that after just one harvest. Typically, an operation can turn four to six harvests a year.

Wholesale value for the plants seized in the modest raid we accompanied—they were days away from a second harvest—is more than $540,000.

 

To avoid detection and stay a step ahead of authorities, growers are continually adapting.

“There are probably a lot more growing indoors that we don’t know about,” Jennifer Morris, a code enforcement officer with Riverside County and former head of its cannabis unit, told The Epoch Times. “But they’re pretty good at keeping themselves looking very nondescript.”

From the outside, the houses look normal, and it typically takes a fire, robbery, or neighbors reporting electrical theft to tip off law or code enforcement, Morris said. Growers also build walls to conceal grow rooms, and sometimes install a resident worker or a dog to give the appearance of normality.

Because the entire industry is clandestine, no one can accurately estimate the extent of the problem. Many communities might not even be aware it’s happening.

“I’ve talked to cities where they say, ‘We don’t have a problem,’” said David Welch, an attorney who contracts as a special counsel with cities in Los Angeles County that want “a more aggressive” approach to narcotics enforcement. “Then law enforcement will hit a grow in that city.”

Where there is one, there are likely more. But perpetrators are opportunistic, itinerant.

“We have seen the same owners of properties in different counties that have had illegal cultivation on them,” Morris said.

Wilson Linares, who leads the Department of Cannabis Control’s Los Angeles County law enforcement unit, said it’s hard to pinpoint which players are tied to which territories. “They’re just everywhere. It doesn’t really stay in that area, they just go wherever they can master operations.”

Growers, he said, “do a good job of layering their operation. I don’t think they even know they’re working for the same organization sometimes.”

That makes it difficult to go after the few bigger fish, to which, some insiders say, all these operations are ultimately “funneling up.”

Those caught at the grows are inevitably low-level employees, if not forced labor, and are typically interviewed and released. Illegal cultivation—anything more than six plants per person, whether it’s 10 or 10,000—is a misdemeanor in California.

“Sometimes our investigations do a good job at digging to make sure we’re eradicating the problem,” Linares said. “But sometimes they cut losses and move on and go somewhere else. We have to follow and chase them. It takes a lot of effort and time to conduct these investigations.”

Like meth houses of decades past, there are residential grows too damaged to flip.

But it’s the moderate ones, the ones that are at risk of selling at a discount to families, that keep Katz up at night.

 

While they can’t prevent the sale, or in many cases, habitation, building inspectors and code enforcement officers use “red tagging” and other methods to compel compliance—like creating liens to cloud the title, or disconnecting utilities. And in some cases, those costs and headaches transfer to new owners.

California law gives local government broad authority to abate “public nuisances”—which include dangerous and contaminated buildings, Katz said. But enforcing compliance can often depend on a municipality’s ability to pay for things like civil lawsuits.

If public safety officials don’t discover a grow before property owners start hiding the damage, it’s often too late.

“There is no roadmap,” Katz said. “These sociopaths are buying and selling these houses.”

‘I Didn’t Know Anything’

There were signs. Two dozen large bags of what Virginia Aceres thought was ordinary grass fertilizer and canisters of chemicals bearing designs of spiders and worms that the previous owner left behind. He offered to pay her $500 to get rid of them.

In two months, a $10,000 electricity bill.

Aceres said she moved from Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley because she didn’t want her kids hanging out with people who use drugs. She nabbed a five-bedroom house for $535,000, $15,000 below asking. “It’s super big—we thought, oh wow, this is perfect.”

But she found out after moving in that it had been used by the previous owners to grow weed.

“Every afternoon the upstairs smells of marijuana and it gives me a raging headache,” she told The Epoch Times. When a city inspector came by and pointed out a meter wired to steal electricity and stains on the bathroom ceilings from burned chemicals, she said, “Now I understand.”

The five bedrooms were originally three, she discovered; the previous owner had added two and it was up to her to register the additions with the city.

When property owners obtain permits to modify buildings but don’t follow up to call for a final inspection of the work, this can tip off code enforcement and form part of the basis for a warrant. So too can electrical fires or electricity theft.

But Aceres said she bought her house without any compliance obligations that would arise from a pre-sale code enforcement; inspectors came after she moved in and pointed out the damage.

The circuit breakers at Aceres’ house are constantly blowing, especially if electronics are running at the same time, and electricians tell her she has to completely redo the wiring.

“My daughter relies on a machine to help her breathe,” Aceres said, referring to a nebulizer that delivers oxygen and liquid steroids. “We had to buy a generator. She’s 9; she can’t ride a bike, can’t walk more than 20 minutes, can’t run. At night she has panic attacks, she comes to my door in pain, she can’t breathe, so I connect the machine and give her medicine.”

A neighbor warned her the previous owner had installed multiple, massive air conditioners and there were fires. People cruise by the house. Someone showed up looking to collect on a debt. The IRS, the police and city inspectors have all visited.

“For all this, I’d like to move—because they’re going to confuse us and they’re going to think that we sell drugs or have something to do with all that. But we haven’t been able to sell the house because of all these problems,” she said. “If a buyer asks questions we’re obligated to tell them the truth.”

 

Banned Pesticides

Labor and sex trafficking, animal abuse, gun violence and rampant environmental crimes have long been associated with illegal marijuana cultivation.

The prevalence of indoor grows and collateral impacts on residential buildings are not new or limited to California. In 2017 Denver police estimated one in 10 homes was being used to cultivate, leaving the city with a dangerous mold problem.

But the influx of banned toxic insecticides in California’s illicit operations is relatively novel, according to those on the front lines.

“About a year ago we started seeing these banned pesticides—they’ve made their way into most of the cultivation sites,” said Jeremiah LaRue, sheriff of Siskiyou County.

LaRue oversees a mountainous swath of Northwest California bordering Oregon, notorious for flourishing outdoor grows. Last year, the DCC confiscated more marijuana in Siskiyou than any other county aside from Alameda.

While operations have moved from federal lands to private property in recent years, LaRue said these days it’s a mix of outdoor grows, “hoop houses” and some converted residential homes.

Linares said he noticed an uptick in pesticides as some producers transitioned from outdoor to indoor.

“They’re easier to operate in that they can control the environment a lot better. So that’s why at least in the Los Angeles County area you see quite a few indoor grows,” he said, pointing to the Antelope Valley as a primary SoCal hotspot, along with the San Fernando Valley and Frazier Park in Kern County.

It may seem counterintuitive that indoor operations are increasingly relying on contraband pesticides, but the lack of natural predators inside means spider mites, aphids, mildew and black rot or fungus can easily take hold, explained Josh Wurzer, CEO and cofounder of SC Labs, a cannabis testing and research lab based in Santa Cruz, with outlets in Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, and Michigan.

“Once you get a single fungus spore or any tiny spider mite into a grow and it starts to proliferate, they take root and it takes off. There are no birds to eat them or natural controls to keep pests in check like there are outdoors.”

Morris, with Riverside County Code Enforcement, said she has observed a lot of indoor grows using fumigated miticides.

‘They tend to have a problem with spider mites, and I think some of the problem is someone tending several house grows, they get mites on them and take them to the next location.”

In the regulated market, growers have adopted organic solutions—such as neem oil, predatory insects, and sterile environments, Wurzer said. But on the black market, where there is no testing and no regulation, the point is to make money as fast as possible.

“If no one is checking, if consumers won’t know the difference, people will do what is easiest,” said Wurzer. “And the easiest solution is to spray all kinds of pesticides so there are no problems with pests and you get the highest yield and make as much money as possible.”

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation publishes a pocket guide for law and code enforcement officers, listing more than two dozen insecticides, fungicides, miticides, rodenticides, and plant growth regulators to look out for in mitigation operations. Several are banned in the United States.

Increasingly, officers say, they are finding chemicals they aren’t familiar with or can’t identify.

‘No One Is Going to Find It’

At recent raids, Katz’s team found endrine, a highly toxic pesticide with neurological, developmental, and reproductive effects that was discontinued in the United States in 1986 and has been shown to persist in soil for 14 years or more. They also found endosulfan sulfate, a similarly toxic pesticide known to be an endocrine disruptor, that was phased out in the United States by 2010 and globally banned under the 2011 Stockholm Convention.

“All kinds of chemicals are being found. The ones from China, they’re not even in any chemical library,” said Katz, noting they’re having to send samples to an “extremely expensive” lab in Sacramento.

“The EPA got involved. We’ve found all kinds of nerve agent pesticides, and they’re not listed in any of these libraries for the machines that read this stuff.”

When it comes to testing for pesticides on the regulated market, Wurzer said a proper lab can find any chemical eventually—if they’re looking for it and they know it exists.

“But we’re not as good at finding things we’re not looking for. If someone develops a new pesticide, until people realize it’s being used, no one is going to be looking for it, so no one is going to find it.”

That problem extends to products consumers buy in state-regulated dispensaries. While Wurzer says less than 3 percent of regulated cannabis samples his lab tests contain pesticides, growers are getting “really creative,” using compounds they know won’t show up in panels in order to circumvent regulation. “A lot of these line up with what we find in illegal grows—pesticides with Chinese origin,” he said.

After a recent investigation found “alarming” levels of toxic pesticides in regulated products, Wurzer said he’s begun offering an expanded testing panel that includes some of these known black market pesticides. But there are plenty of disreputable labs, he said, that will produce results their clients want to see.

On illegal grow sites, some pesticides look like wood chips, burned in halved soda cans as a fumigant; others come in bottles that are mixed and repurposed, leaving public safety teams to guess.

“They started bringing them into indoor grows, and it’s really hard for us to identify all the banned pesticides because they start taking labels off, they start mixing the canned products with other items, and it’s really hard to pinpoint exactly which items are from where, or if we’re finding the same items somewhere else,” Linares said.

The fact that these compounds are inhaled—either by unsuspecting consumers who think they’re smoking regulated cannabis, or by unsuspecting residents who move into a former grow house—exacerbates the harm.

As Wurzer explains, when the plant is inhaled rather than eaten, it goes directly into the lungs, bypassing many of the body’s natural defense mechanisms, like the digestive system and the liver, which filter toxins.

“Any pesticide deemed harmful on a food crop in the U.S. would be extra harmful when it’s inhaled,” Wurzer said.

“I can only imagine anyone who moves into these houses where they’ve been spraying indoors for years and years—certainly there would be off-gassing of these pesticides and the people living there would be breathing them in.”

Nor do they disappear when you stop using them. Wurzer recalled when growers using pesticides to cultivate medical marijuana at indoor facilities tried to transition after legalization but kept failing tests even though they’d phased out the chemicals.

“This was a huge issue. … Because these pesticides permeate every surface and are leeching out of the walls and ceilings,” he said. “The drywall absorbed them, the paint had absorbed them. The grow lights and the heat—now they were continuing to off-gas. The contaminated plants would fail pesticide tests a year later.”

At high enough levels, those agents can be just as toxic to humans as they are to bugs, he said, recalling the history of companies like Monsanto and Bayer, which repurposed compounds originally developed as chemical warfare during WWII for the agricultural market.

Similar to the challenge of regulating performance enhancing drugs in sports, he said, pesticide producers can create new compounds that will evade existing test panels.

‘It’s Just Pot’

California is home to one of the largest legal cannabis markets in the world. But since legalization the state’s black market has only grown, dwarfing and infecting its regulated sales.

“The bargain that was given to voters was—we’ll give out licenses, collect taxes to fund government services and smash the illegal market and the criminal organizations would go away,” Katz said. “That’s not happening. And these collateral issues are something they hadn’t even thought about.”

Recent raids have netted tens of thousands of plants and millions of dollars of product from subterranean operations the size of football fields. The state, touting ramped up enforcement, has seized more than $120 million worth of illegal cannabis so far this year.

In early August, the DCC reported the state’s Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force had served 309 warrants since its inception in 2022, and the agency reported serving 386 search warrants since it was formed in 2021, in operations that overlap with the task force’s. A representative for DCC said its enforcement division has served 250 warrants related to indoor grows since forming in 2021.

But some say soft laws, a patchwork approach, and regulatory blind spots—as well as a lack of interest from federal authorities and local prosecutors—are allowing the black market to wreak havoc.

Tom Lackey, a California assembly member whose district includes the Antelope Valley, thinks the dangers are underestimated, in part because of a prevailing misconception that “it’s just pot.”

 

He points to the fact that black market marijuana comprises some 80 percent of total sales in California, , and licensed growers pressured by high taxes and the cost of compliance are taking shortcuts to survive. Various industry analyses over the past several years have estimated between one half and two thirds of California sales are from illegal sources. According to a 2023 report by New Frontier Data, an estimated $77 billion—or 72 percent of all U.S. sales in 2022—were from illicit sources.

“We’ve overdone it. It’s well-intentioned but we’ve done very little to go after these illicit players. The majority of our focus is directed toward those trying to comply, which is ironic,” Lackey said.

When the state does go after illicit players, it’s costly and time-consuming, and labor-intensive intelligence gathering and warrants can lead to dead ends.

During the recent Lancaster raid, the city’s new assistant chief of police, Chris Roberts, gestured at the two dozen highly trained agents in tactical gear and said, “There’s a lot that goes into this. This isn’t cheap.”

Since voters passed Proposition 64 in 2016, illegal cultivation is a misdemeanor. Violating the six-plant-per-person limit carries the same penalty, regardless of how many plants you have. And while the law is written to include jail time for certain cultivation, possession, and other crimes, most communities have neither the appetite nor the space to incarcerate people for marijuana offenses.

“The court system would not, in my opinion, be locking someone up for six months,” Sheriff LaRue said, referring to the penalty for cultivating more than six plants.

“The jails are so impacted in most communities, there is just no space for people committing misdemeanors. To be housed in jail for any substantive time, it needs to be serious or violent. And marijuana possession, even if it’s thousands of plants, is still a minor crime. It would never happen because it’s not viewed as serious enough,” he said.

Some municipalities appear to be more aggressive, as in the Kern County sheriff’s recent raid of a massive underground grow that seized 17,650 plants and resulted in the arrest of three Chinese nationals. And in some cases a state agency like Fish and Wildlife will serve a warrant that leads to felony environmental crimes.

But that’s less likely to happen in the residential raids that tend to result in misdemeanor referrals to the district attorney, those familiar with the issue say.

“If they’re not going to charge you for dealing drugs, why would they charge you for environmental crimes? Typically drugs are a higher priority,” Welch says.

He estimates L.A. County’s illegal marijuana trade is “90 percent unenforced—and that might actually be somewhat forgiving.”

Previously, he told The Epoch Times that also applies even when there are narcotics or guns involved at the locations. “I’ve seen enough of these cases to know they’re not being filed,” he said.

An inquiry to the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office requesting total referrals for cannabis-related crimes, filings, and rejections was not returned.

Linares said it’s far more common for offenders to get fined, or informal probation. “I have not seen any jail sentences for the misdemeanors.”

Lackey suggested the relaxed penalties are in part because of a misconception–a “‘70s marijuana attitude”–about what the illicit industry really is.

“Everybody thinks people in this business look like Zig-Zag,” he said. “No—these are white collar, brilliant people making billions and billions of dollars. Our system is not taking them seriously.”

The environmental destruction and impacts of pesticides are super toxic—everyone knows this, Lackey said. “Some of these illicit grows, law enforcement finds deceased animals all over the place. The residential impact, molds, cancer, fertility issues—all sorts of human threats. But they turn a blind eye because it’s weed.”

While fentanyl deserves to be “front and center,” he said, “we can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Chinese Dominance

At scale, the two problems are inextricably linked.

The uneasy mix of crime syndicates running illicit marijuana in California, according to law enforcement officials, includes Chinese and Hmong groups, Mexican cartels and Latin American street gangs, and Chaldean and Armenian organizations.

 

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies review documents inside a home during a raid of an illegal cannabis farm in Newberry Springs, Calif., on March 29, 2024. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

While the DCC’s Linares says these groups are not all working together, they maintain a kind of territorial detente.

But according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Mexican cartels and Chinese groups continue to dominate the state’s black market. And in recent years, federal investigations have unearthed how Chinese crime networks have risen to global prominence, in part by laundering cartel drug money.

Ray Donovan, the DEA’s former chief of operations, has described how networks supplying fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican cartels were also laundering fentanyl money and reinvesting it in illicit marijuana. Testifying before the House’s Select Committee on the CCP in April, he outlined how these groups operate with at least tacit support from the Chinese communist regime.

At a Senate drug caucus hearing later that month, William Kimbell, current chief of operations for the DEA, said his agency has found Chinese organizations have “taken over” marijuana cultivation in 23 states, some of which are “legitimate” but still staffed by people controlled by Chinese money laundering organizations.

A 2024 DEA report noted the recent uptick in the number of illicit grows linked to Chinese and other Asian organized crime groups, with “Asian investors” emerging as a new funding source of illegal marijuana production in the U.S.

“Asian drug trafficking organizations have been involved in illegal marijuana cultivation for decades, operating industrial-scale indoor marijuana grows in residential homes, primarily in the western United States,” the report states.

The federal government has kept its eye on California’s Central Valley, which stretches from the Sacramento Valley to the Tulare Basin; in 2017 more than 58 percent of 3.4 million marijuana plants the DEA eradicated in the United States were located in this region.

In 2018, an operation involving hundreds of federal and local agents raided 75 houses in the Sacramento area used for cultivation by Chinese drug traffickers, and filed civil forfeiture against more than 100 houses, making it one of the largest residential forfeitures in U.S. history.

In its announcement, the U.S. Justice Department said patterns had begun to emerge during years-long investigations of indoor grows in residential neighborhoods—including financing and distribution methods.

In 2019, a grand jury indicted six Chinese nationals on money laundering counts alleging they used funds from China to buy grow houses in Sacramento and Placer counties.

‘It’s All Connected’

“The fentanyl, the money laundering, the marijuana grows—it’s all connected,” Leland Lazarus, associate director of national security at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy, told The Epoch Times in an email.

These syndicates, Lazarus said, typically employ illegal Chinese migrants, who are often subjected to forced labor or criminality, terrible working conditions, and even sexual violence.

Sheriff LaRue pointed to an instantly recognizable structure—as if growers had been given a manual—at Chinese-led grows, which dominate Siskiyou County.

“They’re almost cookie-cutter, they all look the same. Even the houses are the same. It’s almost a prescribed thing: This is what you’re going to use, this is what you’re going to have,” the sheriff said. “You can almost go on a site and say, ‘This is Chinese.’”

Lazarus notes U.S. law enforcement agencies have been tracking “the vast Chinese money laundering networks” across 22 states for years, but the problem remains “a lack of significant resources, language skills and cultural knowledge to truly dismantle these networks.”

LaRue conducted a recent raid in which his team encountered 28 people onsite—all of them elderly women. “We couldn’t talk to any of them. One that spoke English, she was not about to let anyone open their mouth. That bothers me,” he said. “What is really going on there?”

The women were released from custody while LaRue’s office continues its investigation.

Some of Lazarus’s recent research has focused on the vast reach of these organizations, far beyond California grow houses, or even the East Coast, where federal authorities say they are anchored.

“Like other transnational criminal organizations, Chinese illegal gangs operate around the globe. You’re seeing some of the same illicit activities in Southeast Asia, Europe, and even Latin America,” Lazarus said.

“And it’s hard to imagine that China—which is the largest surveillance state in the world—isn’t aware of these activities. That’s why we need a truly international effort to deal with the scourge of global Chinese organized crime.”

Path Forward

In a 2013 memorandum, then Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole outlined priorities for federal prosecutors in pursuing marijuana-related crimes, in large part deferring to state authority and taking a hands-off approach in jurisdictions that had legalized the drug.

Such guidance, Cole reasoned, relied on an expectation that those jurisdictions “will implement strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems that will address the threat those state laws could pose to public safety, public health, and other law enforcement interests.”

To many working to contain the collateral fallout of California’s illegal marijuana trade, that has not happened.

“The feds are hands-off on anything involving cannabis,” said Katz, while also pointing to a lack of appetite among local prosecutors. “My guess would be they’re a little gun-shy about jury nullification. … A jury will be like, ‘Who cares? It’s just cannabis.’”

Lackey, the assembly member, is hopeful a DEA proposal to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III drug will loosen restrictions that, for example, prevent the legal market from using banks.

Meanwhile, he said, California needs to take the lead in stronger prosecution efforts and be able to mete out consequences.

“The reason we’re struggling in California is we’ve relaxed consequences, and of course that’s going to increase evasion and it’s going to create victims,” Lackey said. “It really has been a hurtful experience for me to have a front row seat to watch this mistake being made.”

For Katz and Morris, the key to navigating the no-man’s land between the state and the feds, between lax prosecution and the absence of a standardized mandate, remains collaboration.

Morris pointed to Riverside’s creation of a roundtable bringing together 43 jurisdictions each quarter to discuss what agents are seeing on the ground.

“We found there were a lot of the same players, especially in our sister counties like San Bernardino. … There’s a lot of money in this, so they change tactics,” she said. Learning how growers in Kern County were burying shipping containers to house grows, for example, helped Riverside stay ahead of the game, she said.

Katz says his department immerses itself in the issue, cross-training with other disciplines, attending Environmental Protection Agency trainings and medical conferences. In the absence of leadership, or a standard approach, they cobble it together.

“A lot of cities are not investing that kind of effort into combatting this problem, so they don’t even know what they don’t know,” he said.

Ultimately, he says, the battle has nothing to do with the morality of cannabis—“that’s not the war we’re waging”—and everything to do with preventing a multi-billion-dollar criminal industry from sickening and killing residents.

“They don’t care if the pesticides they apply in the house poisons a family. They don’t care about the people who consume their contaminated cannabis. Money is all that matters to them.

“Only a sociopath would allow other human beings into buildings that might kill them. That’s what we’re combatting.”

Source:

NIH:       National Institute on Drug Abuse – Premium Reports August 27, 2024

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Crime/Violence/Prison,Economic,Environment,USA :

Highlights

  • “Kratom” commonly refers to an herbal substance that can produce opioid- and stimulant-like effects. Kratom and kratom-based products are currently legal and accessible in many areas, though U.S. and international agencies continue to review emerging evidence to inform kratom policy.
  • While there are no uses for kratom approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, people report using kratom to manage drug withdrawal symptoms and cravings (especially related to opioid use), pain, fatigue and mental health problems. NIDA supports and conducts research to evaluate potential medicinal uses for kratom and related chemical compounds.
  • NIDA also supports research towards better understanding the health and safety effects of kratom use. Rare but serious effects have been reported in people who use kratom, including psychiatric, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and respiratory problems.
  • Compared to deaths from other drugs, a very small number of deaths have been linked to kratom products and nearly all cases involved other drugs or contaminants.

 

Research topics

To access these references below, go to https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/kratom#references

What is kratom?

How does kratom affect the body?

How do kratom compounds work in the brain?

How is NIDA advancing research on kratom?

What is the scope of kratom use in the United States?

Why do people use kratom?

Is kratom safe?

How does kratom use affect pregnancy?

Is kratom addictive? Do people experience kratom withdrawal?

How are withdrawal and substance use disorder symptoms related to kratom use treated?

Could kratom be used as medicine?

Is kratom legal?

Find More Resources on Kratom

Source: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/kratom#references

 

Filed under: Kratom,USA :

 

Mothers of children who died via fentanyl poisoning champion NC’s new death-by-distribution law and continue to advocate for awareness

BY GALE MELCHER   The CityBeat 

JULY 20TH, 2024

On a billboard off of Battleground Avenue in Greensboro, 20 smiling faces flash grins through the screen — smiles that will forever be contained in pictures and their families’ memories. All 20 people pictured on the billboard passed away after taking drugs they didn’t know were laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid drug that is being mass-produced and added to other illicit drugs to increase their potency. This often results in death — in North Carolina, 183 deaths occurred this March.

Next to the faces a message reads: “Hidden in so-called ‘recreational’ drugs, fentanyl steals families.”

On July 6 around noon, families gathered around Elizabeth’s Pizza facing the billboard to remember their loved ones and raise awareness about the dangers of illicit drugs.

Deborah Peeden lost her granddaughter Ashley in October 2021 and shared her story with TCB last year.

In 2023, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than 80 million fentanyl-laced fake pills. This year, that number has reached more than 28.1 million and is still climbing. Additionally, seven out of 10 pills seized by the DEA contain lethal doses of fentanyl.

 

Deborah Peeden stands next to an image of her granddaughter, Ashley, who thought

she was doing cocaine with friends when she died from fentanyl poisoning at age 23.

(Photo by Gale Melcher)

In an interview, Peeden said that she felt it was important to put the billboard up to highlight the memory of locals lost to fentanyl. For the past two years, Peeden has paid for a billboard in memory of Ashley. Peeden is now an ambassador for Facing Fentanyl, a campaign that provides prevention education and opioid-reversal kits to schools.

“Some days I’m good, and other days it just hits out of the blue,” Peeden said. “She’s on my mind 24/7 every single minute of every single day. She’s got her birthday coming up on August 1.”

Peeden explained that when dates like birthdays come around, she “can feel that tsunami wave coming.”

“You feel like you’re drowning,” she said.

On July 6, TCB spoke with other mothers who have lost their children to fentanyl poisoning;  TCB is not publishing their names as their childrens’ cases are still active. Many of the families have connected via support groups and bonded over their losses. One mother tugged at the layers of colorful bracelets on her wrist before finding the name of Thomas Lamb etched into a plastic bracelet. Thomas died from fentanyl poisoning in September 2022. She’s friends with Thomas’s mother, Amy Lamb, who still celebrates his birthday every year with his friends and family.

 

A bracelet etched with the name of Thomas Lamb. In September 2022, Thomas, age 18,

purchased a pill to help him sleep; he thought it was Xanax. It was fentanyl.

(Photo by Gale Melcher)

A small child bobbed through the crowd, stopping to point at their loved one’s face on the billboard and shout out their name. Some of the families are hopeful that they will be able to see some form of justice through North Carolina’s death-by-distribution law, passed in 2019 and recently updated on Dec. 1.

The older version of the law stated that a person is guilty of death by distribution if all of the following requirements are met: the person unlawfully sold at least one controlled substance such as an opioid, cocaine or methamphetamine, that the substance they sold caused the death of the user and that the person who sold the drug did not act with malice. The crime was a Class C felony, which usually results in a 5-12 year prison sentence with a maximum sentence of 19 years.

The updated version of the law removes the malice requirement or proof that the drug was sold. Under the new law, perpetrators can be charged with a Class C felony if they simply distribute a drug such as methamphetamine, fentanyl or cocaine that leads to a victim’s death. If the perpetrator did act with malice, they could be charged with a Class B2 felony.

In an email to TCB, the Greensboro Police Department’s Public Information Coordinator Patrick DeSota explained that in response to the updated law, the police department “instituted internal procedural changes in [their] response to suspected overdose deaths” in an effort to further these types of investigations. DeSota added that they have implemented screening questions specific to suspected overdose investigations.

Peeden was a vocal critic of GPD and the way they handled Ashley’s case, and said she’s “glad” the law has been updated.

“I’m hoping that that will make a big difference,” Peeden said. “With Ashley’s case, they just never did anything with hers. Nothing more than a police report.”

 

Posters warn of the dangers of fentanyl.

(Photo by Gale Melcher)

Still, communications specialist for Guilford County Sheriff’s Office Bria Evans wrote that the change in law “does not directly affect [their] investigative procedures” but that it does “make it easier for [them] to criminally charge individuals” because they no longer have to “prove the actual ‘sell’ of the substance.”

Another anonymous mother TCB spoke to said that she hopes the updated law will send “shockwaves” to drug dealers, reverberating the message that selling drugs could have serious consequences.

One silver lining is that NC deaths from fentanyl appear to be declining according to data collected by the state Department of Health and Human Services. Since December, which totaled 264 deaths, monthly deaths have dropped to 220 in January, 207 in February and 183 in March. And awareness of the drug is key, Peeden explained.

“It can happen to anybody’s child, and if you don’t think it can happen to you, think again,” Peeden said.

And while Peeden and the other families have been advocating for their loved ones for years, the pain “doesn’t get easier,” she said.

“I’ve had someone tell me ‘Debbie, you’ve done enough, just stop, you’ve done enough, you need to quit.’ I’m like no, I can’t quit,” Peeden said. “We’ve got too many kids out there who don’t know, we have too many parents out there that don’t know, and we want to try to save the lives of other kids so that these parents go through the nightmare that we’re going through.”

 

Thomas Lamb, who died in September 2022 from fentanyl poisoning,

will forever be 18 to his family and friends.

(Photo by Gale Melcher)

 

Source: Gale Melcher, Citybeat Reporter (She/They) gale@triad-city-beat.com

Filed under: Fentanyl,Parents,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

By Kalleen Rose Ozanic, Staff Writer  July 20, 2024

 

NORWALK — While drug overdoses have decreased year over year in the Nutmeg state, the city’s Family and Children’s Agency is concerned about how new popular substances will impact the state and its clients.

Two substances in particular, xylazine and kratom, worry Jess Vivenzio, behavioral health director at Family and Children’s Agency. She said nearly half of the clients in its outpatient program self-reported using kratom, a U.S Food and Drug Administration-unregulated substance associated with five Connecticut overdoses last year, a state Department of Public Health representative said.

And about three of the clients’ drug screens were positive for xylazine, also known by street name “tranq;” they were shocked to learn their drugs had been cut with it, she said.

“Very surprised, scared, concerned,” Vivenzio said. “A lot of them do have some trust in who they’re purchasing their drugs from, and so sometimes there’s a lot of feelings of guilt and shame there, as well.”

Xylazine caused 284 deaths statewide last year and over 100 people have overdosed from the drug from January to May this year, DPH data show.

Kratom is a powdery substance made from a tropic tree grown in Southeast Asia, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reports. Because the substance isn’t regulated by the FDA, it can easily be purchased at gas stations, convenience stores, smoke and vape shops.

“Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s safe,” Vivenzio said.

Family and Children’s Agency is a charitable nonprofit that aids children and families throughout Fairfield County with after-school and summer programming, foster care, and intensive psychiatric services, education, family guidance, adoption, mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment, and homelessness prevention through wraparound support and partnerships with other local aid groups.

Vivenzio said increasing awareness about both xylazine and kratom are among FCA’s priorities this year, in hopes of limiting its harms and preventing more overdoses.

Project Reward

FCA’s outpatient program, Project Reward, aids its 27 clients in their journeys to sobriety with treatment recommendations, referrals, medication management, intervention, drug and alcohol screens, early intervention programming, and a 10-week intensive outpatient program where patients meet for nine hours of group therapy each week, Vivenzio said.

“We’re a gender-specific and trauma-informed, co-occurring substance use and mental health treatment program for women,” Vivenzio said. “We really provide as much wraparound support as possible, connecting (clients) with other resources and recovery support.”

The program, over everything, prioritizes trust, she said. Many women in the program have histories fraught with trauma, abuse and domestic violence.

Project Reward reveals the frequent intersection of drug abuse and other traumas, Vivenzio said; no patients were available to speak with Hearst Connecticut Media Group in the interest of protecting their privacy and not interrupting their progress in the recovery program.

Much of the program revolves around psychoeducation, which is “really just a fancy word for information, but it’s a little bit more therapeutic,” Vivenzio said.

Program staff equip patients with the resources and knowledge to approach sobriety as well as educate them on the risks of drugs, including substances like xylazine and kratom.

‘Kratom is not something we should be sleeping on’

Chris Boyle, Department of Public Health communications director, said that last year kratom was the sole cause of one overdose death last year and was among other substances in four other overdose deaths.

“Kratom use affects the central nervous system and causes mind-altering symptoms,”  Boyle said in an email. “The symptoms include dizziness; drowsiness; hallucinations; delusions; depression; trouble breathing; confusion, tremors and seizures.”

Users report that kratom acts as a stimulant, according to Mayo Clinic. It can also produce opioid-like effects in high doses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

“Kratom is more along the lines of alcohol, in that it is legal, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not addictive, and that doesn’t mean that it can’t cause a problem for some people,” Vivenzio said. “(That) can make it more dangerous, because you can use it responsibly. And so people need to understand that there is the risk that your responsible use will turn into something that you can’t control.”

She’s concerned that increased kratom use can cause tragic outcomes, like that of a Florida father that overdosed and died, leaving a high-needs daughter and wife behind.

In data the CDC referenced from July 2016 to December 2017, 152 overdoses where at least kratom was reported in the toxicology report were identified; in 91 of them, kratom was determined to be a cause of death.

“Kratom is not something we should be sleeping on,” Vivenzio said.

Boyle said that DPH has no current efforts with prevention of kratom associated overdoses, but directed Hearst to the state’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.

While Krystin DeLucia, DMHAS communications and legislative program manager, did not articulate any kratom-specific programming in an email, she said that the department is aware of the drug and monitors its impact.

“The Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services routinely reviews the state of knowledge about the impact of Kratom on mental health and its potentially dangerous adverse effects, as well as how to identify and manage Kratom withdrawal,” the DMHAS statement said. “DMHAS remains vigilant to identify trends related to the devastating crisis of opioid misuse and overdose in our state.”

Xylazine in Connecticut

Vivenzio said xylazine use is among FCA’s top priorities and Boyle said the state tracks its use.

“DPH shares updated surveillance and trend data on xylazine-involved drug overdose deaths with state stakeholders, opioid task forces and local health departments to create awareness about the dangers of using xylazine,” he said.

“Tranq” can extend the “high” that results from fentanyl — a drug that lasts a shorter time compared to heroin and other opioids, Boyle said.

He echoed Vivenzio’s concerns about clients not knowing their drugs contain xylazine.

“Not everyone who uses fentanyl is intentionally seeking out xylazine,” Boyle said. “In many cases, people are not aware that xylazine is in the drugs they are buying and using.”

Now, the Connecticut Public Health Lab is testing urine from those who report to emergency rooms in the state for nonfatal overdoses for xylazine, among other illicit substances, Boyle said.

Vivenzio said that the drug is “across the board, it’s incredibly risky,” especially because it is not an opioid and its effects cannot be reversed with Narcan.

The drug is responsible for 1,252 overdose deaths from 2015 to 2025, DPH reports — with five in Norwalk.

To address the harms of drug use in Connecticut and in FCA’s resident city, Vivenzio said programs like Project Reward need more funding to increase advocacy efforts, harm reduction tools and intervention strategies.

Kalleen Rose Ozanic

Reporter

Kalleen Rose Ozanic is a local reporter at the Norwalk Hour. She covers health, business, cannabis and education. She previously covered cannabis at WSHU Public Radio in Fairfield, Connecticut. She graduated with a B.A. and M.S in Journalism in 2022 and 2023 from Quinnipiac University. She loves to read, snorkel, try new foods and go to Mets games.

 

Source: https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/norwalk-family-childrens-agency-kratom-xylazine-19564963.php

Filed under: Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

Key topics

 

Overdose prevention services should be offered through HIV care

National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow explains the need to leverage the successes of HIV care to prevent overdose deaths. HIV and substance use are inextricably linked. An analysis of the New York City HIV surveillance registry found that in 2017, rates of overdose deaths for people with HIV were more than double overall overdose death rates for the city, but that 98% of those who died of overdose had been linked to HIV care after their HIV diagnosis and that more than three-quarters had been retained in care. This highlights an overlooked opportunity to save lives. Drug overdose claims more lives of people with HIV than HIV-related illness. Volkow says 81% of people who received an HIV diagnosis in 2019 in the U.S. were linked to HIV care within a month, 66% received care and 50% were retained in care. It is sometimes hard to reach people who use drugs with substance use treatment or harm reduction, but when people with HIV seek and receive treatment for HIV, it presents a promising opportunity to deliver addiction services. Delivering naloxone and overdose education in HIV care settings is a relatively easy way to prevent overdose deaths.

Source: We should leverage the successes of HIV care to prevent overdose mortality (National Institute on Drug Abuse)

 

Hemp legalization opened the door to intoxicating products

Lawmakers who backed hemp legalization in the 2018 Farm Bill expected the plant to be used for textiles and nonintoxicating supplements. They did not realize that, with some chemistry, hemp can get you high. People anywhere in the U.S. can use hemp-derived THC without breaking federal law. Hemp and marijuana are varieties of the same plant species. Marijuana is defined by its high content of delta-9 THC. Hemp contains very little delta-9 THC but can contain a large amount of CBD, a cannabinoid that does not get you high. The Controlled Substances Act explicitly outlawed both hemp and marijuana. The Farm Bill defines hemp in a way that allows the plant and products made with it as long as they contain less than 0.3% delta-9 THC, making it seemingly legal to convert CBD into delta-8 THC as long as the process started with a plant that contained less than 0.3% delta-9 THC. The Farm Bill also appears to authorize the creation of hemp-based delta-9 THC products as long as the total delta-9 content is 0.3% or less of the product’s dry weight. The hemp-derived cannabinoid industry is now worth billions of dollars, and hemp-derived intoxicants are available at vape shops and gas stations, but they are not regulated.

Source: Congress Accidentally Legalized Weed Six Years Ago (The Atlantic)

 

Federal news

 

Expanded access to methadone is needed

National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow highlights the need to expand access to methadone. Only a fraction of people who could benefit from medications for opioid use disorder receive them, due to a combination of structural and attitudinal barriers. In 2023, the federal government eliminated the waiver requirement for buprenorphine. This year, it changed methadone regulations to make permanent the increased take-home doses of methadone established during the COVID emergency, along with other provisions aimed to broaden access. Changes implemented during COVID have not been associated with adverse outcomes, and patients reported significant benefits. Recent trials of models of methadone dispensing in settings other than methadone clinics have not supported concerns that making methadone more widely available will lead to harms. Data suggest that counseling is not essential for reducing overdoses or retaining patients in care, though it can be beneficial for some. It will also be critical to pursue other ways that methadone can safely be made more available to a wider range of patients.

Source: Guest Editorial: To Address the Fentanyl Crisis, Greater Access to Methadone Is Needed (American Society of Addiction Medicine)

 

CDC defends overdose prevention work before House committee

Several top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee to defend their agency’s programs. The hearing comes after House Republicans passed a budget that would cut CDC funding by 22%. Republicans claimed the agency has failed to fulfill its responsibilities and lost the public’s trust. Republicans accused the CDC of straying from its core mission of keeping the public healthy and said the agency is spending too much time on programs some GOP lawmakers deemed unnecessary or duplicative. The CDC program directors pushed back, citing work they deemed critical to public health. They emphasized three areas of focus – improving readiness and response to disease outbreaks, improving mental health and supporting young families. Allison Arwady, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which would be eliminated under the proposed funding bill, spoke about why the center’s work on overdose prevention is necessary.

Source: CDC Defense (Politico); CDC fields GOP criticism at E&C hearing (Politico)

 

Task force releases recommendations to protect youth from social media harms

The federal Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force released a report with recommendations and best practices for safer social media and online platform use for youth. The report provides a summary of the risks and benefits of social media on the health, safety and privacy of young people; best practices for parents and caregivers; recommended practices for industry; a research agenda; and suggested future work, including for the federal government. In collaboration with the Task Force, the Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health is launching a variety of new web content, including best practices resources; age-based handouts for parents that pediatricians and others can distribute at well-check visits; new clinical case examples for pediatricians and other clinicians demonstrating how to integrate conversations about media use into health consultations with teens; and expanded content for teens. The report outlines 10 recommended practices for online service providers.

Source: Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force Announces Recommendations and Best Practices for Safe Internet Use (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)

 

FDA allows sale of tobacco-flavored Vuse e-cigarettes

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized sales of certain tobacco-flavored Vuse Alto e-cigarette products from R.J. Reynolds. Vuse is the top-selling e-cigarette brand in the country, comprising more than 40% of the market. The marketing authorization applies to six tobacco-flavored pods, which are sealed, prefilled and nonrefillable. Last year, the FDA banned the sale of Vuse Alto menthol and fruit-flavored e-cigarettes, citing increasing popularity among kids.

Source: FDA allows sale of best-selling tobacco e-cigarette Vuse (The Hill)

 

State and local news

 

Montana plans to install harm reduction vending machines

Montana health officials are considering a new strategy to make naloxone more accessible. Drawing on a pool of behavioral health funds set aside by lawmakers in 2023, health officials have proposed installing two dozen naloxone and fentanyl test strip vending machines around the state at behavioral health drop-in centers and service locations for homeless people. The $400,000 plan to build, stock and maintain 24 vending machines for a year has not yet been approved by the governor. Different versions of the harm reduction vending machine model are being tried in at least 33 states, becoming increasingly popular especially in places with hard-to-reach populations. Some local public health groups in Montana have already begun using vending machines to distribute free naloxone, drug testing strips and other supplies, using public grants or private philanthropy, but these would be the first vending machines in Montana being directly funded by the state.

Source: Montana’s Plan To Curb Opioid Overdoses Includes Vending Machines (KFF Health News)

 

Iowa providing $13 million to expand addiction treatment and recovery housing

Iowa Governor Reynolds announced that the state’s opioid treatment and recovery providers can begin applying for $13 million in grants to expand or improve facilities or develop sober living housing options. The funding opportunities were announced in May as part of a larger $17.5 million investment to help address the opioid crisis. The $10 million Iowa Opioid Treatment and Recovery Infrastructure Grant will assist opioid treatment and recovery providers with physical infrastructure and capacity building. The Iowa Recovery Housing Fund includes $3 million for grants for nonprofit organizations to develop sober recovery housing. The grants leverage federal American Rescue Plan Act funds. An additional $1.5 million will be used for programs focused on prevention, including a $1 million education initiative for health care providers to support opioid-alternative pain management and $500,000 for a comprehensive multimedia opioid overdose prevention campaign. The remaining $3 million will support the completion of a residential addiction treatment center for adolescents.

Source: Gov. Reynolds announces grant funding, education programs to support opioid prevention, treatment and recovery (Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds)

 

LAPPA releases model state laws to minimize harms of incarceration

The Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association released two pieces of model state legislation. The first would require a state department of health and human services to apply for a Medicaid Reentry Section 1115 demonstration waiver to allow a state Medicaid program to cover pre-release services for Medicaid-eligible incarcerated individuals for up to 90 days prior to release and to require the department to conduct comprehensive monitoring and evaluation of the demonstration if the waiver is approved. The second is focused on reducing collateral consequences of conviction. It would establish a process for the identification, collection and publication of collateral consequences that impact individuals convicted of crimes; establish a process by which an individual can obtain a certificate of relief from certain collateral consequences before records are eligible to be sealed or expunged; establish mechanisms for the automatic sealing and expungement, as well as a process for petitioning; prohibit certain entities from inquiring into an individual’s criminal history; etc.

Source: Model Medicaid Reentry Section 1115 Demonstration Waiver Act; Model Relief from Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act (Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association)

 

Other news in addiction policy

 

Mobile treatment vans can help expand methadone access

Some public health experts hope that mobile treatment programs will help increase access to methadone. Addiction experts say methadone is particularly important as the strength of street fentanyl has lessened the effectiveness of other medications and approaches for some. The mobile vans were approved by the federal government in 2021, lifting a moratorium on their use that had been in place since 2007. Their goal is to reach some of the millions of Americans with opioid use disorder that methadone clinics cannot. While the vans make treatment more accessible, the cost and ongoing restrictions limit the number of people that they can help, as well. Constructing and outfitting a methadone van costs about $375,000. They have to replicate the high-security environments of clinics, with a security guard, 360-degree cameras and a safe for the medication. There are now 42 vans registered nationally, though not all are operational yet.

 

Source: https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/policy-news-roundup-july-25-2024/

Filed under: Addiction,Crime/Violence/Prison,Heroin/Methadone,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA,Youth :

Biden’s drug czar is in West Virginia this week.

  • By Allen Siegler | Mountain State Stoplight

This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. Get stories like this delivered to your email inbox once a week; sign up for the free newsletter at mountainstatespotlight.org/newsletter

CHARLESTON — Dr. Rahul Gupta is back in West Virginia. The state’s former health officer has ventured west of Washington this week, hosting seven public discussions in Martinsburg and Charleston as part of his new role as White House Office of Drug Control Policy Director.

Over the last three years, Gupta and the Biden administration have taken significant steps to address the country’s devastating overdose crisis. They’ve promoted harm reduction aggressively, even finding ways to test out hard-sell, evidence-based strategies like safe injection sites.

Still, the addiction crisis continues to ravage U.S. families, especially in Gupta’s former state. Last year, about four West Virginians died of a drug overdose every day.

As the nation’s “drug czar,” Gupta is in a better position to advocate for addiction-related changes than just about anyone else.

Here are five steps the federal government could take to help abate West Virginia’s overdose crisis.

Change opioid treatment program restrictions

West Virginia has policies and regulations that restrict access to opioid addiction treatment. The state makes it difficult for some people with opioid use disorders to receive medications like methadone, which is considered a “gold standard” of treatment. Since 2007, West Virginia has limited the number of methadone clinics, the only places methadone can be prescribed to treat addiction, to nine locations.

But while that’s a state law, federal law is the reason methadone can only be prescribed for treating substance use disorder at these clinics.

People who research addiction have called on Congress to change this policy to allow doctors to prescribe methadone for addiction treatment outside of specialized clinics. Because West Virginia’s moratorium is focused on methadone clinics and not the medication itself, that type of change could make the treatment more accessible to state residents.

Last winter, when Gupta was asked in an interview about a federal bill that would accomplish parts of this goal, he stopped short of endorsing the proposed legislation. Instead, he said it’s important for Congress to “let the science and the data guide policy-making.”

Change restrictions on treatment for methamphetamine addiction

A decade ago, less than 5% of West Virginia fatal overdoses were related to methamphetamine. But that’s changed dramatically; last year, more than 50% of the state’s nearly 1,400 drug deaths involved meth.

That presents a difficult public health problem for West Virginia. Scientists have yet to develop reliable medications for treating methamphetamine addiction.

Of the available treatments, the most effective options are behavior training programs, also known as contingency management. These types of programs reward people regularly with money or other incentives for abstaining from a drug.

Dr. Philip Chan, an addiction and infectious disease researcher at Brown University, said if he could provide patients with $400 to $500 every two to three months, it would be more effective at keeping them from using meth. But the federal government caps contingency management payments at $75 a year.

Repeal the federal funding ban for syringes and needles

West Virginia has many restrictions around needle exchanges. In 2021, the Legislature passed a law that forces syringe service programs to offer a variety of other harm reduction services, and it instructs them to deny service to those who don’t have valid state IDs or return their used needles.

The additional requirements led many programs across the state to shutter. For the ones that remain, restrictions at the national level make it even more difficult to operate.

Needle exchanges are already prohibited from using federal funds to purchase clean needles and syringes. And there have been pushes, including from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, to extend the prohibition to safe smoking devices as well.

Nikki Dolan, the Greenbrier Health Department administrator, said this policy makes it more difficult to fund her county’s only syringe service program.

“We’ve been doing harm reduction since 2018 and have never been able to purchase needles with grant funding,” she said.

Include West Virginia in the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative

West Virginia’s recent drug-related HIV outbreaks have been among the worst in the nation. In 2019, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stepped in to help with a Cabell County outbreak. A couple years later, the agency returned to address cases in Kanawha County, with one top health official calling the outbreak the “most concerning in the United States.”

West Virginia HIV cases have decreased over the last two years, but many doctors and researchers worry about undetected spread, especially in rural parts of the state.

Despite the national attention, no West Virginia counties are included in the federal government’s Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative. The program is designed to direct additional funding and resources to communities heavily impacted by the infectious disease.

Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University School of Public Health professor who studies HIV transmission, said he was surprised to learn West Virginia and its counties weren’t included in the program.

He said Gupta, using his position in the federal government, could ask Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and CDC Director Mandy Cohen to include West Virginia or some of its counties in the initiative.

More funding for recovery residences

Even if state residents with addictions find and receive treatment, sustaining recovery can be challenging. West Virginians in recovery can struggle to find places to live where they aren’t around drugs or alcohol.

Recovery residences, also known as sober living houses, can help with that. The state and federal governments have said the housing units can help people in recovery avoid relapsing.

But in West Virginia, recovery residences often face financial barriers. A survey of state sober living homes last year found that the biggest challenge the organizations faced was financial resources, and the surveyed organizations said only 12% of their revenue comes from federal grants.

Jon Dower, the executive director of West Virginia Sober Living, said the federal government could make these grants easier for recovery residences to win, especially for people who are looking to start state-certified homes.

“If we look at what’s most needed in the recovery housing space in West Virginia, in my opinion it’s capacity,” he said.

Reach reporter Allen Siegler at allen@mountainstatespotlight.org

Source: https://www.timeswv.com/news/west_virginia/bidens-drug-czar-is-in-west-virginia-this-week-here-are-five-things-the-federal/article_43e1fe42-4b80-11ef-8ce1-6b4a5826d699.html

Filed under: Addiction,Drug use-various effects,Heroin/Methadone,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

The number of drug overdoses in this country went down in 2023. But not enough.

Posted July 29, 2024 |  Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

  • While overdoses from fentanyl went down in 2023, overdoses from cocaine and methamphetamine went up.
  • Increased availability of Narcan, harm-reduction practices, and drug seizures likely decreased deaths.
  • The best way to save lives and end the opioid epidemic is to prevent addiction in the first place.

With this tragic news just in, there are several important things to say about the drug overdose situation in this country.

The first is this: It is important that we don’t talk about the more than 107,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year like it’s just a statistic.

These are people’s lives that ended, people like you and me. People with friends and loved ones who cared about them, and who wanted them to succeed.

Evidence of an ongoing tragedy

This is where we are with the continuing drug epidemic, according to the recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from 2023:

  • 107,543 people died from drug overdose deaths compared to 111,029 in 2022. That is a 3 percent decline.
  • 2023 witnessed the first annual decrease in five years (since 2018).
  • Indiana, Kansas, Maine, and Nebraska each saw overdose deaths decrease by at least 15 percent. Note: We need to determine what’s working in those states, and replicate it elsewhere.
  • Alaska, Oregon, and Washington each saw overdose deaths increase by at least 27 percent. Note: We need to determine what’s not working in those states, and figure out solutions including by sharing best practices from states with lower overdose rates.)
  • While overdoses from fentanyl (the main driver of drug deaths) went down in 2023, overdoses from cocaine and methamphetamine went up.

Three developments that are helping to reduce deaths

1. Greater availability of Narcan: I’m a huge advocate for this overdose reversal drug, which is naloxone in nasal spray form. I have argued often that it should be as ubiquitous as the red-boxed automated external defibrillators (AEDs) you now see in malls, hotel lobbies, schools, airports, and workplaces.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took a big and meaningful step in that direction when it approved Narcan for over-the-counter use in March 2023. I have no doubt the increased availability of Narcan has helped bring the overdose numbers down, since Narcan targets opioids like fentanyl and heroin.

2. The stepping up of harm-reduction efforts: Harm reduction means reducing the health and safety dangers around drug use. The goal is to save lives and protect the health of people who use drugs through such measures as fentanyl test strips, overdose prevention sites, and sterilized injection equipment and services.

Harm reduction was a key plank of the White House’s 2022 National Drug Control Strategy aimed directly at the overdose epidemic. Countless harm-reduction efforts have gained traction at the local and state level as well. Again, this continued push may have helped bring down the overdose numbers last year.

3. Increased efforts around law enforcement drug seizures: Of the 107,543 people who overdosed in 2023, 74,702 (70 percent) of them did so after using the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is many times more potent than heroin. For the first time in years, that number of deaths was lower than the year before.

Why? No doubt in part because 115 million pills containing fentanyl were seized by law enforcement in 2023. That compared to 71 million fentanyl-laced pills seized in 2022. These seizure efforts seem to be working, and they need to be stepped up even more.

Drug use prevention efforts must increase also

Ultimately, the best way to save lives, end the opioid epidemic, and halt the spread of substance use disorder is to stop people from becoming addicted in the first place.

The big news: Statistics show that drug use may be trending down among young people. Even delaying the onset of addiction can change the trajectory of the problem, says Nora Volkow, MD, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

When asked recently about the lower number of overdose deaths last year, Volkow said: “Research has shown that delaying the start of substance use among young people, even by one year, can decrease substance use for the rest of their lives. We may be seeing this play out in real time [in 2023]. The trend is reassuring.”

Final thoughts on turning the tide of addiction

As the antismoking campaign that began in the 1960s showed us, massive and well-coordinated public health efforts can work.

Surgeon General warning labels, hard-hitting public service announcements, school-based programs—all of those had a cumulative effect on smoking habits in this country, especially among young people. Those efforts all targeted one thing: prevention.

We need to do much more of that in 2024 around opioids, methamphetamines, cocaine, and other lethal drugs. Lives depend on it.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/use-your-brain/202407/a-closer-look-at-107543-lives-lost-to-drug-overdoses

Filed under: Addiction,Cocaine,Drug use-various effects,Fentanyl,Heroin/Methadone,HIV/Injecting-Drug-Users,Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

July 29, 2024

 By Dr. Nora Volkow. Director, NIDA.

This blog was also published in the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Weekly on July 24, 2024.

Over the past several years, the increasing prevalence of fentanyl in the drug supply has created an unprecedented overdose death rate and other devastating consequences. People with an opioid use disorder (OUD) urgently need treatment not just to protect them from overdosing but also to help them achieve recovery, but highly effective medications like buprenorphine and methadone remain underused. Amid this crisis, it is critical that methadone, in particular, be made more accessible, as it may hold unique clinical advantages in the age of fentanyl.

Growing evidence suggests that methadone is as safe and effective as buprenorphine for patients who use fentanyl. In a 2020 naturalistic follow-up study, 53% of patients admitted to methadone treatment who tested positive for fentanyl at intake were still in treatment a year later, compared to 47% for patients who tested negative. Almost all (99%) of those retained in treatment achieved remission. An earlier study similarly found that 89% of patients who tested positive for fentanyl at methadone treatment intake and who remained in treatment at 6 months achieved abstinence.

Methadone may even be preferable for patients considered to be at high risk for leaving OUD treatment and overdosing on fentanyl. Comparative effectiveness evidence is emerging which shows that people with OUD in British Columbia given buprenorphine/naloxone when initiating treatment were 60% more likely to discontinue treatment than those who received methadone (1). More research is needed on optimal methadone dosing in patients with high opioid tolerance due to use of fentanyl, as well as on induction protocols for these patients. It is possible that escalation to a therapeutic dose may need to be more rapid.

It remains the case that only a fraction of people who could benefit from medication treatment for OUD (MOUD) receive it, due to a combination of structural and attitudinal barriers. A study using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from 2019—that is, pre-pandemic—found that only slightly more than a quarter (27.8%) of people who needed OUD treatment in the past year had received medication to treat their disorder. But a year into the pandemic, in 2021, the proportion had dropped to just 1 in 5.

Efforts have been made to expand access to MOUD. For instance, in 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) advanced the most comprehensive Overdose Prevention Strategy to date. Under this strategy, in 2023, HHS eliminated the X-waiver requirement for buprenorphine. But in the fentanyl era, expanded access to methadone too is essential, although there are even greater attitudinal and structural barriers to overcome with this medication. People in methadone treatment, who must regularly visit an opioid treatment program (OTP), face stigma from their community and from providers. People in rural areas may have difficulty accessing or sticking with methadone treatment if they live far from an OTP.

SAMHSA’s changes to 42 CFR Part 8 (“Medications for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder”) on January 30, 2024 were another positive step taken under the HHS Overdose Prevention Strategy. The new rule makes permanent the increased take-home doses of methadone established in March 2020 during the COVID pandemic, along with other provisions aimed to broaden access like the ability to initiate methadone treatment via telehealth. Studies show that telehealth is associated with increased likelihood of receiving MOUD and that take-home doses increase treatment retention.

Those changes that were implemented during the COVID pandemic have not been associated with adverse outcomes. An analysis of CDC overdose death data from January 2019 to August 2021 found that the percentage of overdose deaths involving methadone relative to all drug overdose deaths declined from 4.5% to 3.2% in that period. Expanded methadone access also was not associated with significant changes in urine drug test results, emergency department visits, or increases in overdose deaths involving methadone. An analysis of reports to poison control centres found a small increase in intentional methadone exposures in the year following the loosening of federal methadone regulations, but no significant increases in exposure severity, hospitalizations, or deaths.

Patients themselves reported significant benefits from increased take-home methadone and other COVID-19 protocols. Patients at one California OTP in a small qualitative study reported increased autonomy and treatment engagement. Patients at three rural OTPs in Oregon reported increased self-efficacy, strengthened recovery, and reduced interpersonal conflict.

The U.S. still restricts methadone prescribing and dispensing more than most other countries, but worries over methadone’s safety and concerns about diversion have made some physicians and policymakers hesitant about policy changes that would further lower the guardrails around this medication. Methadone treatment, whether for OUD or pain, is not without risks. Some studies have found elevated rates of overdose during the induction and stabilization phase of maintenance treatment, potentially due to starting at too high a dose, escalating too rapidly, or drug interactions.

Although greatly increased prescribing of methadone to treat pain two decades ago was associated with diversion and a rise in methadone overdoses, overdoses declined after 2006, along with methadone’s use as an analgesic, even as its use for OUD increased. Most methadone overdoses are associated with diversion and, less often, prescription for chronic pain; currently, 70 percent of methadone overdoses involve other opioids (like fentanyl) or benzodiazepines.

Recent trials of models of methadone dispensing in pharmacies and models of care based in other settings than OTPs have not supported concerns that making methadone more widely available will lead to harms like overdose. In two feasibility studies, stably maintained patients from OTPs in Baltimore, Maryland and Raleigh, North Carolina who received their methadone from a local pharmacy found this model to be highly satisfactory, with no positive urine screens, adverse events, or safety issues. An older pilot study in New Mexico found that prescribing methadone in a doctor’s office and dispensing in a community pharmacy, as well as methadone treatment delivered by social workers, produced better outcomes than standard care in an OTP for a sample of stably maintained female methadone patients.

Critics of expanded access to methadone outside OTPs sometimes argue that the medication should not be offered without accompanying behavioural treatment. Data suggest that counselling is not essential. In wait-list studies, methadone treatment was effective at reducing opioid use on its own, and patients stayed in treatment. However, counselling may have benefits or even be indispensable for some patients to help them improve their psychosocial functioning and reduce other drug use. How to personalize the intensity and the level of support needed is a question that requires further investigation.

Over the past two decades, the opioid crisis has accelerated the integration of addiction care in the U.S. with mainstream medicine. Yet methadone, the oldest and still one of the most effective medications in our OUD treatment toolkit, remains siloed. In the current era of powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl dominating the statistics on drug addiction and overdose, it is time to make this effective medication more accessible to all who could benefit. The recent rules making permanent the COVID-19 provisions are an essential step in the right direction, but it will be critical to pursue other ways that methadone can safely be made more available to a wider range of patients with OUD. Although more research would be of value, the initial evidence suggests that providing methadone outside of OTPs is feasible, acceptable, and leads to good outcomes.

Source: https://nida.nih.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2024/07/to-address-the-fentanyl-crisis-greater-access-to-methadone-is-needed

Filed under: Fentanyl,Heroin/Methadone,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

Cannabis or more commonly known as marijuana, is one of the most frequently used drugs in the United States. In 2022, marijuana became more popular than alcohol as the preferred daily drug of use among Americans. In the same year, it was found that 30 out of every 100 high school age students reported using the drug within the past 12 months, and 3 of every 50 reported using it daily.

Marijuana is often perceived as harmless, which has influenced its increased use by a factor of 15 within the past three decades, but this substance can have severe physical and mental health effects.

This blog will share the heart-wrenching stories of Brant Clark and Shane Robinson, as told by their families, along with a recent article by Alton Northup editor-in-chief of KentWired. Their lives were tragically cut short by marijuana induced psychosis.

Brant Clark

Ann Clark shares the heartbreaking story of her 17-year-old son, Brant, who experienced cannabis-induced psychosis leading to his tragic suicide. She recounts his rapid descent into hopelessness and the devastating impact on their family to raise awareness about the dangers of marijuana use on mental health.

Ann Clark shares the heartbreaking story of her 17-year-old son, Brant, who experienced cannabis-induced psychosis leading to his tragic suicide. She recounts his rapid descent into hopelessness and the devastating impact on their family to raise awareness about the dangers of marijuana use on mental health.

Brant Clark (pictured) was a happy and bright 17-year-old who reported using marijuana socially. However, during his last high school winter break, after smoking marijuana at a party with friends, he experienced a psychotic break believed to have been triggered by smoking a large amount of potent marijuana.

After the party Brent expressed to his mother his feelings of “emptiness and hopelessness”, and deep regret, lamenting his decision to smoke marijuana. Within two days of the onset of symptoms, Brant was admitted to the ER and psychiatric care unit. Tragically, three weeks later, he ended his own life, leaving behind a note revealing his intense mental anguish and regret.

Brant’s doctor diagnosed him with Cannabis-Induced Psychosis, a condition where marijuana use leads to severe mental disturbances. Brant’s case highlights how this condition can manifest suddenly and with tragic consequences. Ann, Brant’s mother, recalls the happiness her son brought to her life, and the pain that lingers after his loss.

 Shane Robinson

In 2009, Lori Robinson’s son faced a similar fate. Shane, a vibrant 23-year-old, turned to marijuana for pain relief after a knee injury. Despite his parents’ concerns, Shane believed that the drug was a safe alternative to pain medication. However, Shane’s behavior changed drastically. He began to experience hallucinations and delusions. After being hospitalized several times and a prolonged struggle with mental health, Shane took his own life at the age of 25.

Lori, Shane’s mother, shared that the psychologists who treated her son questioned marijuana’s role in Shane’s mental illness, but neither Shane nor Brant had any prior history of mental illness, and their symptoms rapidly emerged after using marijuana.

Cannabis-Induced Psychosis would finally be added as a recognized mental health diagnosis in the year of 2013.

 

Medical and Scientific Insights

Although research still has a long way to go and should continue to examine how mental health disorders are affected by marijuana use independently, it should also focus on understanding the physiological mechanisms, as well as the effects of increased potency and contaminants in marijuana. The progress that has been made is enough to encourage the continuation of this field of research. Recent studies have shown strong associations between cannabis use disorder (CUD) and psychotic episodes. One study showed that 5 out of every 6 teenagers who sought help for a psychotic episode had used marijuana and that they were 11 times more likely to experience psychotic episodes compared to non-users of the drug. Another study showed a 30% increase in schizophrenia cases among men aged 21-30 were associated with CUD.

Dr. David Streem from the Cleveland Clinic shared with the editor of KentWired that he has observed a dramatic increase in psychosis cases over the past decade, which aligns with the increase in marijuana potency from less than 10% in the 90s to 30% or more today.

Advocating for Prevention

Ann Clark and Lori Robinson have become advocates, raising awareness about the dangers of cannabis-induced psychosis. Despite facing skepticism and opposition, they courageously continue to share their son’s stories to educate others about the potential risks of marijuana use.

As marijuana becomes widely legalized, Ann believes that “it only gives our young people a lower perception of harm, and a false sense of security and safety”. However, increased levels of THC and the building body of evidence linking marijuana to mental health conditions, call for greater public health education and regulations.

The tragic stories of Brant and Shane underscore the urgent need for awareness about cannabis-induced psychosis as the use of marijuana becomes more prevalent among younger populations.

Source: https://kentwired.com/120770/news/cannabis-induced-psychosis-cost-their-sons-their-lives-more-could-be-next/

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Mental Health,Prevention and Intervention,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

It seems as if every community, big or small, has been impacted by the problems associated with substance use and drug overdose. Within communities, these problems can extend into the family unit, with people often becoming addicted and dying because of drugs.

However, community drug education and prevention programs can be a first line of defense. There is hope for the younger generations as they have more access to prevention and education resources to help them make informed decisions. In addition, more information is available for parents to equip them with the tools to help their kids understand the dangers and risks associated with drugs and alcohol.

In California, the California Department of Education offers information on resources for health services, student assistance programs and alcohol and substance abuse prevention. The California School-Based Health Alliance provides school-based health centers and wellness centers to prevent and treat substance use.

Fortunately, more and more people are seeking treatment. According to the California Health Care Almanac, between 2017 and 2019, the number of facilities offering residential care for substance use treatment grew by 68%, and the number of facilities offering hospital inpatient care more than doubled.

The more people who seek treatment and become aware of the dangers, the more people are saved from an overdose. According to drug abuse statistics, there is an average of 6,100 drug overdose deaths per year in the state. Overdose deaths increased at an annual rate of 10.37% over the last three years. However, this remains below the national average death rate.

Prevention and education information is valuable, especially during Fourth of July celebrations. Binge drinking around Independence Day is typical, and it is known as one of the heaviest drinking holidays of the year. In social settings, it becomes easy to consume too much alcohol, and this could potentially lead to other drug use.

Parents play an essential role when providing drug education. They can take the initiative to create an inclusive and supportive environment with their children. This can equip them with the tools they need to make knowledgeable decisions surrounding alcohol and drug use.

Teens and adults all use drugs and alcohol for different reasons. Much of their use is linked to peer pressure, whether from peers, in a social setting, or in the case of someone they look up to who they see drinking or using drugs.

Stress is also a common factor and alcohol or drugs can seem like an easy escape from the problems of life.

Additionally, environment and family history are contributing factors. Children, for example, who grow up in households with heavy drinking and recreational drug use are more likely to experiment with drugs.

Any parents wondering what to do should consider starting the conversation about alcohol and drug use early. It is also essential to be calm, loving and supportive. Seek out specialized resources, such as those offered by county or nonprofit organizations providing prevention and education.

Additionally, parents want to focus on making it safe for their children to tell them anything and never end the conversation, keeping it going regardless of age.

Local drug education resources are here to help with the goal of helping people of all ages make knowledgeable decisions about drugs and alcohol.

Jody Boulay is a mother of two with a passion for helping others. She currently works as a community outreach coordinator for DRS to help spread awareness of the dangers of drugs and alcohol. She can be reached at jboulay@addicted.org.

 

Source: https://eu.desertsun.com/story/opinion/contributors/valley-voice/2024/07/01/parents-talk-to-your-kids-about-drugs-and-alcohol/74233477007/

Filed under: Alcohol,Drug use-various effects,Parents,Social Affairs,USA,Youth :

By FOX TV Digital Team

Published  July 8, 2024 7:26am EDT

 

Demand for high-potency marijuana causing concerns

Cary Quashen, Owner of Action Family Counseling, joins LiveNOW’s Austin Westfall to dive deep into concerns over the rising demand for high-potency marijuana.

As marijuana use becomes more prevalent, a severe illness linked to frequent cannabis use is also on the rise. 

Cannabinoid (or Cannabis) hyperemesis syndrome, also known as CHS, is an often debilitating condition that affects a small but growing number of chronic marijuana users. 

People with CHS experience severe nausea and vomiting, in some cases 20-24 times a day. It can last days or even weeks and is hard to control – often the only thing that brings relief is a hot shower or bath. 

RELATED: Frequent marijuana use linked to increase in heart attack and stroke risk

Signs of cannabis hyperemesis syndrome

In National Library of Medicine literature, doctors outlined the following criteria for diagnosing CHS: 

  • Long-term cannabis use (often daily)
  • Cyclic nausea and vomiting
  • Relief when stopping marijuana
  • Hot showers/baths relieve symptoms
  • Abdominal pain

RELATED: Teen use of delta-8, an unregulated marijuana alternative, is rising

Ironically, marijuana is often used to treat two key symptoms of CHS: Recent data compiled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded there is “credible scientific support” for the use of marijuana to treat pain, anorexia, nausea and vomiting. 

Doctors are seeing a rise in serious illness linked to heavy marijuana use (Photo by Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images)

Three cycles of cannabis hyperemesis syndrome

There are three phases of CHS, according to Connecticut state’s Adult Cannabis Use website: 

  • Prodromal – Nausea and vomiting following long-term cannabis use. This often leads to a person using more cannabis to reduce nausea.
  • Hyperemetic – Triggered by increased cannabis use, nausea, abdominal pains and vomiting increase
  • Recovery – Once a person stops using cannabis, symptoms may take several weeks to decrease and disappear until they begin using again, which starts the cycle over.

What causes cannabis hyperemesis syndrome?

Researchers are still early in their exploration of what causes CHS. Dr. Sushrut Jangi, a gastroenterologist at Tufts Medical Center, told The Boston Globe it has something to do with the “somewhat mysterious” endocannabinoid system, which regulates critical bodily functions like sleep, mood, pain control, immune response, appetite and more. 

READ MORE: Michigan dog attacks, nearly kills owner after being fed THC gummy

A lot of receptors in the brain and the gut bind to THC, the substance in cannabis that makes people feel high. Those receptors evolve after long-term cannabis use, Jangi told The Globe. 

Jangi said although it’s hard to calculate, he estimates somewhere between 5% and 20% of chronic marijuana users will experience CHS. 

According to the National Library of Medicine, after Colorado legalized recreational marijuana, ER visits for cyclic vomiting nearly doubled.

 

Source: https://www.livenowfox.com/tag/cannabis

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Drug use-various effects,Prevalence,USA :

By Nora D. Volkow and Tisha Wiley / July 9, 2024

 

Programs across the country are underway to offer naloxone, also sold as Narcan, in jails and prisons, paired with instruction, training, and social support

The overdose crisis is claiming lives across the United States, but it reaches new depths of despair in the criminal justice system. Overdose is the leading cause of death among people returning to their communities after being in jail or prison. Providing addiction treatment in these settings could change that.Roughly 60% of people who are incarcerated have a substance use disorder, in many cases an opioid use disorder. When people with addiction leave prison or jail and return to their communities, they are at very high risk of returning to drug use and overdosing. Their tolerance to drugs has diminished during incarceration, and fentanyl is pervasive in the street drug supply. Even one relapse could be fatal.It remains a common belief that simply stopping someone from taking drugs while in jail or prison is an effective approach to treatment. But that belief is inaccurate and dangerous. As scientists, we look to research to guide us. And when research shows strategies with clear benefits, they should be deployed.The Food and Drug Administration has approved three medications for opioid use disorder: methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. All three are effective, safe, and lifesaving. But they are woefully underused, particularly in criminal justice settings.

Related: Rigid rules at methadone clinics are jeopardizing patients’ path to recovery from opioid addiction

A 2020 study in Rhode Island estimated that overdose deaths could be reduced by 30% in the state if jails and prisons made all three medications available to those who needed them. Studies also show that people who receive these medications while in jail or prison are less likely to return to substance use and more likely to continue with treatment in the community afterward.

Less than half of jails nationwide, and fewer than 10% of state prisons, offer all three medications. While 96% of jails did provide the overdose reversal drug naloxone to staff, only 1 in 3 provided naloxone and training on how to use it to decarcerated citizens during the critical period when they were returning to their communities.

Neglecting to provide access to these lifesaving treatments and harm-reduction measures creates deadly gaps for people when they leave jail or prison. The repercussions reverberate throughout communities and generations. They deepen racial inequities and overrepresentation of communities of color within the criminal justice system. They cause devastation for children and families.

Providing medications for opioid use disorder in jails and prisons benefits public health and public safety. It’s cost–effective. It can help break the cycle of recidivism. It can reduce the burden on the wider health care system, including emergency departments.

Programs across the country are underway to offer naloxone and medications for opioid use disorder in jails and prisons, paired with instruction, training, and social support. Federal agencies have launched programs to help people manage withdrawal in jails and provide financial health care support for people who are about to reenter the community. A recently published revised methadone rule now allows any jail or prison registered as a hospital or clinic to dispense medications for opioid use disorder in certain circumstances.

Law enforcement leaders are starting to see how addiction treatment increases safety for everyone. Chris Donelan, the sheriff of Franklin County, Mass., has partnered with researchers to study what happens when jails offer all three FDA-approved opioid use disorder medications. His jail became one of the few in the nation to be licensed as an opioid treatment program.

Related: Q&A: Nora Volkow on how to get ‘at least 50% less people dying’ from opioid overdose

“When someone is booked into our facility, often we are the first treatment provider the person has seen in years,” Donelan told his University of Massachusetts research partners. “These treatments save lives and help people enter into recovery. Treatment makes the work of our facility much easier. We have less fights, less contraband, and a much safer facility.”

Since 2019, the National Institutes of Health has funded partnerships across the country to figure out how to link people with addiction to care during and after their time in the corrections system. These researchers are poised to share new evidence as it emerges that will help other communities make data-driven changes so they can implement what is most efficient in justice settings.

There is still a long way to go. A dangerous supply of street drugs, fragmented treatment systems, lack of funding, lack of training, pervasive stigma, and complex logistics all work against people with substance use disorders as they work to rebuild their lives after incarceration. Support in recovery and continuity of care are essential during this vulnerable time.

Fundamentally, an individual’s best or only option to receive addiction treatment should not have to be during incarceration. In an ideal world, treatment and prevention systems in the U.S. would proactively address social drivers of health and mental health needs to stop the cycle between addiction and incarceration. Moving away from criminalization of substance use disorders toward a public-health approach would remove a key structural practice that perpetuates inequalities. It would improve lives for people and their families.

The Authors

Nora D. Volkow, M.D., is a psychiatrist, scientist, and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.
 

Tisha Wiley, Ph.D., is a social psychologist, associate director for justice systems at NIDA, and leads the NIH Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network initiative, which studies approaches to increase high-quality care for people in justice settings with opioid misuse or opioid use disorder.
Source: https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/09/providing-addiction-treatment-prisons-jails/
Filed under: Addiction,Crime/Violence/Prison,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

US President Joe Biden’s plan to downgrade marijuana, whether politically motivated or empathic, is a regressive step in the global fight against drugs, say Tan Chong Huat and Narayanan Ganapathy from Singapore’s National Council Against Drug Abuse.

23 Jun 2024 06:00AM(Updated: 23 Jun 2024 07:40AM)
SINGAPORE: The United States has formally moved to loosen restrictions on marijuana, with plans to reclassify it as a less harmful drug.

Under the move, marijuana – which has been classified since 1970 as a Schedule I drug alongside heroin, LSD and ecstasy – will be downgraded to a Schedule III drug, putting it in the same category as drugs like testosterone or painkillers containing codeine. Schedule III drugs are deemed to have a “moderate to low potential” of dependence.

“No one should be in jail merely for using or possessing marijuana,” US President Joe Biden said in a video on May 17. “Far too many lives have been upended because of failed approach to marijuana and I’m committed to righting those wrongs.”

Earlier this week, Maryland pardoned more than 175,000 marijuana convictions, becoming the latest state to do so after similar mass pardons by Massachusetts and Oregon, among others.

Research reported in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse highlights that prolonged cannabis abuse can disrupt brain function, particularly during critical developmental stages.

Similarly, the Singapore Medical Journal featured local research that attests to these findings, showing that early initiation of cannabis use leads to greater long-term negative impacts.

The reclassification of marijuana at the federal level could legitimise the cannabis industry and accelerate the normalisation of recreational cannabis use at the state level, despite concerns about the risks.

RISING CONCERNS ABOUT DRUG USE AMONG SINGAPOREAN YOUTHS

In Singapore, recent data highlights growing concerns about drug use among youths.

The 2022 Health and Lifestyle survey by the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) revealed that the mean age of drug initiation in Singapore is 15.9 years.

Drug-related arrests are also on the rise, increasing by 10 per cent to 3,122 cases last year. Notably, there was a 17 per cent increase in cannabis abusers arrested. Amongst new cannabis abusers arrested, close to two in three were below the age of 30.

These statistics reflect a troubling trend that underscore the need for more robust and concerted drug prevention measures. Despite Singapore’s comprehensive demand and supply reduction efforts, endorsed by strong public opinion, misconceptions about cannabis are prevalent among youths.

In the 2023 National Drug Perception Survey by the National Council Against Drug Abuse (NCADA), 90.4 per cent of youths agreed that “drug-taking should remain illegal in Singapore”, but only 79.3 per cent supported the continued criminalisation of cannabis.

Qualitative interviews revealed that some youths believe cannabis use can be personally regulated, while young adults in their early 30s often view cannabis as a “soft” drug suitable for recreational use without addiction risks.

But research invalidates the perception that cannabis is less harmful than other drugs. In a study published in the Singapore Medical Journal last year, researchers found that almost half of the 450 participants surveyed progressed to using other illicit drugs after trying cannabis, with 42 per cent progressing to heroin.

The distorted knowledge among youths is unfortunately compounded by social media and pop culture. The task of combating misinformation about drugs is made more difficult by the vast digital landscape, where young people encounter a wide array of information, some of which can potentially fuel drug-abusing behaviours.

THE INTERGENERATIONAL IMPACT OF DRUG ABUSE

The repercussions of drug abuse extend far beyond individual abusers, deeply affecting their families and the community.

A 2020 study by Singapore’s Ministry of Social and Family Development stated that children of parents who committed drug offenses are 5.18 times more likely than other children to have contact with the criminal justice system in the future.

Additionally, youth offenders from households with a history of substance abuse are 2.2 times more likely to join gangs.

Research shows that children of drug-abusing parents experience a range of social-psychological deficits including weakened social bonds to conventional institutions and role models.

The Biden administration’s decision to relax its stance towards marijuana has been lauded by advocates for addressing what they say is an uneven drug enforcement policy that has fuelled mass incarceration and disproportionately affected certain communities. However, this commendation appears contradictory, as it fails to recognise the potential adverse effects such a move could have on socio-economically deprived and disadvantaged communities already afflicted by the drug scourge.

Empirical evidence from countries that have adopted harm reduction approaches, such as Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia, reveals mixed outcomes.

For instance, the Netherlands, known for its regulated sale of cannabis through so-called “coffeeshops”, continues to face issues of drug tourism and associated social ills where children as young as 14 years old are recruited as “cocaine collectors”. In January 2024, the Mayor of Amsterdam warned in an opinion piece published in the Guardian that the Netherlands risks becoming a “narco-state”.

In Sweden, the number of fatal shootings has more than doubled since 2013, reaching 391 in 2022, primarily due to gang-related drug and arms conflicts. A lawyer representing teenage shooting victims told the BBC in December that “children are using their own bags not to carry books, but to carry the drug markets of Sweden on their shoulders.

Similarly, Canada and Australia, despite their comprehensive harm reduction strategies, persistently encounter drug-related crime and health issues. In 2023, British Columbia decriminalised drugs to reduce overdose rates, but only to see it surge by 5 per cent, the BBC reported. BC authorities are now considering re-criminalising the use of hard drugs in public places.

Closer to home, Thailand is planning to relist cannabis as a narcotic, just two years after it became the first in Southeast Asia to decriminalise its recreational use.

These cases illustrate the complexities and potential negative consequences of relaxed drug policies, particularly for vulnerable populations.

It is precisely for this reason that Singapore maintains its unwavering commitment to shield vulnerable communities from the devastating effects of drug abuse and prevent the intergenerational cycle of crime, arrest, incarceration, and re-incarceration.

Singapore’s approach, guided by science and sensible considerations, prioritises harm prevention over harm reduction and serves as a robust framework for tackling this pervasive issue.

Tan Chong Huat is Chairman of National Council Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) and Associate Professor Narayanan Ganapathy is an NCADA member.

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Global Drug Legalisation Efforts,Others (International News),USA :
PHOENIX – The fentanyl and opioid crisis cost Arizona an estimated $58 billion for 2023, according to a Common Sense Institute Arizona report published Monday. The nonpartisan think tank’s report included the costs of fatalities, opioid use disorder, hospitalizations and border security.The report analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Arizona Department of Health Services and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, among others.

It showed a decline across the U.S. in opioid prescriptions over the past decade. In Arizona, drug-related seizures have decreased since 2020.

“Naively, you should be able to assume that there are fewer drugs, but that isn’t the case,” said Glenn Farley, lead author of the report, at a Monday news briefing.

The report cited the southern border migrant crisis as an underlying cause for more drugs making their way across the border, noting that Customs and Border Protection has been strained due to the increased number of individuals and fewer checkpoints. “As a result of these resource shifts, the ability of CBP to prevent the smuggling of drugs like fentanyl into the United States is likely compromised,” the report said.

Farley said the amount of fentanyl in the United States is unknown, but deaths from the highly addictive synthetic opioid continue to rise.

Fentanyl-related overdose deaths have increased drastically in the U.S. since 2014. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported almost 74,000 deaths in 2022. Opioid deaths have hovered around 2,000 per year since 2020 in Arizona, according to ADHS.

Source: https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2024/06/24/report-estimates-fentanyl-crisis-costs-arizona-2023/

Filed under: Fentanyl,Prevalence,USA :

 By KEVIN A. SABET, PH.D., President of the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions

June 25, 2024

From Oregon to Canada to Thailand, policymakers and the public alike are waking up to the consequences of lenient and irresponsible drug policies. Whether it is the commercialization of marijuana or the decriminalization of all other drugs, policymakers are learning the hard way that public health and safety must remain a jurisdiction’s priority. As we approach the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, on June 26, policymakers elsewhere should learn from these lessons and avoid making these same mistakes.

 

Just over a year ago, British Columbia received an exemption from Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, allowing the province to decriminalize the public use of dangerous illicit drugs, including fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine. The public policy was viewed as a triumph by so-called “harm reduction” activists, who push dangerous perceptions that drug use should be normalized and condoned.

 

Parents were understandably outraged to witness people using drugs in a host of public spaces, including parks where their young children were playing. In short order, British Columbia saw a record 2,511 overdose deaths last year and the Deputy Chief of the Vancouver Police Department warned “there have been concerns from small businesses about problematic drug use,” among other consequences.  In turn, public pushback, alongside the pressure of an upcoming election, compelled policymakers to respond and reverse course.

 

Though this sounds like a common-sense move, officials in Canada have been misled into believing that mass decriminalization of drugs would somehow improve public health. The addiction-for-profit industry has fueled this belief via a massive misinformation campaign about the harms of marijuana and other drugs. Elected officials in BC were reminded about the importance of protecting the interests of non-users and the broader community.

 

Officials in Oregon, United States, recently learned a similar lesson, backtracking their experiment with the decriminalization of all illicit drugs. Passed under the guise of an activist-driven ballot measure in 2020, Oregon took a hands-off approach to its drugcrisis, allowing people to do as they pleased with drugs. Like in British Columbia, public drug use skyrocketed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of overdose deaths increased, as did the prevalence of substance use and crime.

 

In April, acknowledging that this policy had not gone as promised, liberal Governor Tina Kotek signed legislation to repeal Measure 110 and recriminalize drug possession, despite promising to uphold Measure 110 just months before. In its place is a framework to increase access to treatment. Elected officials in Oregon were reminded about the importance of treatment.

 

Thailand, the first and only country in Asia to legalize recreational marijuana, is now backtracking and aims to ban recreational marijuana by the end of the year. Reuters reported, “tens of thousands of cannabis shops have sprung up.” Likewise, the illicit market has expanded, and numerous illicit marijuana shops have emerged throughout communities. And psychosis related to marijuana has doubled to more than 20,000 cases since legalization.

 

Officials in Thailand were alarmed to find the marijuana industry aggressively marketing its products, prioritizing its profits ahead of public health. The industry’s predatory practices have led to higher rates of marijuana use among minors. Elected officials in Thailand were reminded about how the interests of the profit-driven marijuana industry are at odds with public health and safety.

 

Policymakers elsewhere should learn from the unintended consequences of these experiments to implement better, safer drugpolicies. It should not be controversial to prohibit public drug use or to implement policies that guide people into treatment. It should not be controversial to say we distrust the motives of emerging addiction-for-profit industries. Countries continue to contemplate extreme policy measures like drug legalization and decriminalization, they would do well to heed the lessons learned by Thailand, British Columbia, Oregon, and more.

 

International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is also a fitting time to recognize the importance of supply reduction. Law enforcement agencies in the US and around the world should be commended for standing up to the cartels and their affiliates, and they should be further empowered to crack down on those trafficking dangerous psychoactive drugs.

 

We must recommit ourselves to implementing evidence-based drug policies focused on prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery, as well as supply reduction. Doing so would help elected officials remember the importance of public health and oppose the for-profit interests of emerging industries. Oregon, British Columbia, and Thailand are reminders of what happens when these common-sense messages are forgotten or ignored.

Kevin A. Sabet, Ph.D. is  a former drug policy advisor to U.S. Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton. 

 

Source: https://gooddrugpolicy.org/

Filed under: Prevalence,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

Published: Jun 28, 2024, 7:02 PM

It seems as if every community, big or small, has been impacted by the problems associated with substance use and drug overdose. Within these communities, these problems extend into the family unit, with people becoming addicted and dying because of drugs.

However, community drug education and prevention programs can be a first line of defense. There is hope for the younger generations as they have more access to prevention and education resources to help them make informed decisions. In addition, more information is available for parents to equip them with the tools to help their kids understand the dangers and risks associated with drugs and alcohol.

Locally, the Kansas Prevention Collaborative partners with several different states and educational institutions and provides agencies. Substance misuse prevention focuses on underage drinking, marijuana use, and other substances.

Additionally, they offer the “It Matters” campaign, which focuses on the power of perception to help youth and young adults avoid substance misuse. The behavioral health services and programs in the state are provided by the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, which includes treatment, recovery, and prevention.

Prevention and education information is valuable, especially during Fourth of July celebrations. Binge drinking around Independence Day is typical, and it is known as one of the heaviest drinking holidays of the year. In social settings, it becomes easy to consume too much alcohol and experiment with illicit drugs that are potentially laced with opioids.

According to drug abuse statistics, an average of 156 people die from opioid overdose in one year in Kansas. Opioids are a factor in 45.2% of all overdose deaths in the state. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment reported the rate of drug overdose deaths in the state of Kansas almost tripled within the last year few years. Drug education and prevention can help.

Parents play an essential role when providing drug education. They can take the initiative to create an inclusive and supportive environment with their children. This can equip them with the tools they need to make knowledgeable decisions surrounding alcohol and drug use.

Teens and adults all use drugs and alcohol for different reasons. Much of their use is linked to peer pressure, whether from peers, in a social setting, or in the case of someone they look up to who they see drinking or using drugs.

Stress is also a common factor, and alcohol or drugs seem like an easy escape from the problems of life.

Additionally, environment and family history are contributing factors. Children, for example, who grow up in households with heavy drinking and recreational drug use are more likely to experiment with drugs.

Any parents wondering what to do should consider starting the conversation about alcohol and drug use early. It is also essential to be calm, loving, and supportive. Seek out specialized resources, such as those offered by county or non-profit organizations providing prevention and education.

Additionally, parents want to focus on making it safe for their children to tell them anything and never end the conversation, keeping it going regardless of age.

Local drug education resources are here to help with the goal of helping people of all ages make knowledgeable decisions about drugs and alcohol.

Jody Boulay is a mother of two with a passion for helping others. She currently works as a Community Outreach Coordinator for DRS to help spread awareness of the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

Source: https://www.gbtribune.com/opinion/local-drug-education-and-prevention-programs-are-here-help/

Filed under: Education,Prevention and Intervention,USA :

By Leah Kuntz

Psychiatric Times Vol 41, Issue 6
Review tapering challenges and strategies for benzodiazepines in this Special Report article.

SPECIAL REPORT: ADVANCES IN PSYCHIATRY

Benzodiazepines, a controversial treatment widely prescribed for patients with anxiety and insomnia, carry a considerable risk of abuse. The poster “Mood Over Matter: Literature Review on Benzodiazepine Tapering, Current Practices and Updates on Adjunct Mood Stabilizers,” which was presented at the 2024 APA Annual Meeting, summarized a literature review of current benzodiazepine tapering practices, outpatient detoxification challenges, and potential barriers to discontinuation. The poster presenters also prioritized reviewing literature that highlighted mood stabilizer adjunct use.

Research demonstrates why clinicians should use caution when prescribing benzodiazepines. Results of a recent study revealed that between 2014 and 2016 an estimated 25.3 million (10.4%) adults in the United States reported using benzodiazepines, and approximately 17.2% of these individuals admitted to misuse.

Similarly, the National Institute on Drug Abuse documented that benzodiazepines were implicated in more than 14% of opioid overdose deaths in 2021. Furthermore, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinpointed benzodiazepines as a factor in nearly 7000 overdose deaths across 23 states from January 2019 to June 2020, constituting 17% of all drug overdose deaths. This time frame saw a staggering 520% surge in deaths related to illicit benzodiazepines, and fatalities from prescribed benzodiazepines rose by 22%.

The poster presenters stated that psychiatric and addiction- focused clinicians play an integral role in preventing benzodiazepine misuse and addiction.

To help patients taper benzodiazepines to discontinuation, clinicians must be up-to-date on practices; if clinicians mismanage tapering, sudden withdrawal can prove fatal. Challenges to tapering patients with chronic benzodiazepine use can be found in the Table.

Table. Challenges to Tapering Chronic Benzodiazepine Use

As for tapering strategies, the presenters suggested adjunct mood stabilizers such as carbamazepine and oxcarbazepine. Carbamazepine, when used as an adjunct or prophylactically, can help reduce intense withdrawal symptoms and thus keep patients on track for discontinuation. However, carbamazepine has received criticism regarding its efficacy, and it is well documented to have a series of concerning adverse effects such as skin reactions, agranulocytosis, leukopenia, and significant drug-drug interactions by nature of its metabolism. This makes some clinicians wonder: Are the risks worth the benefit?

Oxcarbazepine has also been proposed as an alternative. Results of some small-scale clinical trials noted moderate efficacy for oxcarbazepine in helping patients with detoxification, and it has fewer adverse effect concerns. The presenters suggested that other mood stabilizers, particularly those with antiepileptic effects, require further research for their potential help with benzodiazepine addiction.

“Through a more current literature review, we hope to increase the tools available to psychiatrists for more success in discontinuation and maintaining sobriety for patients,” the presenters wrote.

In a previous Psychiatric Times article, Steve Adelman, MD, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Boston, suggested 8 universal precautions adapted from Gourlay et al for use by psychiatrists who must decide whether to initiate or continue pharmacotherapy with benzodiazepines. They include making a diagnosis with an appropriate differential and creating and ratifying a treatment agreement. However, other clinicians, such as Daniel Morehead, MD, a Psychiatric Times columnist and featured cover author in this issue, suggest that although benzodiazepines carry risks, those risks are exaggerated by government officials, critics, and the public at large.

Source: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/how-to-safely-and-effectively-taper-benzodiazepines

Filed under: Effects of Drugs,Mental Health,Prescription Drugs,Psychiatric drugs,Treatment and Addiction,USA :

(Slip Opinion)

The approach that the Drug Enforcement Administration currently uses to determine whether a drug has a “currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States” under the Controlled Substances Act is impermissibly narrow. An alternative, two-part inquiry proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services is sufficient to establish that a drug has a “currently accepted medical use” even if the drug would not satisfy DEA’s current approach.

Under 21 U.S.C. § 811(b), a recommendation by HHS that a drug has or lacks a “currently acceptable medical use” does not bind DEA. In contrast, the scientific and medical determinations that underlie HHS’s “currently acceptable medical use” recommendation are binding on DEA, but only until the initiation of formal rulemaking proceedings to schedule a drug. Once DEA initiates a formal rulemaking, HHS’s determinations no longer bind DEA, but DEA must continue to accord HHS’s scientific and medical determinations significant deference, and the CSA does not allow DEA to undertake a de novo assessment of HHS’s findings at any point in the process.

Neither the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs nor the CSA requires marijuana to be placed into Schedule I or II of the CSA. Both the Single Convention and the CSA allow DEA to satisfy the United States’ international obligations by supplementing scheduling decisions with regulatory action, at least in circumstances where there is a modest gap between the Convention’s requirements and the specific restrictions that follow from a drug’s placement on a particular schedule. As a result, DEA may satisfy the United States’ Single Convention obligations by placing marijuana in Schedule III while imposing additional restrictions pursuant to the CSA’s regulatory authorities.

April 11, 2024

NDPA EXPLANATORY: GUIDANCE TO ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL’S FULL COMMENT:

To access Mr Fonzone’s full document:

  1. Click on the link below.
  2. An image  – the front page of the full document will appear.
  3. Click on the image to open the full document.

DOJ.OLC.Rescheduling opinion

Source: MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL – by  CHRISTOPHER C. FONZONE –  Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Social Affairs,USA :

SUMMARY: The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) proposes to transfer marijuana from schedule
I of the Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”) to schedule III of the CSA, consistent with the view
of the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) that marijuana has a currently
accepted medical use as well as HHS’s views about marijuana’s abuse potential and level of
physical or psychological dependence. The CSA requires that such actions be made through
formal rulemaking on the record after opportunity for a hearing. If the transfer to schedule III is
finalized, the regulatory controls applicable to schedule III controlled substances would apply, as
appropriate, along with existing marijuana-specific requirements and any additional controls that
might be implemented, including those that might be implemented to meet U.S. treaty
obligations. If marijuana is transferred into schedule III, the manufacture, distribution,
dispensing, and possession of marijuana would remain subject to the applicable criminal
prohibitions of the CSA. Any drugs containing a substance within the CSA’s definition of
“marijuana” would also remain subject to the applicable prohibitions in the Federal Food, Drug,
and Cosmetic Act (“FDCA”). DOJ is soliciting comments on this proposal.

NDPA EXPLANATORY: GUIDANCE TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S COMMENT:

To access the Attorney General’s full document:

  1. Click on the link below.
  2. An image  – the front page of the full document will appear.
  3. This image will be somewhat blurred – CLICKING ON IT WILL STILL ACTIVATE IT.
  4. Click on the image to open the full document.

Scheduling NPRM 508

Source:

21 CFR Part 1308 – Docket No. DEA-1362; A.G. Order No. 5931-2024 – DEA USA.
‘Schedules of Controlled Substances: Rescheduling of Marijuana’

Filed under: Cannabis/Marijuana,Political Sector,Social Affairs,USA :

Back to top of page

Powered by WordPress