Hi friends! We've had to cancel tonight's Queenstown Clinic and tomorrow's VUWSA Drugs Week clinic.
The weather's just not playing ball and we'd rather everyone kept themselves safe and dry ❤️
Next time we will look more closely at how these studies define and measure harm, and why this matters.
Receipts:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
In New Zealand and Australia, methamphetamine ranked second. In the UK and European studies, heroin ranked second and crack cocaine ranked third, while methamphetamine ranked fourth in the UK study and fifth in the European study.
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Expert panels scored drugs across multiple criteria, including harms to the person taking the drug and harms to others, such as impacts on families, communities, and wider society.
Across all four studies, alcohol was consistently ranked as the most harmful drug overall.
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Researchers in the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have used Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to systematically compare the harms associated with different drugs.
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Hi friends! It's Mythbuster Monday 🥳🥳🥳
This month, we are tackling the myth that methamphetamine is the most harmful drug on the market.
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We’d love to be able to check out these shiny new devices, but until then we can still reliably check your drugs for things like nitazines, fentanyl and benzodiazepines with test strips.
Read the article:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
It’s important to note that these techniques are still in development for drug checking, and most of the studies Byuiyan et al referenced had a small sample size.
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SERS uses light to find out things about a molecule, similar in principle to infrared spectroscopy (IR). However, it is better at detecting samples with a lot of water in them than IR. SERS could also detect etizolam, a novel benzodiazepine, better than test strips.
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Let’s start with PS-MS. For this technique, 1mg of sample is loaded onto paper, and then a voltage is applied. This makes the molecules in a sample charged, so they can be detected by the MS. PS-MS could find very small concentrations of fentanyl better than IR specs or test strips.
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These drugs are often present in tiny amounts undetectable by traditional methods like infrared spectroscopy, which we use. The authors suggested two alternative methods to check drugs: paper spray mass spectrometry (PS-MS) and portable surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS).
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This week’s article is about up-and-coming drug checking technology. Bhuiyan et al. suggest different ways to check drugs for nitazines, fentanyl analogues and novel benzodiazepines.
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Hi friends, it's Peer Review Friday 😃
Today we're looking at Responding to changes in the unregulated drug supply: the need for a dynamic approach to drug checking technologies by Bhuiyan, I. et al, published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, July 2023.
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Receipts:
academic.oup.com/epirev/artic...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Harm reduction shows the same pattern: when people with drug dependence access treatment such as methadone, buprenorphine, or therapeutic programmes, violence and offending decline.
Myth busted: drug use does not cause crime. Inequality and criminalisation do.
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Portugal’s decriminalisation in 2000 shows a similar pattern. The reform redirected people away from courts and into health and social services, easing pressure on prisons and opening more space for care, and the predicted wave of crime never arrived.
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In Oregon, after cannabis was legalised, police clearance rates for violent crime improved. This was not because cannabis made communities safer, but because officers spent less time on possession cases.
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Hi friends it's Mythbuster Monday 🥳
Over the past few weeks, we have dismantled the idea that drugs cause crime. So what happens when societies uncouple drug taking from crime?
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💛 Route of administration of naloxone (injected vs nasal) did not affect survival outcomes
We love the size and scope of this study, and it’s great to see that naloxone interventions ARE incredibly effective at preventing opioid overdose deaths.
Image credit: NEXT Distro, Unsplash
💛Programs distributing naloxone to police & family members were slightly less effective: survival rates of 92.4% and 95% respectively. But OD deaths still decreased when naloxone was given to these groups, although it’s hard to know the percent of opioid OD deaths when no naloxone was given
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💛Programs distributing naloxone to PWUD were the most effective at reducing deaths, with a 97.3% survival rate for this group
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Most of the research was from 2003-2018, and Fischer et al. track how naloxone programmes have expanded from giving naloxone to only people who use drugs (PWUD), to the relatives of PWUD, and finally to law enforcement.
Here’s what they found:
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This week’s article is a review of naloxone distribution, summarising the trends of 53 different studies from 2003-2022. This totalled 10,000+ uses of naloxone over almost 75,000 participants. The bulk of studies included were from the United States, Canada, and Europe.
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Hi friends! It's Peer Review Friday 🎉🎉🎉
Today we're looking at Effectiveness of naloxone distribution in community settings to reduce opioid overdose deaths among people who use drugs: a systematic review and meta-analysis, by Fischer et al.
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link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Best come get anything you find checked with us or one of our BFFs at DISC Trust or the NZ Drug Foundation eh?
You can find your nearest checking clinic on The Level website 😘
thelevel.org.nz/drug-checkin...
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We also know that the Festival Gods are agents of absolute chaos and mischief, so the likelihood of that bag's contents being something that is
a) not harmful,
b) not really disappointing, and
c) you actually want to take
is kinda low.
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Hi friends! So you've found a small bag of...something. What now? It could be anything from MDM4 to a cathinone to a laxative.
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He's since grown up and last we heard he was on a farm up north making Lil' Pingas of his own and living his best life 😊
If you want your very own Lil' Pinga we're selling plushie versions as our winter fundraiser. Boop the link and take him home 😊
w8ccea-qs.myshopify.com
*Can't stop won't stop.
His name is Wolf (because he's in sheep's clothing*) and in this photo he's showing his dedication to the festival life by having mud up to his knees and swinging his jaw like a pro (he's chewing cud, we promise 😅)
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Hi friends! You've probably seen Lil' Pinga on our banners and the crew t-shirts at festivals, but do you know Lil' Pinga's origin story?
(KnowYourStuffNZ lore drop in 3...2...1...)
Our cute lil' drug safety mascot started life as a real lamb from our founder Wendy Allison's farm back in 2019
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