A growing number of children are affected by parental substance misuse, and policy and practice increasingly recognise the need to tackle the problems that this causes. Currently, the needs of older children are less well known or addressed. This study explores the experiences of 38 young people, aged 15–27 years, who had at least one parent with a drug or alcohol problem.
In many European countries, one or more general population surveys have been carried out to get an impression of the characteristics of illicit drug use at national level. Despite valuable efforts to standardise national drug surveys among the general populations in European Member States and to enhance cross-national comparability, national drug surveys still use different instruments, reporting formats and methodologies.
This report presents a number of contributions that relate to analysing communal wastewaters for drugs and their metabolic products in order to estimate their consumption in the community. This area of work is developing in a multidisciplinary fashion, involving scientists working in different research areas. For this reason, the contributions to this publication come from a variety of different perspectives including: analytical chemistry, physiology and biochemistry, sewage engineering, spatial epidemiology and statistics, and conventional drug epidemiology.
Substance Misuse Management in General Practice (SMMGP) is a developing network to support GPs and other members of the primary health care team who work with substance misuse in the UK. The project team produces the Substance Misuse Management in General Practice newsletter (Network), and organises the annual conference 'Managing Drug Users in General Practice'.
This is a case narrative detailing the story of a young child Charlene and her mother Jane, who has a history of inappropriate (sometimes violent) relationships and drug misuse. There are a number of concerns about Charlene who is eventually removed from Jane’s care. This case scenario can be used to illustrate a number of issues, including drug misuse, partnership work, good practice in investigation, and assessment in training contexts.
An examination of the domestic cultivation of cannabis in England and Wales. This report examines the domestic cultivation of cannabis in England and Wales. Traditionally cannabis has been imported into the country by drug traffickers, but the extent of home cultivation has grown rapidly over the past decade, and home growing now accounts for a significant amount of cannabis consumed in this country.
This article, pages 8 and 9, covers news and views from the second national service user involvement conference in Birmingham. Using results of a consultation at the event, DDN looks at whether service users had been offered choices about treatment - and whether those choices had worked well for them.
The overall aim of this review was to establish the effectiveness of SDF in delivering its aims and objectives, in particular the extent to which it provides value for money in respect of funding received from the Scottish Government; and to evaluate the current and future capacity of the organisation to deliver value for money in light of the new strategic approach to tackling drug use in Scotland.
This study match information from the Police National Computer with the NTA’s National Drug Treatment Monitoring System database. Researchers looked at a sample of opiate and crack users who had recently offended but had not been jailed, and had started drug treatment in the community. They found, as well, that offences typically committed by drug addicts, such as theft, fell by almost half when they were in treatment programmes.
Harm reduction has become one of the most contentious issues in drug use policy. The initial clarity and simplicity of the phrase "harm reduction" has evolved into an emotion-laden designation that has polarized groups with a common goal and is interfering with opportunities to engage high-risk populations and the implementation of a range of substance abuse services and supports.