Archive for November, 2009
Garda drug tests to speed up justice
No CommentsGardai are to be given the power to carry out drug tests in stations to speed up convictions as part of a crackdown on drug use.
The force is to expand a pilot project which allows officers to test for drugs in police stations using special kits which allow them to detect the presence of cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy, heroin, diazepam and cocaine. The tests are claimed to be 99% accurate and give a positive or negative result.
Schoolgirl Gabrielle Price died last week after taking mephedrone, a freely available ‘legal high’ that dealers sell with impunity
No Comments“It’s big business,” says Sunny, a 35-year-old ex-con who runs one of the many websites that trade in mephedrone, a party drug and so called “legal high” that the Government is under pressure to ban.
“I run the website with two other people and we make around £25,000 a week. We get dozens of orders every day from people all over the country. We never dreamt that we could make so much money from it.”
Review of drug treatment court prompted by low caseload
No CommentsConcern about the volume of cases led to the current review of the Dublin drug treatment court, Minister of State for Justice John Curran told the Dáil.
He said the Minister, Dermot Ahern, was anxious that no decision about the court’s future should be taken without a thorough examination of the facts.
Does Brain Research Worsen the Addiction Stigma?
No Comments“Once an addict, always an addict.”
When it comes to the neurobiology of addiction, the research community has made great strides in a few hectic years. However, as addiction counselor William White wrote in 2007, are we lacking a comparable neurobiology of addiction recovery?
White, a senior research consultant at Chestnut Health Systems/Lighthouse Institute, warns that in the past campaigns seeking to reduce the stigma of mental illness by educating the public about “brain disease” have often inadvertently backfired, and invoked, instead, “harsher behavior toward the mentally ill.”
Methadone maintenance therapy versus no opioid replacement therapy for opioid dependence
No CommentsThis report by The Cochrane Collaboration and published in The Cochrane Library : Methadone maintenance was the first widely used opioid replacement therapy to treat heroin dependence, and it remains the bestresearched treatment for this problem. Despite the widespread use of methadone in maintenance treatment for opioid dependence in many countries, it is a controversial treatment whose effectiveness has been disputed.
