A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
When Susan Sohn's teenagers go out she warns them: "If I even suspect you're not doing the right thing I will show up – and I don't care about your reputation." The Canadian mother believes firm boundaries and open lines of communication are the reasons she has never had serious issues with Sophia or Gabriel drinking or taking [...]
The US military's drug of choice for helping people stay awake while working long hours is finding its way into the 24/7 workplace, researchers warn. Billable hours and the pressure to perform is tempting workers to risk their own health to gain a competitive edge. Leading psychiatrists and drug experts in the US and Australia [...]
The tablets look just like pharmaceutical grade pills, or Pez candy. They are marked as the anti-anxiety medication Xanax, prescription painkillers or packaged in colorful candy wrappers. The buyer may know they’re getting a drug, but what they don’t know is that the drug they’re getting is fentanyl, between 50 and 100 times as powerful [...]
In the latest Beckley/Imperial study, we selected 12 people who had experienced depression over an average of 18 years, despite all that modern medicine can offer. Instead of daily medication, we wanted to know if their condition would improve after an “inner journey” on a 25mg dose of the psychedelic drug psilocybin. We also wanted to [...]
http://www.drugs.health.gov.au Ecstasy continues to be a popular drug in Australia. Although recent use (use in the past year) has decreased since 2007, those reporting ever having tried the drug has continued to rise to almost 11% of the Australian population aged 14 years and over. The number of school-based young people who reported recent use of the drug had remained fairly steady for [...]
Stock Images OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug. The problem offers [...]
After years of debate about the health risks of electronic cigarettes, the federal government on Thursday made it final: They need to be regulated and kept out of the hands of children. The Food and Drug Administration issued sweeping new rules that for the first time extend federal regulatory authority to e-cigarettes, banning their sale to anyone under 18 [...]
Adolescents are experimenting with electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) and there is speculation that this might lead some young people who would not otherwise have smoked cigarettes to progress to smoking (the gateway effect). However, after ten years of experience in other countries where e-cigarettes are widely available, there is no evidence that this is happening. In [...]
When the world’s nations committed to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) last year, they probably weren’t thinking about drugs. But they should have been. Without effective drug control strategies, marginalisation, poverty and inequality will persist in societies. Evidence shows that prohibitionist approaches have not worked – from 1998 to 2008 the number of people using [...]
According to the 2014 World Drug Report published by the United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC), Australia has some of the highest rates of stimulant use in the world. It should be noted that it is problematic to compare one country to another when it comes to illicit drug use as data is collected in different ways and community attitudes and policing methods vary [...]
