Drug and alcohol review
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Drug and alcohol review · Jul 2015
Social disadvantage and exposure to lower priced alcohol in off-premise outlets.
Greater concentrations of off-premise alcohol outlets are found in areas of social disadvantage, exposing disadvantaged populations to excess risk for problems such as assault, child abuse and intimate partner violence. This study examines whether the outlets to which they are exposed also sell cheaper alcohol, potentially further contributing to income-related health disparities. ⋯ Not only are disadvantaged populations exposed to more outlets, the outlets to which they are exposed sell cheaper alcohol. This finding appears to be consistent with the spatial dynamics of typical retail markets.
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Drug and alcohol review · Jul 2015
Working together: Expanding the availability of naloxone for peer administration to prevent opioid overdose deaths in the Australian Capital Territory and beyond.
Since the mid-1990s, there have been calls to make naloxone, a prescription-only medicine in many countries, available to heroin and other opioid users and their peers and family members to prevent overdose deaths. ⋯ The development of Australia's first take-home naloxone program in the ACT has been an 'ice-breaker' for development of other Australian programs. Issues to be addressed to facilitate future scale-up of naloxone programs concern scheduling and cost, legal protections for lay administration, prescribing as a barrier to scale-up; intranasal administration, administration by service providers and collaboration between stakeholders.
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Drug and alcohol review · Mar 2015
Alcohol-related emergency department injury presentations in Queensland adolescents and young adults over a 13-year period.
The rate of alcohol-related emergency department (ED) presentations in young people has increased dramatically in recent decades. Injuries are the most common type of youth alcohol-related ED presentation, yet little is known about these injuries in young people. This paper describes the characteristics of alcohol-related ED injury presentations in young people over a 13-year period and determines if they differ by gender and/or age group (adolescents: 12-17 years; young adults: 18-24 years). ⋯ There is a need for more effective ways of identifying the degree of alcohol involvement in injuries among young people presenting to EDs.
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The US Drug Enforcement Agency classifies marijuana as an illegal substance, yet in 22 states marijuana is legal for medicinal use. In 1996, California legalised the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, but population-based data describing medical marijuana users in the state has not been available. Our aim was to examine the demographic differences between users and non-users of medical marijuana in California utilising population-based data. ⋯ Our study's results lend support to the idea that medical marijuana is used equally by many groups of people and is not exclusively used by any one specific group. As more states approve marijuana use for medical purposes, it is important to track medical marijuana use as a health-related behaviour and risk factor.