heroin%20assisted%20treatment - search results

The powerful non-opioid tranquiliser xylazine has infiltrated the UK’s drug market and is ‘not limited to heroin supplies’, according to a new report by researchers at King’s College London (KCL).  The drug, known in the US as ‘tranq’ or ‘tranq dope’ – especially when mixed with fentanyl or heroin – has been associated with dangerous side […]

There is already a ‘significant shift’ in Afghanistan’s drug market, with ‘surging’ levels of methamphetamine production, according to a new UNODC report. Methamphetamine trafficking saw a ‘drastic’ twelvefold increase in the five years to 2021, it says, from 2.5 tons to just under 30 tons.  The UNODC found that heroin trafficking had continued, but at […]

Too scared to prescribe Dr Chris Ford finds that in the US, new restrictions have had negative consequences for patients in pain I was recently discussing the increase in use of prescription opioids in the UK and the US with Alex, an American doctor, who specialises in pain treatment, and I asked whether their new […]

A report to be presented to the Glasgow City Integration Joint Board later this month will identify potential sites for what could be the UK’s first drug consumption room. The board officially approved the development of a business case for the facility late last year (DDN, November 2016, page 4). Suitable available sites in the […]

Belfast’s injecting drugs crisis has prompted a call for action – to bring a drug consumption room to the city as quickly as possible. Report from Chris Rintoul. There has been a marked rise in people who inject drugs in Belfast city centre over the last two years. This is shown by a dramatic increase […]

Scotland’s first heroin-assisted treatment service has been launched in Glasgow, the city council has announced. The Enhanced Drug Treatment Service (EDTS) will treat people with the most severe, long-term and complex problems with ‘pharmaceutical grade diamorphine’. The service is operated by the Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership (GCHSCP) and has been licensed by the […]

Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has fallen by 95 per cent following the Taliban’s opium ban last year, says UNODC, further fuelling fears that highly potent synthetic opioids will now fill the gap. Poppy cultivation fell in all parts of the country, according to UNODC’s latest analysis, from 233,000 hectares to less than 11,000. As […]

Could a recent growth in crack cocaine use indicate its move to social acceptability – and how should we respond? Kevin Flemen examines the situation. Read the full article in the June 2018 issue of DDN Stigma-driven barriers between powder cocaine and crack may be breaking down. Increased availability of crack thanks to ‘county lines’, […]

The quality of treatment for heroin users is being threatened by diminishing funds and ‘disruptive re-procurement processes’, according to a new report from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). Treatment quality now varies significantly across England, says the document, and is being further compromised by ‘frequent re-procurement and shrinking resources’. The report […]

Maintaining the ‘capacity and quality’ of treatment is essential to prevent more increases in opioid-related deaths, says a new report from the ACMD. The large cohort of people who have been using heroin since the 1980s and ‘90s are ‘increasingly vulnerable’ as they age, stresses Reducing opioid-related deaths in the UK,with fatalities increasing by almost […]

Aggressive marketing by dealers and a change in attitudes towards the drug were among the reasons for increasing levels of crack cocaine use in England, according to a new investigative report from Public Health England (PHE) and the Home Office. Crack has become increasingly available and affordable in recent years, following a surge in cocaine […]

Service users are accustomed to professionals exerting power over them. Nowhere is this more true than in drug and alcohol services, says Tom Zagoria. I work in a service where the power we exert frequently occurs at the overlap between ‘risk management’ and ‘medication control’.  We prescribe people with ‘opiate substitution’ treatments, providing buprenorphine or methadone […]

A new family of synthetic opioids, known as nitazenes, have adulterated a number of illicit drugs in the UK. It’s not clear exactly when this began, but evidence of them being present in cocaine and heroin was detected in 2021.   Nitazenes are broadly equipotent to the fentanyls – or in layman’s terms, they’re many times stronger […]

The number of heroin and crack cocaine users in England has fallen below 300,000 for the first time, according to figures issued by the NTA.  The figure stood at 298,752 in 2010-11, according to Esti­mates of the prevalence of opiate use and/or crack cocaine use, down from a peak of more than 332,000 in 2005-06. […]

Downward spiral I applaud Ms Durjava’s sensitive and respectful study of heroin users in prison (DDN, May, page 6). Government drug strategies invariably talk negatively about drug use and base their strategies accordingly – on the  crude assumption that, given plenty of stick and a bit of carrot, all users want to stop. It is […]

The rate of deaths linked to new psychoactive substances could be ‘higher than heroin’ within two years, according to a report from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank. Hospital admissions related to new psychoactive substances (NPS) rose by 56 per cent between 2009 and 2012, says Ambitious for recovery, while 97 people were […]

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It used to be that senior police, like politicians, would only speak out on drug policy from the safety of retire­ment. These days, however, serving PCCs are taking an increasingly leading role in the call for change, as DDN reports. A few short years ago most people would probably not have predicted that it would […]

Addaction started 50 years ago with a desperate mother writing to the paper about her son’s addiction. Much has changed but the charity’s purpose grows ever stronger, says Alistair Bohm. Fifty years ago, the Guardian newspaper published a letter from Mollie Craven (above). Mollie’s son had been a registered heroin addict since the age of 18 […]

‘I do believe that the best care for people who use drugs and alcohol is in their own GP surgeries where possible,’ says Dr Judith Yates, who – although retired from her GP practice since 2010 – is far from retired from the drugs field. She’d wanted to go into medicine since childhood but dropped out halfway through medical […]

The Middlesbrough heroin assisted treatment (HAT) pilot launched last year (DDN, November 2019, page 5) has had a ‘dramatic impact’, according to the programme’s clinical team lead Daniel Ahmed. Teesside University has now been given a £60,000 grant to independently evaluate the scheme and its results.  The HAT pilot, the UK’s first, was launched to […]

Methadone’s dominance over Suboxone in substitute prescribing may have more to do with cost than effectiveness. It could be time for a reassessment, say Neil McKeganey, Christopher Russell and Lucy Cockayne Within the drug treatment field there are few more controversial subjects than the role of substitute prescribing. For some people, drugs such as methadone […]

Better utilisation of data and data sharing, including early warning systems, is needed to address the escalating drug crisis in the UK, says a report from Cranstoun. The document has been published in response to the increasing number of accounts of parts of the UK’s heroin supply being contaminating by highly potent nitazenes.  Among the […]

Denmark’s initiatives to tackle drug-related deaths could give valuable pointers to reshaping drug policy in the UK, says Blaine Stothard As part of his programme of international visits looking at drug policy, Home Office minister Norman Baker visited Copenhagen in February 2014. This visit, one of many from the UK, included a roundtable discussion at the British […]

At the end of the 1980s the threat of a crack epidemic in the UK loomed large as we scrambled to take heed of dire warnings from America. Mike Ashton and Natalie Davies delve into the Findings Effectiveness Bank to separate fact from fiction. In its various guises, no drug has widely been considered so […]

Can we meet six basic challenges to repair a fragmented treatment system, asks Paul Hayes. Brexit continues to dominate mainstream debate. But far more important to most people, particularly the poor, the marginalised, and the ‘left behind’ is the cumulative impact of years of austerity and the continuing failure of the economy to grow. The […]

The number of heroin-related deaths in England and Wales has doubled since 2012, from 579 to 1,201, according to the latest ONS figures. Last year saw the highest number of drug-related fatalities ever recorded with 3,674 poisoning deaths, of which 2,479 exclusively involved illegal drugs. Scotland also recorded its highest drug death toll in 2015, […]

The DDN letters page, where you can have your say. The December issue of DDN will be out on 2 December — make sure you send letters and comments to claire@cjwellings.com by Wednesday 20 November to be included.   Misplaced faith In your October issue (page 21) Neil McKeganey stated his case for keeping a dual focus on health and criminal […]

This is the second column from the drugs team at Release, where every other month we are putting forward a new case study from our advocacy work to share with others in the sector. Our hope is to spotlight some of the difficulties people face in treatment and shine a light on how people might […]

More drug-related deaths were registered in Scotland in 2011 than in any previous year, according to figures released by National Records for Scotland. There were 584 deaths, says Drug-related deaths in Scotland in 2011, an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year.  Six of the past ten years have seen increases, with an […]

Now tell me yours… Different lives require different approaches to treatment, says Dr Steve Brinksman. Read it in DDN. I had the privilege of speaking at the annual RCGP/SMMGP conference at the end of November. I have been attending these for 20 years now and the knowledge I have gained, alongside the peer support, has […]

This year’s opium harvest in Afghanistan is up by eight per cent compared to 2020, to almost 7,000 tons, which could lead to global drug markets being ‘flooded with around 320 tons of pure heroin’, says UNODC. Afghanistan accounted for 85 per cent of global opium production last year and now supplies eight out of […]

The three Rs It’s all about the right treatment, at the right place, and the right time, says Dr Steve Brinksman There are many things I love about being a GP but above all I value the long-term relationships I have with my patients. The other night while doing a routine surgery session, I recognised […]

The three Rs It’s all about the right treatment, at the right place, and the right time, says Dr Steve Brinksman There are many things I love about being a GP but above all I value the long-term relationships I have with my patients. The other night while doing a routine surgery session, I recognised […]

The National Crime Agency (NCA) has taken the ‘unusual step’ of warning drug users to be vigilant following the detection of powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl in heroin supplies in the north east of England. Fentanyl and its analogue carfentanyl are thought to have contributed to recent deaths among drug users in the Yorkshire, Cleveland and […]

Controlling cravings is an essential part of treatment, says Dr Steve Brinksman.   Sean and I go back a long way. He first started treatment 15 years ago and has had quite a few treatment episodes over the period he has been with us. These tend to follow a pattern; he starts opioid substitution with methadone, […]

A person who injected heroin has died in hospital in Blackpool from anthrax infection, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has confirmed. The death comes three weeks after another fatal anthrax case in the town (DDN, September, page 5), and Public Health Wales has confirmed that a Gwynedd drug user has also been hospitalised with a […]

‘Cheap and easy’ synthetic drugs are ‘changing drug markets with lethal results’, according to UNODC’s World drug report 2023. Fentanyl has ‘drastically altered the opioid market in North America with dire consequences’, it says, with the majority of the country’s approximately 90,000 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2021 involving illegally manufactured fentanyls. Fentanyl’s potency means reduced […]

The news and views from the national media Substance misuse policy is, of course, a subject of passionate debate at all points on the political spectrum. While policy will always remain a highly charged issue, it is facts that should guide the commissioning of substance misuse, not politicised opinion or ill-informed conjecture. Victor Adebowale, Guardian, […]

Last year saw 3,744 drug poisoning deaths in England and Wales, according to the latest ONS figures – 2 per cent higher than the previous year (DDN, October 2016, page 4) and the highest number since comparable statistics began in 1993. While the figure relates to both legal and illegal drugs, almost 70 per cent […]