Category Archives: Drugs

Amsterdam considers banning ‘cannabis tourists’ from its coffee shops

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Fed up with stoned visitors and worried by hard-drug criminality, the mayor wants to clean up the city. But will it work?

Strumming gently at a guitar, outside the “nicest” coffee shop in Amsterdam, French tourists Terry Novel and Manon Fouquet enjoy a quiet joint in the sun.

They have no idea of the dark cloud around them and the cannabis sector in Amsterdam. The council has just spent a day debating whether to ban tourists from cafes such as Coffeeshop The Rookies – where the state currently turns a blind eye to foreigners smoking weed and taxes the profits.

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Services for county lines victims in England and Wales get funding boost

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Up to £5m allocated to help young people escape drug gangs, with money also going to helpline

Up to £5m has been allocated by the Home Office to support victims of county lines exploitation over the next three years.

Hundreds of victims will be helped to escape drug gangs following the expansion of support services in London, the West Midlands, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

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Implement pre-court diversion for drug users now, author of NSW ice inquiry urges

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Prof Dan Howard says he’s ‘puzzled’ it took the government nearly three years to agree to such modest changes in policing

The author of a landmark inquiry into crystal methamphetamine (“ice”) addiction in New South Wales has warned the government’s commitment to expand pre-court diversion for drug users in the state could be pushed into “the never-never” if it is not implemented by the March election.

On Wednesday the NSW government released its long-awaited response to Prof Dan Howard’s 14-month inquiry into drug addiction in NSW, committing to spending $500m on expanded treatment services and justice initiatives.

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Limits on paracetamol purchases could reduce injury and death from overdoses, expert panel says

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TGA report recommends reduced packet sizes and restricting over-the-counter sales of the drug to people 18 and over

The size of paracetamol packets sold in supermarkets could be reduced and limits introduced on the number of boxes that can be bought, in a bid to reduce injury and death from intentional overdoses.

The recommendations are contained in an independent expert report published by Australia’s drugs regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration. The report found rates of intentional paracetamol overdose were highest among adolescents and young adults, and more common among women and girls.

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Canadian advocates pledge to continue selling pure drugs amid overdose crisis

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Over the last six years, the vast majority of overdose deaths in British Columbia have been driven by impurities in street drugs

A Canadian advocacy group has pledged to continue selling cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin to users, in defiance of a federal government order to stop, arguing that their plan is the only way to save lives amid a nationwide drugs crisis.

Over the last six years, more than 10,000 people have died from drug overdoses in the province of British Columbia, with the vast majority of deaths driven by impurities in street drugs.

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Officer who wrote Met’s drug strategy smoked cannabis daily, panel told

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Commander Julian Bennett refused to take a drug test in 2020 after his lodger contacted police alleging drug use

A senior Metropolitan police commander who wrote the force’s drug strategy allegedly smoked cannabis in front of his lodger every day, a gross misconduct hearing has been told.

Commander Julian Bennett later threatened to resign when he was asked to take a drug test on 21 July 2020, a disciplinary panel heard.

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Rise in Albanian asylum seekers may be down to criminal gangs

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Albanian gangs controlling UK drugs trade offer minibus trip and Channel crossing for £4,000 on TikTok

Official data released on Thursday has confirmed suspicions that Albanians are now a prominent national group among the asylum seekers travelling across the Channel.

But the Home Office and refugee charities are still trying to explain why there has been a recent surge in demand.

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First government-backed pill testing clinic finds 40% of ‘cocaine’ contained no coke

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Canberra service examined 70 samples in August with 25% of potential users discarding drugs once made aware of what they actually contained

Australia’s first government-backed pill and drug testing service has found a majority of samples were tainted with other substances, with a quarter of people choosing to ditch their drugs after getting them checked.

In its first month of operation, Canberra’s fixed-site CanTest health and drug checking clinic examined 70 samples, with 18 people discarding their drugs once the results were in.

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Magic mushrooms’ psilocybin may help heavy drinkers cut back

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Positive results in first ‘rigorous’ trial investigating compound’s effect on alcohol use

The most rigorous test yet of psilocybin as a treatment for alcoholism has found that the compound in psychedelic mushrooms helped heavy drinkers cut back or quit entirely.

Psilocybin, found in several species of mushrooms, can cause hours of vivid hallucinations. Indigenous people have used it in healing rituals and scientists are exploring whether it can ease depression or help longtime smokers quit.

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Mexico’s citizens caught in crossfire as cartels launch attacks across the country

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Brazen strikes by organised crime leaders have left bystanders killed as many question the president’s security policies

For Carlos Holguín it was supposed to be just another day of toil.

After leaving the factory where he works morning shifts in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, the 24-year-old began his nightly routine last Thursday as a food app delivery driver.

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New ‘Parp inhibitors’ could prevent certain tumours appearing

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Breakthrough research could see some genetic cancers neutralised before they take hold and is already being used for people at risk

Sue Hayward was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2017. Doctors acted swiftly and she was given a hysterectomy followed by sessions of chemotherapy.

But her cancer returned within a year. “I carry a mutated version of a gene known as BRCA1 which makes me susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers,” said Hayward, who works at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. “It runs in families. My mother died of cancer and we assume her mother did as well.”

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‘Very good for tourists’: Thailand aims for high season with U-turn on cannabis

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The once-banned drug is now on sale at market stalls, beach clubs and even hotel receptions. But the laws in this ‘pot paradise’ are blurry

A distinctive sweet smell wafts through Fisherman’s Village night market on the Thai island of Koh Samui, drifting up between the sticky mango rice stalls and bucket cocktail vans. The Samui Grower cannabis stall is doing swift business tonight. A table is laid with glass jars, each displaying a different flowering green bud, with labels saying things like ‘‘Road Dawg’ hybrid THC25% 850TBH/gram”.

Elsewhere on the island, at Chi beach club, tourists lie on couches puffing ready-rolled joints and munching pizzas topped with green cannabis leaves. On Instagram, the Green Shop Samui offers a marijuana menu of fantastically named buds: Truffle Cream, Banana Kush and Sour Diesel, alongside hemp cookies and cannabis herbal soap.

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Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss facing Tory members in Leeds for first official leadership hustings – UK politics live

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Leadership rivals bid to win members’ support in foreign secretary’s home town

Drug-related deaths in Scotland fell by nine in 2021, according to the latest figures released by National Records of Scotland, the first decrease since 2013 but falling well short of the significant reduction that campaigners are calling for.

The latest figure of 1,330 is still the second highest annual total on record, and Scotland continues to have by far the highest drug death rate recorded by any country in Europe and five times the rate in England.

We’ve had a raft of reports, policies and strategies that say what needs to change, and families are more likely to be included round the table, but it’s much harder to track their influence on the ground. We don’t understand what’s getting in the way of good words becoming good deeds.

1,330 of our fellow Scots have died entirely preventable deaths and we should not be celebrating this as an achievement ... The solutions are no secret. We need action, not reports with recommendations that are never implemented.

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‘Every part is useful’: the man who wants Afghanistan to swap opium for hemp

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Oil from the versatile plant makes cannabis medicine CBD and its fibre has a range of uses but the Taliban need convincing

The smell seemed unmistakable, the dried buds looked familiar and the Taliban checkpoint guards, who had never heard of CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabis compound, were disgusted by the pungent cargo of Amin Karim’s truck.

“They said to me: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Haji?’” using an honorific for an older man, as they poked through the piles of hemp headed for Kabul last October.

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Leading figures urge drugs firm to lower price of ‘game-changing’ HIV prevention drug

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Signatories including Olly Alexander, Stephen Fry and Joseph Stiglitz issue a letter asking ViiV to make cabotegravir affordable to low- and middle-income countries

Nobel laureates, business leaders, former premiers and celebrities have urged a UK pharmaceutical company to lower the price of its groundbreaking HIV prevention drug and ensure it is not kept “out of reach” of the world’s poor.

In a letter signed by dozens of high-profile figures, including Sir Richard Branson, the singer Olly Alexander, the economist Joseph Stiglitz and Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand, the pharmaceutical company ViiV Healthcare is praised for having developed the first of a new kind of HIV prevention drug.

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Plantwatch: green allies – the plants that helped UK’s war effort

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With medical and food supplies hit, volunteers foraged in the British countryside for useful species


In the second world war tonnes of deadly nightshade leaves and roots were collected to extract atropine, a drug used for eye operations. Foxgloves were harvested for digitalis, the powerful drug used for regulating abnormal heart rhythms – abundant foxgloves found in the Chilterns were rich in digitalis. And in the first world war sphagnum moss found in bogs was used as a highly absorbent and naturally antiseptic wound dressing, and a million dressings a month were sent to military hospitals around the world by the end of the conflict.

These were some of more than 80 wild plant species recruited during the world wars to make up for the vital pharmaceutical supplies that had been imported from Germany but which were cut off in wartime. There were other valuable wild plants, such as rose hips made into a syrup rich in vitamin C, which was in short supply because of severely limited fruit supplies.

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Australians over 70 granted access to Covid antiviral treatments

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From Monday, access will also be expanded to over 50s and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over 30 with two or more risk factors

All Australians over 70 with Covid will be eligible to take antivirals from Monday, after the health minister, Mark Butler, expanded access to the treatments.

Butler revealed that access will also be expanded to people aged over 50 with two or more risk factors for severe disease and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged over 30 with two or more risk factors.

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Mob-style killings shock Netherlands into fighting descent into ‘narco state’

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Murders, corruption and ‘Mocro Maffia’ prompt Dutch to set up war chest to tackle wave of organised crime sweeping nation

Journalists and lawyers under protection or murdered on the streets, court hearings guarded by the army, witness statements anonymised, and billions in dirty drug money that leaches through society, corrupting as it goes.

This is the Netherlands, where these facts have now inspired a crackdown pitting some €500m a year against a level of organised crime that politicians fear is increasingly “undermining” public order.

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Germany’s move to legalise cannabis expected to create ‘domino effect’

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Coalition government consults health experts, economists and growers in race to clear legal hurdles within two years

Germany is mulling over the consequences of soon becoming the world’s largest potential market for legally sold cannabis, as the country’s left-liberal government presses ahead with plans to allow the controlled distribution of the drug among adults.

Olaf Scholz’s coalition government has in recent weeks reiterated its 2021 coalition-deal vow to legalise for recreational use what its Green and liberal party minister have taken to referring to as Bubatz, a slang word for weed popular among German rappers.

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War on drugs prolonged Colombia’s decades-long civil war, landmark report finds

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Truth commission’s report, touted as a chance to heal after half a century of bloodshed, called for a ‘substantial change in drug policy’

The punitive, prohibitionist war on drugs helped prolong Colombia’s disastrous civil war, the country’s truth commission has found, in a landmark report published on Tuesday as part of an effort to heal the raw wounds left by conflict.

The report, titled “There is a future if there is truth” was the first instalment of a study put together by the commission that was formed as part of a historic 2016 peace deal with the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

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