DS Daily - 8th December 2011

Building recovery in the workforce: developing an inspirational, recovery orientated drug and alcohol workforce

After the success of the Consortium’s first national event, service managers, team leaders and other key treatment service staff are again invited to hear and share practical experience on how to deliver an inspirational recovery-orientated workforce. 14th February 2012 9.30am - 4.30pm. Brochure as a Word document | Substance Misuse Skills Consortium, UK

Should national drugs policies be harmonised?

Lord Henley, the Minister of State for Crime Prevention, will face questions from the House of Lords EU Sub-Committee on Home Affairs as part of its inquiry into the EUs drugs strategy | House of Lords, UK

The recreational use of MDMA is associated with long-lasting increases in serotonin2A receptor density

Serotonin2A receptor levels correlate positively with lifetime MDMA use and do not decrease with abstinence. These results suggest that MDMA use produces chronic serotonin neurotoxicity in humans | Archives of General Psychiatry, USA

'Elected police commissioners are coming in 2012 - how ready is your organisation?

Please take 5 minutes to complete our online survey so we can get understand how best to support our members | Clinks, UK

The pitfalls and perils of payment by results

The targets culture in UK public services that emerged during the past two decades fell foul of Goodhart’s Law, which led to increases in complexity and bureaucracy to counteract the gaming of the system by frontline staff. The emergence of payment-by-results claims to avoid this pitfall, but in practice it is likely to be exactly the same - David Boyle PDF | Local Economy, UK

Judging cost effectiveness - Economic evaluation in social care

Today sees the launch of a report by the Social Care Institute for Excellence, setting out its approach to assessing the cost effectiveness of social care services. This must be evaluated, and involves analysing the costs and also the benefits of a service | Social Care Institute for Excellence, UK

Is drug testing good or bad?

The future of the treatment and prevention lies not in the policing and punishment, but to talk and listen, and drug testing associated with the latter and not the past - Julian Buchanan, Associate Professor Victoria University of Wellington Institute of Criminology | Beom, Sweden

Dealers sell ‘packs’ of crack and head shop drugs

Drugs formerly available in head shops are being sold in party packs with crack for as little as €40, a conference has heard | Irish Examiner

Cigarettes to increase from midnight

Cigarettes are going up by 25 cent | News Talk, Ireland

Watchdog abandons campaign for needle exchange in prisons

The government has made it clear that they will not be introducing any prison-based needle exchanges in Canadian penitentiaries,” Mr. Sapers said on Tuesday, following a parliamentary committee meeting about drugs in prisons. “At some point, you move on.” | Globe and Mail, Canada

Cocaine Seizures Outstripping Production? Not Exactly

An analysis released today by Narcoleaks makes the claim that cocaine seized worldwide in 2011 has surpassed our estimates of world production. Their analysis is systematically flawed. Here’s why ...| ONDCP, USA

Injection Drug Abuse Admissions to Substance Abuse Treatment: 1992 and 2009

Although the number of injection admissions increased from over 199,000 in 1992 to nearly 278,000 in 2009, they remained a relatively constant proportion of all admissions (13.2 percent of all substance abuse treatment admissions in 1992 and 14.3 percent in 2009) | SAMHSA, USA

Smoking and the First Amendment

On June 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law. For the first time, Congress had given the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to directly regulate tobacco products, with the aim of improving public health. But on November 7, 2011, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a preliminary injunction blocking some of its key provisions as unconstitutional restrictions on commercial speech, and the battle seems likely to end up in the Supreme Court | NEJM, USA