The review in this issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy (Grund, Latypov, & Harris, 2013) highlights the disturbing harms caused by the increasing use of 'krokodil' by people who inject drugs (PWID) in Eurasia. The growing use of this home produced injectable opiate poses a number of challenges for harm reduction policy, particularly when situated in restrictive regulatory environme...

Background E-cigarettes are the latest in a line of potentially reduced exposure products that have garnered interest among smokers. Methods In this paper, we use experimental auctions to estimate smokers' demand for e-cigarettes and to assess the impact of advertisements on willingness to pay. These are actual auctions, with winners and losers, which means hypothetical biases often seen in s...

This paper measures tobacco policies in statewide representative samples of secondary and mixed schools in Victoria, Australia and Washington, US (N = 3,466 students from 285 schools) and tests their association with student smoking. Results from confounder-adjusted random effects (multi-level) regression models revealed that the odds of student perception of peer smoking on school grounds are ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the prevalence of motivation and behaviours relating to smoking cessation and attempts at harm minimization and the stability of these over a 1-year period; to identify demographic, social, behavioural and psychological predictors of attempts to stop smoking and the success of these attempts. DESIGN Face-to-face interviews were carried out with a national sample of UK smok...

To cite: Sokol-Hessner L, Folcarelli PH, Sands KEF. BMJ Qual Saf 2015;24:550–553. INTRODUCTION Consider these actual patient experiences: ▸ A patient is admitted to the hospital for a bowel obstruction from a known malignancy. She calls her cancer specialist about this complication, but he is unavailable. A covering provider reading from her file says ‘your cancer is untreatable’. This is the f...

Self-harm is prevalent in incarcerated adults, yet comparatively few studies of self-harm in detained youth (and even fewer in low- and middle-income countries) have been published. We examined the prevalence and correlates of self-harm in a sample of 181 young people (mean age 15.0 years, SD = 2.3) detained in the youth justice system in Sri Lanka. Structured face-to-face questionnaires assess...

objective: pediatric cancer is a life threating and challenge for family and it may affect adjustment and mental health of the family members. many factors such as harm avoidance and emotion regulation strategies may have a role in people's wellbeing when coping with stressful situations. the aim of the present study was to examine the mediating role of cognitive emotion regulation strateg...

Note from the Editor Although cannabis is the most widely consumed illicit drug in many western countries, there is a paucity of information about harm reduction strategies for this drug. In part this may be due to the polarized debate around cannabis which tends to characterize it as wholly evil, or wholly good. In this paper Wendy Swift, Jan Copeland and myself attempt to summarize the major ...

The 2001 Institute of Medicine report Clearing the Smoke: Assessing the Science Base for Tobacco Harm Reduction has helped to focus attention on the scientific basis for assessing tobacco harm reduction products. As the tobacco research and policy communities tackle the challenges of evaluating harm reduction, there are ethical issues that must also be addressed. There has, however, been very l...

BACKGROUND Research questionnaires are not always translated appropriately before they are used in new temporal, cultural or linguistic settings. The results based on such instruments may therefore not accurately reflect what they are supposed to measure. This paper aims to illustrate the process and required steps involved in the cross-cultural adaptation of a research instrument using the ada...