Recent development cooperation with Guinea‐Bissau, focusing on good governance, state‐ building and conflict prevention, did not contribute to democratization nor to the stabili‐ zation of volatile political, military and economic structures. The portrayal of Guinea‐ Bissau as a failed “narco‐state”, as well as Western aid meant to stabilize this state, are both based on dubious...

North America's first medically supervised safer injecting facility (SIF) recently opened in Vancouver, Canada. One of the concerns prior to the SIF's opening was that the facility might lead to a migration of drug activity and an increase in drug-related crime. Therefore, we examined crime rates in the neighborhood where the SIF is located in the year before versus the year after the SIF opene...

Ritual use of ayahuasca within the context of the Brazilian ayahuasca churches often starts during late childhood or early adolescence. Premature access to psychoactive drugs may represent a risk factor for drug misuse. Conversely, religious affiliation seems to play a protective role in terms of substance abuse. The objective of this study was to describe patterns of drug use in a sample of ad...

Random gunfire problems are distinguishable from other types of shooting incidents such as urban sniper attacks, gang shootouts, domestic homicides, and revenge shootings because (1) random gunfire is strictly an outdoor activity; (2) it is not usually part of other criminal activity such as drug dealing, assaults, or robberies; and (3) random gunfire shooters do not fire their weapons to inten...

On a summer afternoon in the late 1990s in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park, sociologist Bruce Western and his colleague Katherine Beckett engaged in a conversation that would change the course of their research. At the time, Western studied the social programs of European welfare states. Against the backdrop of a park that had seen a surge in drug dealing and homeless encampment in the 198...

Biological thought in the 20th century was dominated by the study of structures at increasingly minute levels. For biology to advance beyond structural reductionism and contribute its full measure to clinical care, living biological structures must be understood in the context of their collective chemical processes at the relevant chemical time-scales. Using high-speed fluorescence microscopy, ...