Forensic analysis of pills suspected to contain illegal drugs is a time-consuming process; therefore, only a small sample from a seizure can be investigated. Notwithstanding, for drugs like Ecstacy, experience of forensic analysts indicates that a seizure of tablets usually consists either wholly of illicit drugs or no illegal substances at all. Consequently, it should be possible to draw fairl...

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) STRIDE data contain records of acquisitions of illegal drugs by undercover agents and informants of the DEA and Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia. These data are widely used in economic analyses of markets for illegal drugs. The STRIDE data are mainly records of acquisitions made to support criminal investigations and are not a ra...

BACKGROUND/AIMS This study compares illegal drug and alcohol use behaviors between medical and nonmedical users of prescription opioids (PO) and nonmedical users with distinct motives to use. METHOD An ethically approved cross-sectional study (2010) was conducted on a representative sample of private university students (n = 570), using a self-filled anonymous questionnaire. RESULTS About 2...

The occurrence of illegal medicines is a well-established global problem and concerns mostly small molecules. However, due to the advances in genomics and recombinant expression technologies there is an increased development of polypeptide therapeutics. Insulin is one of the best known polypeptide drug, and illegal versions of this medicine led to lethal incidents in the past. Therefore, it is ...

OBJECTIVES To identify the type and extent of weapons being carried among young people in Scotland, and to determine the relation between use of illegal drugs and weapon carrying. DESIGN Questionnaire school survey. SETTING Independent schools in central Scotland and schools in Lanarkshire and Perth and Kinross. PARTICIPANTS 3121 students aged 11 to 16 in 20 schools. MAIN OUTCOME MEASUR...

This study uses information from the Central Pennsylvania Women’s Health Study (CePAWHS) to analyze health risk factors for adverse pregnancy outcomes in the Amish population of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. A survey was conducted with 288 Amish woman and 2002 women from central PA. This study focuses specifically on how age (≤34 vs. ≥35), conception status (preconceptional, pregnant, interco...

Over the next decade an increasing number of new "pharmacotherapy" medications will become available with the potential to tremendously impact the use and abuse of illegal drugs and the overall direction of national and international drug policy. These pharmacotherapy medications are designed to block or significantly reduce the "highs" elicited by illegal drugs. Used as part of a drug treatmen...

This paper provides a thorough economic evaluation of the anti-drug policies implemented in Colombia between 2000 and 2006 under the so-called Plan Colombia. The paper develops a game theory model of the war against illegal drugs in producer countries. We explicitly model illegal drug markets, which allows us to account for the feedback effects between policies and market outcomes that are pote...

The basic aspects of capillary electrophoresis (CE) such as: instrumentation, separation modes and its chief domains of use in forensic analysis are presented. Micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MECC), capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) and chiral separations – the most often used separation modes in drugs analysis – are described. The main directions of development of CE metho...

This study investigates the attitudes of a group of 185 London schoolchildren towards a number of legal and illegal drugs, and examines the ways in which they discriminate between these drugs. Heroin and LSD were seen as the most dangerous drugs, and alcohol and cigarettes as the safest. Subjects who had a negative attitude towards drugs in general regarded cannabis, amphetamines, alcohol and t...