New psychoactive substances (NPSs), sometimes referred to as "legal highs" in more colloquial environments/the media, are a class of compounds that have been recently made available for abuse (not necessarily recently discovered) which provide similar effects to the traditional well studied illegal drugs but are not always controlled under existing local, regional or international drug legislat...

INTRODUCTION Sex workers, people who use drugs, men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women and transgender people in South Africa frequently experience high levels of stigma, abuse and discrimination. Evidence suggests that such abuse is sometimes committed by police officers, meaning that those charged with protection are perpetrators. This reinforces cycles of violence, increase...

Injecting drug use is a growing problem in Africa and a growing risk factor for contracting HIV in the region. It is imperative that HIV research includes injecting drug users so that they too are able to benefit from safe and effective behavioural interventions and biomedical HIV prevention and treatment products. This article relates a critical review of the findings of a desk review of previ...

Under German law, federal ministries are responsible for preparing legislation, while federal states (Länder) are responsible for applying the legislation. The author describes the system, contrasting it with the situation in former East Germany, where preparation and application of legislation were controlled centrally. The author also describes the various inland water fisheries Acts and regu...

Dentistry has much to offer law enforcement in the detection and solution of crime or in civil proceedings. Forensic dental fieldwork requires an interdisciplinary knowledge of dental science and forensic science. Most often the role of the forensic odontologist is to establish a person's identity. Teeth, with their physiologic variations, pathoses and effects of therapy, record information tha...

www.thelancet.com Vol 373 March 21, 2009 989 Illegal drug use has long been a threat to community and public health. In response, UN conventions (1961, 1971, 1988) were created to criminalise the possession, use, and manufacture of illicit drugs. Internationally, the conventions have been most strongly supported by the US Government since 1971, when President Richard Nixon described the abuse o...

BACKGROUND Thailand has for years attempted to address illicit drug use through aggressive drug law enforcement. Despite accounts of widespread violence by police against people who inject drugs (IDU), the impact of police violence has not been well investigated. In the wake of an intensified police crackdown in 2011, we sought to identify the prevalence and correlates of experiencing police be...

For some drug policy scholars, including us, the online marketplace Silk Road and its successors are inherently fascinating. When we first discovered Silk Road in 2011, on opposite sides of the globe, we could not believe it was real: people were buying illegal drugs anonymously through a global marketplace that resembled eBay or Amazon. We were instantly hooked. Rather than addressing our fell...

In the last 20 years, orphan drug legislation (ODL) has been adopted in several countries around the world (USA, Japan, Australia, and the European Union) and has successfully promoted R&D investments to develop new pharmaceutical products for the treatment of rare diseases. Without these incentives, many life-saving new drugs would have not been developed and produced. For economic reasons, th...