Drug checking to improve monitoring of new psychoactive substances in Australia

As has been reported previously in the Journal, 1 novel psychoactive stimulant drugs are now increasingly prevalent in patients presenting to hospital emergency departments. A further cluster of 11 patients showing confusing hallmarks of sympathomimetic poisoning but no identifiable substance presen...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Butterfield, R., Barratt, Monica, Ezard, N., Day, R.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Australasian Medical Publishing 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/29714
Description
Summary:As has been reported previously in the Journal, 1 novel psychoactive stimulant drugs are now increasingly prevalent in patients presenting to hospital emergency departments. A further cluster of 11 patients showing confusing hallmarks of sympathomimetic poisoning but no identifiable substance presented to St Vincent ’ s Hospital in Sydney over a public holiday weekend in April 2015. Also, the start to the 2015 e 2016 summer festival season has included multiple deaths and hospitalisations following drug use at festivals, leading to calls for novel actions to protect public health. 2 Here, we take the opportunity to describe a method of harm minimisation that has been deployed in Europe and could potentially be deployed locally to tackle this problem. As has been reported previously in the Journal, 1 novel psychoactive stimulant drugs are now increasingly prevalent in patients presenting to hospital emergency departments. A further cluster of 11 patients showing confusing hallmarks of sympathomimetic poisoning but no identifiable substance presented to St Vincent ’ s Hospital in Sydney over a public holiday weekend in April 2015. Also, the start to the 2015 e 2016 summer festival season has included multiple deaths and hospitalisations following drug use at festivals, leading to calls for novel actions to protect public health. 2 Here, we take the opportunity to describe a method of harm minimisation that has been deployed in Europe and could potentially be deployed locally to tackle this problem.