What Scotland’s drug deaths cannot tell us and why it matters. I have written this as one sustained essay in four acts, almost like Hitchens’ The Missionary Position or Roger Scruton’s longer essays. Each part can stand alone for readers arriving midway through the series, but together they amount to a single argument. Most commentary on Scotland’s drugs...
Five days ago we asked a simple question: what does resilience look like on an ordinary day? Today, the last day of World Resiliency Week 2026, is where it all comes together, and where everyday resilience really begins. You showed up this week, maybe loudly, maybe quietly. Both count. Whether you tried every challenge or...
There’s a picture of “rising” that does a lot of damage: the dramatic comeback, the total transformation, the highlight reel. Real rising is quieter than that. It’s getting up when you didn’t want to, answering a text you’ve avoided, choosing water, going outside for five minutes, saying “I need help.” Day four of World Resiliency...
We’re good at the first part and the last part. Something hard happens, and not long after we’re saying “I’m fine now.” It’s the middle we skip. Day three of World Resiliency Week 2026 is about that middle. We’re calling it Feel, and it’s really about how to feel your feelings instead of rushing past...
Some days just drag. A bad night’s sleep, a hard conversation, a knock you didn’t see coming, or a low mood with no clear reason at all. Today, the second day of World Resiliency Week 2026, is about coping with a bad day. We’re calling it Fall. The temptation on a hard day is to...
A major new review published in The Lancet Psychiatry examining global cannabis policies ought to have settled the argument. Instead, it will almost certainly deepen it. Indeed, I suspect the review will keep both tribes happily supplied for years to come. Drug policy, after all, has become not merely a disagreement about evidence but an entire ecosystem of...
World Resiliency Week 2026 begins today. As the first of five days, it is a good moment to ask a plain question: what does building resilience actually involve? There is a common idea that some people are simply resilient and others are not, as though it were a fixed trait you are born with or...
A new study from Woodlands Grove Recovery Campus found alcohol-related deaths among adults 65+ are disproportionately concentrated across Western and Mountain West metros highlighting what clinicians say is an often-overlooked addiction and mental health issue among older Americans. The study analyzes CDC WONDER alcohol-induced mortality data and U.S. Census population estimates from 2020–2024 to identify: Where are Americans...
I recently had the honour of representing both Drug Free Australia and DAESY by attending the virtual 2-day AddictionZ 2026 conference held in Queensland on 27-28 May. Watching presenters who represented several organisations, from my Demand Reduction perspective, was extremely interesting. As we have all come to understand, the main focus regarding drug policy has,...
Supervised consumption sites were sold as a disciplined, tightly monitored answer to the overdose crisis. In Alberta, the evidence suggests something far messier: weak oversight, fuzzy statistics, rising disorder, and a public policy that keeps asking citizens to trust what it does not fully measure. The claim that these facilities are “safe” has become a rhetorical...