Smoking rates in Australia have fallen to their lowest level on record, according to new figures that offer a striking contrast to the images of celebrities lighting up at parties and fashion shoots that keep popping up on social media feeds. The latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey, released this month by the Australian Institute...
People often talk about cannabis as though it were harmless, something users simply grow out of. The clinical picture looks very different, and much of it comes down to strength. Over the past three decades, high-potency cannabis has taken over the market, and doctors have watched cases of cannabis-induced psychosis climb alongside it. This is...
The alcohol free definition used across UK pubs and shops could soon change. Sales of no and low alcohol beer keep climbing. Now one of the industry’s biggest trade bodies wants looser rules for what actually counts as alcohol free. The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) has called for a change to the current...
Childhoods marked by neglect, abuse or upheaval leave marks that can last well beyond the years they happened. A large new review of research confirms just how far those marks can reach. It links adverse childhood experiences to some of the most serious outcomes a young person can face, including death by suicide. Substance use...
Alcohol comes with built in rules of thumb. A pint after work. A glass of wine with dinner. Decades of research on safe units and daily limits. Cannabis has no such shared culture, even as it becomes part of daily life for millions of people. That gap is fuelling a wave of new research into...
Cancer Prevention Action Week ran through June this year. It carried a blunt message for drinkers across the UK. Most of us still don’t grasp the real link between alcohol and cancer. Decades of research have already settled the science. Public knowledge simply hasn’t caught up. Health experts call that gap a genuine crisis. World...
Sixty years after Yale scientists first turned their instruments on lysergic acid diethylamide, the compound is back under the microscope, and this time the questions are less about hallucinations and more about how the brain learns.
Fewer than 70,000 Americans died from a drug overdose in 2025, the third consecutive annual fall and the longest run of declines in decades. The figure is roughly where it sat in 2019, before the pandemic. The question of why overdose deaths are falling in the US has no single answer, and the answers on...
Cannabis poisoning children is no longer a rare event in New York State. A new report from the New York State Department of Health has found something startling. Emergency department visits linked to cannabis exposure among children aged 0 to 4 have climbed so sharply that cannabis now rivals, and in recent years has overtaken,...
New research published in JAMA Network Open has confirmed what many communities have feared for years. In fact, xylazine fentanyl contamination is not slowing down. Instead, it is spreading into new regions of the United States. This is happening even as the concentration of the drug within each dose appears to be falling. For families,...