A new UK drug strategy evaluation has handed the government a mixed report card. The extra money was welcome and the aims have wide support. Yet the treatment system is not world class, and a whole system approach to alcohol and other drugs has not arrived. The findings come from RAND Europe. Researchers Lucy Strang...
The Princess of Wales got her hands dirty on 24 September, joining people in recovery at a gardening session in Southend, Essex. She was marking Addiction Awareness Week in her role as patron of the Forward Trust. Kate turned down the offer of gardening gloves and helped to pot plants at Garon Park. When asked...
Australian drug trends 2026 tell a familiar story. Methamphetamine and heroin remain easy to buy, people keep using them for years, and the road out of addiction is still blocked for many who want to take it. The numbers come from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW Sydney. Its 2026 Illicit Drug...
Residential rehab in Scotland has changed a great deal since the postcode lottery days, according to a major evaluation published by Public Health Scotland on 15 September 2026. The synthesis report covers five years of the Scottish Government’s Residential Rehabilitation programme. Its headline result is one the sector has waited a long time to see....
A new integrated solution for drug and alcohol abstinence monitoring has launched in the UK, pairing DrugPatch’s wearable drug testing patch with SCRAM Remote Breath’s portable alcohol monitoring. Why Snapshot Testing Falls Short Urine screens, oral fluid tests and occasional breathalysers all share the same weakness: they only capture a moment in time. A missed...
Collegiate recovery programs were built for one specific group: students who identify as being in recovery and want support maintaining changes they’ve already made to their relationship with substances. For most of their history, that meant abstinence, often through frameworks like 12-step programs. That definition is now being tested. Ahmed Hosni, Assistant Director of the...
The American Society of Addiction Medicine recently flagged several pieces of research. Here are three, checked directly against the original study text, and the clearest thread running through them is that stimulant overdose deaths are moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the overdose crisis. 1. Stimulant Overdose Deaths Kept Rising in 2024,...
Sporting Culture, Addiction and the Toxic Game of addiction. For years, Paddy Ryder’s addictions did not begin with a single catastrophic choice. They grew through a thousand smaller decisions: the drink after the game, the binge rationalised as “normal”, the belief he could still function, and the conviction that help was for someone else. His...
New figures show Glasgow addiction services staffing sat more than 22 full time posts below budget last year. The shortfall has added to concern over the strength of the city’s frontline recovery support. Freedom of information data obtained by The Herald reveals the scale of the gap. Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership finished...
A newly published pilot study has found that a peer delivered violence prevention program helped women in substance use treatment build protective skills and experience a marked drop in intimate partner violence within just three months. The program, known as THRIVE (The Healthy Relationships and Interpersonal Violence Education program), was developed by researchers at Clemson...