How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected drug use and supply? What drugs are causing the most concern today? What are the latest trends in drug production and trafficking?

Find out more in the recording of the online media event from 9 June 2021 on occasion of the launch of the European Drug Report 2021: Trends and Developments. Based on data from 29 countries (EU 27, Turkey and Norway), the report delivers the latest overview of the drug situation in Europe.

Summary

This report provides a technical review of the current body of knowledge regarding new benzodiazepines that are monitored by the EU Early Warning System.

The aims of this report are to strengthen situational awareness of new benzodiazepines in Europe and to help stakeholders prepare for and respond to public health and social threats caused by such substances.

The European Commission announces today the first edition of the Horizon Europe info-days, to take place online from 28 June  to 9 July 2021.

Horizon Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation with a budget of €95.5 billion.

The 10-day event will give the opportunity to prospective applicants, and other stakeholders of EU research and innovation, to receive information and ask questions about the novelties, main funding instruments and processes of Horizon Europe.

The Horizon Europe info-days will address 9 themes, each featuring a programme of exclusive...

The VNGOC together with the UNODC Civil Society Unit will be holding two webinars to present and discuss the World Drug Report 2021, which will be launched on 25th June.
 
VNGOC are looking for civil society speakers wishing to present at these webinars, on how they use the data compiled in the World Drug Report each year and how these data impact their work. 

• The first webinar will be held on 13th July 2021 and will focus on Asia, Oceania and Europe.
• The second webinar will be held on 15th July 2021 and will focus on Africa and the Americas. 

Each webinar will comprise welcome remarks...

Introduction

Analysing communal wastewaters for drugs and their metabolic products in order to estimate their consumption in the community is a developing field, involving scientists working in different research areas, including analytical chemistry, physiology and biochemistry, sewage engineering, spatial epidemiology and statistics, and conventional drug epidemiology.

This page, put together by EMCDDA, presents the findings from studies since 2011. Data from all studies may be explored through an interactive tool, and a detailed an analayis of the findings of the most recent study in 2020...

Source: https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/13745/TD0321143ENN_002.pdf

Summary

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the way we live, with European countries having to introduce unprecedented measures to protect public health. As with all areas of life, drug consumption, related harms and drug markets have been impacted, as have the services established to respond to drug-related problems. During the first weeks of the pandemic, the EMCDDA instigated two rapid assessment studies to identify the initial impact and implications of COVID-19.

Objective: -

• To present results from studies carried out to collect insights from people who use drugs and service providers on how COVID-19 control measures have affected their lives, as well as the drug market 
• To discuss how some of the changes observed are worth becoming a ‘new normal’

Background: In April 2020, in the framework of the EU4Monitoring Drugs (EU4MD) project, two research teams launched a 6-month long cohort study among people who use drugs in Georgia and Ukraine. The aim was to document how the COVID-19 lockdown measures may impact their social-economic status, drug use...

The EMCDDA releases today the third in a series of rapid ‘trendspotter’ studies exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the drug situation and responses to it. Revisiting and reviewing findings from two studies in 2020 on the effects of the pandemic on drug use and services, the report identifies new trends and developments which may have implications for policy and practice.

The report explores the situation in the EU Member States from June 2020 to February 2021, particularly changes in drug markets, patterns of use, harms and drug services, both in the community and in prisons.

The EMCDDA’s...

The journal Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy has published a special edition focussing on Drug experienced young people in contact with the Criminal Justice System.

The collection of papers examines young peoples' experiences of substance use and/or offending and their impression of the support they have received. The research also explores the consequences of restrictive drug policies.

The papers in this collection are based on research from the EU funded EPPIC project (Exchanging Prevention practices on Polydrug use among youth In Criminal justice systems).

This report presents the current status of alcohol consumption, alcohol-attributable harms and the implementation of alcohol control policies in the WHO European Region, using available data from 2010, 2016 and 2019.

A detailed overview is provided of the implementation of alcohol policies described in the 10 action areas of the European Action Plan to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol 2012–2020 (EAPA), including the current status of implementation of the five action areas of the WHO-led SAFER initiative:

1. Strengthen restrictions on alcohol availability;
2. Advance and enforce drink–driving...

This report presents new findings from the ESCAPE (European Syringe Collection and Analysis Project Enterprise) network, based on the chemical analysis of the contents of used syringes across sentinel sites in Europe.

Syringes were collected in 2018 and 2019 from the bins of street automatic injection-kit dispensers and at harm reduction services in eight European cities: Amsterdam, Budapest, Cologne, Helsinki, Lausanne, Oslo, Paris and Vilnius.