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‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia

BACKGROUND: Recent deaths of young Australian music festival attendees from ‘party-drug’ overdoses have sparked debate about the effectiveness of drug policies. Australia is widely lauded for its harm minimisation approach to drugs, and yet, over the last 30 years, it can be argued its policies have...

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Autor principal: Groves, Andrew
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5891912/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29631613
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12954-018-0216-z
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author Groves, Andrew
author_facet Groves, Andrew
author_sort Groves, Andrew
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Recent deaths of young Australian music festival attendees from ‘party-drug’ overdoses have sparked debate about the effectiveness of drug policies. Australia is widely lauded for its harm minimisation approach to drugs, and yet, over the last 30 years, it can be argued its policies have been fragmented, sometimes inconsistent and contradictory. The present article examines the root of this inconsistency, using it as a foundation to advocate for drug policy reform. In keeping with the goals of the National Drug Strategy to promote policy innovation, there is an opportunity to learn from international studies which have shown promising findings in the reduction of party-drug use and its harms through application of pill testing. METHOD: This paper evaluates Australia’s National Drug Strategy and pill testing through a lens of pragmatism, to determine whether there is space for testing practices in contemporary policy. Specifically, the paper analyses current drug policy literature and research studies, examining a range of key drug use indicators, social and political debate and research evidence. RESULTS: The need for policy reform, attitudinal and cultural shifts and development of stronger cross-sectoral partnerships is highlighted, to ensure a rational and logical approach that genuinely tackles drug policy-making and strategy from a broad public health perspective. CONCLUSIONS: Using a theoretical frame of pragmatism and drawing from national and international research evidence, this paper recommends the integration of pill testing into Australia’s harm minimisation strategy.
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spelling pubmed-58919122018-04-11 ‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia Groves, Andrew Harm Reduct J Research BACKGROUND: Recent deaths of young Australian music festival attendees from ‘party-drug’ overdoses have sparked debate about the effectiveness of drug policies. Australia is widely lauded for its harm minimisation approach to drugs, and yet, over the last 30 years, it can be argued its policies have been fragmented, sometimes inconsistent and contradictory. The present article examines the root of this inconsistency, using it as a foundation to advocate for drug policy reform. In keeping with the goals of the National Drug Strategy to promote policy innovation, there is an opportunity to learn from international studies which have shown promising findings in the reduction of party-drug use and its harms through application of pill testing. METHOD: This paper evaluates Australia’s National Drug Strategy and pill testing through a lens of pragmatism, to determine whether there is space for testing practices in contemporary policy. Specifically, the paper analyses current drug policy literature and research studies, examining a range of key drug use indicators, social and political debate and research evidence. RESULTS: The need for policy reform, attitudinal and cultural shifts and development of stronger cross-sectoral partnerships is highlighted, to ensure a rational and logical approach that genuinely tackles drug policy-making and strategy from a broad public health perspective. CONCLUSIONS: Using a theoretical frame of pragmatism and drawing from national and international research evidence, this paper recommends the integration of pill testing into Australia’s harm minimisation strategy. BioMed Central 2018-04-10 /pmc/articles/PMC5891912/ /pubmed/29631613 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12954-018-0216-z Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Groves, Andrew
‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia
title ‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia
title_full ‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia
title_fullStr ‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia
title_full_unstemmed ‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia
title_short ‘Worth the test?’ Pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in Australia
title_sort ‘worth the test?’ pragmatism, pill testing and drug policy in australia
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5891912/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29631613
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12954-018-0216-z
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