Tag: drugs

Reading of the Week: Can We Reduce Suicide in the Emergency Department Population? Also, Drugs & Crime

May 11, 2017 /

From the Editor

He presents to the Emergency Department a few days after a suicide attempt. What can we do to help keep this man safe today – and moving forward?

Emergency Departments: noisy, busy, and an opportunity for suicide prevention?

It’s a scenario that repeats itself at EDs across the country with regularity. This week, in our first selection, we consider a new JAMA Psychiatry paper that has just been published looking at suicide prevention in the ED population. The authors claim “this study is the largest suicide intervention trial ever conducted in the United States,” and they show that, with an intervention, they can reduce suicides and suicide attempts.

And, in the other selection, we look at a short New York Times essay in which economist Austin Frakt argues that substance programs pay for themselves in crime reduction.

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Reading of the Week: Drugs, Drugs, Drugs – Vermont Tries To Break The Addiction Cycle, and Minister Philpott Weighs In On Opioids

January 19, 2017 /

From the Editor

“I don’t think that we can sit back and be complacent for one moment,” said Toronto Mayor John Tory in a media interview in which he called for an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to dealing with opioids.

It’s a comment on our times when the mayor of Canada’s largest city is focused on the use (and abuse) of opioids. And so are others – opioid addiction has sparked conversations across North America, from big city Canada to rural America. In 2014, Peter Shumlin, governor of the second smallest state in the U.S., devoted his annual address to the opioid problem striking “every corner” of Vermont.

Vermont: hills, lakes, opioids

How we deal with opioids is complicated, touching on everything from drug regulation to clinician education. But the legal response is particularly interesting – the intersection of the law, addiction, and public policy. And so, in this Reading, we look at the Green Mountain State. In a Wall Street Journal essay, reporters Jennifer Levitz and Scott Calvert discuss Vermont’s experimentation with mandatory treatment for minor drug-related crimes – and the struggles of a young user.

We also consider federal Minister of Health Jane Philpott’s recent essay on the opioid issue, which ran in The Globe and Mail last week. She calls on us to address the roots of the issue – which “are tangled and deep.”

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