Anti drug propaganda or prohibition blowback?

Guardian wrote:[...] spice, the collective name given to various synthetic smoking mixtures making headlines in Russia. On the market for five years, spice has the potential to be deadly.

According to Russian authorities, in recent weeks the spice epidemic has taken 25 lives and led to 700 people seeking medical attention. Hardly a day goes by without a fresh horror story of adolescents dying from the drug. [...]

Guardian wrote:Spice is just the latest horror drug to hit Russia. Several years ago krokodil, a synthetic heroin substitute made from boiling codeine tablets with other ingredients, became popular.

aairfccha wrote:A few years ago, spice was popular in Europe but without those mounting fatalities. Either the suppliers now use far more toxic psychoactive component(s) or this is extremely exaggerated. Neither explanation is exactly an endorsement of Russian drug policy. I mean it's not like black market replacements for known and more or less safe drugs have been more dangerous before... oh wait.

Tenshinai wrote:It is becoming a sadly regular matter for hospitals to take on spice cases, no need for overdosing, still a few cases per month of "almost dying". And that´s just in my country, which isn´t exactly neither the biggest or worst off.

Tenshinai wrote:New versions of spice is currently causing BIG headlines because of its lethal risks and availability.

aairfccha wrote:...I don't see it in the headlines any more.

As of Thursday, 154 cases of HIV have been confirmed since December in southeastern Indiana – nearly all of them in Scott County, which has been at the center of the HIV outbreak tied to needle-sharing among IV drug users. The county typically sees only about five new HIV cases a year, state health officials said.

[...]

A new Indiana law spurred by the local outbreak allows communities to seek state approval to run needle exchanges if they can prove they’re facing an HIV or hepatitis C epidemic fueled by IV drug use.

Scott County is expected to soon ask Indiana’s state health commissioner for permission to operate a year-long needle-exchange program under that law.

[Ed Clere] has been working with people like Myerson to develop a comprehensive plan to reduce harm from drug use by breaking up the state into four areas, and introducing needle exchange programs according to the anticipated risk the area has of attracting a crisis similar to the one in Scott County. While he wants needle exchange to be legal for the whole state, he narrowed the plan because of the governor’s concerns.

Russia’s top Aids expert has lambasted the Kremlin’s increasingly conservative agenda, saying the HIV-Aids epidemic is worsening and at least two million Russians are likely to be infected in about five years.

Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the country’s state Aids centre, said the Kremlin’s policies promoting traditional family values had failed to halt the spread of the deadly virus.

“The last five years of the conservative approach have led to the doubling of the number of HIV-infected people,” he told Agence France-Presse.

“It has not justified itself,” Pokrovsky said, noting that the official number of Russians with HIV has grown to some 930,000 people from around 500,000 in 2010.

The annual report of the UN’s office of drugs and crime, published on Friday, says that the number of legal highs “with a negative health impact” being marketed around the world increased by a further 20% to 541 substances, up to last December.

[...] the substances [...] are being reported in 95 countries around the world, reflecting the global reach of this new illicit industry.

Countries that reported the emergence of new legal high drugs to the UN under its early warning system for the first time last year included Peru, the Cayman Islands, Montenegro and the Seychelles.