Controlled to uncontrolled drug use: The impact of Covid-19 among young people in the UK.

The Covid-19 pandemic lockdown had a profound impact on British young adults' drug using lives. Overnight, participants found themselves unable to access the protective mechanisms, specifically peer groups and routines on which they had come to rely to control and maintain pleasure with their drug use. The resulting analysis from online semi-structured qualitative interviews with 14 young people exposes a trend in drug use patterns.

Substance use policy and practice in the COVID-19 pandemic: Learning from early pandemic responses through internationally comparative field data.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented natural experiment in drug policy, treatment delivery, and harm reduction strategies by exposing wide variation in public health infrastructures and social safety nets around the world. Using qualitative data including ethnographic methods, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with people who use drugs (PWUD) and Delphi-method with experts from field sites spanning 13 different countries, this paper compares national responses to substance use during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Field data was collected by the Substance Use x COVID-19 (SU x COVID) Data Collaborative, an international network of social scientists, public health scientists, and community health practitioners convened to identify and contextualise health service delivery models and social protections that influence the health and wellbeing of PWUD during COVID-19.

Are psychotic-like experiences related to a discontinuation of cannabis consumption in young adults?

Objective: To assess changes in cannabis use in young adults as a function of psychotic-like experiences.

Method: Participants were initially recruited at age 14 in high schools for the longitudinal IMAGEN study. All measures presented here were assessed at follow-ups at age 19 and at age 22, respectively.

Harm Reduction From Below: On Sharing and Caring in Drug Use.

This article focuses on how recreational drug users in the Netherlands and in online communities navigate the risks and reduce the harms they associate with psychoactive drug use. To do so, we examined the protective practices they invent, use, and share with their immediate peers and with larger drug experimenting communities online. The labor involved in protective practices and that which ultimately informs follows three interrelated trajectories: (1) the handling and sharing of drugs to facilitate drug use, (2) creating pleasant and friendly spaces that we highlight under the practices of , and (3) the seeking and sharing of information in practices to .