The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic and Lockdown on Alcohol Consumption: A Perspective From Hair Analysis.

The increase in stress levels, social confinement, and addiction's physical consequences play an essential role in the proliferation of drug abuse. In this context, the Covid-19 pandemic produced remarkable effects on those individuals prone to addictions, especially to alcohol. Alcohol is linked to multiple dangerous conditions such as social issues, severe medical conditions, and road accidents.

On-site identification of psychoactive drugs by portable Raman spectroscopy during drug-checking service in electronic music events.

Introduction And Aims: Hundreds of new psychoactive substances (NPS) have burst into the marketplace, making both the scientific community and people who use drugs lacking of adequate information about their diffusion and effects. In this scenario, drug-checking services have been recently proposed to assist harm reduction policies and provide a global description of the circulating drugs.

Design And Methods: The results obtained by a portable Raman spectroscopy device on 472 alleged drugs within the first formal implementation of drug checking in Italy, are reported.

Interpretation of group-level factors from a large population dataset in the determination of ethyl glucuronide in hair.

Ethyl glucuronide in hair (HEtG) is the most accredited marker to prove chronic alcohol abuse. In this study, we evaluate the comprehensive results of HEtG determination obtained during four years of activity (2009-2013) in our laboratory (Northwestern Italy) - across a large cohort of subjects (over 20 000 subjects mostly undergoing medical examination for driving re-licensing) - to provide a general perspective on HEtG analysis and dependence on group-level factors (e.g.