Overdose Awareness (Yester) Day
The Salvation Army in Australia has been promoting an Overdose Awareness Day. Actually Overdose Awareness Day 2010 was 2 days ago but I’ve never really been a big fan of the whole concept of awareness days anyway.
Concern around overdoses is always a factor when seeing people who abuse substances and the video makes some good points. It’s the combination of multiple drugs that is usually the problem. The role of prescribed or OTC drugs has to be acknowledged. Benzos, anti-depressants and anti-psychotics from the GP can add up to a heady mix. The depressant role of alcohol shouldn’t be under-estimated either and the video only mentions it briefly in the 10th minute.
Of course, if methadone happens to be one of the multiple drugs found in an overdose then you can be certain it will be given star-billing.
BTW – if you are sensitive to punctuation or spelling disorders you need to be warned about the title at around 19 seconds. Maybe Australian practioners [sic] don’t believe in the use of the apostrophe for possessives.
I wonder if you read The Observer yesterday? It ran a special report of “What Portugal’s revoltionary drug laws can teach Britain.” It appears the UK government has approached Portugal’s ministry of health for advice on its drugs programme, although the government remains resistant to decriminalisation.
Have you any thoughts on Portugal’s approach?