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Published: 06 August 2026

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A new book argues that tobacco companies wrote the original addictive drug industry playbook. It claims the marijuana industry has quietly copied that playbook, strategy for strategy. The book is Marketing Pleasure: How Addictive Drug Industries Tell Big Lies to Make Big Profits, by Sue Rusche. Her argument is simple. Every commercial industry built on an addictive substance follows the same script. The public, she writes, keeps mistaking that script for genuine debate.

A Prevention Leader, Not an Outside Critic
Rusche spent forty six years running National Families in Action. The organisation helped lead the parent movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her prologue is personal. She describes losing her father to a heart attack, and later her mother and brother to smoking related illness. At the same time, she worked to reduce youth marijuana use with a cigarette in her hand. By her own account, the contradiction eventually became impossible to ignore. That personal history sits behind the book’s central claim. Nicotine, alcohol, marijuana and opioids are not separate problems. They are variations on one commercial pattern.

Denying Harm to Protect Profit
The book calls this pattern biological capture. It is the process by which an industry must exploit human biology to keep people buying its product. Rusche states it plainly. Once a government legalises a drug for medical use, the industry making it moves to deny harm and increase use. The goal is protecting shareholders. Public health scientists move in the opposite direction. They work to identify harm and reduce use. She backs this with a stark comparison. Tobacco kills around 480,000 Americans a year. Alcohol kills around 178,000. Opioids have killed more than a million since the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin in 1995. Understanding the profit motive common to all four, she argues, is the key. It shifts responsibility from the people harmed to the industries doing the harming.

Same Tactics, New Drug
Rusche draws direct parallels between the drug industry marketing tactics tobacco once used and what marijuana companies do today. She points to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which forced the Joe Camel campaign off a Times Square billboard. The book then describes a marijuana company floating a giant lit joint over Broadway, timed to the 4/20 cannabis holiday. An industry spokesperson defended the stunt to trade press as necessary to normalise the plant. Rusche treats that line as an admission rather than a defence.
A similar echo shows up in vaping. The founders who later built Juul first sold a marijuana vaporiser called Pax. They moved half a million units at nearly 250 dollars each before Juul ever launched. Rusche cites research showing marijuana vaping rose sevenfold among American and Canadian teenagers between 2013 and 2020. That rise happened in the same markets the company targeted.

Who Actually Led Legalisation
One of the book’s sharper claims concerns who actually drove marijuana legalisation. Rusche states it was not scientists or doctors. Instead, she names a Santa Monica public relations firm, financed by three billionaires. A group that later became the leading legalisation advocacy organisation hired that firm. It shaped the ballot initiatives that first legalised marijuana for medical use in California. The same model then spread to other states, part of the drug industry marketing tactics Rusche describes in the book. Some of those campaigns, she notes, claimed marijuana could treat cancer. She contrasts that claim with newer research pointing the other way. That research treats marijuana as a possible contributing factor in some cancers, rather than a cure.
Rusche also flags a practical consequence of loosely worded legalisation laws. New York permits households to grow up to five pounds of marijuana. By her own arithmetic, an ounce produces roughly sixty joints. Five pounds works out to around 4,800 joints from a single household crop, far beyond anything resembling personal use.

Proof That Demand Reduction Works
The book is not only a warning. Rusche uses her own organisation’s history as evidence that prevention works when people take it seriously. National survey data she cites tells a striking story. Adolescent lifetime marijuana use fell from 31 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 1992, nearly a two thirds drop. Daily use among high school seniors fell from around 11 percent to under 2 percent over the same period. That shift, she argues, followed directly from parents organising and refusing industry framing. They demanded that policy protect children, not commercial interests. She believes the same template is available today. The addictive drug industry playbook, she suggests, only wins when nobody names it.

Where to Find It
Marketing Pleasure is available now. Rusche has structured its proceeds to support the cause the book argues for. Once the book covers production costs, seventy five percent of proceeds will go to the University of California, San Francisco. That university is digitising National Families in Action’s archive of drug industry research. The remaining share goes to Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions. It also supports Georgians for Responsible Marijuana Policy. For anyone working in prevention, treatment or public health policy, that is worth noting. It is a rare case of a book’s business model matching its argument.

Source: Marketing Pleasure: How Addictive Drug Industries Tell Big Lies to Make Big Profits (WRD News)

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Published: 06 August 2026

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Every alert issued by Australia’s drug early warning networks starts with the same uncomfortable fact. Someone has already taken a substance nobody could be certain about. New research published in the International Journal of Drug Policy examines how these networks operate. It looks at the state based systems that predate them, and at the national Prompt Response Network that now links practitioners across the country. The study offers a useful window into how these networks work. It also underscores something no warning system, however fast, can change. The surest protection against an unpredictable drug supply is never encountering it at all.
The study was led by researchers at the National Centre for Clinical Research on Emerging Drugs. It drew on twenty interviews with forensic toxicologists, government health officials, police, laboratory scientists and representatives of community organisations. Together they described a system built on relationships as much as on technology. Those relationships take years to form, and only moments to damage.
Why Detection Cannot Replace Prevention
Even the researchers behind the study acknowledged the limits of a reactive system. Practitioners told them their work sits downstream of drugs already circulating. Warnings are issued only after a substance has caused concern somewhere in the community. That timing gap matters. However well a network coordinates, it cannot undo an exposure that has already happened.This is why detection, however sophisticated, belongs alongside prevention rather than in place of it. An unregulated drug supply changes constantly. Strength, purity and composition are impossible for anyone to verify in advance, including the person taking the substance. No monitoring network can promise otherwise. The only response with no margin for error is not using an unpredictable substance in the first place. Building that understanding within communities before exposure occurs is arguably the harder work. It may also be the more valuable one.
What Drug Early Warning Networks Actually Do
Drug early warning networks exist to spot dangerous or unexpected substances circulating in the community. In Australia, this work happens mostly at state and territory level. It has been supported since 2018 by a national body called the Prompt Response Network. That network now brings together roughly three hundred people across ninety organisations, spanning every jurisdiction.
Members share information gathered from hospital emergency departments, forensic laboratories, seized drug samples and other monitoring sources. When something concerning turns up, agencies work to confirm what they are seeing and communicate the risk. It is necessary work. It is not, on its own, an answer to why people encounter unregulated drugs in the first place.
Twenty Practitioners, One Consistent Message
Researchers approached thirty six practitioners and ultimately interviewed twenty. Each spoke for sixty to ninety minutes about their experience of both their local network and the national Prompt Response Network. The sample deliberately spanned disciplines, from lab based scientists to frontline community workers. This meant the findings reflect a genuinely mixed picture, rather than a single professional viewpoint.
It is worth noting what that mixed picture did not include. None of the twenty roles represented sat specifically within prevention education. That is not a criticism of the study, which set out to examine network collaboration rather than prevention. It does illustrate where Australia currently concentrates its drug related expertise. Most of it sits in detecting and responding to a market that already exists, rather than in reducing how many people enter it.
A clear pattern emerged among those interviewed. Collaboration within these drug alert networks tends to build in stages. It moves from trust, to shared awareness, to a faster and more coordinated response when something goes wrong. Each stage feeds the next. Practitioners described the whole process as cyclical, though every turn of that cycle still starts after a substance is already circulating.
Why Trust Comes First in Drug Early Warning Networks
Before any information gets shared, practitioners said they needed confidence that fellow network members would handle it responsibly. One forensic toxicologist described hoping the Prompt Response Network would help him trust contacts interstate the way he already trusted colleagues in his own state. He said the network had ultimately achieved that. It is a real achievement, and one worth taking seriously: a functioning response system depends on people who will pick up the phone for each other under pressure.
It is also worth asking who gets invited to build that trust in the first place. The practitioners describing this cycle of growing confidence were, almost without exception, people working in detection and response — toxicologists, public health officials, police, drug checking services. Prevention education workers were not among the twenty interviewed, and nothing in the study suggests they hold a defined place in the network’s trust-building either. A network can become extraordinarily good at trusting itself while still having no formal relationship with the people whose job is stopping exposure before it starts.
That confidence was not automatic even among those who were included. Interviewees pointed to real tensions behind the scenes: competition for scarce funding, clashing professional opinions and, occasionally, uncomfortable working relationships between individuals or organisations. One drug checking service representative described how a small field with limited funding “lands there being competition,” and how dismissive comments about people who use drugs could sour a working relationship for years afterward. Several noted that trust grew only where members felt their particular expertise was respected, whether clinical, forensic, lived experience or operational, rather than overridden by another discipline’s assumptions.
The same funding pressures that strain trust inside these networks reach further than the interviews cover. Government figures cited in the study show 64 per cent of drug policy spending goes to law enforcement, against 1.6 per cent for harm reduction. Detection and response programmes, the study notes, are themselves often funded on short fixed terms rather than ongoing arrangements. Prevention education, sitting outside both categories, barely features in that budget picture at all. A network can only build trust among the people who are resourced enough to be in the room.
Formal agreements mattered too. Clear terms of reference, data handling rules and expectations around confidentiality gave practitioners a rationale for sharing sensitive information in the first place. Without that clarity, several participants said, goodwill alone would not be enough. A national drug early warning network needs more than good intentions to last. But the agreements and terms of reference described in the study all point one direction: toward faster, more reliable detection and response. None of them describe a formal channel for turning what the network learns into prevention education that reaches people before a substance is ever in circulation.
From Shared Information to Coordinated Response
As trust grew, practitioners described exchanging increasingly detailed information, including emerging detection techniques and early signals of concerning substances. Researchers termed this situational awareness: a shared, up to date picture of what is moving through the illicit drug supply.
That awareness has a cost attached to it that is easy to lose in the account of how well the system responded. One police representative described a case in which two people overdosed on the same batch; one died, and one survived. Only after that loss did the coordination the study highlights actually begin — officers and hospital toxicologists working together, navigating separate legal constraints, to get information to the public quickly. She attributed that speed to years of relationship-building within her jurisdiction’s network. It is a genuine strength of the system, and it is also, unavoidably, a story that starts with a death. No amount of coordination afterward changes when the network’s involvement began. That timing gap is the case for prevention in miniature: everything the network did well here happened after the point where prevention would have mattered most.
Where Australia’s Drug Early Warning Networks Still Fall Short
Despite these strengths, the study identified a clear gap. Most information sharing within the national network remains informal and reactive, relying on personal relationships rather than binding agreements. Several practitioners, including one senior public health official, suggested a formal memorandum between agencies would help.
The researchers noted that Australia’s drug policy settings compound this challenge. Funding is split across supply, demand and other responses. Programmes underpinning early warning work are frequently funded on short fixed terms rather than ongoing arrangements. Much of the public conversation about strengthening these systems centres on faster detection and data sharing. Comparatively little attention goes to how findings from this work could feed into prevention education, long before a substance ever reaches a community.
The authors concluded that formalising data sharing arrangements would mark a natural next stage of maturity for these drug monitoring networks. That step should preserve the trust already built. It is a reasonable goal for a monitoring system. But the deeper lesson of an unpredictable and fast changing illicit drug market is not only that Australia needs faster warnings. It is that avoiding that market altogether remains the one response that no delay, and no data gap, can ever undermine.
(Source: WRD NEWS ScienceDirect)

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Published: 30 July 2026

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Childhoods marked by neglect, abuse or upheaval leave marks that can last well beyond the years they happened. A large new review of research confirms just how far those marks can reach. It links adverse childhood experiences to some of the most serious outcomes a young person can face, including death by suicide. Substance use sits close to the centre of this picture. One factor stands out as offering real protection: a stable and consistent family life.

What the Evidence Shows About Adverse Childhood Experiences

Published in JAMA Network Open, the review pulled together findings from 68 studies and 90 reports. It covered young people aged 24 and under, comparing those who died by suicide with peers who did not. Dr Geoffroy at McGill University in Canada led the analysis, which the authors describe as the most comprehensive of its kind to date.

The findings were stark. Young people who had experienced maltreatment faced roughly four times the odds of dying by suicide compared with those who had not. Youths removed from their family home carried similarly elevated risk. So did those who had been through the youth justice system, or whose parents had faced justice system involvement themselves. Lower educational attainment carried nearly three times the odds of suicide.

Taken together, the researchers describe childhood adversity as one half of a picture. The other half is psychiatric vulnerability, and the two are often closely intertwined.

How Adverse Childhood Experiences Fuel Substance Use

Among the clearest threads running through the research is substance use. Young people with a history of substance use faced more than seven times the odds of dying by suicide. Alcohol misuse carried around five times the odds. Drug use carried around six times the odds, figures the authors note were remarkably consistent across the studies reviewed.

Prior self-harm carried some of the highest odds of any single factor in the review, at fourteen times higher. Serious mental illness, including schizophrenia and mood disorders, followed close behind. Substance use rarely sits alone in a young person’s life. It tends to follow, or run alongside, the same childhood adversity that raises the risk of suicide in the first place. Early exposure to alcohol and drugs is a marker worth taking seriously, not a separate or later stage problem.

This is why prevention matters so much. Delaying and reducing early substance use, rather than managing it once established, remains one of the clearest levers available to protect young people. Waiting until use has become a fixed pattern narrows the options for changing course.

Family Stability as the Strongest Protection

Protective factors were studied far less often than risk factors. Where they were, one signal came through clearly. Young people living with both parents had close to half the odds of dying by suicide compared with those who did not. Having married parents carried a similar protective association.

The authors are careful to note that living arrangement and marital status are imperfect measures. What they most likely capture is something harder to quantify: consistency, presence and a sense of belonging. For prevention efforts, the message is nonetheless clear. Strengthening family bonds and supporting parents through difficulty is not a peripheral concern. It sits at the heart of protecting young people from some of the worst outcomes linked to adverse childhood experiences.

Turning the Evidence Into Prevention

Suicide remains among the leading causes of death for people aged 10 to 24 worldwide. The researchers behind this review are clear that reversing that trend means acting earlier. Reducing exposure to maltreatment and instability sits upstream of the crises this research documents. So does supporting families under strain, and treating early substance use as an urgent warning sign rather than a private matter.

Adverse childhood experiences do not determine a young person’s future on their own. But where they combine with early substance use and an absence of family stability, the risks compound. Recognising that pattern, and acting on it early, gives young people the best chance of a different outcome.

(Source: jamanetwork)

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Published: 22 July 2026

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Drug checking services have quietly become one of the most accepted tools in how society now handles illegal drug use. A sample goes in. A result comes out. Somewhere in that exchange, a seller learns whether they cut the batch correctly, and a buyer learns whether tonight’s supply is roughly what it claims to be. It sounds sensible. It sounds careful. Nobody asks what all that careful information actually serves.

What Drug Checking Services Actually Tell You

These testing tools genuinely impress. Fourier transform infrared spectrometers scan a sample and match it against a library of known substances. British Columbia’s storefront testing programme now runs a paper spray mass spectrometer, a machine that can detect concentrations as fine as 0.04 per cent across 107 different drugs. Fentanyl test strips and benzodiazepine test strips fill in the gaps. Some services even accept samples by mail, so a person never has to walk through the door at all.

None of this is trivial science. But notice what it measures. It measures purity. It measures potency. It even measures contamination. It never set out to measure whether anyone should take the drug in the first place. Researchers in Victoria have reported that the market has stabilised its average opioid potency at around ten per cent. That market is not moving toward safety. It has simply learned to sustain itself more efficiently and hand out better instructions along the way.

The Seller Becomes an “Information Node”

One of the more revealing moves in recent harm reduction research is linguistic. Researchers no longer call them sellers. They become, in the words of one Canadian study, “main nodes of information” in the community. Researchers treat them as trusted intermediaries who might one day carry scientific knowledge back through informal networks. It is a generous framing. It is also a convenient one, and it is easy to see why drug checking services need it: the whole model depends on sellers walking through the door voluntarily.

A person who sells an illegal, often lethal substance for profit is still doing exactly that. It makes no difference how many test strips sit on the counter behind them. Recasting that role as a public health asset does something quiet to the moral picture. It shifts the seller from someone the community needs protection from into someone the system now works with. Ask a family that lost someone after a dealer added an unlisted sedative to the batch whether that reframing feels like progress.

A Safer Experience Is Not a Smaller Market

Here is the part that drug testing services rarely say out loud. Better information about a drug’s contents improves the experience of taking it. It does very little to reduce the demand for taking it at all. A buyer who trusts the result feels more confident walking away, not less. A seller who confirms the cut is right walks away with quality assurance for an illegal product.

A 2018 evaluation of one of Vancouver’s drug checking services found that just one per cent of clients at a supervised injection facility used the fentanyl test strip service, even though roughly eighty per cent of the drugs tested came back positive for fentanyl (Karamouzian et al., 2018). Wide contamination and low uptake sat side by side. That gap says something. Availability does not change behaviour anywhere near as much as its advocates assume.

This is not an argument that fewer people will die of poisoning tomorrow because a service caught a batch of unlisted nitazenes today. They probably will. The entire apparatus, however well meant, manages the supply of drug use. It never set out to shrink the appetite for it. Fewer surprises is not the same goal as fewer users.

“It Makes Them Feel Good” Is Not a Medical Explanation

Somewhere in the research that underpins this sector sits an unusually honest line. People use drugs, one researcher put it plainly, because it makes them feel good. That sentence deserves a straight reading, not a quick skim past it. In most of the cases this research describes, people are not medicating their own untreated trauma. Drugs are not the only tool available to them for that. This is recreational use. People choose it for the sensation it produces, and a scientific system now tests it and quietly approves the pursuit.

Call it what it is. A lab report does not turn hedonism into medicine. Treating that pursuit as neutral, no different to insulin dosing, changes what prevention now has to compete with. That is a system that has already made peace with the behaviour continuing indefinitely. None of this is a reason to scrap drug checking services outright, but it is a reason to stop pretending they sit outside the argument about right and wrong.

What the Evidence on Drug Checking Services Shows

None of this dismisses the data. Drug checking services do have a real evidence base behind them for reducing fatal overdoses, and the researchers behind them are not cynics chasing funding. Many come from lived experience and are trying, in good faith, to keep people alive inside a market that criminalisation has made chaotic and unpredictable. Safety and prevention are not always opposites, and a service that stops one preventable death has done something real.

The disagreement is not about whether these services save lives in the short term. It is about what harm reduction policy builds and normalises around them in the long term. It is about whether an approach that manages risk closes the door on an approach that reduces use altogether. We have raised a generation to believe that getting high safely is the ceiling of what prevention can offer. That generation deserves better. A higher ceiling was always possible.

(Source:  WRD News)