Drug Checking - From guerrilla to government agent: the full spectrum of drug checking services

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Drug Checking - From guerrilla to government agent: the full spectrum of drug checking services

12 January 2023

Guest Editors: Nicolas Van der Linden, Raoul Pieter Joost Koning, Daan van der Gouwe, Mireia Ventura, Fiona Measham

Introduction - Guest editorial

The aim of the special issue is twofold. On the one hand, it capitalises on the momentum generated by the growing scientific and political interest in drug checking to present some of the latest insights and models of drug checking to a diverse audience of academics, policymakers and professionals. On the other hand, it explores some of the limitations of the scientific literature to date (for recent reviews, see Giulini et al., 2022; Maghsoudi et al., 2021; Palamar et al., 2021), which has tended to focus on micro-level variables (e.g. evaluations of technologies or individual behavioural change; e.g. Harper et al., 2017), to the neglect of variables located at the meso-level (including impact at community or event level; but see, e.g. Wallace et al., 2021), or macro-level analyses (such as the effects of drug checking on international drug markets or public health indicators such as national mortality and morbidity) [1]. Additionally, to date, the vast majority of studies on drug checking have been carried out in the Western European context (Maghsoudi et al., 2021) and therefore additional efforts were made by the guest editorial team to directly support submissions to this special issue from other parts of the world such as Latin America, Eastern Europe and Oceania.

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