1. Jamaica Gleaner – ‘Use churches for counselling’. “Churches in Jamaica and, in particular, the Adventist denomination, were called upon to use their facilities to counsel individuals who are in need of someone to relate to as the nation faces tougher economic and social problems. The call came last Sunday from Dr Wendel Abel, head of the department of psychiatry at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI).”

2. Independent Online (South Africa) – Can rehabs cure sex addiction? “A recovering drug and sex addict in Cape Town says fancy rehabilitation centres, like the one British Lord Irwin Laidlaw has booked into, cost a fortune and are a waste of money. Laidlaw is at Montrose Place in Bishopscourt, one of the most exclusive facilities in the country, run by the wealthy Graaff family. Part of his treatment includes attending a sex and love addicts anonymous programme.”

3. Globe and Mail (Canada) – Military drug tests find one in 20 using. “More than one in 20 Canadian soldiers and sailors in non-combat roles tested positive for illicit drug use in random tests conducted on more than 3,000 military personnel from coast to coast. The results provided to The Canadian Press show that over a four-month period, 1,392 sailors in the navy’s Atlantic and Pacific fleets and 1,673 soldiers in the army’s four regions and training branch were subjected to blind drug testing.”

4. Merinews (India) – Teenage drug addiction. “MEET MRINAL from Kanpur. He is 16 years old and has already been to a rehabilitation centre. He started drinking and smoking since he was 13. Meet Manoj and Vijay from Delhi, aged 17. They are famous among their group for throwing big parties with unlimited flow of alcohol and marijuana.”

5. AOL Canada – Feds pony up $10M to battle addiction in Vancouver. “The federal government is putting up $10 million to fund new programs to battle drug addiction in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. However, none of the cash will go to Insite, the controversial supervised safe-injection site that has won praise from Premier Gordon Campbell but drawn fire from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has called it a “second-best strategy at best.”

6. ScienceAlert (Australia) – Receptor may control heroin addiction. “Researchers from the Howard Florey Institute in Melbourne have identified a factor that may contribute towards the development of heroin addiction by manipulating the adenosine A2A receptor, which plays a major role in the brain’s ‘reward pathway’. Using mice specifically bred without the adenosine A2A receptor, Prof Andrew Lawrence and his team showed that these mice had a reduced desire to self-administer morphine; heroin is converted to morphine in the body. The mice also self-administered less morphine compared to control littermates, but did not develop tolerance to specific behavioural effects of morphine.”

7. news.com.au – Ice addicts clog our hospitals. “DOCTORS are warning the health system is not coping with violent ice users. In the publication Australian Medicine, released today, the Australian Medical Association says medical staff are increasingly at risk from psychotic and aggressive methamphetamine (ice) users. AMA national president Rosanna Capolingua said emergency departments were being strained by ice users who were often drunk as well.”

8. United Press International – Prescription drug abuse surging. “Healthcare workers and dishonest patients are filling U.S. streets with potentially addictive prescription medications, officials say. Also contributing to the problem are pharmacy thefts, robberies and burglaries, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.”

9. Thaiindian News – A new poppy variety to check drug abuse. “A poppy plant that is difficult to extract morphine from? That is what scientists at the Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (CIMAP), Lucknow, have developed in order to combat abuse of drugs produced from poppy. The new poppy variety is the first of its kind in the world, claim scientists who have been working on it for the past seven years. “Unlike the original poppy plants, easy extraction of morphine is not possible from the new variety developed at our institute,” Ashutosh K. Shukla, a senior scientist at the institute, told IANS.”

10. TheHeart.org – Marijuana users have increased apoC3, triglycerides. “Heavy, chronic use of marijuana causes increased levels of apolipoprotein C3 (apoC3), which in turn results in a major increase in triglyceride levels, a small study shows [1]. The findings may explain some of the vascular effects of marijuana that have been observed, say Dr Subramaniam Jayanthi (National Institute on Drug Abuse, Baltimore, MD) and colleagues in their paper published online May 13, 2008 in Molecular Psychiatry. Senior author Dr Jean Luc Cadet (National Institute on Drug Abuse) told heartwire: “A lot of people in cardiology have probably not been following the literature on marijuana, as most of it comes from the perspective of the neurologist or neuropsychiatrist. But in researching this topic, we came across a lot of papers suggesting that marijuana has acute cardiovascular effects, and we ourselves published a paper in 2005 showing that heavy marijuana users had increased resistance to brachial flow.”