The July 2025 issue features an editorial on gender differences in alcohol research, with a focus on how men and women are studied in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian research in this issue focussed on: psychological distress trajectories in residential alcohol and other drug treatment; service provider perspectives on implementing telehealth for alcohol and other drug counselling as a health service innovation; understanding drug and alcohol staff perspectives on the barriers and facilitators to drug checking; clinicians' perspectives on cannabis use and cannabis treatment in clients undertaking opioid dependence treatment; the prevalence and correlates of self-reported cannabis use for medicinal, dual and recreational motives; e-cigarette use among gender and sexuality diverse (LGBTQA+) adolescents; patterns of acute gamma-hydroxybutyrate harms requiring ambulance attendance; changes in drug-induced hospitalisations and deaths during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; contents and time-course of falsified alprazolam detections in New South Wales; exploring socio-demographic characteristics of caregivers who indicated a child was substantially affected by others' drinking; the acceptability of ‘sober curious’ tools for alcohol reduction among midlife women; estimating the prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder; supervised short-acting injectable opioid treatment; assessing the processes and experiences of using and implementing a routine data collection system at two Aboriginal alcohol and other drug residential services located in rural Queensland; exploring the views of service providers about delivering drug- and alcohol-related health services to Aboriginal people in rural New South Wales; young adults' perspectives on the appeal and influence of ‘better for you’ alcohol products; and a letter updating a previous paper on Australian attitudes towards supervised injecting facilities based on 2022/23 National Drug Strategy Household Survey data.
Research from New Zealand addressed vaping cessation strategies and triggers for relapse amongst people who have vaped and a scoping review on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and the caring and financial burden to caregivers.
International research included papers from Canada on applying a modified version of the prediction of alcohol withdrawal severity scale in a community withdrawal management setting; defining terminology and outcome measures for evaluating overdose response technology; changes in the sex/gender gap in cannabis; and susceptibility to hepatitis B virus infection among people who inject drugs. Papers from America focus on alcohol use disparities among transgender and nonbinary adults; alcohol use in the early postpartum period; and fentanyl polysubstance use patterns and their associations with hepatitis C virus, skin and soft tissue infections, and non-fatal overdose among people who inject drugs. European research looked at parental alcohol problems and lack of adult support during childhood; estimating the prevalence and correlates of problematic alcohol use among patients treated for illicit substance disorder in France; and the Portuguese validated versions of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test.
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Cannabis legalisation and its impact on access, use and public perceptions
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