A Scoping Review of Home Produced Heroin and Amphetamine Type Stimulant Substitutes: Implications for Prevention, Treatment and Policy

Several home-produced substances such as krokodil and boltushka are prevalent in many Eastern European countries. Anecdotal reports of its use have been circulating in Germany and Norway; however, this has not been confirmed. Its use has also been reported by the media in the USA, although only one confirmed report of its use exists. Home-produced drugs are associated with high levels of morbidity and a number of complex health issues such as the spread of blood borne viruses, gangrene, and internal organ damage. The high incidence of HIV rates amongst people who inject home-produced substances is a public health concern. The resulting physical health consequences of injecting these crude substances are very severe in comparison to heroin or amphetamine acquired in black markets. Due to this fact and the increased mortality associated with these substances, professionals in the area of prevention, treatment, and policy development need to be cognisant of the presentation, harms, and the dangers associated with home-produced substances globally. This scoping review aimed to examine existing literature on the subject of home-produced heroin and amphetamine-type stimulant substitutes. The review discussed the many implications such research may have in the areas of policy and practice. Data were gathered through the use of qualitative secondary resources such as journal articles, reports, reviews, case studies, and media reports. The home production of these substances relies on the utilisation of precursor drugs such as less potent stimulants, tranquillizers, analgesics, and sedatives or natural plant ingredients. The Internet underpins the facilitation of this practice as recipes, and diverted pharmaceutical sales are available widely online, and currently, ease of access to the Internet is evident worldwide. This review highlights the necessity of prevention, education, and also harm reduction related to home-produced drugs and also recommends consistent monitoring of online drug fora, online drug marketplaces, and unregulated pharmacies

Modifying the structure and flow behaviour of aqueous montmorillonite suspensions with surfactant

Colloidal suspensions of plate-like particles undergo a variety of phase transitions. The predicted isotropic/nematic transition is often pre-empted by a sol/gel transition, especially in suspensions of the most commonly used natural swelling clay montmorillonite (MMT). A number of factors, including charge interactions, flexibility and salt concentration, may contribute to this competition. In this study, the effect of surfactant adsorption on suspensions of MMT was studied using rheology, small-angle X-ray scattering, static light scattering and optical microscopy. The addition of a polyetheramine surfactant reduced the moduli of the system and shifted the sol/gel transition to a much higher clay concentration, compared with suspensions of bare clay particles. Yet, scattering data revealed no change in suspension structure on length scales up to around a micrometre. Primary aggregates remain at this length scale and no nematic phase is formed. There is, however, a change in structure at large length scales (of order 20 μm) where light scattering indicates the presence of string-like aggregates that disappear on addition of surfactant. Microscope images of dried suspensions also revealed a string-like structure. The dried strings show strong birefringence and may consist of concentric cylinders, self-assembled from clay sheets.</jats:p

The development of nanoscale morphology in polymer: fullerene photovoltaic blends during solvent casting

The power conversion efficiency in a conjugated polymer-functionalized fullerene bulk heterojunction organic photovoltaic (OPV) device is dependent both on the electronic properties of the constituent materials and on the nanoscale morphology of the active semiconductor layer thin-film. Here we use in situ ellipsometry and grazing incidence X-ray scattering (GI-XS) to study molecular self-organization in poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and [6,6]-phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) blend films in real time, during the drying process as they are cast from solution. We illustrate the evolution of the extinction coefficient from a solution to a solid, semi-crystalline state. We show that once the solvent fraction in the film falls below 50%, the P3HT undergoes rapid crystallization via heterogeneous nucleation; a process that is complete in seconds. We also evidence a rapid, dynamic self-annealing process that reduces the characteristic lamella spacing in the P3HT crystallites. The mechanistic understanding of film-formation demonstrated here is an important component in optimizing deposition processes suitable for large-area OPV manufacture