OTC codeine rescheduling deferral at odds with rising harmful opioid misuse

The recent TGA decision to defer the rescheduling of codeine-containing OTC medications conflicts with rising codeine analgesics misuse, its devastating consequences and the recognition that opioid misuse is a public health concern. Further, the TGA’s own acknowledgement of low dose codeine efficacy, genetic variances in codeine metabolism and established misuse side-effects from combination OTC products, gives little…

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$1 million granted to research a solution to break Australia’s growing ice addiction – December 1, 2015

In a bid to tackle the growing public health issue of amphetamine addiction, The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has awarded more than $1 million to conduct the nation’s largest clinical trial of medical treatment for “ice” addiction to date. The urgency of this research stems from what has been described this year, as an ice…

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Andrea, 51 – Active mother-to-one & breast cancer survivor

Happily married mother to an adolescent daughter, Andrea, 51, Melbourne, leads a healthy lifestyle, playing netball, coaching basketball, and dragon boat racing with 20 fellow team paddlers. Her lifestyle nowadays however, is a far cry from 12 years ago, when she was living in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and four year old daughter, when…

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