policy, politics

The ongoing overdose and drug toxicity crisis in North America has contributed momentum to the emergence of safer supply prescribing and programs in Canada as a means of providing an alternative to the highly volatile unregulated drug supply. The implementation and scale-up of safer supply have been met with a vocal reaction on the part of news media commentators, conservative politicians, recovery industry representatives, and some prominent addiction medicine physicians. This reaction has largely converged around several narratives, based on unsubstantiated claims and anecdotal evidence, alleging that safer supply programs are generating a "new opioid epidemic", reflecting an emerging alignment among key institutional and political actors...

BACKGROUND: Alcohol problems are increasing across the world and becoming more complex. Limitations to international evidence and practice mean that the screening and brief intervention paradigm forged in the 1980s is no longer fit for the purpose of informing how conversations about alcohol should take place in healthcare and other services. A new paradigm for brief interventions has been called for. BRIEF INTERVENTIONS 2.0: We must start with a re-appraisal of the roles of alcohol in society now and the damage it does to individual and population health...

The sea crossing from Libya to Italy is one of the world's most dangerous and politically contentious migration routes, and yet over half a million people have attempted the crossing since 2014. Leveraging data on aggregate migration flows and individual migration incidents, we estimate how migrants and smugglers have reacted to changes in the border enforcement regime, namely the rise in interceptions by the Libyan Coast Guard starting in 2017 and the corresponding decrease in the probability of rescue to Europe...

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to discover the prevalence of school nutrition state legislation and to identify the correlates of enactment. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: An online legislative database, Legiscan, was used to collect bills related to school nutrition from the US from 2010 to 2019. Bills were coded and compiled into a study database with state-level dietary variables (obesity prevalence, fruit, and vegetable intake, sugar-sweetened beverage consumption), community variables (percent White, poverty), and bill-characteristic variables (party affiliation in legislature, strength of language, party of governor, school gardens, vegetable intake, and other salient variables)...

Entering the political arena isn't for everyone, but here the second - and currently only - vet to sit in the House of Lords, Lord Trees, and his parliamentary intern, discuss why contributing to parliamentary business is an exciting and stimulating end and start to their respective careers.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

France is at a crossroads, facing environmental and social challenges that are profoundly altering its society. Yet, the French government keeps prioritizing short-term political gains over long-term evidence-based planning for major transitions that France, like most countries, will undergo over the next 20 years. There is an urgent need for France to implement long-term science-informed policy-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed additional and specific challenges on the lives and wellbeing of informal unpaid carers. Addressing an important gap in the existing literature, this systematic review (prospectively registered with PROSPERO CRD42022376012) synthesises and evaluates the quantitative evidence examining the association between unpaid caregiving and mental health (compared to non-caring), during the pandemic. Five databases were searched (Medline, PsycInfo, EMBASE, Scopus, Web of Science) from Jan 1, 2020, to March 1, 2023...

INTRODUCTION: The implementation of tobacco control policies has been a neglected topic in tobacco research. A comprehensive Tobacco Action Plan including plain packaging, point-of-sale display ban, a ban on characterizing flavours (in products other than cigarettes), a strengthening of the promotion and marketing ban, a ban on the sale of novel nicotine products to minors, smoke-and nicotine-free-school hours in all schools with minors, and a significant increase in tobacco tax, was adopted in Denmark in 2019...

OBJECTIVE: This paper identifies the multiple adversities and trauma experienced by children who are detained after seeking asylum. A conceptual framework identifies the specific impact of immigration detention on the psychosocial development and mental health of refugee children that can inform policy and prevent additional migration-related trauma. METHOD: The paper draws on international evidence about the impact of childhood adversity, challenges faced by all displaced children, and the additional negative consequences of immigration detention...

BACKGROUND: Green education is an essential precursor to promoting long-term sustainable practices and fostering environmentally conscious behaviours, especially among the younger generations. Such education equips individuals with the knowledge, awareness, and experiences necessary for green behavioural shifts, empowering them to engage actively in sustainable practices in the long run, which is essential for ensuring environmental sustainability. However, green education practices and policies vary among the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) owing to different levels of socioeconomic development, national priorities, and capacities of each member state...

BACKGROUND: Planetary health equity (PHE) is defined here as equitable good health in a stable Earth system. PHE is arguably in crisis. Human-made climate change is damaging global populations through hotter temperatures, wildfires, and more severe and frequent storms, flooding, and landslides. A tsunami of health inequities will result from this, as pre-existing health conditions and inequities in living and working conditions ensure that socially disadvantaged groups and people in low-income and middle-income countries are disproportionately affected by climate change...

BACKGROUND: In May 2020, news outlets reported misinformation about the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) related to COVID-19. Correcting misinformation about outbreaks and politics is particularly challenging. Affective belief echoes continue to influence audiences even after successful correction. Narrative and emotional flow scholarship suggest that a narrative corrective with a positive ending could reduce belief echoes. Therefore, this study investigated the efficacy of a narrative corrective with a relief ending for correcting misinformation about the CDC...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

INTRODUCTION: Improving sustainable transportation options will help cities tackle growing challenges related to population health, congestion, climate change and inequity. Interventions supporting active transportation face many practical and political hurdles. Implementation science aims to understand how interventions or policies arise, how they can be translated to new contexts or scales and who benefits. Sustainable transportation interventions are complex, and existing implementation science frameworks may not be suitable...

Although a rich academic literature examines the use of fake news by foreign actors for political manipulation, there is limited research on potential foreign intervention in capital markets. To address this gap, we construct a comprehensive database of (negative) fake news regarding U.S. firms by scraping prominent fact-checking sites. We identify the accounts that spread the news on Twitter (now X) and use machine-learning techniques to infer the geographic locations of these fake news spreaders. Our analysis reveals that corporate fake news is more likely than corporate non-fake news to be spread by foreign accounts...

This article aims to clarify citizens' responses to conspiratorial anti-science beliefs (e.g. "The cure for cancer exists but is hidden from the public by commercial interests"). Based on Eurobarometer 95.2 (Spring 2021, 38 countries), we examine how public opposition or support for conspiratorial anti-science beliefs is related to individual- and country-level variables. There were large differences between the countries in their opposition or support. Controlling for artifacts, the individual-level variables showed associations with science-specific variables, for example, knowledge, preferred communication sources, social evaluations of scientists, attitude toward vaccines, and more general political (dis)satisfaction...

Public opinion scholarship suggests that Europeans broadly interpret Brexit as a cautionary fable rather than an encouraging blueprint to follow. Yet, Brexit singularly demonstrates the possibility of European disintegration, and is but one of multiple recent crises that have brought the potential for member state departures into focus. Drawing on new survey data from 16 countries and using logistic regressions, this article charts Europeans' perceptions of the likelihood future EU exits over the next decade...

Brexit constitutes a puzzle for integration theory. Functionalist analyses have not only failed to predict the UK's exit but have also underestimated the disintegrative dynamics of the withdrawal negotiations. By contrast, postfunctionalism accounts for the disintegrative Brexit process but struggles to explain the unity and defence of supranational integration among the EU-27. This article tries to make sense of the Brexit puzzle. First, it argues that Brexit constitutes an attack on the EU polity rather than a policy failure - the type of crisis that functionalist theories explain best...

This study revisits the feedback effect from foreign direct investments (FDI) on environmental regulations under the presence of the host country's political structure. Such a relationship may encounter the endogeneity problem due to the omitted variable bias and reverse causality. As such, the two-step system generalized method of moments is employed. Using data from 21 OECD countries from 1990 to 2019, we confirm that FDI flows influence environmental regulations, but such an effect is conditional on the host country's political constraints...