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An analysis of law enforcement seizures of illegal drugs in five key regions of the United States revealed a rise in methamphetamine and marijuana (cannabis) confiscations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seizures of the two drugs were higher at their peak in August 2020 than at any time in the year prior to the pandemic. While investigators found that trends in heroin, cocaine and fentanyl seizures were not affected by the pandemic, provisional overdose death data show that the increased drug mortality seen in 2019 rose further through the first half of 2020.
The findings suggest that the pandemic and its related restrictions may have impacted the availability and demand of some, but not all, illegal drugs, and that availability may have increased in summer and fall of 2020 in the five regions included in this study.
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Home Office data shows the number of police officers voluntarily resigning from the force in England and Wales has more than doubled in the last eight years.
Scant attention has been paid to the reason for this mass exodus. Until now. Researchers from the University of Portsmouth studied government statistics, and discovered the numbers of officers voluntarily resigning from the police service is rising - from 1,158 in the year ending March 2012 to 2,363 in the year ending March 2020. The figure amounts to 1.83 per cent of the total police officer population in England and Wales up from 0.86 per cent eight years ago.
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Visits to digital groups, websites or email lists that share nude or semi-nude photos of women without their consent, known as slutpages, may be common among US college students, according to a survey conducted at a large university in the USA. The findings, published in the journal
Archives of Sexual Behavior, could help inform sexual violence prevention education offered by universities, according to the authors.
Researchers at Michigan State University, USA found that one in three US college students may be viewing slutpages, based on a study of student behaviour at a large US university. One in ten participants reported using a secret photo storing app to store or share nude images, and one in 30 reported posting nude images or videos online without consent. Younger and male participants were found to be more likely than older or female participants to engage in any of these behaviours.
County jail incarceration rates in the USA are potential drivers of many causes of death in the communities where they are located, with particularly pronounced effects on the number of deaths caused by infectious and respiratory diseases, drug overdose, and suicide, according to a long-term analysis of jail incarceration and county-level mortality across 1,094 counties between 1987 and 2017, published in The Lancet Public Health journal.
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Prisons with more green space have lower levels of violence and self-harm, according to new research at the University of Birmingham and Utrecht University.
The study is the first to attempt large-scale mapping of green space within prison environments and link it to well-being in a robust, statistically significant way. The results are published in
Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
The researchers used GIS mapping to identify the percentages of green space (such as trees, lawns and shrubbery) within prisons in England and Wales. They compared this with available data about incidents of self-harm, prisoner assaults on staff and violence between prisoners. They also drew on information about the age and function of individual establishments - for example their capacity, what the security level was, whether they accommodated men, women or young offenders, and whether they were purpose-built prisons, or converted from other types of buildings such as milit