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GHB date rape drug is back and pill testing may not help, says ED doctor

GHB the Date Rape Drug Discovered by a Russian chemist in the nineteenth century, used as a general anaesthetic in 1970s Dunedin, picked up by Californian bodybuilders in the 1990s - the drug known as GHB has travelled a long road to its current resurgence in the Australian party scene. On the weekend in Melbourne, more than 20 people were hospitalised after reportedly overdosing at the Electric Parade festival. GHB was blamed - one of the biggest overdoses of the drug since 10 people collapsed outside at a Gold Coast nightclub in 1996. "It's back again," exclaimed Dr David Caldicott, a Canberra-based emergency department doctor who was in Adelaide when GHB hit in the '90s. "I thought we managed to explain to people it was a stupid drug to take. Around Australia there will be emergency doctors everywhere holding their heads in their hands going, 'Oh God!'. "A new generation has started learning the mistakes all over again."

Welfare drug test: the most likely trial sites based on Govt criteria

Wednesday 17 May 2017 11:00am By James Purtill From next January, anyone applying for Newstart or Youth Allowance in one of three as-yet-unnamed areas could be tested for drug use. Not everyone gets tested. Job seekers and students will be profiled to identify the ones most likely to be taking drugs. We don't know what the profiling will be based on, only that it will be "relevant characteristics that indicate a higher risk of substance abuse". That could be anything from age, to income, to gender to school leaving age. But we do know what criteria the government will use to pick the three trial sites: High rates of welfare; High rates of drug use; Available counselling services. That narrows it down a bit. The three trial sites will test 5,000 *new* applicants, so they need to be Centrelink offices with a lot of people walking through the doors. The office with the highest number of payment recipients in December 2016 (the most recent

Make sure you’ve got a Drug Testing Policy in place

Drug testing employees? Make sure you’ve got a policy in place John Salter / Thursday, April 6, 2017 SmartCompany You suspect one of your staff members is regularly turning up to work affected by their drug intake. Or there’s been an incident at work, and an investigation has uncovered that the staff member involved was impaired by alcohol at the time. What do you do? For many SMEs, their initial reaction will be to discipline and perhaps dismiss the employee. But before you go ahead and make any rash decisions, you need to understand exactly where you stand legally if you want to minimise the chance that an unfair dismissal or other relevant claim is brought against you. The case of the Sydney ferry driver One of the most notorious unfair dismissal cases in Australia involving drug and alcohol use was that of a Sydney ferry captain who tested positive to cannabis in 2013, after being called in to work on a day off to cover an unexpected absen

NSW Police overlooked scientific advice about hair sample

NSW Police overlooked scientific advice about hair sample and sacked drug-tested sergeant Eamonn Duff  March 12 2017  A single strand of hair that destroyed the life of a long-serving Sydney police officer has the potential to influence the future of not just the entire NSW Police Force but all workplaces across NSW. Sergeant George Zisopoulos insists he has been wrongly dismissed due to one of his hair follicles which returned a positive drug test reading. But while the state's top cop, Commissioner Andrew Scipione, has determined that, on the "balance of probabilities", the officer knowingly consumed drugs, scientific opinion suggests otherwise. Leading forensic experts have cast doubts over the decision to sack Sergeant Zisopoulos, concluding there is "no evidence" the substances found on his hair were ingested and that the minute readings may have been caused by "external contamination". ergeant Zisopoulos, who is the first NSW