apart from the tragedy of all the deaths this could be dodgy for the club/party scene..
AFAIK Brighton has a reputation for being more tolerant of hedonism / rave/club culture than many places and being a coastal resort is obviously an entry point for drugs..
I can see cops/councillors looking at this report and using it as a justification for a clampdown, especially after 3 years of evidence in a row.
BTW although predictable the Executive summary of the report mentions 70% of these deaths were from opiates (heroin etc) there are these bullet points…
Quote:
♦ The following perceptible changes were also observed:
– An increase in the number of cases involving cannabis from 21 to 35
– An increase in the number of cases involving amphetamines from 22 to 40
– An increase in the number of cases involving ecstasy-type drugs from 38 to 45
– An increase in the number of cases involving cocaine from 152 to 171
– The proportion of cases involving cocaine increased from 10% to 13%
– A decrease of about 1.4 percentage points in the proportion of cases involving hypnotics/sedatives
Of course cannabis cannot kill you on its own and TBH most of these party drugs arent that toxic on their own – so this would indicate a larger level of poly-drug abuse and binge use;
conversely I think a lot of chronic (long term) drug users (particularly addicts) die from “normal” illnesses caused by weakened immune systems and the Coroner/Fiscal doesn’t always record these deaths as drug-related!
So it seems to be a case of people literally caning too much of everything at once and then keeling over…
http://www.sgul.ac.uk/depts/icdp/icdp_home.cfm
