Italian Expert for UK Parliamentary Group on Emerging Drugs

mentary representatives.

The initiative is supported by the Private Secretary to the UK Justice Secretary, the Honourable Gareth Bacon MP, who hoped this would be the first in a series of events which would allow politicians to highlight issues emerging from academic research in Parliament and to disseminate the results through the media.

Professor Corazza explained the reasons why an inter-parliamentary group is important for exposing to the political world a relatively new phenomenon which she herself was the first to highlight in 2000 and she personally communicated the alarming increase at the recent hearing in the British Parliament for the Commission of the Ministry of the Interior.

The other members of the highly qualified group of speakers were the Italian/British professor in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics Fabrizio Schifano who highlighted the fact that many new drugs are not easily identified by urine tests and presented the discovery of 120 substances similar to prescription drugs and about 400 illegal synthetic opioids (substances made from the opium poppy) that are sometimes extremely potent and lethal.

Professor Owen Bowden-Jones, UK Government adviser on drug disuse, explained that this high number of new drugs create new after-use effects which then prove difficult to treat. Professor in Social Psychology Lambros Lazuras highlighted how these new drugs are also finding space in the world of sport, both at an amateur and