The Need to Revitalise Drug Use Monitoring to Keep Pace With a More Dynamic, Digitally Enabled and Globally Connected Drug Market

Summary

Globalisation, developments in information technology, and social and demographic changes are profoundly impacting the modern world. They have also resulted in an illicit drug market that is more dynamic, complex and globally connected. Drug consumption patterns are rapidly changing, with synthetic drugs, controlled psychoactive substances and poly substance use all playing a greater role. These developments are impacting both the nature and the scale of associated health problems. Moreover, there are concerns that the pace of change may be rapidly growing in those parts of the world in which our current capacity to collect information is least developed. Approaches to drug monitoring need to be timelier, better coordinated across jurisdictions and more digitally enabled to keep pace with the challenges we are facing in this area. These were the conclusions from a recent informal technical meeting on the state of global drug surveillance held in the margins of the Lisbon Addictions 2024 Conference. A group of experts from different parts of the world met to critically review current monitoring capacity and to discuss what developmental actions were needed to better meet the needs of policy and practice in this area. The meeting focused on sharing innovations in methodology and insights on drug trends and new developments. The experts reviewed the current drug situation in South America, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania. From this meeting, it was evident that despite considerable heterogeneity in monitoring capacity, all regions now faced similar challenges in respect to the need to develop systems that could rapidly respond to the growing sophistication of drug markets and complexity in drug consumption patterns.[...]