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• The Taliban opium ban of 2000–2001 disrupted European heroin supplies. • Effects differed across the seven Nordic and Baltic countries in systematic ways. • Some heroin markets bounced back, although perhaps with less vibrancy. • Other markets substituted to another opioid, either more or less harmful. • Market responses to the 2000–2001 ban may be informative for the new, current ban. The 2000–2001 and the 2022–2023 Taliban opium bans were and could be two of the largest ever disruptions to a major illegal drug market. To help understand potential implications of the current ban for Europe, this paper analyzes how opioid markets in seven Baltic and Nordic countries responded to the earlier ban, using literature review, key informant interviews, and secondary data analysis. The seven nations' markets responded in diverse ways, including rebounding with the same drug (heroin in Norway), substitution to a more potent opioid (fentanyl replacing heroin in Estonia), and substitution to one with lower risk of overdose (buprenorphine replacing heroin in Finland). The responses were not instantaneous, but rather evolved, sometimes over several years. This variety suggests that it can be hard to predict how drug markets will respond to disruptions, but two extreme views can be challenged. It would be naive to imagine that drug markets will not adapt to shocks, but also unduly nihilistic to presume that they will always just bounce back with no lasting effects. Substitution to another way of meeting demand is possible, but that does not always negate fully the benefits of disrupting the original market. Nonetheless, there is historical precedent for a European country's opioid market switching to synthetic opioids when heroin supplies were disrupted. Given how much that switch has increased overdose rates in Canada and the United States, that is a serious concern for Europe at present. A period of reduced opioid supply may be a particularly propitious time to expand treatment services (as Norway did in the early 2000s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1999, a cooperative tripartite cancer research and training agreement was signed between Ireland (IE), Northern Ireland (NI) and the United States (US) National Cancer Institute, giving rise to the All-Ireland Cancer Consortium (AICC). We wished to consider if AICC increased the amount/impact of cancer research on the island of Ireland and what effect this enhanced research activity had on cancer services and cancer outcomes. As comparator, we chose the city regions of Copenhagen and Lund & Malmö, whose physical connection was greatly improved following construction of bridges between Denmark and Sweden around the time AICC was established. We analysed cancer research outputs from all four geographical regions in the Web of Science (1988–2017), with a particular focus on citations and journal impact factors. We evaluated disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) as an indicator of change in health status. Research outputs increased in all four regions, but more in IE/NI than in the Scandinavian cities, while collaboration between IE and NI and both the US and the Rest of Europe increased even more substantially. Citation scores also showed a greater improvement for IE and NI. Journal citation impact factors indicated that IE/NI papers were increasingly being published in more highly cited journals. Research-enabled cancer service provision improved on the island of Ireland, with concomitant increases in cancer survival. The AICC collaborative agreement delivered significant additionality on the island of Ireland, promoting transnational cooperation, enhancing cancer research activity, and underpinning improved cancer services and better cancer outcomes. • The All-Ireland Cancer Consortium led to: ○ Increased research outputs on the island of Ireland. ○ Enhanced collaboration. ○ Improved citations and enhanced impact. ○ Improved cancer services and increased cancer survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of European and Swedish national and municipal waste prevention plans to determine their capability of preventing the generation of waste. An analysis of the stated objectives in these waste prevention plans and the measures they propose to realize them exposes six problematic features: (1) These plans ignore what drives waste generation, such as consumption, and (2) rely as much on conventional waste management goals as they do on goals with the aim of preventing the generation of waste at the source. The Swedish national and local plans (3) focus on small waste streams, such as food waste, rather than large ones, such as industrial and commercial waste. Suggested waste prevention measures at all levels are (4) soft rather than constraining, for example, these plans focus on information campaigns rather than taxes and bans, and (5) not clearly connected to incentives and consequences for the actors involved. The responsibility for waste prevention has been (6) entrusted to non-governmental actors in the market such as companies that are then free to define which proposals suit them best rather than their being guided by planners. For improved waste prevention regulation, two strategies are proposed. First, focus primarily not on household-related waste, but on consumption and production of products with high environmental impact and toxicity as waste. Second, remove waste prevention from the waste hierarchy to make clear that, by definition, waste prevention is not about the management of waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: With the emerging technologies of the Internet and smartphones during the last decades, the gambling environment has undergone a massive transformation. In Sweden, and Europe in general, online gambling has more than doubled since 2007.Method: The paper studies online gambling venues (OGVs) as relational actors of addiction. By drawing on the actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage thinking, we examine how OGVs, as actors in specific networks of attachment, enable the development of gambling addiction and facilitate its continuation. The data consists of life story interviews with 34 online gamblers.Results: Online gambling venues extend the scope of gambling opportunities through space, providing an easy portable 24-hours-a-day access to gambling online and on smartphones. This increases the spatial mobility of gambling to diverse contexts. By linking gambling to more unpredictably evolving patterns of relations, online gambling venues also increase gambling's temporal mobility to intrude in the habitual trajectories of everyday life. By enhancing the gambling mobility through space and time, OGVs simultaneously extend the scope of situations in which gambling may transform from a controlled activity into an addiction. It is then that the actor-networks of gambling infiltrate in the actor-networks of work, domestic life and leisure, and start to feed processes where they are translated to serve the interests of gambling.Conclusion: By giving us tools to challenge simplistic and taken-for-granted explanations of gambling addiction and by allowing us to grasp the flux and changing nature of addiction as a relational pattern of heterogeneous contextual attachments, the actor-network theory can help us to understand the complexity and multiplicity of gambling problems. The knowledge on what kinds of contextual attachments in diverse actor-networks enable harmful gambling and sustain unhealthy relations helps practitioners to focus treatment interventions especially on these contextual linkages and their configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]