Television and Drugs

Introduction
As a response to the anti-malarial drug resistance situation, the
World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that treatment
policies for falciparum malaria  in all countries experiencing
resistance to monotherapies should be combination therapies,
preferably those containing an arteminisin derivative (ACT-artemisinin-based combination therapy).
Methodology
A retrospective quantitative study was designed to examine case
records of patients treated for malaria in a tertiary health hospital
in Jos, Northern part of Nigeria between August and December
2012. Questionaires were also distributed to doctors working
within the hospital environment. Data on demographic, clinical
features of disease, diagnostic procedures and drug administration
were collected from the patients' records.
Results
Case record files of 130 patients were selected, 80.7% of the
patients were prescribed antimalarial drugs. 55.2% of patients
admitted for malaria were males, 44.8% were between 21-50 years
of age. Fever (35.2%) was the most common presenting symptom,
71.4% of the patients had diagnostic blood slides. Antimalarial
drugs were prescribed for malaria and malaria associated with
other disease conditions, artemisinin and lumefantrine was the
most prescribed antimalarial agent. 44.0% of these drugs were
prescribed by trade names, 29.0% were administered orally. The
most antimalarial drug prescribed for prevention of malaria in
pregnant women was sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, all the
practitioners followed current WHO guidelines  , half of the
clinicians would prescribe parenteral antimalarial drugs for severe
and cerebral malaria, laboratory and clinical assessment were used
for malaria diagnosis, 71.4% of the physicians adhered to hospital
guidelines.
Conclusion
This study indicates the implementation of artemisinin
combination therapy in a public health facility; however the
success of this new treatment policy would depend on patient
adherence to recommendations and provision of ACTs at
subsidized costs in Nigeria.

""In season 3 of acclaimed TV crime drama The Wire, Major 'Bunny' Colvin experiments with a desperate solution to Baltimore's irrepressible drug-related crime: total legalisation in an abandoned neighbourhood. Dealers and users are transported by police into the free zone of 'Hamsterdam', named after the Dutch city known for its liberal drug laws: as a result, major crimes decline whilst drugs users and sex-workers are able to access medical support. Drugs are consumed freely, so long as users adhere to Colvin's social contract: no violence. Yet what also occurs is a grim vision of  brutality and lawlessness, as children become ensnared in the disorder and misery of the 'free zone', which is ultimately shut down after violence and political scandal.

Amsterdam is also birth-place of Spinoza, 17th century philosopher and political theorist. Spinoza believed that what preceded civil society was a universal 'state of nature', without any moral laws, justice or rights. Like Spinoza, Colvin assumes that drug-users, like all living beings, are dominated by their addictive 'passions' to inevitably seek their own gain. Rather than vainly attempt to prevent this, the lesser of two evils is chosen, concealing their usage within the street-drinker's geographical 'paper bag'. Whilst The Wire depicts the failure of America's 'War on Drugs', total legalisation without attending to its social causes also results in disaster. As Spinoza would explain, the 'social contract' can only manage, without improving, the collective lot of humanity. Only through understanding the social causes of our actions, and attempting to re-direct them by education, toleration and building peaceful communities, can societies move beyond hiding problems to overcoming them. Like Colvin's Hamsterdam, this first requires facing our problems in the first place, however politically unpalatable.""

The use of pharmaceuticals in Australia is tied to a range of cultural narratives about consumption that have become increasing casualised. This paper will discuss the medicalised, normalised and marketised approach of the use of painkillers among a sample of non-medical drug users, collected as part of the author's PhD research. In line with much of the rest of the Western world, Australia has seen, what is termed, the medicalisation of everyday life, in which everything from diet to exercise, mood to pain now commonly fall under the domain of medical concerns. Participants who used painkillers to pre-empt a headache or avoid symptoms of stress actively drew on the medicalisation of everyday life in their narratives. Close comparisons to narratives about the normalisation of  alcohol and illicit drug use was also common among the participants. Narratives of normalisation were especially common among those who mixed painkillers with alcohol to 'get more drunk.' Lastly the use of consumer language when describing painkillers will be explored. It is argued that the integration of a medicalised, normalised and marketised approaches constitute a casual context under which a slippage between medical and non-medical ways of using painkillers becomes likely.