'drugs' - tagged features

Some in Poland are worried about what’s seen as a criminal westernisation of their country. Crimes that were thought of as exclusively west European are now appearing in Polish statistics. One such crime is date-rape, often perpetrated by spiking a victim’s drink with a drug that knocks them out, sometimes even wiping their memory. Now a new campaign’s under way to make young Poles aware of the dangers they face. 

The Dutch city of Utrecht used to have a big problem with drug dealers loitering on the streets. The problem got so bad that the city had to get creative and find ways to deal with them. They found an effective, though unorthodox solution: give addicts housing, and allow them to keep taking drugs. It works because members of the community are able to be watched over by caretakers. 

A different kind of smoking is the focus of Amsterdam's Hash Museum as Louise Dunne from Radio Netherlands Worldwide found out. 

It’ll be a white Christmas for more European party-goers than ever before this year. Cocaine abuse is on the rise across Europe, and particularly in Spain. So far in 2007, Spanish police have intercepted five shipments each holding over 3 tonnes of the drug. With such high supply, prices have dropped and the Iberian peninsular is awash with the narcotic that keeps you up all night. DW’s Jerome Socolovsky reports from Madrid's Barajas airport, one of the key entry points for smugglers from Latin America. 

Europe is in the grip of summer holidays, and many visitors to Amsterdam this summer are disappointed to find that two of the Dutch capital's world famous museums are closed for renovation with only a tiny portion of their collections on show. But there are a wealth of other, smaller museums in the city to visit. Louise Dunne from Radio Netherlands Worldwide ventured into Amsterdam's Hash Museum. 

Look in your letterbox: Newspaper, bills, advertisements, a letter from your mother and ... a delivery of cannabis... Surprised? Maybe, but much to the dismay of customs officials in Sweden - getting drugs delivered directly into your letterbox has been a 21st Century problem. Using the Internet and the postal service is becoming an increasingly popular way of smuggling drugs into Sweden. 

The Tour de France pushes off in London this week, a city notorious for its intolerance of anything on two wheels. But enthusiasm for the race has dwindled over the past few years, thanks largely to scandals involving competitors testing positive for performance enhancing drugs. The American Floyd Landis was crowned king yellow-jersey last year, but officially Landis is no longer the winner of the 2006 Tour de France, after he failed a drugs test. 

LSD is usually associated with the hippy "flower power" era in the West in the late 1960s. But few people know that thousands of tests involving the psychedelic drug were carried out in Czechoslovakia, from the mid 1950s until the mid 70s. Canadian journalist R.M. Crockford is currently in Prague researching this country's LSD testing program, which he says was perhaps the biggest conducted anywhere in the world. 

People will certainly be shouting "skål" as they wine and dine in royal company during the Nobel ceremony in December in Stockholm but in the Czech Republic doctors are sounding the alarm. Women there are raising their glasses with a "Na zdravi!" far too often. In fact, in 2005, the number of women who entered Czech clinics with an alcohol abuse problem was twice as high one decade earlier. Radio Prague's Daniela Lazarova reports. 

The Swedish media have been in a frenzy over a cocaine scandal involving some of the country’s top former athletes. The European Athletics Championships in Gothenburg earlier this month was Sweden’s most successful championships since World War II. That is if you ignore the fact that two former athletes were caught in a drug bust at a party during the championships. Now police are warning that cocaine is no longer just a party drug and that the number of seizures in Sweden is going up.