Doctors need to start having honest and open conversations with their patients about illicit drug-taking for pleasure, an eminent addiction specialist from London has told a medical conference in Melbourne.
Dr Adam Winstock, an addiction psychiatrist who also founded the Global Drug Survey, told the International Medicine in Addiction conference on Sunday that doctors were doing a disservice by only speaking about drug-related harms.
But health professionals needed to help a hidden but potentially at-risk group of people who like using drugs, but whose lives were not necessarily dominated by them, he said.