Conducted anonymously online, the findings will not only be of interest to consumers, but also to the medical practitioners and members of law enforcement who for too long have been forced to guess about the precise nature of the drug trades here, both legal and illegal.“I’m really chuffed that Hot Press has come on board as our official Irish media partner,” enthuses Dr. Adam Winstock, the Consultant Psychiatrist and Addiction Medicine Specialist responsible for crunching the GDS numbers, which Hot Press will exclusively be publishing in March next year. “We did the first Drug Survey in 1999 with Mixmag at the height of the dance music explosion. We took a bit of a break, and were then up and running again in 2011.

Originally just a UK thing, we’re going international this year with eight languages, 17 countries and 27 media partners who include The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Australian, Stuff.Co.NZ, Zeit Online, La Liberacion and yourselves.“We’ve three big focuses – one of them being cannabis. How dominant or otherwise is skunk and what’s ‘the perfect weed’? The second is Acceptability and Adoption of Harm Reduction Strategies, which is a fancy way of saying, ‘What do people in the real world do to keep themselves safe when they take coke, pills, ketamine, acid, meth, heroin, valium, mephedrone, alcohol etc. etc.’ Thirdly, we’ve got a whole section on workplace drug testing and how that influences people’s use of drugs. It’s becoming a big issue in the UK – and will, I’m sure, rear its head here in the very near future.”