“Doctors in dispute: What exactly is normal human behaviour?”, wrote The Independent, while The Observer said: “Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle.” These headlines focused on a new version of a major guide to mental health that was published in May 2013 amid a storm of controversy and bitter criticism. Fourteen years in the writing (and according to one psychiatrist, “thick enough to stop a bullet”) the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s “D

We should all be concerned about our laws on illegal drugs because they affect all of us – people who use drugs; who have family members using drugs; health professionals seeing people for drug-related problems; ambulance and police officers in the front line of drug harms; and all of us who pay high insurance premiums because drug-related crime is extensive. Drug-related offences also take up the lion’s share of the work of police, courts and prisons. But what can we