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OCR
3. ASSESSING THE EXPERIENCE OF USING SYNTHETIC CANNABINOIDS... m 55 could have a harm-reducing role (e.g., (Móró g Racz, 2013)). The rapid alteration of effects and experiences may explain the severe psychopathological symptoms, which may be important information for harm reduction and treatment services, where treatment staff should be aware of unpredictable mood changes. From a harm reduction point of view, SC is underrepre-sented in harm reduction literature. Therefore, it is important to emphasize the impossibility of knowing the quantity, purity, or even the number of different SC compounds in a particular SC product (e.g., (Flemen Kevin, 2016). Another important aspect could emerge: people who use SCs do not (or rarely) access harm reduction services (while intravenous substance users visit these services, for example, needle exchange program, more often (Gyarmathy et al., 2016; Räcz, Csäk, et al., 2016). People who use SCs rather utilize emergency and toxicology treatments only when they experience very adverse effects. Therefore, nurses of health care services have the possibility to give messages of harm reduction, for example, that people who use drugs should do it in a user company (to control its effects), or people who use drugs should consume them in smaller quantities each time. Also, staff of emergency treatment and toxicology has the possibility to offer people who use drugs a treatment spot in rehabilitation settings. Our study findings suggest that despite of the adverse effects, including a rapid turn of experiences to negative, rapid development of addiction and withdrawal symptoms of SCs, participants continued using the drug because this drug was mostly available and cheap. Therefore, a harm reduction approach would be to make available and legal certain drugs that have less adverse effects and could cause less serious dependence and withdrawal symptoms, with controlled production and distribution (similarly to cannabis legalization in the Netherlands).
