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3. ASSESSING THE EXPERIENCE OF USING SYNTHETIC CANNABINOIDS... m 55
could have a harm-reducing role (e.g., (Móró g Rácz, 2013)). Ihe rapid altera¬
tion 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 com¬
pounds in a particular SC product (e.g., (Flemen Kevin, 2016). Another im¬
portant aspect could emerge: people who use SCs do not (or rarely) access
harm reduction services (while intravenous substance users visit these ser¬
vices, for example, needle exchange program, more often (Gyarmathy et al.,
2016; Racz, Csak, 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 ap¬
proach would be to make available and legal certain drugs that have less ad¬
verse effects and could cause less serious dependence and withdrawal
symptoms, with controlled production and distribution (similarly to cannabis
legalization in the Netherlands).