Introducing and applying a new Australian alcohol advertising code

This article introduces the new Australian Alcohol Advertising Review Board (AARB) Code and assesses television advertising practices against its advertising content provisions. The Code is administered by independent experts to provide an alternative to the industry‐led Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code Scheme that has attracted substantial criticism. The new Code aims to balance the alcohol industry's right to promote a legal product against critical protections for young people and public health. To assess whether the new Code will require substantial changes to alcohol advertising practices, a content analysis was conducted of alcohol advertisements aired prior to its introduction on all four free‐to‐air commercial television channels over two months. A majority of the analysed advertisements (48 of 64) contained at least one element that could be construed as a breach of the AARB Code. The largest numbers of potential breaches were for the provisions relating to the association of alcohol with success and using appeals that are likely to be attractive to young people. The results demonstrate that the Australian alcohol industry will need to reassess current advertising practices to achieve compliance with the new Code. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Policy Sciences: The Challenge of Complexity

This essay reviews some of the recent criticisms of positivist science. It interprets this criticism, more generally, as directed towards the complexity of social science phenomena and the difficulty of dealing with complexity epistemologically and methodologically. Rather than ignoring complexity, changing the subject matter or explaining it away, we argue that complexity may be acknowledged and studied systematically withn the context of post-positivist approaches. The essay than proposes several strategies for conceptualizing and researching complexity (at a "meta-level" from substantive policy research) that are based in systems theory.     

Typologies of Violence Exposure and Cognitive Processing in Incarcerated Male Adolescents

Incarcerated youth experience high rates of violence exposure (VE), cognitive processing (CP) deficits, and mental health (MH) problems. It is not clear whether VE combined with CP deficits are particularly salient risk factors for MH dysfunction. Male incarcerated youth offenders (n?=?115) completed standardized self-reports of MH and VE. CP was measured with executive functioning tasks and academic assessments. Person-centered Ward’s Squared Euclidian Distance cluster analysis was used to examine unique patterns of CP and VE. Cluster analysis defined five distinct profiles of MH functioning, CP, and VE rates within incarcerated adolescents. Two groups, with high rates of VE and CP deficits, showed high rates of MH problems. Linear techniques may obscure important differences within this population.     

Anaphylaxis After the Injection of Buprenorphine

Cause of death rulings in cases when the concentration of a drug or drugs is higher than observed following therapeutic use are generally straightforward “drug deaths.” However, when toxicology testing identifies drug concentrations consistent with therapeutic use or detects no drugs at all, then the cause of death determination is more complicated. Given the rapidity and protean manifestations of anaphylaxis, it should be considered in deaths where no other cause of death is apparent in a suspected drug death. This article reports two cases where an anaphylactic reaction was observed following either the actual or alleged use of therapeutic formulations of buprenorphine intravenously.