16/10/24 at West Mercia Police HQ, 60 experts from Warwickshire, West Midlands, Staffordshire and West Mercia attended a regional CPD event.
The day opened with some health and wellbeing which links into the role performed as most of our DEWs conduct this role on top of their day jobs, so it hit the mark for work life balance, anxiety and stress.
We then moved into an excellent presentation from Dr Alex Lawson, a toxicologist, who spoke about nitazenes, ketamine and xylazine – how they are detected at the lab, the process etc and what was going on in our region currently.
Paul Hannaford was our lived experience guest speaker, who spoke around his upbringing and his addiction to heroin. He mainly spoke around how it affected his life, relationships, employment and health – showing some pretty gruesome images of an open wound on his leg, treated with maggots! Great just before lunch!
We then had an economic and SOC specialist CPS lawyer who spoke about the pivotal role of the DEW and it was a reminder around CPR and presentation.
Drug Expert Witness (and DEWVA Committee Member) Erin Wright then delivered presentations around ChemSex and the Dark Web before we finished with a roundup from the regional SPOCs regarding patterns/trends etc.
In all, it was a really interesting day crammed full of CPD and best practice guidance.
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