Drug use is on the rise in Italy with women catching men up in terms of user numbers, according to Health Ministry pointman Claudio Cippitelli.
Until recently there were seven times more male habitual consumers than female, Cippitelli said in an interview with the Italian police magazine Polizia Moderna.
''Now the ratio is more like two to one,'' he said.
Drug use was also ''rapidly changing,'' said Cippitelli, who heads the ministry's New Drugs Unit.
''What we're increasingly seeing is what we call poly-consumption, or the use of several different drugs in rapid succession''.
''Among the ingredients in the new cocktails are speed, amphetamines, and (synthetic upper) MBA, washed down with alcohol and followed by cannabis and sometimes even smoked heroin,'' Cippitelli said.
Authorities are more concerned, however, by a recent rise in the use of crack because ''it turns users into addicts overnight, forcing most into a life of crime''.
Among the newer drugs coming onto the scene, he added, was the anaesthetic ketamine, which is used in small doses as an upper and in bigger ones as a hallucinogenic.
Users of several different drugs, Cippitelli stressed, face much greater health risks than those which confront single-drug users.
''Poly-consumption, especially when it involves synthetic drugs, makes it much harder to apply the right treatment for overdoses,'' he said.
The new trend also makes it more difficult to put together effective detox programmes, Cippitelli told the magazine.
