Global health. The current scenario and future perspectives

204 be learned from the North American experience, it is that excessive supply of prescription opioid analgesics increases the likelihood of opioid use disorder and its attendant problems.”. Certainly, this poses a great challenge for public policies, which generally tend to react to present problems rather than anticipate them. It is necessary to recognize different realities, learn from them, learn from successes and mistakes. From there early interventions can be generated to minimize potential impacts of new scenarios. These interventions should not only focus on substances themselves but rather on individuals by developing appropriate protective measures. Research plays a fundamental role in generating suitable knowledge for this purpose. This requires a change in policy priorities and their financing. In addition to the above, it is necessary to add the emergence of the so-called New Psychoactive Substances (NPS), which are substances that are not subject to control or prohibition and produce effects like those controlled by international conventions. The responses to this new threat have been diverse, the most relevant being the creation of global and regional instances that allow for continuous generation of information about this phenomenon, as well as capacity building for human resources in countries. On the one hand, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime creates the Global Synthetic Drugs Monitoring Program: Analysis, Reports and Trends (SMART), in Europe, under the administration of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, an Early Warning System for NPS is generated. More recently, the Early Warning System for the Americas (SATA) was created within OID/CICAD/OAS. All these efforts are aimed at generating early information that allows for a more effective response while reducing risks associated with using these types of substances. For the April 2021 report from the SMART program (UNODC 2021a), Figure 2 describes worldwide trends regarding NPS appearance.