Today I have another guest article from Matt Gleeson, He's previously written for this blog about use of the word Junkie in journalism. This time he's talking about the types of 'architypes' the media use to describe drug users. Matt normally write a great blog called Stonetree Harm Reduction.

At heart I'm a harm reduction kind of person. I've spent the last decade working in needle programmes, running a website that provides injecting advice and presenting sessions at conferences promoting harm reduction. For me this work has always had as one of its goals the idea of helping people who want to stop using drugs achieve this. And for the people who don't want to stop, it's been about helping them stay safer and, if I can, 'nudging' them to the idea of stopping at some time in the future.

So the idea that harm reduction and recovery are somehow opposite ends of drugs work has been something I've always found confusing. To me recovery is harm reduction and harm reduction is something that sits perfectly in recovery – even the original ACMD document statement that kicked off needle programmes in the UK had as one of its stated goals 'increase abstinence'.

One of the exercises I do when I'm delivering safer injecting training looks at the most common injecting sites and their associated risks. People are usually quite good at putting the different sites in some kind of order of risk, but when it comes to the feet they often underestimate the dangers.

What do you do when someone come into an NSP who isn’t injecting drugs, this week I’d like to talk abit about someone I recently saw who has a different reason for injecting.