Usually this topic would be more about the increased risk of vein injury, or the fact that injection can often be used as a control mechanism. But this time I'm going to focus more of the way I see injecting another person as a type of sharing behaviour, especially within trust relationships.

We talk to people a lot about how they inject, what they inject and where on their body they inject it.

 

But how often do we talk to people about their injecting environment? And the effect this has on both their injecting risks and their perception of drug use.

It's a standard question on most assessments in drug services, asked in lots of different ways. "How often do you inject?", "Number of injections per day?" etc.

 

But, why ask it? And how would a worker react if someone was really honest about the answer?

I've talked before about the importance of coming up with new and novel ways of giving people advice. But his idea came from a conversation I was having with a co-worker. 

 

Like most ideas I get this is a relatively simple solution to a problem.

A large part of harm reduction work is discussing sharing issues with people who use drugs. Of course this is mainly focused around stopping sharing behaviours. But shouldn't we be finding out why someone shares first?

Urban environments provide numerous concealed settings that may be used on a regular and frequent basis for the injection of illicit drugs. In addition to general public amenity (car parks, stairwells, toilets) these places may include derelict buildings, marginal wasteland and squats. Each of these latter examples may be typically used and frequented almost exclusively by injecting drug users who may consider such places as providing temporary safety and sufficient privacy to administer drugs without detection/interruption...

*(Apologies to Paul Weller and The Style Council for such a shameful mis-appropriation of this song title)

 

In this article, I would like to draw attention to and comment on the potential problems caused by fluorescent blue lights upon the health of injecting drug users.

I’ve got aTED conference talk for you today, this one is with Simon Sinek talking about “How great leaders inspire action”.

 

I watched this for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it got me really thinking about how the best drugs workers/activists/services do what they do so well, by communicating effectively.