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Adulterants, such as fentanyl and xylazine, among others, are present in a high percentage of the illicit drug supply, increasing the risk for overdose and other adverse health events among people who use drug...
Due to shared modes of transmission, coinfection with hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) is common, and HBV vaccination is recommended for all persons with HCV who remain susceptible to HBV. T...
Against the backdrop of North America’s overdose crisis, most overdose deaths are occurring in housing environments, largely due to individuals using drugs alone. Overdose deaths in cities remain concentrated ...
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) disproportionately affects rural communities, where health services are geographically dispersed. It remains unknown whether proximity to a syringe services program (SSP) is associated ...
Many physicians including emergency medicine physicians report insufficient training and education on prescribing buprenorphine for opioid use disorder. As emergency departments implement buprenorphine inducti...
Although cannabis use incidence, societal acceptance, and legislation all trend positively, cannabis remains federally illegal in the USA. Prior studies have revealed that patients are reluctant to disclose th...
Opioid-related mortality is a rising public health concern in France, where opioids were in 2021 implicated in 75% of overdose deaths. Opioid substitution treatment (OST) was implicated in almost half of death...
Over 180,000 people use crack cocaine in England, yet provision of smoking equipment to support safer crack use is prohibited under UK law. Pipes used for crack cocaine smoking are often homemade and/or in sho...
Addressing xylazine harms are now a critical harm reduction priority, but relatively little epidemiological information exists to determine prevalence, magnitude, and correlates of xylazine use or related outc...
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an urgent need to establish isolation spaces for people experiencing homelessness who were exposed to or had COVID-19. In response, community agencies and the City of ...
The rise in injection drug use in the USA has led to an increase in injection site infections. We performed a national survey of people who use drugs to evaluate common drug use preparation, harm reduction pra...
Consistent reports from health professionals suggest that heroin is commonly used by patients undergoing opioid maintenance treatment (OMT) in France, potentially jeopardizing their recovery process. However, ...
The overdose crisis driven by synthetic opioids continues to escalate in the USA. We evaluated the efficacy of multiple manufacturing lots of a fentanyl test strip (FTS) to detect fentanyl and fentanyl analogs...
Over the past decade in the USA, increases in overdose rates of cocaine and psychostimulants with opioids were highest among Black, compared to White, populations. Whether fentanyl has contributed to the rise ...
The first Harm Reduction DACH Conference [DACH = D (Germany), A (Austria), CH (Switzerland)] took place in Vienna on June 23rd, 2023, and focused on tobacco harm reduction. It is the first conference bringing ...
Shifts in the US drug supply, including the proliferation of synthetic opioids and emergence of xylazine, have contributed to the worsening toll of the overdose epidemic. Drug checking services offer a critica...
While women living with HIV (WLWH) are twice as likely to report severe or undertreated chronic pain compared to men, little is known about pain among WLWH. Our goal was to characterize the correlates of pain ...
Each year, thousands of migrants enter the EU. Data on drug use in migrant populations are scarce and inconclusive. However, several risk factors make them particularly vulnerable to engaging in problematic dr...
The original article was published in Harm Reduction Journal 2023 20:116
Programmatic and financial sustainability of health responses dependent on donor funding has risen as a major concern. In the HIV field in particular, it generated a number of instruments and assessments on su...
The Correction to this article has been published in Harm Reduction Journal 2024 21:27
Globally, People Who Inject Drugs (PWID) have limited healthcare, treatment, and prevention services, and they frequently experience stigma and negative attitudes toward healthcare providers when accessing ser...
With growing rates of unregulated drug toxicity death and concerns regarding COVID-19 transmission among people who use drugs, in March 2020, prescribed safer supply guidance was released in British Columbia. ...
HIV self-testing (HIVST) could increase HIV testing access among people who inject drugs (PWID), and secondary distribution (i.e., peer-delivery) of HIVST kits in PWID social networks could further expand cove...
Women with substance-use issues are overrepresented in prison. Research on women’s recidivism often focuses on offending behaviour rather than the health and social circumstances women are experiencing when re...
Medical cannabis use and public acceptance in the United States have increased over the past 25 years. However, access to medical cannabis remains limited, particularly for underserved populations. To understa...
Medications for opioid use disorder (OUD) are effective at preventing overdose and infectious disease but are vastly under-prescribed in the US. For decades, prescribers faced additional training and regulatio...
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid that is 50 times more powerful than heroin and has become ubiquitous in the illicit drug supply in the USA. Studies show that among people who use drugs, fentanyl is som...
Lives lost in North America due to the unregulated drug poisoning emergency are preventable and those who survive an opioid overdose may suffer long-term disability. Rates of opioid overdose more than doubled ...
Harm reduction strategies can decrease morbidity and mortality associated with substance use. Various barriers limit conversation around substance use between clinicians and patients. Graphic medicine techniqu...
Rave music parties (RMP) are a world-wide socio-cultural phenomenon, where people listen to rave music while frequently consuming psychedelic drugs. Epidemiological studies have emphasized the hazardous conseq...
Fentanyl test strips (FTS) are a commonly deployed tool in drug checking, used to test for the presence of fentanyl in street drug samples prior to consumption. Previous reports indicate that in addition to fe...
Perception of drug adulteration has increased in Mexico, but there is little research on adulterants and toxicity. The aim of this study was to identify drug composition in an electronic music outdoor festival...
BUP-XR (SUBLOCADE®) is the first buprenorphine extended-release subcutaneous injection approved in the USA for monthly treatment of moderate-to-severe opioid use disorder (OUD). Among patients with OUD, those who...
This paper applies the theory of change model (Kotter in Harv Bus Rev 2:59–67, 1995; Moore et al. in Viet Nam J Public Health 1(1):66–75, 2013) to describe the pathway that lead to Australia’s first pill testi...
Bystander administration of naloxone is a critical strategy to mitigate opioid overdose mortality. To ensure bystanders’ willingness to carry and administer naloxone in response to a suspected overdose, it is ...
The original article was published in Harm Reduction Journal 2023 20:141
The Canadian drug supply has significantly increased in toxicity over the past few years, resulting in the worsening of the overdose crisis. A key initiative implemented during this crisis has been data monito...
The experiences and perceived support needs of harm reduction workers in the USA have been understudied. While previous research has explored staff burnout and role-related stress, there is a research gap arou...
Interpersonal violence and opioid use disorder are significant and intersecting public health concerns in the USA. The current study evaluated the consequences associated with opioid use (e.g., physical, socia...
Overdoses have surged in rural areas in the U.S. and globally for years, but harm reduction interventions have lagged. Overdose education and naloxone distribution (OEND) programs reduce overdose mortality, bu...
Women who inject drugs in Ukraine are disproportionately burdened by HIV. To help address the needs of this population, a greater understanding of how interventions may uniquely benefit women who inject drugs ...
In Kenya, violence is common among people who inject drugs (PWID) living with HIV and their sexual and injecting partners and may lead to decreased uptake of HIV services, increased HIV risk behaviors, and inc...
The rising rates of drug use-related complications call for a paradigm shift in the care for people who use drugs. While addiction treatment and harm reduction have historically been siloed in the US, co-locat...
Injectable opioid agonist treatment (iOAT) is an effective option to support people living with opioid use disorder (OUD) who have not sufficiently benefitted from oral OAT. However, iOAT has been criticised b...
The methodological part of the large-scale study on the psychosocial distress of young people in Slovenia focused on vulnerable young people who use drugs and explored the potential of online interventions in ...
Providing sterile drug smoking materials to people who use drugs can prevent the acquisition of infectious diseases and reduce overdose risk. However, there is a lack of understanding of how these practices ar...
Opioid overdose deaths are of great concern to public health, with over one million lives lost since 1999. While many efforts have been made to mitigate these, Black communities continue to experience a greate...
Opioid withdrawal is a regular occurrence among many people who use illicit opioids (PWUIO) that has also been shown to increase their willingness to engage in risk-involved behavior. The proliferation of fent...
Research conducted in urban areas has highlighted the impact of housing instability on people who inject drugs (PWID), revealing that it exacerbates vulnerability to drug-related harms and impedes syringe serv...
Harm Reduction Journal