Drugs and Alcohol Today: Volume 19 Issue 2

Editorial

Blaine Stothard, Axel Klein

Harm reduction in Italy: the experience of an unsanctioned supervised injection facility run by drug users

Sonia Bergamo, Giuseppe Parisi, Paolo Jarre

Efforts to establish harm reduction interventions in Italy have persisted since the mid-1990s. Despite this, no sanctioned SIF has ever been implemented. The purpose of this paper…

Time to look beyond ageing as a factor? Alternative explanations for the continuing rise in drug related deaths in Scotland

Iain McPhee, Barry Sheridan, Steve O’Rawe

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons and risk factors that explain the threefold increase in drug-related deaths from 267 in 1996 to 934 in 2017 in Scotland. The…

Silent deaths: a commentary on new mortality data relating to volatile substance abuse in Great Britain

Victoria Leigh, Sarah MacLean

The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on new information from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on deaths caused by volatile substance abuse (VSA) in Great…

Consumer participation in drug treatment: a systematic review

Mark Goodhew, Jane Stein-Parbury, Angela Dawson

It is unclear how consumer participation (CP) can be optimised to transform drug and alcohol treatment services and improve health outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to…

Challenges, relationship and outcomes in low-threshold drug services

Sarah Morton, Laura O’Reilly

This paper reports on the findings of an action research study that sought to explore the development and provision of community-based low-threshold services within a socially…

Social representations of polydrug use in a Finnish newspaper 1990–2016

Jenni Savonen, Pekka Hakkarainen, Kati Kataja, Inari Sakki, Christoffer Tigerstedt

The purpose of this paper is to study the social representations of polydrug use in the Finnish mainstream media. Social representations are shared ways of talking about socially…

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the strange case of the two selves of clandestine drug users in Scotland

Iain McPhee, Chris Holligan, Robert McLean, Ross Deuchar

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hidden social worlds of competent clandestine users of drugs controlled within the confines of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, which…

Substance use by social workers and implications for professional regulation

Niki Kiepek, Jonathan Harris, Brenda Beagan, Marisa Buchanan

The purpose of this paper is to explore the prevalence and patterns of substance use among Canadian social workers. With legalisation of can professional regulatory bodies are…