Injection is the act of delivering a psychoactive substance into the body using a hypodermic needle. Injected substances are mixed with a liquid (such as distilled water) to form a solution, which is usually either injected directly into the bloodstream via the veins (i.e. Intravenous or IV injection) or into the muscle tissue (i.e. Intramuscular or IM injection). The film is aimed at people who inject heroin (specifically, the brown heroin commonly available in the UK), but many of the steps shown can.
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Make sure you are taught how to inject properly, preferably by a medical professional. Contact your local friendly GP or book an appointment with an and they will be able to help you.If you are injecting it’s important to use clean injecting equipment and to avoid sharing needles or any other equipment you might be using to inject. Blood borne viruses such as Hepatitis B, C and HIV can be transmitted through the sharing of rigs.With that being said it’s important to also be aware of where blood can end up. Blood can remain on or in syringes but also on other equipment or surfaces such as your skin, on the hands or the tops of tables. You can’t always see blood so don’t assume that just because you can’t see it that it isn’t there.Make sure you wash your hands and clean the area where you are preparing to inject. Injecting drug use and the sharing of equipment with others puts you at increased risk of:.
Vein damage and permanent scarring. Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, Tetanus and HIV transmission.
Deep vein thrombosis and clots – this may result in the loss of limbs, damage to organs, stroke and possibly even death. If possible, we recommend not reusing a rig. Try to stock up on a bunch of new equipment and access a NSP as much as possible so that you have ample amounts of gear. However, sometimes there isn't the choice to use new equipment, so in the event that you have to reuse a rig then:RINSE IT - under clean, cold tap water straight after use. This will remove most of the blood and helps to reduce the likelihood of HIV and HEP C if someone happens to stick themself.
“Time for safer spaces”: Scenes of public injecting in Birmingham documented by Nigel BrunsdonIn August 2016, harm reduction advocate and photographer Nigel Brunsdon spent a day walking around Birmingham, evidence of public injecting ( ). He visited three known injecting areas – two on waste grounds next to car parks, and one in a main walkway in the centre of town – and the ground covered in injecting equipment and general waste; needles alongside garbage and human excrement. “No one ‘chooses’ to inject in these spaces”, he said, “this is where the most desperate people in our society have been driven”.A few years earlier in 2012, Philippe Bonnet explored these key issues in a produced by Social Impact Films. He toured known injecting sites in Birmingham, and interviewed outreach workers, healthcare professionals, and people who were currently injecting (or had injected) drugs in public places. Injecting equipment was already available to the city’s population, and services were providing this equipment knowing that it would be used by people to inject illicit drugs. Many vulnerable people would go on to inject those illicit drugs in unsafe spaces – places that were cold, unhygienic, with poor lighting and no washing facilities. Describing the conditions as “completely appalling’, he said:“The aim of this video is to highlight the problem we have in this city.
Can we let people inject in these situations? Can we let the harm carry on?”A core demographic of drug consumption rooms is homeless people who use drugs, due to between homelessness and high-risk behaviours such as public injecting, sharing injecting equipment, and poor injecting hygiene.The term homelessness covers a. Though traditionally associated with ‘rough sleeping’, someone who has a roof over their head can still be homeless.
Cubicles for hygienic, supervised injecting inside a drug consumption roomDrug consumption rooms are spaces where people can bring their own pre-obtained illegal or illicit drugs, and either inject or inhale them using sterile equipment under the supervision of nurses or other medical professionals. Assessing impactEurope’s monitoring centre on drugs (1) improving survival and (2) increasing social integration as the overarching aims of drug consumption rooms. Essay on overdose deaths in the UKThe of opioid-related deaths is respiratory failure, caused by opiate-type drugs switching off the part of the brain that reminds you to breathe. If no one intervenes in the event of this type of overdose, oxygen will be depleted and eventually the heart will stop, causing death. Staff can overdoses becoming fatal by: protecting a person’s airway; providing supplemental oxygen; providing resuscitation (artificially breathing for the person using a bag/valve/mask); and administering the opiate overdose antidote.Staff in two facilities in Hamburg (Germany) nearly three quarters of emergencies were related to heroin use. More difficult to manage, they suggested, were cocaine-related emergencies characterised by increased anxiety, psychotic states, or epileptic seizures. Whereas the response to opioids was driven by the need to aid breathing, interventions after problematic cocaine use generally involved calming and protecting the person who had used drugs.Only one death has been documented in a drug consumption room since the first opened in 1986, and this was not linked to the drug consumption room itself; in 2002, a person who used drugs died from anaphylaxis (an acute allergic reaction) in a German facility ( ).
While ‘nobody has died from an overdose inside a drug consumption room’ a strong argument for them having a positive effect, this in itself is not a principal and necessary measure of success, but rather a comment or observation on the history of drug consumption rooms to date.of lives saved by drug consumption rooms include the prevention of four fatal overdoses per year in Sydney (Australia), and ten deaths per year in Germany. In (Canada), there was a 35% decrease in fatal overdoses, and an estimated two to 12 fatal overdoses were prevented each year. Costs and benefitssupervising drug use (the most distinctive function of drug consumption rooms) have been estimated at roughly the same in Vancouver and Sydney – the equivalent in Canadian currency of C$7.50–C$10 per injection. This would bring the cost of supervising all injections for someone who injects twice a day to about C$5,500–C$7,300 per year, which is in the as the cost of providing methadone for a year to a patient in the United States.Focusing almost exclusively on Vancouver, simulation studies have the value of averting a fatal overdose or HIV infection is so high that drug consumption rooms can pass the cost–benefit test even if the number of people affected is small ( ). ‘Honeypot effect’ applies to bees, not consumption roomsThe is large and almost unanimous in its support for drug consumption rooms, and there is little to no basis for concern about drug consumption rooms producing adverse effects.
However, fears of adverse effects persist.One of the concerns about drug consumption rooms is that they will aggravate public disorder and crime in surrounding local areas by attracting people who use drugs and dealers from elsewhere – termed the ‘honeypot effect’. While if this did happen it would also presumably extend the benefits of drug consumption rooms to non-local people who use drugs, neither the adverse nor the beneficial results of the honeypot effect have materialised in practice; where used, the term is alluding to a ‘phenomenon’ based in fear (or fear-mongering) rather than fact.The European Union’s drug misuse monitoring centre that drug consumption rooms result in higher rates of drug-related crimes in the vicinity (eg, trafficking, assaults, robbery).
Most consumption room users, and typically reflect the profiles of people buying drugs in local markets, and for this reason, facilities located any distance from drug markets very few users. Explaining why, people who use drugs and gave evidence to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s pointed out that:“An addicted injecting heroin user is likely to be primarily driven by the need to obtain their drugs. If they have the money, their first port of call will be a dealer.
If there is somewhere nearby where they can safely use their drug (and obtain a clean syringe), then this is likely to be their next step. If they need to go any distance to reach such a place, their need to inject their drug is likely to lead to them using somewhere else (often a public area nearby).”Although, on balance, research suggests that drug consumption rooms make drug use safer (eg, increasing access to health and social services, identifying and responding to emergencies, and reducing public drug use), and that fears (eg, encouraging drug use, delaying treatment entry, or aggravating problems arising from local drug markets) are not grounded in evidence ( ), policy is not informed by evidence alone. Evidence ‘just one ingredient in the policymaking process’Drug consumption rooms have been seriously considered in the UK on several occasions since the turn of the millennium, but have arguably never been a realistic prospect because of government opposition.
Drink and Drugs News article on what would persuade a city to accept a drug consumption roomA month later in June 2014, the feasibility working group that there was insufficient support at the time to consider drug consumption rooms; both the Association of Chief Police Officers and Sussex Police were opposed, as were other organisations. Resistance was a “shift in focus for substance misuse services from harm reduction to recovery which placed a greater emphasis on abstinence”. It was unclear whether as a group stakeholders were aligned with the values of abstinence-based recovery, or whether the policy and funding climate was forcing their hand.
However, Brighton’s local paper The Argus reported that weeks after the feasibility study was launched, several stakeholders spoke out against drug consumption rooms, revealing a less than open mind in advance of the enquiry being concluded. This included Andy Winter, chief executive of Brighton Housing Trust, who he wanted to see “something far more positive done with addiction and recovery”. Frustrated at what he considered a ‘distraction’ from recovery, treatment and abstinence, he resolved to “oppose any further waste of public funds, time and effort on exploring their feasibility”. With members like this on the group, whose minds were made up from the beginning, it would have been a surprise if drug consumption rooms were deemed feasible in Brighton.In 2016, the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs that “consideration be given – by the governments of each UK country and by local commissioners of drug treatment services – to the potential to reduce drug-related deaths and other harms through the provision of medically-supervised drug consumption clinics in localities with a high concentration of injecting drug use”. However, a 2017 letter from the Home Office to the advisory council clarified that the government change its position on drug consumption rooms.
The following year the government restated its position in public ( ). “We have no intention of introducing drug consumption rooms, nor do we have any intention of devolving the United Kingdom policy on drug classification and the way in which we deal with prohibited drugs to Scotland” (Home Office Minister Victoria Atkins, January 2018, House of Commons debate on drug consumption rooms). Section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) 1996 permits a Minister to exempt “any person or class of persons or any controlled substance or precursor or any class thereof from the application of all or any of the provisions of this Act or the regulations if, in the opinion of the Minister, the exemption is necessary for a medical or scientific purpose or is otherwise in the public interest”.
On the 24th June 2003, the federal Minister of Health granted, in principle, the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority’s application for an exemption under section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to launch a supervised injection site pilot for the purposes of scientific research. A decision to extend (or not to extend) the trial would therefore be informed by the data obtained. The in Canada was that it complied with the UN conventions by permitting a pilot project only., the Drug Summit Legislative Response Act 1999 amended the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act 1985 to enable the licensing and operation of a medically supervised injecting centre for a trial period of 18 months, subject to a license with certain conditions. In 1999 the board these facilities in the strongest possible terms, suggesting they breach the conventions because they “facilitate illicit drug trafficking” – far from part of the solution, they were part of the problem: “The Board believes that any national, state or local authority that permits the establishment and operation of drug injection rooms or any outlet to facilitate the abuse of drugs (by injection or any other route of administration) also facilitates illicit drug trafficking. The Board reminds Governments that they have an obligation to combat illicit drug trafficking in all its formsBy permitting drug injection rooms, a Government could be considered to be in contravention of the international drug control treaties by facilitating in, aiding and/or abetting the commission of crimes involving illegal drug possession and use, as well as other criminal offences, including drug trafficking.
Essay on harm reductionDrug consumption rooms seek to of drugtaking for a cohort of people who, for complex reasons, are unable or unwilling to engage with treatment for their drug dependence, or are in treatment but still using illicit drugs.What makes drug consumption rooms distinct from and more disruptive than other harm reduction approaches such as needle exchanges, is that they employ staff who bear witness to illicit drug use, as opposed to staff who advise and provide resources but are ultimately absent for the act of drugtaking. In Taking away the chaos, the local health service and Glasgow’s drug service coordinating partnership the health and service needs of people who inject drugs in public places in the city centre. Resulting recommendations were to develop existing services, including extending assertive outreach services and developing a peer network for harm reduction, and to introduce new services, such as a pilot safer injecting facility in the city centre to “address the unacceptable burden of health and social harms caused by public injecting”.
However, to date the Scottish Government has been legal judgements that drug consumption rooms would fall under the purview of the UK Government (and UK-wide Misuse of Drugs Act 1971).The Scottish Government’s approach to drugs and alcohol the belief that substance use problems are predominantly public health and human rights issues, which enables it to pursue policies that save and improve lives. This puts it at odds with the UK Government, which has been unwilling to depart from substance use as a issue.