“One of the principal harms of the drug war is that society fails to treat people with dignity. And to me, a prosecutor disrespecting the wishes of a person who dies of drug overdose would just be one more act of turning their backs on people who needed help” - Grey Gardner, a lawyer with the Drug Policy Alliance
“Talking about needle injury with people who inject, giving advice on how to avoid it and talking about testing if someone gets spiked is not only great harm reduction, but is also treating people as a valuable human being. I think both workers and people injecting often have a habit of just assuming that needle injuries for injectors are par for the course. They’re not, they’re avoidable.”
“We know that equipment is often stored and re-used some time later, so in these cases because of reduced viral survival when there is less blood, reducing the dead space could make the difference between someone catching hepatitis C or not.”
“Tracing around the redness (draw a line around the border) of suspected cellulitis, will allow for the individual to gauge whether or not the redness is spreading. If this is the case, they should seek urgent medical advice.”
Sign up for regular updates
The people behind this site
Nigel Brunsdon
Nigel's day job is being the Community Manager at HIT, he also runs the injectingadvice.com website and a number of other online harm reduction projects. In his spare time he can be found hiding behind a camera.
Craig Harvey
Craig is a committed harm reductionist, having worked primarily with people who inject drugs for two decades, both in the United Kingdom and Australia. A surfer, climber and wannabe novelist, he sometimes takes photographs too.