The International journal on drug policy
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Int. J. Drug Policy · Jul 2013
Exposure to project-based Housing First is associated with reduced jail time and bookings.
Project-based Housing First (HF) programs provide immediate, permanent, low-barrier, nonabstinence-based supportive housing to chronically homeless people within a single housing project. Previous studies have shown project-based HF is associated with 6-month reductions in jail time (Larimer et al., 2009), and that people with criminal histories are able to maintain their housing in supportive housing, such as project-based HF (Malone, 2009; Tsai & Rosenheck, 2012). This study aimed to extend these findings to document the criminal histories of project-based HF residents and to test the associations among exposure to project-based HF, criminal histories and jail time over a 2-year follow-up. ⋯ Findings suggest that participants' criminal histories primarily reflect "symptoms" of homelessness rather than threats to public safety. Further, the extent of participants' criminal histories was not associated with subsequent jail time or housing attrition. Although causation cannot be implied, these findings show that the amount of time spent in project-based HF is associated with decreased jail time for up to two years following initial HF exposure.
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Int. J. Drug Policy · Jul 2013
CommentThe 'do-it-yourself' New Zealand injecting scene: implications for harm reduction.
The review in this issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy (Grund, Latypov, & Harris, 2013) highlights the disturbing harms caused by the increasing use of 'krokodil' by people who inject drugs (PWID) in Eurasia. The growing use of this home produced injectable opiate poses a number of challenges for harm reduction policy, particularly when situated in restrictive regulatory environments where initiatives such as Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) are prohibited or limited. In such contexts where OST access is restricted, how can these harms be minimised, and what alternatives can be offered? This commentary addresses these questions, by offering the rarely researched case of home produced injectable opioid use in New Zealand as an example.
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This article applies the insights of Actor Network Theory to analyse some of the actions performed by Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT), a technology which separates nicotine physically and conceptually from the harms of tobacco and enhances its capacities to act against rather than for smoking. The article argues that NRT puts into action a medicalised logic of substitution in which dependence on nicotine becomes a route to health as well as a disorder to be treated. ⋯ The article draws on a range of smoking cessation and tobacco control literature, including medical and public health research, government-sponsored stop smoking websites and clinical guidelines to trace the changes produced by the shifting status of most forms of NRT from prescription medication to consumer health product. It also examines less conventional uses of NRT which produce varied practices of quitting and thus support the possibility of tobacco harm reduction based on the circulation of 'good nicotine'.