Syringe exchange has been a cornerstone of HIV prevention strategies for people who inject drugs. It has been one of the most rapidly expanding and developing areas of work, and has had major significance as a symbol of new aims, working practices and working ideologies for those seeking to help drug users reduce their risk of HIV infection or of transmitting it to others. Programmes in Britain...

The arrests, detentions, prosecutions, and other legal actions taken against drug-dependent pregnant women distract attention from significant social problems, such as our lack of universal health care, the dearth of policies to support pregnant and parenting women, the absence of social supports for children, and the overall failure of the drug war. The attempts to "protect the fetus" undertak...

BACKGROUND Illegal drug use and related problems have been emerging as an important public health issue in Taiwan. Via the capture-recapture approach, the present study aimed to offer insights into the size of heroin and methamphetamine male user population in the northern Taiwan during the period from 1999 to 2002. METHODS Annual lists of male subjects were collated from both judiciary and m...

This article illustrates how the Aboriginal female drug user is responded to as an expected offender based on the intersection of her gender, race, and class. Drawing on the findings of a national Canadian study documenting the lived experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit female drug users, we argue that the strengthening of cultural identity can potentially disrupt this expected status...

This is the final article in a series based on a study of a cohort of Irish drug abusers. Previous papers dealt with the overall social (Carr et al., 1980) and psychological (Carr et al., 1981) characteristics of the cohort. While certain general trends were identified, perhaps the most striking feature of the data was the variability that exists between subjects. In the present paper this vari...

Rates of HIV antibody testing remain at approximately 45% of the general population. To more effectively design interventions to increase testing, comprehensive information is needed to understand the barriers to HIV testing. A measure of barriers to HIV testing was developed using the major barriers identified in the literature on barriers to health care utilization (Melnyk, 1988), and tested ...

OBJECTIVES We investigated individual- and neighborhood-level factors associated with adolescent initiation of injection drug use. METHODS Injection drug users (IDUs) who had been injecting 2 to 5 years underwent HIV testing and completed a sociobehavioral risk survey. Modeling techniques accounting for intraneighborhood correlations were used in data analyses. RESULTS Adolescent-initiating...

Infective endocarditis is a serious complication of intravenous (IV) drug abuse, with a reported mortality of 5 to 10%. A 21-year-old man, who was an intravenous drug abuser, presented with fever and dyspnea. Transthoracic echocardiography showed a highly mobile, large vegetation on the anterior leaflet of the tricuspid valve. Despite antibiotic therapy for ten days, the patient remained febril...