Following the recent retirements of Professor Suzanne Fraser (former DruGS Program Lead) and Professor David Moore (former DruGS Professorial Fellow), longtime DruGS team member Dr Adrian Farrugia has been announced as the new Program Lead. Aiming to continue their highly influential careers conducting theoretically innovative and empirically robust research on alcohol and other drugs and…
Marked annually on August 31, International Overdose Awareness Day 2021 is the world’s largest annual campaign to end overdose. As the event’s website explains, the day is an opportunity to ‘remember without stigma those who have died and acknowledge the grief of the family and friends left behind.’ International Overdose Awareness Day 2021 is a…
One of the outcomes of the DruGS team’s Australian Research Council-funded project on overdose prevention and take-home naloxone is a collection of Overdoselifesavers.org resources, including keyrings with backing cards explaining how to respond to an opioid overdose, and USB drives containing the project’s report and recommendations for future overdose policy and practice. Over the last month or…
One of the outcomes of the DruGS team’s Australian Research Council-funded project on overdose prevention and take-home naloxone is a collection of Overdoselifesavers.org resources. These are now being distributed for free to services and individuals. As project coordinator Dr Adrian Farrugia explained at the project report launch earlier this year, the team has produced keyrings with…
The term ‘take-home naloxone’ refers to a variety of life-saving initiatives in which a medication (naloxone) is made available to non-medically trained people for administration to others experiencing an opioid overdose. Despite a range of efforts to expand these initiatives over the last decade, the uptake of take-home naloxone in Australia remains inconsistent. This month…
In 2019 the DruGS team completed work on two large Australian Research Council-funded qualitative projects, one on opioid overdose and take-home naloxone, and the other on performance and image enhancing drugs and hepatitis C. In an invited chapter for the forthcoming Handbook on Intoxicants and Intoxication edited by Tamar Antin, Vibeke Frank and Geoffrey Hunt,…
What is an opioid overdose? How do people manage and respond to them? What is take-home naloxone? What is it like to respond to overdoses with and without naloxone? A ground breaking new website sheds light on the stories of people affected by overdose and explores the different ways people who consume drugs manage overdose.…
2019 workshop at the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs (APSAD) conference: Tuesday 12 November, Grand Chancellor, Hobart, Tasmania. In early 2017 members of the SSAC team began work on an ARC Discovery project on take-home naloxone uptake in Australia. Entitled Understanding the impediments to uptake and diffusion of take-home naloxone in Australia,…
Many thanks to those who have volunteered to be interviewed for SSAC’s project on ‘take-home’ naloxone in Australia. We have now begun conducting interviews with people who consume opioids in Sydney. Interviews will be conducted by research officer, Dr Jeanne Ellard. If you are interested in taking part the study, please contact research associate Adrian…
Many thanks to those who have volunteered to be interviewed for SSAC’s project on ‘take-home’ naloxone in Australia. We have now begun interviewing health professionals in New South Wales about their experiences with and knowledge of opioids, overdose and take-home naloxone. We would like to interview: Pharmacotherapy prescribers Pain management specialists General practitioners Pharmacists Participation…
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