One of our plans for the 2024 HIT Hot Topics conference was to have a session on neurodivergence and its intersection with substance use. Ultimately, that session never happened because of a mix of speaker ideas falling through and us already having a large number of speakers booked on other topics. (Don’t worry, you will see that session one day.) Part of our planning for that session was a commissioned article from HIT Hot Topics regular Jay Cooper. Now you can read that article.

Drugs are changing and overdoses are rising. Harm Reduction Leads from leading treatment providers Cranstoun , Change Grow Live , Humankind , Turning Point and ourselves here at HIT are encouraging anyone who uses drugs to make a Stayin’ Alive Plan, aimed at preventing fatal overdose.

The Andrey Rylkov Foundation (ARF), the only NGO that provides sterile needles and syringes to injecting drug users in Moscow, has been declared a “foreign agent” by the Russian government. This means that the Russian government regards as presenting a threat to national security because they receive funding from international donors.

As the eventful 24th Harm Reduction Conference entered its final day, I feel a great sense of pride that we have arrived where we are, but at the same time sad that in some countries harm reduction is not on the agenda, and In others such as England it has slowly been dismantled. Harm reduction in England was described to me recently by one of the early UK pioneers as a “cottage industry”.

In the mid 1980s, the Mersey Health Region, which consisted of the counties of Merseyside and Cheshire in the UK, became the focus of attention because of its radical and pioneering approach to dealing with the problems connected with drug use. Most of this focused on Liverpool, the biggest city in the region. Liverpool has a proud history of public health and was the first city in the world to appoint a Medical Officer of Health in 1847.

The drug scene is constantly changing and new drugs are being used alongside the old favourites. There has been an increase in drug-related deaths and problems using ‘new’ drugs. Too many users are being put at risk by not knowing what they are taking, taking too much and/or mixing drugs.