It’s convenient to dismiss people who inject drugs (pwid) as criminals or, at best, the victims of their own bad decisions. But this approach not only eschews our responsibility to help marginalised and vulnerable people, it also keeps us impervious to broader social issues. Top-down, authoritarian policies steered by legal priorities don’t address these issues, and those based on medical knowledge, even with the best intentions, risk being condescending and unhelpful. The alternative is to listen to the people the policies are supposed to support. That is precisely what two senior public health researchers did. What they discovered was a series of recurring themes that challenge our biases and give clearer direction for co-designed harm-reduction approaches.
You can read the rest of this article, complete with additional feature content, on the Research Features website here. (Opens in a new tab)