Supervised injection facilities are a form of micro-environmental intervention that aim to address various harms associated with injection drug use. Given the numerous threats faced by women who inject drugs and are street-involved, including heightened risks for violence, we sought to elucidate...

High rates of violence among street-level sex workers have been described across the globe, while in cities across Canada the disappearance and victimization of drug-using women in survival sex work is ongoing. Given the pervasive levels of violence faced by sex workers over the last decades,...

Recent research has highlighted the ways in which social structural processes and physical environments operate to push young drug users towards risk. We undertook this study in order to explore how young people who were currently street-entrenched characterized and understood their initiation...

People who inject drugs (PWID) experience high levels of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C (HCV) infection that, together with injection-related complications such as non-fatal overdose and injection-related infections, lead to frequent hospitalizations. However, injection drug-using populations are...

Transitions into more harmful forms of illicit drug use among youth have been identified as important foci for research and intervention. In settings around the world, the transition to crystal methamphetamine (meth) use among youth is considered a particularly dangerous and growing problem....

Despite growing awareness of the importance of context for the health of people who use drugs, studies examining labour market outcomes have rarely considered the role that physical, social and structural factors play in shaping labour market participation among drug users. Using discrete time...

The objective of this study is to examine the rates of mortality among different social classes and socioeconomic groups of British Columbian males from causes of death amenable to medical intervention. We examined the rates of avoidable mortality from the causes of death published by Charlton,...

Ethnographic research among people who inject drugs (PWID) involves complex ethical issues. While ethical review frameworks have been critiqued by social scientists, there is a lack of social science research examining institutional ethical review processes, particularly in relation to...

The objective of this study is to describe the relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and the geographic distribution of persons with HIV in the metropolitan area surrounding Vancouver, British Columbia. Specifically, we sought to determine the location of persons with HIV and...