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...

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...

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...

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...

Although research has examined the impacts of childhood maltreatment among various marginalized populations, few studies have explored the relationship between child abuse and subsequent involvement in sex work among drug-using street-involved youth. In the present study, the relationships...

There is growing acknowledgment that social, structural, and environmental forces produce vulnerability to health harms among people who inject drugs (PWID), and safer environment interventions (SEI) have been identified as critical to mitigating the impacts of these contextual forces on...

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,...

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...