#harm-reduction

#harm-reduction

Dr. Elyse Stevens had a reputation for taking on complex medical cases, including people who'd been battling addiction for decades. Some were chronic-pain patients on high doses of opioids; others were sex workers and people living on the street. "Many of my patients are messy, the ones that don't know if they want to stop using drugs or not," said Stevens, a primary care and addiction medicine doctor.

Smoking is one of the clearest public-health failures of our time. More than 500,000 Americans still die each year from smoking-related illnesses, and globally the picture is even more alarming. In the United States, anti-smoking campaigns have reduced the number of new cigarette users, but the effectiveness of these measures may be fading. Indeed, the headline of a widely-shared news story notes "Celebrities Are Making Smoking Cigarettes Cool Again". Yikes.

The Attorney General, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the Secretary of Transportation shall take immediate steps to assess their discretionary grant programs and determine whether priority for those grants may be given to grantees in States and municipalities that actively meet the below criteria, to the maximum extent permitted by law:

I dream of a future where everyone has what they need and where design supports human and planetary flourishing. This vision fills me with hope while also making me acutely aware of the reality many designers face today. Our work is done within the dominant capitalist framework that prioritizes financial growth above all else, often at the expense of true flourishing.

Eating disorders are among the most chronic and life-threatening psychiatric illnesses, with many affected individuals experiencing fatal outcomes. Recovery is often difficult because patients may fear changes to their bodies, struggle to relinquish control over eating and exercise, and live within a culture that reinforces disordered eating behaviors and unrealistic beauty ideals. As a result, harm reduction has increasingly been discussed as a necessary approach for individuals with long-term, chronic eating disorders.

Toronto's Drug Checking Service said in a report last week that a new opioid, known as cychlorphine, was found in three fake pharmaceutical opioid samples collected in the city's downtown core and the west end between Oct. 25 and 28. One of the samples was expected to be hydromorphone, Dilaudid, another was expected to be oxycodone, OxyContin, and the third was said to be Percocet. But none contained their expected drug only cychlorphine, the report said.

But few people know that later in life he was a secret advocate of what's widely considered the world's most potent psychedelic: 5-MeO-DMT. The hallucinogen, also called "the God molecule," is a compound found in the venomous secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad named Incilius alvarius (it's commonly called Bufo alvarius) and is known to bring about ego death, a total dissolution of the senses, and a euphoric feeling of existential connectedness, all in a roughly 20-minute trip.

Drug users have found a dangerous and cheap way to get a high that is fueling a surge in HIV diagnoses. Called 'bluetoothing', the practice involves injecting yourself with the blood of another drug user in an effort to share in their high. Already common in Fiji, the practice has driven an 11-fold surge in HIV cases on the Pacific island nation in just a decade.

The support for this type of legislation among PSH tenants has been misrepresented. Based on my conversations, tenants overwhelmingly support having the option to have recovery housing available for those who need it, and that includes myself. I support recovery housing options-but there are plenty of PSH tenants who don't believe that sobriety should be forced and would not be in support of anything that didn't give a harm reduction option.

When President Donald Trump delivered a barrage of false statements about climate change during his September 23 speech to the UN General Assembly, he made headlines around the world. Mocking climate change as a "con job" promoted by "stupid people," Trump's remarks also illustrated a dilemma facing journalism's traditional approach to covering politics, where not appearing to take sides has long been a cardinal rule. As more and more political leaders and movements mirror Trump's habit of making factually inaccurate claims, a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism offers a fresh way to think about this dilemma, along with a host of practical tools for tackling it.

The idea is simple, and supported by decades of research and data: It's almost impossible to address addiction issues if you're living on the streets. Requiring total sobriety as a condition of housing just makes the homeless crisis worse. As Dorsey freely admits, many people facing addiction issues relapse, and require multiple efforts to reach sobriety. That's much easier to handle when you have a roof over your head.

And so this piece of art you see behind us, we wanted to have a place in an alley like this where people who are on the street can come anytime of day or night to grieve those who they've lost. This is a memorial wall for those types of people. And we think it's really important. And the hand prints are there to say: We are here, we have been here.

There was a long period of time that we weren't seeing [it], but it has started creeping up since May,

Harm reduction is a proven public health intervention that acknowledges that incremental steps toward healthy decision-making can save lives and prevent the spread of disease.