Last May I uploaded a film to YouTube staring my daughter Emily responding to an overdose her teddy bear had. Although it was only a couple of minutes long it seemed to have a real impact on people. So back in September I gave a talk about the film at the Hot Topics conference in Liverpool this included a second interview with Emily as well as outtakes from the original.

Although many of the presentations given that day were filmed this one of mine wasn't because it was part of the 'Unconference' so I decided to make this short film so more people would be able to see what I was talking about (and of course see the outtakes).

Recently as part of my day job with HIT I've been working on a new naloxone website which will be launching soon. This means that naloxone is talked about in my household quite a bit, and as a result my daughter has taken an interest (especially as she's been learning the recovery position at school) and she decided she wanted to make a film about it.

Steroids have always been a bit confusing when it comes to discussing legalities with visitors to a needle programme.

But changes to the law covering steroids that come into effect from April 23rd are going to cause a major change if both the legalities and possible risks of using this group of drugs.

At heart I'm a harm reduction kind of person. I've spent the last decade working in needle programmes, running a website that provides injecting advice and presenting sessions at conferences promoting harm reduction. For me this work has always had as one of its goals the idea of helping people who want to stop using drugs achieve this. And for the people who don't want to stop, it's been about helping them stay safer and, if I can, 'nudging' them to the idea of stopping at some time in the future.

So the idea that harm reduction and recovery are somehow opposite ends of drugs work has been something I've always found confusing. To me recovery is harm reduction and harm reduction is something that sits perfectly in recovery – even the original ACMD document statement that kicked off needle programmes in the UK had as one of its stated goals 'increase abstinence'.