On the 31st of August 2010 many groups and organisations around the world held events for International Overdose Awareness Day.

As well as being held in the 'real world' the day was observed on the internet.

Steroid use and the use of other performance & image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) have been on the rise in the UK for a number of years now. We even have services reporting that over 50% of new injectors visiting their needle programmes come from these groups.

But in most services workers are being given very little guidance on the types of advice they should give, and most paperwork used is the standard paperwork that is used for opiate injectors. This has resulted in both steroid users and workers having very little confidence in the quality of the harm reduction advice being given.

To help try and address this I've developed a new PIED assessment tool.

Since releasing the Overdose Workshop in mid January its been viewed over 1000 times. So I've decided to provide some more supporting resources for it.

I've developed both a presentation to be used when running the workshop and a poster to promote the 'What's my score' tool.

Because of the recent Anthrax outbreak in Scotland I've decided it is time to rewrite my self detox handout.

This handout is designed to help people stop using heroin without the need for a substitute script.There are many reasons people chose to self detox, and over the years I've used versions of this handout with lots of people who tell me its helpful.

Each year we lose far too many people to overdose (lets face it, one person dead is 'too many') so I decided it was about time I wrote a new workshop to try and help address the situation.

This latest workshop covers a range of overdose issues and has been designed to be run either as a full workshop, or as separate sections in NSP or one to one sessions.

Not all work in needle exchanges is about the injecting issues. A future article will discuss the advantages of non-problematic talk. Today though is going to be the release of Injecting Advice.com’s first free workshop pack.

As you can tell from the title to this article, this workshop will be concentrating on Crack Cocaine and safer pipe use, and of course includes all the information needed to run a successful harm reduction workshop with clients and/or staff.