I've been asking Jamie Bridge to write another article for this site since he started his new job. Well he's now written it and his timing is impeccable. Next week is the AIDS2010 conference in Vienna and the Global Fund is a key player in the fight to tackle the spread of AIDS.

In this article Jamie gives us a quick introduction to their work.

While I was at the International Harm Reduction Conference in April I finally got to meet face to face with Meghan Ralston of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). Of course I took the oppotunity to interview her for Hooked.

We talked on a number of drug policy issues from NSP provision in the US through to stigma issues. But the main focus was prescription drug use and overdose (Meghan is the person responsible for developing the DPAs overdose campaign).

It's not often you get some totally new equipment in a needle programme and the last thing I expected people to be innovative with was a sharps bin.

The new bin from Exchange Supplies is something which will change whole aspects of the way we work with used injecting equipment, not to mention the fact it is (in my opinion at least) a better bin from the injectors point of view.

While I was at the International Harm Reduction Conference in April I was lucky enough to get to talk with Patrick Gallahue and Rick Lines about IHRAs latest report into countries that use the death penalty as a punishment for drug offences.

Interviewing Patrick and Rick was really interesting, and of course scary. The fact that some countries seem to feel its appropriate to kill people based on the substances they are involved in was something I was aware of but the scale of the situation was a shock.

It's a standard question on most assessments in drug services, asked in lots of different ways. "How often do you inject?", "Number of injections per day?" etc.

But, why ask it? And how would a worker react if someone was really honest about the answer?

I've got another guest article today for you. This one is another from the wonderful Dr.Stephen Parkin. You might remember he wrote an article for the blog previously on drug related litter. 

This time he is writing about the blue lights that you find in some public toilets that he has been researching recently (the lights, not the toilets).