Since the beginning of April, staff from The Loop Australia have a run a drug checking trial at the Uniting Medically-Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross for service users there. To get an overview of the service on offer, who can participate and why this ground-breaking trial is important, Users News has chatted to Dr Robert Page.

Users News dives into Australia’s new vape laws and what they mean for the cloud puffers out there.

2C-B and ‘tusi’ are on the rise here in Australia but confusion persists about the substances. Users News has taken a deep dive to find out what’s fact and what’s not.

Prison and health experts including NUAA have raised concerns over the safety of Australian inmates following a rise in local detections of nitazenes, an extremely strong lab-made opioid.

Users News wants to learn more about our readers and what you want to see us cover, so we’ve put together a short 5-minute survey. All questions are optional, but the more information we get about our readers, the better! The survey is anonymous and confidential. We are giving out 2 x $50 gift vouchers for completing the survey! It’ll only take a few minutes, and your input is super valuable to us. Ready to share your thoughts? Survey closes 5 August 2024 at midnight.

Last week NSW Health published guidelines for depot bupe. While it is intended to provide guidance for health practitioners and prescribers, there’s a lot of useful information in here for those on opioid treatment programs . We’ve saved you some time by summarising the key points relevant to NUAA’s community.

This year, NUAA outreach workers have participated in 2 successful high-intensity testing campaigns in NSW Correctional Centres. In April, the HITC crew were in Nowra at the South Coast Correctional Centre where over 90% of the population received a hep C test. This was followed by another successful event at the Bathurst Correctional Centre in June.

Hepatitis C peer worker Kiah Glasson shares her story with Users News and gives the low down on all things hep C.

Reflections on the missing piece in the hepatitis C elimination puzzle: the supply of clean sterile injecting equipment in Australian correctional centres.

As the picking season ramps up in NSW, we’ve chatted to two peer educators in the plant medicine space, Dr Liam Engel and Caine Barlow to find out what NOT to do when foraging.

A class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes, which are stronger than fentanyl, are beginning to hit Sydney streets with NSW Health issuing two recent health warnings about the drug.

Users News chats to peer worker Jodie Stevenson about her journey into the AOD sector and how you can get a job in the industry too.

People whose drug preferences are for stimulants and party drugs may not see the need to know about opioid harm reduction, or carry Naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdoses. However, with highly potent opioids such as nitazenes, are being used to cut cocaine, meth and MDMA, it’s important to be aware of the risk of taking opioids unknowingly, and what to do about it.

There’s a lot of reasons people decide to quit using cannabis. You might be smoking up every day, spending more time or money on it than you want to, or be worried about the very real health harms that can come with chronic cannabis use. Cannabis harm reduction is one way to make sure you’re not doing yourself a disservice – it might include cutting down the amount you’re using, seeking treatment, or making use of some savvy tips that will help you keep it together and stay healthy when smoking (especially for daily smokers).

Opioids (heroin and synthetic opioids) have recently been detected in drugs sold as crystal meth in NSW. This unexpected mix is a reminder of how important it is to always practice harm reduction. We pulled this guide together to address the harms of getting unexpected opioids in your meth.

Time to be honest – while many Australians smoke cannabis occasionally or regularly, chronic and everyday smoking can cause a range of health and social problems that together can be known as Cannabis Use Disorder. The CBD-CUD study is a new study looking at treatment of cannabis use disorder. Led by the University of Sydney and rolling out across sites in Sydney, Newcastle and Melbourne, the study focuses on whether CBD (in combination with counselling) can help people with cannabis use disorder reduce their cannabis use.

NUAA and NDARC have collaborated on research asking how people engage with drug alerts. The results show – what we already knew - that drug alerts are making us safer.

Australian researchers have just completed the worlds first study into psychedelic assisted psychotherapies (PAT) for methamphetamine use disorder. But what is PAT? And how could it change the treatment landscape?

The Early Drug Diversion Initiative (EDDI) came into effect in NSW on 29th February 2024. Under the new scheme, if you are caught by police with a “small amount” of a single illicit drug, you could now receive a $400 fine instead of a charge and court summons. However, there are some serious limitations in this reform so it’s worth reading the small print.

It is Australia’s most popular illicit drug and probably the most popular drug worldwide. Can you overdose from it? The short answer is yes, you can, but not fatally: cannabis alone will not kill you. But how much is too much?