Peer-assisted injection as a harm reduction measure in a supervised consumption service: a qualitative study of client experiences.

Background: Peer assistance is an emerging area of study in injection drug use. When Canada's first supervised consumption site (SCS) opened in 2003 in Vancouver, Canada, clients were prohibited from injecting their peers; only recently has this practise been introduced as a harm reduction measure at these sites. In 2018, Health Canada granted federal exemption to allow peer-assisted injection at certain SCS sites, under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

The Impact of Racially Motivated Housing Discrimination on Allostatic Load among Indigenous University Students.

Allostatic load (AL) is an aggregate measure of wear and tear on the body due to the chronic activation of the stress response system. The goal of this study was to examine the association between racially motivated housing discrimination (HD) and AL score within a sample of Indigenous university students. Data for this cross-sectional study were collected from Indigenous adults attending university in a small city in western Canada between 2015 and 2017 (N = 104; mean age = 27.

Racially-motivated housing discrimination experienced by Indigenous postsecondary students in Canada: impacts on PTSD symptomology and perceptions of university stress.

Objectives: To examine the impacts of housing discrimination experienced by Indigenous postsecondary students on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology and perceptions of university stress.

Study Design: Cross-sectional study.

Methods: Data were gathered via in-person surveys completed by 142 Indigenous students between 2015 and 2017.

Supervised inhalation is an important part of supervised consumption services.

Setting: The first regulated supervised inhalation site (safer smoking room) in North America has opened in Lethbridge, Alberta, as part of a supervised consumption site addressing all routes of consumption. When designing the service, we felt it was important to accommodate not just injection drug use but also inhalation because (1) it is not the method of drug use that kills but the drug itself, (2) all people who use drugs deserve service regardless of their mode of use, and (3) people who use drugs should have the opportunity to use the method with the lowest risk.

Intervention: We received approval from Health Canada to offer supervised inhalation services in addition to supervised injection services.

Optimizing the performance of the entropic splitter for particle separation.

Recently, it has been shown that entropy can be used to sort Brownian particles according to their size. In particular, a combination of a static and a time-dependent force applied on differently sized particles which are confined in an asymmetric periodic structure can be used to separate them efficiently, by forcing them to move in opposite directions. In this paper, we investigate the optimization of the performance of the "entropic splitter.