Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research

The Community of Practice (CoP) brings together community members and partners from across Vancouver Island and beyond to share resources, discuss emerging research, evaluate drug market trends and present novel substances as they enter the supply chain. Our goal is to bind capacity and expertise across disciplines to facilitate greater inclusion and incorporation of drug checking as a critical component of harm reduction practice. This virtual space will act as a central hub to post and store content and developments related to the Community of Substance as they are continually produced.

Community of Substance aims to provide public access to emerging knowledge within drug checking practice and research while developing tools and training to integrate such knowledge into everyday practice. In an effort to support mutual learning and knowledge integration, we’re creating this resource to be responsive to the needs and interests of those offering and accessing drug checking services. We look forward to this critical collaboration highlighting the important practice of drug checking as it responds to the ongoing challenges of criminalization and the overdose public health emergency.

A Review on Victoria’s Drug Supply

Our project members, Jarred Aasen and Ash Larnder, presented on our findings from Nov. 2020 through May 2021 to share recent drug data and trends we are seeing in the Victoria drug supply.

“We often receive a lot of questions about how the illicit supply relates to client use from the local health care community. We aim to present data with this frame of reference to answer these questions. This presentation is focused on the healthcare community here in Victoria that is providing care in the area of substance use.”

Here we recap the presentation and include some dialogue from the Q&A that followed.