Understanding pleasure and euphoria among people who use opioids
Overview
Current public health research on opioid use predominantly focuses on risk and harms, including HIV transmission and overdose. While it is important to address the ongoing public health crisis (i.e., overdose epidemic), this leads to a framing of opioid use as inherently negative. Less is known about the positive effects of using opioids. We are therefore conducting a pilot via interpretive phenomenology to understand the lived experience of people who use opioids as it relates to positive drug use experiences.
Objectives
Understand how people who use opioids experience euphoria and pleasure.
Identify social and built environment factors that affect opioid-related euphoria and pleasure.
Team Members Involved
This community-based research project is being done in collaboration with Sanguen’s Consumption and Treatment Services, ACCKWA, and a local community advisory board comprised of people with lived/living experience of drug use.
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