Grant: Operating Grant: Methamphetamine and related psychostimulant use

While safe injection site services have expanded in the ongoing overdose crisis, there are very few overdose prevention services for people who use non-injection drugs. There is an innovative peer-run outdoor smoking tent that has been established and operating for over 2 years in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. To respond to the increase in methamphetamine users, the Overdose Prevention Society (OPS) in partnership with the British Columbia Centre for Substance Use proposes a collaborative examination of the smoking tent program model to so that this effective model can be expanded and adapted for new places. The purpose of the project is to understand what it is about the program that makes it work and how to modify it when moving to new contexts. This one-year project will involve people who use the tent services in the research and will take a mixed-methods approach including quantitative and qualitative analyses. Quantitative data for this study will come from short surveys with n=200 current tent users administered by peer research assistants. Qualitative data come from interviews conducted with 15 current tent users and 5 service providers at OPS in Vancouver. This project will help with decision-making for people working at OPS about how to proceed with expanding their services. It will additionally support other overdose prevention sites and service providers interested in starting up new overdose prevention smoking tents in their areas through the toolkit that will be created. This has the potential to reduce harm and overdose for methamphetamine users, who are underserved in the overdose crisis.