Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Tobacco is the most preventable cause of disease and death in Canada. Although the tobacco use rate has substantially gone down in the general population, significant differences exist between sub-populations in Canada, where for example Ottawa's highly vulnerable People Who Use Drugs (PWUD), homeless or at-risk for homelessness population has a 96% tobacco smoking rate relative to 9-18% in the rest of Ottawa. This stark inequity in tobacco use translates into devastating healthcare outcomes such as a disproportionate amount of cancer, stroke, heart disease and death. In order to tackle tobacco related health disparities, a novel approach to smoking cessation in vulnerable populations is required. Despite commonly held dogma that the PWUD and homeless populations does not want to quit smoking, many studies have demonstrated that in fact they are very interested in quitting. Pragmatic peer-led community-based approaches have demonstrated that tobacco dependence strategies can be implemented with great success in this population. The Healthy People Initiative (HPI) aims to compare two tobacco dependence management strategies in the homeless (or at-risk for homelessness) multi-drug use population in two large Canadian cities, Ottawa and Toronto.