Beyond Co-Production: The construction of drug checking knowledge in a canadian supervised injection facility

Original research
by
Betsos, Alex et al

Release Date

2022

Geography

Canada

Language of Resource

English

Full Text Available

No

Open Access / OK to Reproduce

No

Peer Reviewed

Yes

Objective

The implementation of Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) in Vancouver, Canada's Downtown Eastside in response to the overdose crisis has made it possible for people who use drugs to receive information about the drugs that they are consuming. Using insights developed from the ‘ontological turn’ and approaches to co-production from public health and science and technology studies, we explore the multiple relations that come to produce and contest drug-checking knowledge in this setting.

Findings/Key points

We find that the traditional demarcation between lay and expert, or peer and professional, which co-production idioms often rely on, creates barriers to seeing the different knowledge formations of drug-checking knowledge, and instead offer up a new idiom, trans-production, to explore how knowledge and harm reduction services are mutually enacted.

Design/methods

Ethnographic assessment and semi-structured interviews

Keywords

Drug checking
Illegal drugs
Peer/PWLLE program involvement