Injecting Substance Use, Recovery and Critical Harms: Understanding the Complexities of the Drug Problem provides an important overview into the history, drivers, and consequences of drug injecting, what sustains it and why problems continue to surprise clinicians, policy makers and politicians. It explores the gritty reality of the harms caused by injecting drugs, and puts the medical, psychiatric, and social damage in a contemporary context. Harms resulting from substance use include viral and bacterial epidemics and devastating loss of life. Although no simple solutions are possible, by engaging with the consequences of drug use, the book aims to understand the causes, to prevent worse outcomes.

Drawing on the author’s in-depth experiences at the forefront of practice, policy and research in this field, the book provides an extended case study examining drug injecting and the HIV crisis in the Scottish health system. The book shows how trying to get to grips with the “drug problem” is complicated by confusing definitions of what is a drug and where the separation lies between the benefits and harms, since culture and politics determine legal status, and consequently penalties and acceptability, which varies across nations. In grappling with these complexities, the book aims to develop a strong theoretical framework which examines how the drug use is socially constructed.

It is essential reading for health, medicine and social care students and those with an interest in the consequences of illicit substance use including law, humanities, business and politics. It will also be informative for professionals and policy makers in the criminal justice, health and education sectors and those responsible for political influence and planning in the public realm. Anyone who thinks that substance use will not throw up new problems and challenges for the health and politics affecting us all in the future just has to consider the roller coaster of the last six decades.