"Safer Injections"

I am an intravenous drug user. I am homeless. Yet - highly unusually amongst my kind - I observe clean injection technique. I wash my hands, I swab with alcohol first, I always use clean works, and I apply antiseptics afterwards.

My peers use needles sometimes weeks old, rinse out cotton filters nearly the same age for a fix in desperate times and never, and I mean never, clean their hands or the site first. They suffer abscesses, infections, vein damage and are often immunocompromised.

Inclusion and the pharmacies that offer a needle exchange service do a lot to minimise the harm from injecting and I have been a grateful user for years. But the lack of provision for hygienic injection astounds me. In neighbouring towns, packs of needles come with alcohol swabs and disposable spoons. In Cambridge, spoons are only available at Inclusion, and swabs - not at all. I find this is especially bad since there aren't even any pharmacies in Cambridge selling them.

Maybe the service users are not asking for this. But maybe they don't know there is a need for it. I may be teased by my friends for my attention to hygiene but if I offer a fellow addict a squirt of antibacterial hand wash or an alcohol swab, they never refuse! Considering the fact that so many of Cambridge’s intravenous drug users are homeless, and that all the public toilets are closed overnight leaving no access to running water or sanitation, the need for hygienic supplies is more urgent than one might think.

This is an invisible and pernicious harm that goes largely unnoticed and widely un-thought of. I understand the resources are strained and the demand is worryingly absent, but basic education and a few supplies at least to those who ask for them would go a long way to preventing the illness and injury that most addicts seem to be accepting as inevitable and leaving untreated.