Following the successful completion of data collection, the study has now progressed to the writing-up and dissemination phase. The analysis presented in these works is based on data from a UK-wide qualitative survey with over 100 respondents (service users and professionals), in depth interviews with 42 service professionals from across the sector (including commissioners, managers, key workers, GPs, psychiatrists, nurses, and civil servants) and 30 service users, and a creative, arts-based stakeholder workshop.

Reports

• Based on an arts-informed stakeholder workshop, this report reflects learning from the day and paths forward for improving UK service provision for people who use drugs and alcohol.

Talks

The project has informed numerous talks and opportunities for knowledge exchange, including:

• Marginal care spaces: Learning from crisis, invited talk at the Wenner-Gren sponsored symposium, Uni of Madison-Wiscosin, 19-22 May 2026
• Why we still need to talk about Covid, invited talk at the national harm reduction conference, HIT, Liverpool, Oct 2025
• Ripping up the rulebook’? (De)territorialising drug treatment after Covid-19, Contemporary Drug Problems, Manchester, Aug 2025
• A thousand tiny problems: The COVID-19 pandemic and engendering a feel for a different kind of drug treatment, talk at the University of Liverpool, Jul 2025
• Studying and making drug policy from below. ISSDP, Manchester, Jun 2025
• Opioid agonist therapy’s scientificity and reimagining, invited talk at the Biomedicine’s Incongruities workshop, King’s College London, May 2024.
• What happened to a ‘new normal’? The rise and fall of doing opioid agonist differently after Covid-19. European Society for Social Drug Research, Manchester, Sep 2024.
• Drug infrastructures: Deinstitutionalising drug treatment after Covid-19, Thinking with Drugs workshop, London, Jul 2024.

Workshops

• With collaborators, Professor Kate Seear (La Trobe), Dr Alex Dymock (Goldsmiths) and Dr Simon Flacks (Uni of Sussex), drug and alcohol sector professionals, activists, advocates, and academics came together to think through ‘Drugs in Flux’. Supported by Goldsmiths’ Centre for Invention and Social Process, and in collaboration with King’s College London, we examined contemporary transformations in global drug policy, exploring how shifting legal, political, social, and institutional arrangements shape experiences of drug use.
• With 16 professionals from across the substance use sector and art practitioners, Susie Miller Oduniyi and Andy Lee, we developed an arts-based workshop to explore learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic and different ways of doing treatment. (report above)
• With Dr Alan McGee (Uni of Liverpool), we facilitated a workshop at the national harm reduction conference, HIT (31 Oct 2025), bringing together a packed room of service professionals and stakeholders, asking: ‘What would treatment look like if drugs weren’t the problem?’
• With Drs Kiran Pienaar (Deakin), Renae Fomiatti (La Trobe) and Kari Lancaster (Uni of Bath), we facilitated a two-day workshop and public lecture in London on 22-23 July 2024: ‘Thinking with drugs: Interventions in the social’ workshop.

Supported by the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness, the two-day workshop was attended by an interdisciplinary and international cross-section of critical drug scholars from all career levels working on issues of drug consumption and policy. Drawn together by the workshop call to foreground drugs as animate objects intimately involved in social relations, we discussed and developed new thinking in relation to how drugs shape bodies, lives, relationships, and institutions. We explored the ways drugs resist dualistic categorisation such as good/bad, medical/non-medical, pleasurable/harmful, and the kinds of relations and subjectivities they make possible. We ended the first day with a sell-out public keynote address from workshop attendee and eminent international historian of drugs, Professor Nancy Campbell (Rensselear Polytechnic Institute), who took up our invitation to think with drugs in the most astute and imaginative way, developing a novel concept of ‘metabolising drugs’ as ‘living better with drugs’. The event was hugely successful, stimulated lively conversation, which continued well into the evening.