Rapidly Shifting Opioid Route of Administration Preferences and Their Implications for Health and Harm Reduction

George Karandinos, MD, PhD • Clinician Investigator and Instructor • Division of General Internal Medicine • Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

Since 2014, injection opioid use has been declining with corresponding increases in opioid smoking and snorting.  More recently, the prevalence of opioid smoking has rapidly accelerated.  This represents a historically unprecedented change in US opioid use patterns that is unfolding with large regional variation and stark differences even between neighboring states.  Please join us this month for a special conversation with George Karandinos, who will provide a detailed examination of this evolving phenomenon, including its possible repercussions for health and harm reduction. 

George Karandinos is a physician-anthropologist and faculty member of the Massachusetts General Hospital Division of General Internal Medicine and Harvard Medical School. George's research includes long-term ethnography in Kensington, Philadelphia, an inner-city neighborhood with spatially concentrated open-air narcotics markets and a very high burden of firearm violence, as well as epidemiological and health services research on changing patterns of substance use and on the reverberations of firearm injury on survivors and their families.

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The UCSF Drug Use Research Group (DURG) is a city-wide seminar attended by faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and other Bay Area investigators centering on persons who use drugs.  Started in 2005 after a friendly debate between an epidemiologist and anthropologist on the merits of quantitative versus qualitative research methods, the DURG monthly seminars provide a community platform for new and established investigators to present their work, explore research questions and methods, and to prepare for grant applications and the dissemination of findings in a supportive environment.  The seminar has been successful in cultivating new collaborations and mentorship and in sustaining an interdisciplinary and interprofessional dialogue between those engaged in basic sciences, epidemiology, clinical, and public health research.  

Our meetings are not recorded or live-streamed. Please contact us if you’d like to present your work or research ideas for friendly consultation and peer review.