Welcome

About our project

Wastewater analysis (WWA) is a new tool that is being used to monitor drug markets across many regions of the world based on analyses of the drug metabolites in wastewater. First applied in 2001 WWA has been rapidly rolled out across Europe, as well as many regions in North America, Central America and Asia, and cemented itself as an important tool to capture trends in close to real time and to provide unique spatiotemporal information about drug markets. Application in the Australian context has started to show that drug consumption in regional areas often exceeds that in urban areas.

Yet best practice WWA is increasingly pointing to the need to triangulate WWA data with epidemiological surveys. This is because WWA can tell the overall amount of drug used, but not in what circumstances drugs are used, information that is critical to interpret the data and inform policy and practice. This study will thus conduct the first study to triangulate wastewater analysis (WWA) and a bespoke prospective survey of alcohol and other drug consumption in a regional Australian town.

This project is funded by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Project design

An anonymous and encrypted self-report survey of alcohol and other drug consumption and purchasing will be developed and administered over a 90-day period to a cohort of people who use drugs from one regional town. The survey will then be administered and run in this town concurrent to WWA such that the two datasets will be comparable in space and time.

Benefits

This study has four key benefits. First, this study will provide a comprehensive analysis of the profile of alcohol and other drug consumption in a regional Australian community. This is important given most surveys conducted in Australia focus on drug consumption in metropolitan areas alone. Second, it will provide the first triangulation of a regional drug use survey with WWA and the value add of combining these datasets to monitor drug markets in a regional community. Third, it will provide valuable new insights to inform policy and practice within a regional community e.g. unmet health, harm reduction and social needs. Finally, it will provide methodological insights into how to best triangulate WWA and drug survey analyses.