Who Did We Interview?

The stories presented on this website are drawn from interviews conducted with 83 people living in Victoria and New South Wales, Australia. Detailed information about the people interviewed is presented in the table below.

Elsewhere on the website, basic information about each person interviewed is presented in brackets after their pseudonym. For the participants who consume opioids this information includes their gender, age range, location and form of opioid consumption, e.g. Ghassan (M, mid 30s, non-prescribed opioids) says administering take-home naloxone is easy. More information about each person and a summary of their story can be found under Personal Stories. The information provided about participants who are health professionals includes their gender, profession and location, e.g. Li (M, pharmacotherapy prescriber, Vic) positions take-home naloxone as a life-saving medication.

The website also includes video re-enactments of selected quotes from the interviews with 18 of our participants. The people featured in the re-enactments represent only a small selection of the cultural and ethnic diversity of our participants as we were limited to choosing material from those who consented to their interview extracts appearing in video form on the website.

Participants who consume opioids

*The complexity of lives that include opioid consumption means that individuals are not easily divided into research categories. Acknowledging this, we do not suggest that the research categories we have used to organise the participants’ accounts capture the full breadth of their experiences. Rather, certain categories, such as the distinction between opioids accessed with or without prescription, are used to ensure we explore a broad range of experiences.

~Reporting of cultural and ethnic background follows the Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG), developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Cultural and ethnic background was classified according to a combination of self-reported group identification with particular cultural or ethnic groups, the participant’s birthplace and their parents’ birthplaces. For example, if one parent was born overseas and the other was born in Australia, as was the participant, and they identified as ‘Australian’, their background is classified as ‘Australian’. Details of each participant’s self-reported cultural and ethnic background, birthplace and parents’ birthplaces are presented in their biography in the Personal Stories section of the wesbite.

Participants who are health professionals