Harm-reduction activism: a case study of an unsanctioned user-run safe injection site

Due to the ongoing health crisis among injection drug users in Vancouver, Canada, there have been repeated calls for the establishment of safe injection sites (SISs) since the early 1990s. In April 2003, in response to a large-scale police crackdown and government inaction, a group of activists opened an unsanctioned SIS in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). The 327 Carrall Street SIS operated for 181 days despite considerable police harassment and limited financial support. During the operation of the SIS, volunteers supervised over 3000 injections and demonstrated the feasibility of a user-run low-threshold SIS. The experience of the SIS provides valuable lessons for those seeking to advance the interests of injection drug users through community mobilization and direct action approaches. In this article, Thomas Kerr, Megan Oleson, and Evan Wood describe the events surrounding the establishment, operation, and closing of the unsanctioned SIS, and outline the lessons learned.     

Osteological individuality indicative of migrant citrus laboring

Particular features of a skeleton discovered near Dade City, Florida, are consistent with the stresses of a life of migrant citrus laboring. In particular, unusual aspects of the right shoulder skeleton are not manifested bilaterally. Ethnographic data, radiographs from a living citrus worker, and the police investigation also support the hypothesis that these remains were derived from an individual who spent significant time as a citrus fruit picker.     

Business and politics in a criminal state: the case of Equatorial Guinea

This article assesses the changing nature of the contemporarypolitical economy of Equatorial Guinea. It provides an overviewof the complex and dynamic web of elite rent-generation andexplores the extent to which the development of an oil industryhas contributed to a monoculture of accumulation. It is concludedthat, despite the oil windfall, other, ‘illicit’,modes of elite rent-generation persist and have even intensified.     

A latent variable model of the Family-of-Origin Scale for adolescents

The Family-of-Origin Scale (FOS) is a recently developed 40-item instrument originally designed to assess adults' perceptions of the family in which they were raised. A modified version of the FOS has shown promise for assessing adolescents' perceptions of the extent to which their family fosters autonomy and intimacy. The current study involved administration of the FOS to a large sample of adolescents currently residing with their family of origin. Confirmatory factor analysis supports the scale's original 13 theoretical constructs and establishes factorial validity. Follow-up hierarchical tests indicate the current confirmatory model provides a significant refinement over other plausible models proposed by several different authors finding a similar unitary factor employing exploratory factor analyses.