Tobacco & Nicotine Vape Control

In my role as Senior Principal Social Scientist at the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence on Achieving the Tobacco Endgame, I have conducted research into potential public health approaches to reduce smoking and nicotine addiction. This has included a narrative review of the Project Stop policy in Australia, which saw the introduction of recording ID from people purchasing pseudoephedrine to prevent diversion into methamphetamine use. This review provides a basis for implementing a similiar project for the sale of nicotine vape devices from Australian pharmacies, to prevent diversion to underage or recreational use.

In April 2024 I additionally published a policy proposal, in collaboration with Professor Coral Gartner, the centre director, and senior pharmacy researchers Professor Kathryn Steadman and Professor Lisa Nissen, presenting a model for pharmacist-only supply of nicotine vape devices, without requiring medical prescription. In June 2024 the Australian Greens Party drew on this paper when requesting amendments to new legislation before the Australian Senate, and a pharmacist-only supply model was subsequently implemented by the Federal Government, although without the consultation processes and many of the additional sale requirements outlined in our proposal.

Methamphetamine Use

My PhD research (2017-2021) used ethnography to explore trajectories of methamphetamine use and recovery. These findings critiqued the binary ideas frequently used to understand harmful drug use such as volition/compulsion, health/pathology, normality/abnormality, and virtue/pleasure. This study has led to the following theoretical developments that can inform and support interventions and policy for this population:

1. A posthumanist understanding of agency in addiction that provides a more nuanced depiction of how people using drugs experience choice.
2. The concept of ‘living with’ harmful drug use similar to how people are empowered to live with other longer term health issues.
3. The concept of ‘ambient paternalism’ in how people perceive their own behaviour within the hegemonic norms of neoliberal public health.
4. The methamphetamine use ‘cascade’ emerging from multiple complex pleasures of methamphetamine use related to fundamental human needs for connection, social acceptance, adventure, meaning, and purpose.

These insights are used to construct a model of ‘Extended Recovery’ based on posthumanism and Extended Health, where recovery is understood to emerge from a complex socio-material environment, rather than as a process occurring only within an individual. A paper presenting this model is currently under review.

Sex Worker Health

From 2017-2019 I was part of a collaborative project between the University of Queensland and Respect Inc., the peak body sex worker advocacy organisation in Queensland, developing the ‘Factors influencing transgender and male sex worker access to sexual health care, HIV testing and support study (TaMS)’ report.  This included a systematic review and synthesis of the global qualitative literature on this subject which included members of the sex worker steering committee as co-authors.  The report provided an investigation of how this population experienced marginalisation and stigma when accessing sexual health services and was then used by Respect Inc. as part of their advocacy submissions to the Queensland government regarding decriminalisation of sex work.  This process contributed to the Queensland Attorney-General requesting the Queensland Law Reform Commission to conduct a review of current laws and draft a decriminalisation bill forthcoming in November 2022.  The decriminalisation bill has the potential to dramatically improve safety, working conditions, and health and wellbeing for sex workers throughout Queensland, and provide a necessary precedent for other states and territories.

Homelessness and Natural Disaster Management

For my Masters thesis I conducted qualitative interviews with people sleeping rough and their experiences of natural disasters and extreme weather.  These findings can be drawn on to adapt the ‘all hazards planning’ concept within disaster management, to also being an ‘all people’ plan that can account for the various specific vulnerabilities of very different groups often bundled together under the title of ‘vulnerable populations’.  This research was published in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management and provided recommendations on how community service organisations could better support this population across the different stages within the ‘Adaptive Cycle of Resilience’.