Urinalysis and self-reporting allow us to monitor drugs on the illegal market for the substances they contain and compare this to what people who use those drugs expect them to contain. The process involves analyzing urine samples for metabolites of substances after people consume them and compare these with information from a survey that asks what people intended to consume. Compared to drug checking, this process avoids storing and transporting illegal substances for testing and does not require that participants sacrifice drug samples for testing.
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Project Overview and History
The standardized system used by the Community Urinalysis and Self-Report Project (CUSP) for monitoring the content of illegal drugs was originally developed by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) and the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux du Centre-Sud-de-l’Ile-de-Montréal (CCSMTL)...
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Timeline
The Community Urinalysis and Self-Report Project (CUSP) was developed and is being rolled out in multiple phases...
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Participation
CCSA is recruiting new sites interested in implementing the Community Urinalysis and Self-Report Project (CUSP) at a harm reduction site in their region...
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Partners and Collaborators
CCSA would like to acknowledge and thank the following partners for developing and implementing the Community Urinalysis and Self-Report Project (CUSP)...
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Reports
CUSP is a monitoring system that compares the drugs people think they are using (via self-report) with the actual drug contents (via urinalysis). The goal is to collect standardized information about drugs from the unregulated supply...
CCSA coordinates the Community Urinalysis and Self-Report Project (CUSP), which collects anonymous surveys of recent drug use from people accessing harm reduction services and compares them with urine toxicology results. The survey also includes questions about drug use patterns and needs that can inform local services and supports.
As part of CCSA’s continuing efforts, CUSP is collaborating with project partners to develop guidelines, tools and templates that make implementing urinalysis and self-reporting easy for harm reduction sites and that standardize data collection and reporting across sites. Please contact us if you are interested in implementing this “research project in a box” (see Participation). Our goal is to build the capacity of harm reduction sites across Canada to generate information useful for local service delivery as well as for monitoring national substance use trends.
