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Background:
Residential eviction and involuntary displacement are common among people who use drugs (PWUD) in the United States (U.S.). It can be highly disruptive and may lead to changes in drug use behaviors that increase risk of bloodborne infection including HCV and HIV. We examined the association between eviction/involuntary displacement and drug use associated risk behaviors among a sample of PWUD, both housed and unhoused, in San Diego, California, U.S.
Methods:
We used cross-sectional data from an ongoing longitudinal cohort which followed PWUD (N=202) in San Diego bi-annually from October 2020. We applied basic descriptive statistics to determine the prevalence of homelessness, eviction and displacement, and drug use practices in the past six months, and multivariate logistic regression to examine differences in drug use practices by homelessness and eviction status.
Results:
Fifty-seven percent of participants (n = 115) reported any period of homelessness and 30.2% (n = 61) reported any eviction or displacement in the past six months. Among housed participants 9.2% (n = 8) experienced eviction, while 46.1% (n = 53) of unhoused participants reported eviction/displacement (p < 0.005). Of participants who had injected any drugs in the past six months (n = 143, 70.7%), 23 (16%) had injected using a previously used syringe and 28 (19.6%) had injected using previously used paraphernalia. In pairwise comparisons and multivariable regression, there were no significant differences in injection practices by eviction and/or displacement status.
Conclusion:
In this sample of PWUD in San Diego, over half had experienced homelessness. Eviction and forced displacement were common, but not cross-sectionally associated with two drug use risk behaviors, independently of housing status. These preliminary results do not conform to the available literature on this topic to date. More research is needed to understand how population characteristics may modify the observed association or lack thereof.
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