Dr. Gillian Kolla
Dr. Gillian Kolla recently completed her PhD at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto and is excited to be joining the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research as a postdoctoral research fellow, with funding from the Canadian Network on Hepatitis C Research. She uses community-based qualitative and ethnographic research to examine how to make health and social services more accessible to people who use drugs. Her doctoral research explored how the criminalization of drug use impedes the ability of public health programs to respond effectively to drug use. She is currently also conducting research on the impacts of the overdose epidemic on the physical and emotional health of communities of people who use drugs. Gillian is a member of the coordinating committee for the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society, which opened and ran Ontario’s first supervised injection site in Moss Park as a volunteer initiative for 11 months as part of a community-led response to overdose deaths. She has also evaluated and published on the role of Overdose Prevention Sites within the public health response to the overdose crisis.
Publications:
- Practices of care among people who buy, use and sell drugs in community settings. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-020-00372-5
- Medicalization under Prohibition: The limits of a public health approach to improving the health of people who use drugs under criminalization. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687637.2020.1769029
- Help me fix: The provision of injection assistance at an unsanctioned Overdose Prevention Site in Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.102617
- Critical studies of harm reduction: Overdose response in uncertain political times. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.102615
- “It’s too much, I’m getting really tired of it”: Overdose response and structural vulnerabilities among harm reduction workers in community settings. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.09.012
- "It's Our Safe Sanctuary": Experiences of Using an Unsanctioned Overdose Prevention Site in Toronto, Ontario. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.09.019
- The major lesson from Canada’s overdose crisis: Government and public health authorities are not acting fast enough. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(19)30040-4