ID: HR19-671

Presenting author: Marie Jauffret-Roustide

Presenting author biography:

Marie Jauffret-Roustide is a sociologist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. Her research focuses on ethnicity, gender issues and users' involvement in drug policy including the analysis of the biomedicalization process of addiction and the history of peer education and community-based approaches.

Drug use and migration: Urgent need for reinforcing access to care and social integration - Results from ANRS-Coquelicot study, France

Marie Jauffret-Roustide, Dasha Serebryakova

Background: Since the mid 2000’s, injecting drug users from Eastern-Europe (especially from Georgia) migrate to France, due to the repressive policy toward drug use in their country and also to the easier access to substitutive treatments and HCV treatments in France. In Paris and its suburbs, approximately a third of the patients who attended harm reduction facilities or treatment centres came from Eastern Europe and Russian speaking countries.

Methodology: A cross-sectional study among drug users in France that includes Russian-Speaking participants (N=839), with the aim to describe their socio-demographic profiles, their drug use practices, their risk exposure to HCV and their access to care, with a comparison with French-Speaking drug users.

Results: The results of this study show that HCV seroprevalence among Russian-speaking drug users is twice as high as among French-speaking users (9 drug users out of 10 are HCV positive vs 4 out of 10). Russian-speaking drug users are characterized by a higher level of education (43% have higher education vs. 27,6%, p=0,08), but have more precarious living conditions than French-speaking drug users (89,9% have very precarious living conditions vs. 49,3%, p<0,0001), which corresponds to a social decline linked to migration experience. Products most frequently used by Russian-speaking drug users over the last month are cocaine (45,7% vs. 26,8%, p=0,0002), Heroin (38,6% vs. 16,4%, p<0,0001), morphine sulphates (30,9% vs. 19,2%, p=0,17) and cocaine crack (18,2% vs. 41,8%, p=0,0001).

Key conclusion: Drug use practices and HCV exposure are different between Russian-speaking and French-speaking drug users. When they migrate in France, Russian-speaking drug users have to face a social decline and shift from opiates to stimulants. These epidemiological data show that it is urgent to reinforce access to care and social integration for all these sub-populations of drug users, especially those vulnerable to HCV exposure.