Project Updates
What have the Benzo Research Project been up to?
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On 12th June 2024, we hosted a hybrid event at Imperial College London in collaboration with SSDP Imperial on Local and national approaches to young people's drug use.
Our volunteers presented exclusive findings from their upcoming reports to local government officials, drug support staff, NHS, police commissioners, and the general public. You can watch the full event recording on your YouTube channel here. Sign up to our mailing list to receive our teams' publications when they launch this Summer! |
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Our Founder and Project
Lead, Monica
Richards travelled to Vienna to
present our testimony findings and preliminary
FOI data at the 4th meeting of the CND Thematic
Discussions – 4-6th December
2023 (timestamp
01:52:35), focused
on Health and regulatory
challenges posed by synthetic opioids and
non-medical use of prescription
drugs.
We want to thank everyone that submitted their testimonies and experiences with benzos. Our mission has always been to amplify young people's voices and lived experiences, and we hope that by bringing these to the world stage, we can contribute to a more compassionate and harm reduction-focused approach to drugs. We also thank all past and present volunteers at BRP whose time and effort has been instrumental in our progress. This has been a collaborative effort from young people across the UK and beyond, and it is incredible to see how far our qualitative findings have gone: from our report launch event on 5th December 2022 in London, to the United Nations in Vienna exactly 1 year later! To read our full intervention statement, click here. |
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The Benzo Research Project was
founded by Monica Richards in July 2021. Though we
faced many challenges in our beginning, our December 2022 report
highlighting the lived experiences of young people
who use benzos was embraced by the drug support
sector. Our work has been incorporated into drug
support staff training and the recent Scottish Drug Trends Report,
among others.
In Summer 2023, we ran a volunteer recruitment campaign and onboarded 15 new volunteers. We reorganised into three working groups: Research, Media (including Social Media), and Policy. To coincide with this shift, we decided to constitute our organisation as an unincorporated charitable association (aka small charity). Our constitution, which can be read here, will allow us to more smoothly manage the Benzo Research Project and secure funding and resources to aid our mission. Our values, mission, and vision remain the same. We will continue to centre and uplift youth voices in the pursuit for more compassionate and evidence-based drug education, support, and policy. If you have any questions regarding our work moving forward, please contact us at hello@brp.org.uk. |
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We are very proud to have
attended the House of Commons yesterday in support
of the #BringBackDrugTesting
campaign by our Founder and Project Lead, Monica Richards, and
Research team Co-Leads, Joanna Bright and AJ Martin. We were grateful
to amplify the lived experiences of young people who
use benzodiazepines in the UK, in the pursuit of
safer drug policy.
Following the Home Office's unprecedented policy U-turn, this campaign calls on the government to allow back-of-house drug testing at UK festivals. We are deeply concerned that the absense of such services will impede on effective harm reduction strategies, putting young people's lives at risk. |
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On Monday 5th December
(19:00-21:00), we hosted an event at
(K2.31) Nash Lecture Theatre, King's
Building, Strand
Campus, King's College London. We
celebrated the work we have done
throughout the course of this project, and
the release of our report which analyses 73
testimonies on benzo use in young people (18-25)
across the UK. Watch the recording here.
There was also a panel debate discussing 'What should the future of drug policy look like?' Chair: Paul North (Volteface) Panellists:
The event was held in partnership with Generation Maastricht. The event was recorded and streamed live. |
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Event photographs taken by Nathan
Frank.
The Benzo Blogs with Volteface
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Our Co-Head of Research, AJ
Martin, recently had a piece republished by
Volteface and Drugs and Me, titled 'Benzodiazepines and Post-War
America'.
"Before the availability of these so-called emotional aspirins, Freudian psychoanalysis reigned supreme in the psychiatry field. In fact, there was no clear consensus that anxiety was 'a psychiatric illness serious enough to require pharmaceutical care'. Instead, in the 1950s, Americans viewed anxiety as an honourable emblem of hard work and an inevitable side effect of their 'insatiable hunger to get ahead'. Thus, when the new anti-anxiety drug Miltown was marketised in 1955 by Carter-Wallace Laboratories, American celebrities and their loyal fans were enamoured." |
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Our previous Head of
Socials, Ross Webster, had a piece
republished by Volteface and Drugs and
Me, titled 'The Benzo Research Project: a UK
Platform for Young
People'.
"Increased use in recent years has warranted health warnings regarding the drug all across the UK. Far from being an issue restricted to certain counties, benzo addiction and the subsequent risks to health it incurs has become a nationwide problem. Worryingly little is being done to combat this, with the general assumption seeming to be that issues relating to benzo addiction are only prevalent in cities with a lively drug culture. Benzo misuse and addiction does not only take place in these underground scenes where recreational drug use is part of the norm, but also in homes and hospitals across the nation. Owing to this, benzo consumption has rapidly become a prolific problem within the UK." |
Completion of our qualitative research report
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Our team has conducted an
inductive thematic analysis on testimonies 1-74 for
our report (excluding non-consenting participants).
These include over 19,000
words worth of experiences
from young people across the
UK.
We are incredibly grateful to all people who submitted their stories to us; we hope to spotlight your words and experiences to drive change and hopefully improve support avenues for us all. We deserve better, so we hope that these findings and recommendations persuade people who have the power to advocate for a brighter alternative. |
Student Opportunity Fund
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Thanks to KCL's Student Opportunity Fund, we've been awarded £1,000 of funding towards social media advertising to collect more testimonies and spread harm reduction information to young people across the UK. |