After the initial release of our drug combinations resource over a year ago, its resultant poster has proven popular among the drug community, and has even been displayed by several harm reduction organisations at festivals.

Following feedback from users and ideas from our own team, we have worked over the past few months to improve our combinations resources and now we are pleased to announce the release of the second version of our combination chart, as well as the availability of combinations information directly on our factsheets.

Alongside the new version of the poster, which we have modified to be more easily printable and readable, we have revised a lot of the categorisations to make the actual safety of a particular drug combination clearer for the user.

We’ve done this firstly by splitting the ‘Unsafe’ category into two new categories ‘Caution’ and ‘Unsafe,’ which gives a more clear indication as to how likely bodily harm is from a regular dose of a particular combination; whether a combination should be avoided entirely or if it’s more a matter of the combination making the user uncomfortable with a smaller risk of actual harm. We have also changed a few of the safety categorisations based on new research.

Secondly, we have annotated many of our combinations with information on exactly why the combination is considered dangerous, with more elucidation as to the specific drugs to be avoided when comparing larger drug categories (such as opioids).

Alongside the combinations chart and its associated Wiki page, we have also made the information directly accessible for individual drugs from the ‘interactions’ section of drug profiles on our factsheets website, where you can for example on the DOM page see that interactions of note are annotated with specific information about the combination. The factsheets website has also undergone some additional usability improvements which come with this release.

We are continuing to develop our combinations database, along with our other resources, focusing on clarity and accuracy. Currently we are working on building a central normalised database of drug effects and references, using these to directly annotate our drug database and then create new and better tools for users to access harm reduction information (however note that many references are already available in free-text on the combinations Wiki page).

We hope the second release of our combinations resources increases their capacity to help users make safer and more informed decisions around drug use. If you notice a discrepancy, an entry you feel is incorrect or have a great idea, we are happy to receive feedback via mail to [email protected] or by using the contact form on this site.