István Gábor Takács is a human rights activist, videographer and trainer. He ran the Video Advocacy Program of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union between 2007-2015. He worked as a needle exchange program counselor for 5 years. He is author of several articles on harm reduction and cameraman, editor, director and co-director of more than 700 online videos, among them longer documentaries, such as “Kostya Proletarsky” (2020), “Taking Back What’s Ours: An Oral History of the Movement of People who Use Drugs” (2020) ”A Day in the Life: The World of Humans Who Use Drugs” (2016), “Without Rights” (2009), “Without a Chance” (2014), “Room in the 8th District” (2014) and “The Invisible” (2011). Since 2016 he works at the Rights Reporter Foundation, where besides producing films, he is training activists in video advocacy.
“People are afraid of the Police. If you go to protests… you are marked and whenever they see you, they might stop you, control you.” This is just one of the obstacles restraining drug user activism in Macedonia. An article by Vlatko Dekov.
“The local authorities in Bucharest, Romania, don’t have any official statistics on the city’s homeless population.” According to a local NGO, there were about 5,000 people in 2010. Read the story of Florian, by Vlad Odobescu, who cannot go to shelters because of his alcoholism.
An image from the centre of Skopje: Children, barely five years old, walk around the park, holding a bag, pressing it to their faces from time to time to inhale. Healthy Options Project Skopje fights for available treatments for these kids thus for their lives.
“Instead of promoting harm reduction programs, journalists and other relevant actors use stigmatizing and discriminating terminology” Ognjen Martinović and Irena Molnar from the Serbian NGO Re Generation deconstruct the problem drug and terminological confusion.
We proudly present Drugreporter’s new feature documentary: A Day in the Life. Produced by drug users and activists, the movie features the different realities of the global war on drugs by guiding us through one day in the life of people who use drugs in seven cities of the world. Watch the new trailer and check out screening dates and news about the film!
The outcome document of UNGASS 2016 was probably a disappointment for the most progressive parts of the world, but for countries like Bulgaria, it contains some inspiring commitments. Read this article on Bulgarian drug policy news!
A case study by our guest author David Haddad on Methoxetamine, misinformed media and prohibition as a failed approach towards New Psychoactive Substances.
A struggle for making medical cannabis legal in Poland: an article by Iga Jeziorska on our new video produced by Paweł Libera and the Polish Drug Policy Network.
