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.
Scientists at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, are aiming to work on cutting-edge research to study how endogenous DMT, occurring naturally in the body, may be useful to modern medicine, particularly by protecting brain cells in the stage of clinical death.
Well-targeted advocacy, hand-in-hand with a bit of hype, recently caused Serbian media to give extensive coverage to the idea of opening safe injecting rooms in the country. Part of the ‘Room for Change’ campaign in Serbia – read our local partner’s report!
In Poland, a ban on over a hundred new psychoactive substances coincided with a massive outbreak of poisonings related to the use of synthetic cannabinoids. The most pressing question must therefore be: Does an increase in prohibition do anything useful to protect our young people?
Read about the great example of how the civil sphere of Portugal is joining forces to convince the authorities and public service providers to take harm reduction related to drug use seriously.
New psychoactive substances – temporarily legal substitutes for traditional illicit drugs – have been around in Serbia for several years, but the biased local media coverage tends to leave one poorly informed about them.
On 26th of June 2015, as many as 150 cities all over the world joined the “Support, Don’t Punish” campaign, to mark Global Action Day. For eight cities in Europe, it was also the opening day of the “Room for Change” campaign, advocating for safe injection rooms for people who inject drugs. In this context, the situation of the Warsaw Harm Reduction Foundation is especially alarming.
On 6-10 July, 2015, fifteen activists participated in video advocacy training provided by the HCLU and the Indonesian Drug Users’ Network (PKNI) in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Slovakia needs to find a common solution to guarantee harm reduction for all in need – argues a local harm reduction provider, Odyseus, in a video produced jointly with Drugreporter.
