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.
Harm Reduction International, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and the International Drug Policy Consortium have launched a ground-breaking study highlighting the funding crisis for harm reduction. Drugreporter filmed the presentation of the new report at the AIDS conference in Melbourne. Watch the very informative and important speeches of Maria Phelan, David Wilson and Tanya Deshko!
After the AIDS conference in Melbourne, the New Zealand Drug Foundation invited us to hold a two-day video advocacy workshop in Auckland, New Zealand, and to deliver a presentation in Wellington.
Activists disrupt the speech of Mr. Gregg Alton, the top manager of Gilead pharmaceutical company, to protest against unreasonably high prices of hepatitis C medicines. Recorded at AIDS 2014 Melbourne.
Check out our new infographic on how the war on drugs is failing in Poland. It's both a waste of taxpayer’s money, and a missed opportunity to improve society. In addition, there is no program of targeted education on psychoactive substances and harm reduction throughout Poland – that also has to be changed!
At the end of March, the court in the Bulgarian city of Lovech found Marin Kalchev not guilty. He is a 31-year-old multiple sclerosis patient, who uses marijuana extract to manage the negative symptoms of his chronic disease.
Young Roma people in Serbia are particularly severely affected by the increase in use of traditional psychoactive substances, such as cannabis, inhalants (glue and solvents), heroin and alcohol. EDPI’s local partner, the NGO 'Re Generation', argues that these young people – a high proportion of whom live and work on the streets – are in need of special care.
HCLU's European Drug Policy Initiative this year took the form of grant-aiding a group of European journalists to cover on location the high-level meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna.
