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.
2013 has come to an end. It's time to sum up the past year, and make plans and wishes for the coming one. With the end of the year, the implementation period of the first Serbian national strategy related to reduction of supply and demand of psychoactive substances – representing the backbone of Serbian drug policy – has ended. EDPI’s Serbian partner takes stock of the period.
"Initiative for Health", (European Drug Policy Initiative's Bulgarian partner), has published its advocacy video on the situation of drug users in Bulgarian prisons.
Police in the Czech Republic have launched an unprecedented operation, evidently aimed at liquidating grow shops, i.e. shops with accessories for growing plants – despite the country's liberal drug laws.
Now more than ever, we have to rescue the real principles that underpinning the Portuguese Model of Decriminalisation, says European Drug Policy Initiative's Portuguese partner, APDES, in its social manifesto rejecting stigma and discrimination in the sphere of drug use.
Commissioner Viviane Reding says the solution to the growing problem of legal highs is making them illegal – but declines to discuss the unintended consequences
Görlitzer Park in Berlin-Kreuzberg is the latest hot topic in the local media, due to ongoing problems that come with the massive scale of drug dealing and drug use there. Residents are no longer prepared to accept the situation as it stands. Politicians are trying to defuse the situation by making some unusual decisions.
Hungarian needle and syringe exchange programs are facing financial problems because the government is not budgeting enough money for harm reduction services. Experts predict this could result in dramatically increased prevalence of HIV/AIDS among injection drug users- such as that currently being experienced in Romania.
HCLU's European Drug Policy Initiative invited a group of journalists to cover the world's largest assembly on harm reduction. Find out how they covered the Harm Reduction International Conference in Vilnius.
A short video interview with Jean-Paul Grund on the drug ‘Krokodil.’ The interview was made on the occasion of a new and freely downloadable study, published in the International Journal on Drug Policy.
