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.
Mephedrone has proved to be the most successful of the recent wave of novel psychoactive drugs to have appeared on the European recreational market. The only ‘legal high’ to have managed to enter users’ repertoires even after being banned in most countries, it also raised the question of how ‘phantom’ narcotics are to be dealt with.
Watch the full speech of Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna, march 2013. Now with English and Spanish subtitles.
Following the example of many other EU member states, Portugal has recently approved a restrictive law on legal highs – threatening to push the use of new psychoactive substances into the shadows.
Drugreporter interviewed the former head of the European Commissions drug unit, Carel Edwards to discuss the chances of global shift on drug policies, how the EU deals with the psychoactive substances, and if more competence has to be given to Brussels in regulating drug issues.
What was originally a small group of friends, has become a feasible alternative to the cannabis black market in the north of Belgium. Our guest author guides us through Antwerp’s cannabis social club.
Just days after cannabis was legalised in Colorado and Washington states, regulation of weed became a new hot issue in Bulgaria, after two fundamentally different poll results were published.
The HCLU organised a video training in May 2012 to teach 14 harm reduction and drug policy activists how to use video in activism. Now we have selected some of the movies they have made.
The availability of syringes through the Portuguese National Program for Needle Exchange was temporarily at risk, despite the country’s reputation for having one of the most progressive European drug policies.
