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.
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.
Legal highs have entered and reshaped recreational drug markets throughout Europe, confusing policy makers, law enforcers and users alike. In one Eastern-European country, injecting drug users have radically changed their habits.
Real decriminalization efforts are still lagging behind in Europe because of foot-dragging on the part of member states, Drugreporter learned at a Brussels conference dedicated to the EU's next drug strategy.
Prominent Polish politicians and celebrities have expressed their belief in the need for a move away from prohibition-based drug policies and the promotion of a science-based approach, under the umbrella of The Global Commission on Drug Policy.
