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.
On: The Importance and impact of research and evidence base in the drug field. The interview was made at the Correlation European Conference 27 – 29 September, Sofia, Bulgaria
Ethan Nadelmann is the executive director of the largest drug policy reform organization in the U.S., the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org ). Earlier he was a professor at the Princeton University.
Dagmar Hedrich is a leading researcher of the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), a Lisbon based, de-centralized agency of the European Union responsible for data collection and analysis on drug use and drug policies.
Dr Alex Wodak is the Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital. He was also President of the International Harm Reduction Association for several years, he is the author (with Ron Owen) of “Drug Prohibition: a call for change” published by UNSW Press.
Annette Verster works for the HIV/AIDS Department of the World Health Organization in Geneva, she coordinates all activities related to HIV prevention. She speaks about the conclusions of an investigation on prisons and harm reduction which WHO commissioned recently.
Stijn Goossens, the head of the International Network of People Who Use Drugs (www.inpud.org) is speaking about Trek Uw Plant, an interesting social experiment in the city of Antwerp, Belgium.
Eberhard Schatz is the head of an Amsterdam-based harm reduction NGO, AMOC, which operates a drop-in and consumption room for injecting drug users with foreign nationality. According to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, consumption rooms can successfully reduce drug related harms, especially drug overdoses and HIV infections.
