Péter Sárosi is the Executive Director of the Rights Reporter Foundation. He is a human rights activist and drug policy expert, the founder and editor of the Drugreporter website since 2004, the author of countless articles, co-author of books and director of films about harm reduction and drug policy reform. He was the Director of the Drug Policy Program at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union between 2004 and 2015. He is experienced in working at international drug policy forums such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. He was twice elected to the Core Group of the EU Civil Society Forum on Drugs. He is the co-chair of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network. He has been representing the Hungarian Harm Reduction Network at the government’s drug advisory body in Hungary since 2007. Peter also contributed to building a network of advocacy NGOs in Europe: the European Drug Policy Initiative. He provided technical assistance to several NGOs, and launched several campaigns on drug policy reform. As a member of the Drugreporter video advocacy team, he has produced videos about drug policy issues in a number of countries. These videos are now part of a unique online drug policy video library.
‘Despite the fact that drug use has been decriminalised in Portugal, there seems to be a lasting resistance to framing drug use beyond public health and public disorder issues.’
Humankind has the capacity and knowledge to eliminate the Hepatitis C virus from Earth – but stigma, prejudice and greed stand in the way. Watch our movie produced in cooperation with the Correlation Network and learn more!
In this month’s Dose of Science, rather than focusing on a specific academic paper, we present an interview with Mendel Kaelen, a neuroscience researcher at Imperial College London, working in collaboration with Professor David Nutt and Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris. In this piece, we get an unprecedented window into the scientific conceptualization behind one of the world’s only active human neuroimaging laboratories investigating the effects of LSD in combination with music.
The city of Paris has opened its first drug consumption room (DCR) last year, after a long political struggle. We interviewed Charlotte Mévil-Blanche, a volunteer at the Gaia-Paris DCR about their plans.
While the federal government of Germany does not dare to change cannabis laws, cities like Berlin and Düsseldorf are taking over the lead in reform. We interviewed Georg Wurth, the chairman of the German Cannabis Association about the situation.
Scotland has witnessed a dramatic increase in overdose deaths and HIV infections among injecting drug users. Policy-makers in Glasgow are reported to be considering a proposal to open the first supervised injection site, in response to the epidemics. We interviewed David Liddell, the director of the Scottish Drugs Forum, to learn more about the situation!
The Civil Society Forum on Drugs (CSF), an expert group of the European Commission with more than forty members representing leading European NGOs, held its annual plenary meeting in Brussels last week. The Forum has become an important voice, but it needs more inclusion and funding from EU institutions.
Governments of wealthy countries will be meeting to discuss the future budget of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Romanian civil society organisations have sent them an open letter, warning of catastrophic consequences if they fail to allocate adequate funding for HIV prevention measures, in a country which has been badly hit by the epidemic.
