The BOOST project aims to support and strengthen community-based and community-led organisations in providing communicable diseases services as part of comprehensive, people-centred harm reduction strategies. Drugreporter produced this short video at a dynamic Advocacy Workshop in Budapest in the framework of the BOOST Project.

Welcome to the first episode of our new live online video show, Drugreporter Café, where we will regularly discuss new developments in the world of drug policy with professionals, activists and decision makers. Today our show will feature drug policy reform in a small country in Southern-Eastern Europe, North Macedonia. We will discuss the chances of reform with two guests, two activists from the country, Vlatko Dekov (HOPS Skopje) and Natasa Boskova (Coalition Margins).

Crossings is a sex-worker produced documentary about the effects of criminalisation on migrant sex workers in Europe and the powerful ways of their resistance. Produced in cooperation between Drugreporter and ICRSE.

A Macedonian harm reduction NGO, HOPS, assessed the access of injecting drug users and sex workers to justice. Please read a short summary of the findings of this research by Ivica Cekovski!

“An example of not learning from good practice.” Darko Kostovski, a psychiatrist from Skopje, highlights the problems the clients of opiate substitution treatment face in Macedonia.

Healthy Options Project Skopje (Macedonia) has launched a new campaign to save underfunded harm reduction programmes which are a huge success in the region. Watch the video we produced with them and learn more!

“People are afraid of the Police. If you go to protests… you are marked and whenever they see you, they might stop you, control you.” This is just one of the obstacles restraining drug user activism in Macedonia. An article by Vlatko Dekov.

An image from the centre of Skopje: Children, barely five years old, walk around the park, holding a bag, pressing it to their faces from time to time to inhale. Healthy Options Project Skopje fights for available treatments for these kids thus for their lives.