Debunking the War on Drugs

Dear Drugreporter Global Giving Supporters!

We would like to update you on our recent filming activity: We travelled to Romania to produce two movies, and launched a campaign, in collaboration with the Romanian Harm Reduction Network, to raise awareness of the current outbreak of HIV/AIDS among injecting drug users in Romania. For many years, HIV infections were very rare among injecting drug users in Romania: just one or two cases annually. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. A market boom in new psychoactive stimulants (sold as “ethnobotanicals”) has led to a rapid increase in the number of drug injections: a heroin user injects 4-5 times a day - a stimulant drug user 10-15 times. As a result, HIV is rapidly increasing among drug users in Romania. Previously, successful harm reduction programs in Romania were funded by the Global Fund, but when it withdrew from the country, the Government did not maintain support for these life-saving services. As a result, programs have been forced to shut down. In our short documentary and taster, experts and users call upon the government to provide funding for harm reduction. Please join the campaign: watch and share this video and take action to stop HIV!

The situation is similar in Serbia, with the exception that an HIV epidemic has not yet started among injecting users, thanks to the existing harm reduction measures. Just like in Romania, Global Fund support will stop, Government funding is uncertain, and the result may well be a similar rapidly-growing HIV epidemic. We travelled to film in Belgrade, and we are planning to produce our movies in the coming month. You can find many photos on Facebook about our filming trip!

The Drugreporter video team will be attending the Drug Reform conference in Denver, USA. As official conference film-makers, we will record sessions and produce video blogs about the event. For updates of the conference, follow us on Facebook!

For our movie on InSite, the safer injection room in Vancouver, we won the prize for the best Web Video documentary, in the Hungarian Kreatív Magazine's Annual contest. At the end of the year we bought a new camera, a Canon 5d Mark III. It will improve the quality of our movies, and we can now produce really good quality still images too. Thank you very much for your support!

Yours sincerely,
István Gábor Takács and Péter Sárosi
HCLU/Drugreporter

The International Harm Reduction Conference was organized in Vilnius, Lithunaia this year - more than thousand activists, professionals and decision makers have gathered to discuss the key issues and challanges of harm reduction from all over the world. The video advocacy team of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) attended the conference and filmed the most interesting sessions and produced several short videos available on YouTube.

Click here to watch our 5 minutes video report from the conference!

Some people say harm reduction is a Troyan horse of drug legalization - others say harm reduction is about public health and not about politics. The Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) made a powerful speech at the International Harm Reduction Conference in Vilnius on this issue - watch him on our video!

In a statement released at the Harm Reduction International Conference in Vilnius, Ukraine International HIV/AIDS Alliance has announced that last year, for the first time since 1999, there was a reduction in the number of new HIV cases in the Ukraine, thanks to harm reduction services funded by international donors. Watch our video and learn how this country could beat the HIV epidemic with the help of harm reduction programs!

Ruth Dreifuss, the former president of Switzerland made a speech at the opening session of the International Harm Reduction Conference. She spoke about the need to have a more comprehensive understanding of harm reduction that goes beyond the traditional public health definition of this term. "Time has come to a broader understanding of harms produced by the moralistic condemnation of activities which do not harm others," said Ms. Dreifuss. The pursuit of the dream of a drug-free society leads to executions, murders, mass imprisonment and other human rights abuses - we cannot ignore the broader, international context of drug policy related harms. Watch her speech on our video!

There are three magical words very few politicans dare to utter: I was wrong. Mr. Alexander Kwasniewski, the former president of Poland is among them. Last May he published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he publicly apoligized for signing a bill in 2000 that criminalized people who use drugs. He has realized that the society had to pay a terrible price for criminalization. It has not led to less drug use but filled prisons with young people and creates huge black market. This year he is attending the Harm Reduction 2013 Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he spoke at the opening plenary. The Drugreporter video advocacy team filmed his speech and we posted it uncut!