5th European Harm Reduction Conference
10-12 November 2021 Prague, Czechia
- I don't know what should I say.
Here we are.
Yeah I think it's really amazing
we started to prepare this conference in 2019.
and postponed it four times.
and this time, November 21, it has to happen.
again, we are here.
- We have more than 400 participants
and we are actually all overwhelmed by
the interest of people here coming to the conference.
We see that people really want to come together
and they are somehow fed up with meeting online
so it's great to be here.
- We have celebrated thirty years of existence
in SANANIM last year,
because of COVID, we do not have a chance to celebrate much
so this is one of the most nice presents we get,
I mean to get the Harm Reduction Conference in Prague
SANANIM is one of the two large organizations in Czech Republic
and both are doing everything
the complex care from the outreach to the aftercare.
- It's our mobile unit from SANANIM,
from Prague, we work at the open drug market,
we are doing, needle exchange
Hepatitis testing, HIV testing,
COVID testing and now COVID vaccination
and a lot of health care.
at the moment we are fighting for existence again,
after the 30 years more or less.
Even if we probably have the largest network
of harm reduction services in Europe,
This doesn't mean that it will be there tomorrow.
- I'm very happy to be here, i'm learning a lot,
and I think also this conference
is a very interesting space of diversity
which I think it's really really important.
There's one group that I was told that has
a very strong representation of this conference,
which is the sex workers community,
thank you also for coming out and being part of this conference.
- In many harm reduction services, the majority of the of the of the clients are men.
transgender people and women, they don't have enough
opportunities to share with us, because the space is not safe,
so also this is the reason why last year we started to provide services
specifically dedicated to women and to trans women.
- Since the people who are engaging in chem sex
are mostly from already marginalized communities,
like the msm or transgender people, or sex workers,
they are being stigmatized on two different levels,
as part of one community and as drug users,
so we ave to have a multiple angle approach
in order to actually understand what is going on,
and approach them and offer the services they need
in the way that they need to have them.
- We are now kind of speaking more and trying to inform people in the region
more about new psychoactive substances,
what they are, because people are getting
quite a lot of not real, not correct information
- While in the United States people are nostalgic
for good old heroin, because it's being replaced by fentanyl
in Estonia this is already old news,
fentanyl is being replaced by the new nitazines,
or the so-called benzimidazol group opioids,
which of course are untested on humans
and can be very dangerous as usual.
But I think it's still not going to break any records,
because Naloxone is made more and more available.
If at all possible use drug checking services.
- We have a new system to quantify drugs
and this this machine that we have here is based on FTR technology.
It takes 15 seconds to to analyze the drug,
we don't need reagents, so we can do as much
samples as we want, without any reagents.
It's non-destructive, people can have it in a second
and then can take back that sample, which is amazing.
We have a drug analyzing system which can analyze more than 200 drugs,
cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, methamphetamine amphetamine, ketamine, heroin, ibogain and way more.
you just put the sample, and then you just press,
wait 15 seconds and then you will have that, pumba!
so it shows that MDMA is 85%, and the other one is 83%.
the results of the machine quantify, which is new!
and for sure we work as well with cannabis, which is also really new with this technology.
we can quantify THC, but also extracts and oils.
we go to drug consumption rooms and festivals,
and then we are able to analyze a lot of, lot of drugs.
- We did a research on community perceptions of mobile drug consumption rooms, in Lisbon.
There's a really high level of acceptability.
100% of participants in both data rounds
were accepting of the service in the neighborhood
and they really understood what the service is,
that it's aimed for people who use drugs
that it's a health and harm reduction service.
They said that they think it's a good service, to support people who use drugs,
that it is good for their health and well-being.
- It's more and more important that
you can't do harm reduction without having
young people telling you how we need it done
because if you don't understand youth drug use,
you won't be able to implement it.
- That's why we need to be here and we're so glad to be.
- We had a lot of feedback that for a lot of people it's the first time
that they heard a youth panel,
made up of exclusively young people,
focusing on young people and young people's participation,
so it was very very rewarding.
- Young people want peers,
they want to know about these things from people who are closer to their age
and not some older police officers telling them not to do drugs.
- We, drug users, we began with calls for harm reduction 30- 35 years ago
harm reduction organizations, have basically roots into the
drug user movement from 80's, so maybe it's time to recognize this
give back the powers to the drug users themselves. Ourselves.