November 2015 Newsletter

It's now a month since we opened the 24th International Harm Reduction Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The conference brought together over 800 harm reduction activists and specialists from over 70 countries worldwide, including many of you reading this.

You can read detailed coverage of the conference from our official Scientific Reporter, NAM, here, and see photos and videos at the bottom of this newsletter.

But not only was it a unique opportunity to meet and share knowledge, experience and expertise among such a wide cross-section of the harm reduction world. The conference also marked the official launch of our work in the run-up to the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs, which takes place in April next year. This came in the form of the Kuala Lumpur Declaration: Towards a Harm Reduction Decade. Read more about this and add your support to the Declaration below.

Harm Reduction International launched three important publications at the conference too: an update of our Global Review of the Harm Reduction Response to Amphetamines, Community-based drug treatment for people who use drugs, and a Step-by-Step Toolkit for preparing for work with children and young people who inject drugs. You can view and download them in this newsletter.

Launched by Mme Ruth Dreifuss on 21st October 2015

The Kuala Lumpur Declaration: Towards a Harm Reduction Decade, calls on governments and international organisations to:

• Endorse and adopt harm reduction as a key principle of drug policy throughout the next decade of the global response to drug use.
• Redirect just a small portion of funding from ineffective punitive drug control activities into health, human rights and harm reduction responses, and deliver a global target of a 10% shift in such funding by 2020 at the upcoming UNGASS.
• End the criminalisation of people who use drugs and the punitive legal frameworks that fuel HIV transmission, overdose, mass incarceration and human rights violations.

Three new HRI reports launched