ID: 1213

Type of submission: Oral

Conference track: Advocacy

Topics: Harm Reduction in Latin America; Innovative Harm Reduction Programmes

Presenting author: Brun Gonzalez

Presenting author biography:

Brun González is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Network of People who Use Drugs, the Latin American representative for Youth RISE and he has been working with ReverdeSer, the Universe of Drugs and the Substance Analysis Program in Mexico since 2012.

The Universe of Drugs as an international harm reduction campaign!

Brun Gonzalez, Gabriel Amezcua

The Universe of Drugs started as an idea back in 2011 through the harm reduction program of the Mexican youth-led organization, Espolea, the first step was an eye-catching infographic that brought together many different psychoactive substances arranged by their effects, families and molecular properties, with the intention of destigmatizing the concept of drugs, bringing awareness on the relationship between some socially accepted substances such as alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and the “classic” illicit black market street drugs, but also bringing attention to other more obscure or novel substances to expand the collective notion of "Drugs".

This evolved into a fully functional Spanish based harm reduction database/website that provides a comprehensive fact sheet on each substance that emphasizes harm reduction practices and recommendations in a friendly, practical, non-judgmental manner that works as an empowering community-strengthening tool where people can ask anything about their specific substance use and learn about those substances in terms of the historical origins of its use or the cultural practices that have been developed around them through our history.

Today this infographic and website is still evolving and has grown to an international collaborative platform for specialized harm reduction and psychoactive substance education that brings together the Mexican based NGO ReverdeSer along with the Mexican Substance Analysis Program (P.A.S.), the international youth-led network Youth RISE, the Drug Policy Alliance and the Czech Psychedelic Society among others, taking the content and the messages to different languages and promoting them through beautiful visual resources around the content and the graph.

We will be presenting the new and updated English version of the poster infographic and focusing on the New Psychoactive Substances that have been added recently and the future steps of the international campaign around the Universe of Drugs.