September 30, 2011
A Happy Day For Harm Reduction!
By
Katherine Dodds
Woke up and turned on CBC radio to the happy news that The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Insite Safe Injection site will stay open!
Insite is also featured in our friends at Kensington TV's fine film Raw Opium which had a special screening on PBS Newshour last night.
It's being a very busy health related month for us at Hello Cool World. Last week we hosted the Social Media and Health Promotion mashup as part of Social Media Week Vancouver. Check out Michelle's wrap up blog. We're still tweeting using #SMWhealth if you care to follow our conversation.
Today's the day that Raw Opium is launching a Twitter conversation around #DrugPolicy.
Hello Cool World partnered with Kensington TV to promote the DOXA premiere of Raw Opium just before Insite went to court, and Insite is a strong throughline in the documentary, which takes an international look at the drug trade and harm reducuction but begins on the streets of Vancouver and creates a compassionate portrait of Insite and the people who access its services. This is one of the reasons we felt the film would be such a strong tool in the international fight for harm reduction and drug policy reform. See our blog about our POV ad.
Check out TVOs footage of the panel discussion of the private premiere screening in TO moderated by Hello Cool World's founder Katherine Dodds.
TVO, Kensington TV and Raw Opium will be tweeting facts and stats about drugs with the hashtag #drugpolicy between Sept. 30th and October 20th to raise awareness about the upcoming TVO broadcast, the online stream of their documentary and their online live chat. Their aim is to promote debate about Canadian drug policies, the war on drugs, and the issue of whether drug use should be considered a public health issue or a criminal justice issue. Given the Insite announcment this debate can start on a celebratory note.
If you would like to participate in this Twitter campaign tag your relevant tweets with the hashtag #DrugPolicy.
And today also marks the day we finish our video for Vancouver Coastal Health and Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). We will be very exicited to deliver the short safe injection video: "Share Stories, Not Needles" which was made with the fine folks of VANDU. (Although I am very tempted to grab our camera and head down the street to Insite where I believe a street party is erupting!)
Yours in spreading the good stuff!
Kat
Tag(s):
Harm Reduction,
health promotion,
Health/Health Advocacy,
Downtown Eastside,
Drug Policy
Recent Blogs by Katherine Dodds:
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Katherine Dodds AKA "Kat" is the founder of Good Company Communications and HelloCoolWorld.com. Trained in renegade advertising & branding through her work with Adbusters in the '90s, Kat's early induction into the possibilities of the web-world was inspired by the term hypertext, which she immediately found comforting. She is dedicated to cause-related communication and to the development and use of tools that promote democratic processes.
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