IHRA is governed by a Board of Directors (formerly the Executive Committee) of individuals from around the world. Each Director is elected on a three-year term by IHRA’s members at the Annual General Meetings. The current Board of Directors consists of the following people:
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Dr Mukta Sharma (Chair)
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 Dr Mukta Sharma is a harm reduction researcher and programmer from India, and has been Chair of the IHRA Board since 2007 (having served as Vice-Chair since 2003). Mukta has worked in HIV prevention and care among people who use drugs in Asia and South East Europe for the past decade - including researching, designing, and implementing harm reduction interventions. She currently works for the World Health Organization's South East Asia Regional Office (WHO-SEARO), and remains an ardent supporter of harm reduction.
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Dr Marcus Day (Vice Chair)
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 Dr. Marcus Day is the Director of the Caribbean Drug Abuse Research Institute and the founder and co-ordinator of the Caribbean Harm Reduction Coalition based in Castries, Saint Lucia. Marcus is an accomplished street outreach worker, and founded the first low-threshold drop-in centre for homeless crack users in the Caribbean (in Saint Lucia) and helped to establish subsequent drop-in centres in Jamaica, Trinidad and the Dominican Republic. Currently, Marcus is the principal investigator on research project on "Cocaine and HIV Risk Behaviour in Saint Lucia" and has done extensive work on access and utilisation of health care by the homeless crack using populations in the Caribbean. Marcu is also the CARICOM Technical Advisor on HIV and Drugs, works to keep drug offenders out of prison by promoting alternative sentencing regimes, and does extensive work in Caribbean prisons on issues around drug use and HIV. Marcus has published a manual on implementing alternative sentencing, is the co-editor of "Caribbean Drugs: From Criminalisation to Harm Reduction", and co-authored the 2002 CARICOM report on "Drug Demand Reduction Needs in the Caribbean Community" - which continues to inform CARICOM drugs policy.
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Bill Stronach (Treasurer and Secretary)
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 As well as being a founder of IHRA, Bill Stronach has been ever-present on the Board during the organisation’s 10-year history and is currently serving as Treasurer and Secretary. Through the Australian Drug Foundation (ADF), Bill also organised the 3rd, 7th and 15th International Conferences on the Reduction of Drug Related Harm. Bill is the recently retired Chief Executive of the ADF, which operates an extensive range of programmes and services across Australia such as providing information, research, community development, education and advocacy for issues around drugs and drug policy. During his term as CEO the ADF’s particular focus was on alcohol use among young people and they pioneered one of the first alcohol harm reduction programs in Australia in the early 1990s. Bill has an interest in drug law reform and harm reduction initiatives for injecting drug users. He is a past President of the Association for Prevention and Harm Reduction Programs in Melbourne.
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Tasnim Azim
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 Tasnim Azim heads the HIV/AIDS Programme at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (ICDDR,B) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been working on HIV for more than 10 years, primarily as a researcher, in following and understanding the epidemic in Bangladesh which is IDU driven. She works closely with the harm reduction programmes of Bangladesh and actively promotes evidence based HIV programming. Regionally she has had projects in Nepal and Bhutan and has participated as a consultant in several international missions of the World Bank, UNAIDS, WHO and FHI.
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Professor Nick Crofts
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 Professor Nick Crofts is a leading researcher in the epidemiology and prevention of blood-borne viruses and has been the Director of the ‘Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre’ in Australia since 2004. After 12 years as a Medical Officer in community health, Professor Crofts founded the Epidemiology and Social Research Unit at the Burnet Institute in 1990. He later established the ‘Centre for International Health’, the ‘Asian Harm Reduction Network’ and the ‘Centre for Harm Reduction’ (which provides advocacy, technical assistance and implementation for harm reduction programmes throughout Asia). He has also been the Editor in Chief for ‘The Manual for Reducing Drug Related Harm in Asia’. In 1998, IHRA awarded Professor Crofts with the International Rolleston Award for his work promoting harm reduction in Asia. In 2001, he was also awarded a Principal Research Fellowship by the National Health and Medical Research Council.
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Stéphane Ibanez-de-Benito
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 Stéphane Ibanez-de-Benito is currently working as Expert in Drug Dependency, Treatment and Rehabilitation for the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC), based at the Regional Office for Eastern Africa, in Nairobi (Kenya). Prior to this role, Stephane was working as Service Development Manager of the Substance Misuse Management Project (SMP) and Clinical Leader for Brent Teaching Primary Care in London working for Brent Primary Care Trust (PCT) developing treatment interventions for drug users in Primary Care. Stephane is Co-founder of the Nursing Harm Reduction Network (NHRN) and ex-Vice-Chair and Research and Development Executive Member of ANSA (Association of Nurses in Substance Use) as well as a Member of the Spanish Society of Drug Dependency and Member of the Scientific Committee of “Las Drogas.”
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John-Peter Kools
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 John-Peter Kools has been working in the field of drug use, harm reduction and HIV prevention since 1983. As a staff member of the drug users interest group in Amsterdam, he was involved in starting the first needle exchange service and early community-based HIV responses. In 1990 he was co-founder of ‘Mainline’, a harm reduction NGO in The Netherlands. John-Peter Kools has extensive experience in outreach work, was editor-in-chief of the health promotion magazine ‘Mainline’, and developed a wide variety of health interventions and programmes. Since 1996 he has been mainly involved in initiating and supporting HIV prevention services in Central and Eastern Europe and co-ordinated a multi-country programme on HIV, drug use and poverty reduction in Asia. Since 2005 he is a board member of Health Connection International, a web-based platform to support non-English speaking communities and health practitionors in low income countries. Currently Jon-Peter Kools works on an independant basis in various drugs and HIV responses works in transitional and developing countries and is involved in assessing substance use and related HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Danny Kushlick
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 Danny Kushlick has worked with clients with learning difficulties and unemployed ex-offenders. He then began work as a drug counsellor for drug users that had been referred from the criminal justice system. His experiences of working with heroin and cocaine users on probation and in prison led him to believe that the prohibition of drugs caused much more harm than the drugs themselves. As a result, he founded the Transform Drug Policy Foundation - a UK charity campaigning for effective drug policy (including the replacement of the global prohibition-based framework with a system whereby nation states can put in place democratically governed systems of legal regulation and control). As well as founding Transform, Danny is currently the Director of the organisation and is a passionate supporter of harm reduction.
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Guy-Pierre Levesque
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 Guy-Pierre Lévesque recovered from opiates addiction in 1994 and founded Méta d'Âme in 2000. Méta d'Âme is a community project which provides peer assistance to empower people currently or formerly addicted to opiates and people receiving methadone. This peer-led intervention model has been successful on various levels and has ventured far beyond traditional rehabilitation. Guy-Pierre is involved in government health committees to improve the quality of life for drug users and homeless people. Guy-Pierre joined the IHRA Executive Council in 2007 at the Warsaw Conference.
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Anan Pun
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 Anan Pun is the Chairman of INPUD (the International Network of People who Use Drugs) and also the chair of Recovering Nepal, a national network of drug users and drug service organizations in Nepal. He graduated from Tribhuwan University, Nepal. He has been working in the field of drug HIV prevention, treatment and policy advocacy since 2001. He has helped to establish numerous drug user and community based harm reduction organizations in Nepal and he is also involved in INPUD Asia Pacific movement in the region. His long time association with national and international drug treatment, harm reduction, AIDS care and development organizations and his personal ability to understand and sensitivity towards drug users issue is noteworthy. This has made him extraordinarily devoted and committed towards working with drug users and their issues. He is an excellent orator, good manager and humble creature.
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Dr Emran Razaghi
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 Dr Emran Razaghi is the Director of the Iranian National Center for Addiction Studies (INCAS), and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS). A more detailed bio will be available soon
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Alex Wodak
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 Dr. Alex Wodak trained as a physician and, since 1982, has been Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia. Alex and his colleagues helped to establish the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, the Australian Society of HIV Medicine, Australia's first (pre-legal) needle exchange programme and Australia’s first (pre-legal) medically supervised injecting centre. Alex is currently the President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and is a member of several state and national committees. He often works in developing countries to assist efforts to control HIV infection among drug users.
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