The 2008 International Rolleston Award was won by Dr. Andrew Ball, Senior Strategy and Operations Advisor in the Department for HIV/AIDS for the World Health Organization (WHO) and a long-time supporter of harm reduction – both within WHO (since 1991) and in the wider community (where he has supported the development and expansion of harm reduction programmes in a wide range of low and middle income countries).

The 2008 National Rolleston Award was won by Àmbit Prevenció, a Spanish NGO whose aim is to deliver support and HIV prevention to people who use drugs through needle exchanges, workshops and outreach.

The 2008 Travis Jenkins Award was presented to Theo van Dam of the Netherlands, in recognition of his efforts to teach people who use drugs to defend their rights, and his pioneering work within the European drug-user activism movement – including helping to establish the ‘International Drug Users Day’.

In addition to these annual IHRA Awards, a new scholarship was also presented – the ‘Bonnie Devlin Memorial Scholarship’. This award was developed as a tribute to Bonnie Devlin, a women who was not only instrumental in the organisation of the 1996 International AIDS Conference and the 2006 IHRA Conference (both in Canada), but also in the development of community programmes, services and research for people affected by drug use. In Barcelona, the first ‘Bonnie Devlin Memorial Scholarship’ was awarded to Ananda Pun – the chair of the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) and also of Recovering Nepal (a national network of people who use users) – for his tireless efforts, in the face of such adversity, in the development of peer-based community HIV and harm reduction programmes in Nepal and Asia.