PDIS: People Doing Interesting Stuff

In this episode of PDIS: People Doing Interesting Stuff, I talk to Deon Haywood, the Executive Director of Women With A Vision, Inc. (WWAV). Founded in 1989 by a grassroots collective of Black women in response to the spread of HIV/AIDS in New Orleans, Louisiana, Women With A Vision is a social justice non-profit which focuses on the most urgent issues faced by women, especially women of color vulnerable to criminal justice involve...

In the late 1980s, Howard Josepher and Joe Turner met in New York City and began the program now known as Exponents. Their goal was deceptively simple, to establish an outreach and recovery program for people returning home from prison with a substance use problem. But it was actually more complicated than that. Although they had some federal funding to run a limited three-year program, when that money dried up th...

The "harm reduction as resistance" edition (with Joyce A. Rivera). Welcome to PDIS. A week after the Trump election of November 2016, Joyce Rivera, the founder and Executive Director of the St. Ann's Corner of Harm Reduction, joined me and my students at the PDIS studios. This was a few days after the federal election of 2016, which put Donald Trump in office, and Joyce explained to me why she's optimistic about the future. A lot o...

The "culturally competent harm reduction" edition. At the Drug Policy Alliance's October 2017 conference in Atlanta, I got the chance to speak with four harm reduction and public health activists and researchers, including Lyn Ayala (Condom Program Coordinator at Washington Heights Corner Project), Zina Age (Founder & CEO, Aniz, Inc., in Atlanta, GA), Carrie Ann Lawrence (Director of the Indiana School of Public Health's Project Cu...

Formerly the Vice President of Programs at AIDS United in Washington DC, and a twenty-plus-year veteran of the AIDS and harm reduction movements, Monique Tula in the summer of 2016 became the Executive Director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, one of the nation's foremost organizations in the field. On August 1, 2017, Tula dropped by the PDIS studios for a cup of coffee and to talk about the Harm Reduction Coalition's new North Sta...

Happy Fall, everyone! My guest in this episode of PDIS is Flores Forbes. Born and raised in San Diego, California, at age sixteen Forbes joined the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The Panthers had been formed in 1966, and Flores rose through the ranks to become a high-level operative in the Party's military wing, called the Buddha Samauri. As one of the Party's principal armorers, Flores was responsible for maintaining the Pa...

A week after being honored by Citizens Against Recidivism, Parent Advocate and harm reduction practitioner Dinah Ortiz-Adames stopped by to give me a hard time about the state of my office and my lack of technical expertise with the recording equipment. We also talked about her work and a little-known aspect of drug policy and criminal justice: their effects on families of color. In this interview, we discuss stigma and the word "a...