People and dancefloors podcast Season 2, episode 1
We are back for season 2 after a long hiatus! Karen and I are joined by Dr. Fabian Pitter Steinmetz, who is both a toxicologist and an advocate for harm reduction and evidence-based drug policy. So cool!
Fabian is also the president elect of the European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies (ENCOD), a member of Schildower Kreis, a German expert panel for drug policy reform, and a member Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) Germany. He has been involved in important advisory work including giving evidence to the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence, where he recommended not classifying Kratom. In the podcast, we talk all sorts as we all like to go off on tangents.
Drug policy reform and harm reduction are the usual suspects in this podcast, but we also discuss the need for more reform advocates to have a natural science background (we are a heavily social science crowd, and sadly social science does not have the same clout). It’s good to hear about how much Fabian has learnt from social scientists though! Makes me proud!
We also talk about the need to have people who use drugs as role models (a stoner kid who is into skating can become a scientist after all!) We discuss the work of debunking myths about certain heavily stigmatised substances, our use of language in relation to all things drug-related (we could not stop using loaded terms like “hard” drugs or “hard” science and then we tried to correct ourselves – these expressions are so ingrained!)
I think we even talked about basic income?! But then we all agree we do not have the expertise to really do it justice…
Find out what Fabian thinks about the present and future of drug policy reform by listening to the podcast.
Below is a link to the academic article detailing the cocaine e-cigarette model that Fabian talks about in the podcast. This work is so important considering that we struggle to come up with substitution treatment measures for stimulants.
Some media coverage of the article can be found here
Follow Fabian on Twitter @docsteinmetz
