Thursday, October 16, 2025

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Discussion Space

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Details

Across the Global South, drug criminalization continues to deepen inequalities and access to comprehensive healthcare services, especially for women and girls in all their diversity. Yet, the dominant narrative remains rooted in prohibition, punishment, and control—not care, human rights, or public health. We are seeing an alarming increasing trend of authoritarian governments who use security and the “war on drugs” as a political tool; targeting and criminalising people who use drugs, as a form of political control. Latin American and Caribbean countries, for example, are key players in global drug supply chains— absorbing the heaviest social impacts: mass incarcerations, violence, human rights violations, rising rates of HIV and TB, and health systems pushed to collapse. This situation is repeated similarly in other global south countries and contexts. Consequently, women who use drugs—and people who use drugs more broadly—remain absent and not meaningfully included in the design of policies, programmes, data and information systems, and decision-making spaces. Their needs, stories, and rights are ignored and actively erased. This discussion space is an invitation for organisations to hold a dialogue, from the global south perspective, with peers in other regions to exchange our approaches on harm reduction, not just a set of services, but as a political and structural response to inequalities; with a gender-transformative focus. It challenges the systems that criminalize poverty, gender, and drug use. This space aims to elevate how communities across the Global South are reshaping the narrative: defining harm reduction on their own terms, resisting punitive frameworks, and building people-centered, gender-transformative responses. Through storytelling and shared advocacy tools, the session aims to strengthen regional and cross-regional dialogue, support narrative change, and show donors and decision-makers why investing in gender-transformative harm reduction means investing in resilience, dignity, and justice.

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Speaker

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Facilitator