Keynote Speaker: Maia Szalavitz, Award-Winning Neuroscience Author, Journalist & Mental Health Advocate Session Title: How Harm Reduction Saved My Life Maia Szalavitz blends personal experience and years of investigative research into an inspiring perspective on addiction. She eloquently makes the case that addicted people need to be understood on their own terms, instead of being further marginalized by constructs that reflect society’s biases. Deeply passionate about rectifying the inequality in drug policy and harm reduction, Maia gives us a tour of her recovery journey. Experiencing the legal system and treatment programs firsthand, she committed to understanding how we can do better as a society to help others who’ve gone down a similar path. Her work has helped the world understand addiction in a whole new way. From "one of the bravest, smartest writers about addiction anywhere" (Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author), Maia delivers the untold story of harm reduction, a surprisingly simple idea with enormous power.
Learning Objectives: 1. Create or enhance participants’ definition of harm reduction utilizing firsthand experience of addiction and recovery. 2. Enlighten participants’ on the roots of harm reduction and how it has evolved to become an effective evidence-based practice. 3. Explore why addiction persists despite consequences and what this means for policy across the criminal justice system, prevention and treatment systems.
Maia Szalavitz is an award-winning author and journalist who covers addiction and neuroscience. Her most recent book, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, is the first history of the movement aimed at focusing drug policy on minimizing harms, not highs. Her previous New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction wove together neuroscience and social science with her personal experience of heroin addiction to explore how reframing addiction as a learning disorder can transform prevention, treatment and policy. It won the 2018 media award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She writes regularly for The New York Times and has written for numerous other publications including TIME, Wired, Elle, The Nation, Vice, The Guardian and Scientific American. |