Building community support for drug users using mobile cinemas

Benin West Africa Flickr CC Colin & Penot

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Building community support for drug users using mobile cinemas

7 June 2018

By Open Society Initiative for West Africa

Waves of dialogue in West Africa on drug policy reform with the ultimate goal of decriminalizing drug use and possession for personal use have been making headway. Progress is slowly but surely on its way, and different actors are employing various tools and strategies to reach this goal. Senegal is home to le Centre de Prise en charge Intégrée des Addictions de Dakar (CEPIAD), the only government-run harm reduction facility in West Africa. CEPIAD does remarkable work by providing psychosocial support, needle exchange programs (NSP) and opioid substitution programs (OST) for drug users struggling with addiction, but despite its presence, Senegalese stakeholders working on drug related issues have yet to see any advances in legislative reform. While high level dialogue on reform is necessary, it needs to be complimented with community-level dialogue. After all, you can only begin to build a movement of reform by building community support for the lives of those in communities affected by the issues you are trying to change. In this case, building a movement for reform is not possible if we do not make a concerted effort to make the lived experience of drug users the central focus. In August 2016, OSIWA disseminated a short documentary film on the harm reduction experience in Senegal and CEPIAD. This year, film screenings targeted high policy level officials and both regional and international civil society actors. However, there was a shift in approach following the realization that the film could also be used as a participatory tool to reframe the discourse and expand dialogue in communities around locally contentious themes such as drugs and drug use.