Appendix I
Presenter Bios
Senator Larry Campbell was the Mayor of Vancouver when Insite opened, and was the architect of that program. He fought and won a landslide election on this issue and he can take credit for working out many of the practical and political details. He started out in his career, back in 1969, working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver; by 1973, he was working with the Drug Squad. Starting in 1981 Campbell worked for the Vancouver District Coroner’s office and in 1996 he was appointed British Columbia Chief Coroner, a post that he served in until 2000.
Liz Evans is the founder of the PHS Community Services Society, a housing and harm reduction organization which she ran for about twenty years. Liz is now an Open Society Foundations Fellow. The PHS spearheaded much of the SIF advocacy in Vancouver, and developed various program models, from the original mobile injection rooms to what is now Insite, a supervised injection facility co-located with a low-threshold detox center and transitional housing.
Dr. Thomas Kerr is co-director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Kerr has extensive research experience in the areas of drug use, infectious diseases, and public health, especially in evaluating programs and treatments designed to address injection drug use and HIV/AIDS. Dr. Kerr was the principal investigator of the scientific evaluation of Insite-Vancouver’s supervised injecting site.
Werner Schneider was the Drug Policy Coordinator of the City of Frankfurt and authored the original “Four Pillars Framework.” It is hard to overstate the role of local officials like Schneider in promoting and implementing harm reduction policies in Germany, where harm reduction initiatives initially met with strong opposition from the central government. But as a result of his advocacy, the city governments of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Zurich and Frankfurt came together in a trans-governmental alliance to draft and sign a “Frankfurt Resolution” calling for a transition to harm reduction approaches.
Dr. Marianne Jauncey is a public health physician and the Medical Director of the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC). This was the first supervised injecting service in the English-speaking world, and has been operating since 2001. Marianne began as the director at the MSIC in 2008, and is a passionate advocate for the service and for thinking differently about drugs and drug users. Working at the front-line Marianne sees first-hand the impact of the social determinants of health – that people’s beginnings in life determine so much of where they end up. She believes that all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and that the medical profession as a whole should be more active in advocating for social justice.
Dr. Alex Kral is Director of the Behavioral and Urban Health Program at RTI International, a non-profit research institute. He is an epidemiologist with two decades of experience conducting community-based research related to substance use, mental health, criminal justice, and infectious diseases.
Tony Trimingham is a psychotherapist who lost his son to a heroin overdose. This led Tony to found Family Drug Support, an organization that helps families of people who use drugs. Tony was instrumental in advocating for the opening of supervised injection facilities in Australia.
Peter Frerichs is the former Vice-President of the Police Department of the City of Frankfurt, in charge of law enforcement and coordination with harm reduction drug policy in the city.