The Fine Print Blog

Last month, the Trump administration escalated its attack on harm reduction within an executive order. Alongside ceasing support for harm reduction research and programming, the order threatens criminal, civil, and other punishments for programs offering life-saving harm reduction services. These destructive methods will only intensify the tragedies caused by the overdose crisis, especially for Black, brown, and Indigenous people, which are acknowledged by International Overdose Awareness Day.

This World AIDS Day, we must recommit to our shared principles of collective action, to cross-movement building, and to not leaving behind those most at risk of criminalization.

Let me be extremely clear: We will not be deterred or derailed. Our work continues and we will continue to do it well and offer a sound assessment of the political conditions we are in as a part of the legal and policy analysis so many have come to rely on and expect from us.

Earlier this month, reports started to reveal a widespread breach of medical data stolen in a cyberattack targeting the Florida Department of Health (DOH). The hackers claimed to have 100 gigabytes of information, including private patient records, and threatened to publish it online if the DOH refused to pay their ransom. Because the Florida government doesn’t pay ransoms, the hacker group uploaded all its stolen files to the dark web.

As we transition from the end of Black History Month to the beginning of Women’s History Month, Staff Attorney Kae Greenberg blogs about how our identities, like our advocacy work, can’t be siloed and that centering an intersectional approach is essential to the success of our organizing work.

On this National HIVAIDS and Aging Awareness Day, we are calling on our community, advocates, and policymakers to ensure that the specific needs and vulnerabilities of aging PLHIV are accounted for in their advocacy and included in ongoing national discussions and planning for the needs of America’s aging population.

New CHLP blog for National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NYHAAD) points out the importance of centering system-affected youth in national dialogues about sexual health and LGBTQ+ rights.

On International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, the struggle to end criminalization based on identity and health/disability-related bias is far from over. To secure real justice for those who are crushed by the horrific inequities of the criminal legal system, we need to be intentional about keeping the bigger picture in view and centering the concrete needs of the most marginalized, the most criminalized, and the most unheard.

On National HIV Testing Day, we must hold public health professionals and agencies accountable -- by honoring principles of disability and racial justice, and protecting medical privacy and bodily autonomy, we improve the public’s health.