Shaun Shelly - South African Drug Policy HD

Shaun Shelly is dedicated to the understanding of drug use and the development of effective drug policy and the rights of marginalised groups, including people who use drugs. His passion for the subject and compassion and respect for people comes across in his frequent academic and public talks and writing. He studied at the University of Stellenbosch Department of Psychiatry where he graduated cum laude with a Post Graduate Diploma in Addiction Care and is currently in the Addictions Division of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at UCT, where he is an MPhil Candidate in Addictions Psychiatry. Shaun also established South Africa’s first non-abstinence focused community program for people who use drugs in Cape Town. He is currently the Projects, policy, Advocacy and Human Rights” manager for TB/HIV Care Association. He has an appointment at the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Pretoria as part of the team implementing a Community Oriented Primary Care approach to address drug use in the City of Tshwane. Shaun is on the board of advisers to the Harm reduction, Abstinence and Moderation Support network (HAMS) and Families for Sensible Drug Policy in the United States. He is also a member of the International Drug Policy Consortium strategy sub-committee. In his role at TB/HIV Care he conceptualized and organized the first SA Drug Policy Week. Currently Shaun’s main area of research is on access to opioid substitution therapy and the implementation of low-threshold methadone and buprenorphine programs for low-resource communities through public-private partnerships. He is a 2016 Open Society Foundations International Drug Policy Fellow and spent more than a decade doing embedded ethnographic research on drug use and the informal economy in Cape Town South Africa.