Altered States Lead to Altered Minds

At this week's Round Table, Emily, Hannah and Skyla spoke with Sasha Simon and Rhana Hashemi about harm-reduction based drug education. As the Founder and Principal Consultant at Sasha Simon Consulting, Sasha provides training, technical assistance and consulting services to youth-serving professionals transitioning away from punitive, abstinence-based drug education and policies and towards inclusive, restorative, and health-based structures that support the whole child and their community. Rhana is a Bay Area-based drug educator, a national expert in youth overdose prevention and harm reduction, and a doctoral student in Social Psychology at Stanford. She founded an educational organization called Know Drugs, which works to advance evidence-based prevention and harm reduction drug education for youth to prevent overdoses and risky drug use. Sasha advocates extensively on issues related to teens and drug use, sexuality and health, adultism, and BIPOC mental health, building intergenerational coalitions and collaborative networks to empower youth as advocates to challenge political issues that directly impact them and to deliver innovative, cross-sector approaches to public health and education. Sasha also co-founded the Fierce Leadership for Youth Academy, a college prep non-profit aiming to remove financial barriers to higher learning for first-gen college students of color. Rhana translates scientific research and uplifts community youth voices in the design and development of prevention messaging. She was a key contributor to Safety First, the nation's first harm reduction-based drug education curriculum, and has piloted the program across several Bay Area schools. Her work has been featured by major news outlets such as the NY Times, TIMES Magazine, and NBC’s Today Show. After learning about their fascinating backgrounds, we dug into how they’ve co-designed, piloted, and evaluated Safety First programs WITH teachers and students, which is super inspiring. We also discussed recently updated drug education laws in Illinois and Texas, honing in on the policy changes since the fentanyl overdose crisis. Sasha and Rhana put forth a call to action based on everything that they’ve learned and experienced on how YOU can adopt harm reduction-based approaches to drug education in your community. Thank you for listening!