 Hello, I'm Pita Sjarosci. I'm the editor of the Drug Reporter website. I'm really happy today because I'm sitting here with Nana Gotfretzen, a long-time friend and ally, a legendary street lawyer, a founder of the street lawyers in Copenhagen, and now elected member of the Danish parliament. Hello, Nana. How do you feel here in Vienna today? I'm really good. It's an amazing place to be with so many friends and allies from all over the world. So it's really good to be here. So you were elected last year. Can you tell us the story? How did you decide to become a member of parliament? I think it was a decision made of quite a desperate street lawyer who really wants to change the world for our most vulnerable people and you can fight and scream and fight again from bottom up. It can be hard to be listened to. It was kind of an experiment. What can I do and achieve if I'm not just a street lawyer? I'm still a street lawyer on Mondays, but if I can also fight together with the people who use drugs and other vulnerable groups from inside and top down. So it's an experiment and it's only a few months now. The election was on 1 November, International Drug Use Day. So it's very new, but I think for now it's promising. Yeah. Exciting. Yesterday you spoke at the session and you emphasized that you are not a politician. So can you talk about that? I've never been a member of a party. I've never been a politician or I'm not a politician now. I will never become a politician. I'm a member now of purple, coloured, political party, the moderates, a new political party who wants to insist on having the dialogue and the conversation about also really, really difficult issues which we have not solved by now, but have it cross the parliament with all parties. It's really amazing that your constituency, the voters, they supported this kind of harm reduction agenda, right? And standing up for the people who live in poverty, the marginalised. So how could you do that? Like, what kind of campaign did you do? How did you convince the people to support this agenda? I was very insecure about how would this go. But I got a lot of messages from people who use drugs and their families and close ones saying that they completely lost trust in politics. But now they are going to vote for the first time in 18 years someone wrote and another one in 26 years. I was Nana, I was a street lawyer promising to continue to do street lawyering but wanting to expand the platform from where I could do the street lawyering and that helped. I won Copenhagen, so it worked very well. I was not a politician in a campaign. I was just me, a street lawyer. OK, so let's speak about the problems of the street then. Last time we were talking there were still so-called no-go zones in Copenhagen where the police were kind of banning people of who use drugs, right? What's the situation right now? Is that still exists? The no-go zones is history. And we got the drug and sums in rooms from actually 11 but the first one was a civil disobedience one. And just a year later we had the state-sanctioned DCRs in Copenhagen and even also in other parts of the country. And we do have the diamorphine also called heroin treatment program. So we have had successes. It took a very long time and we have lost so many loved ones while waiting for our politicians to be mature enough to do these things. But it kind of... We need to scale up. And we need to develop these initiatives. We need to also have a really honest and evidence-based discussion, conversation on decriminalization. It's still a tough one. We have many politicians and policymakers who really fear to take that step and they fear missing the means of sending messages. But an evidence-based dialogue in parliament would be helpful, I believe. Do you think that what's happening in Norway, for example, can inspire politics in Denmark? Yeah. Yeah. We are not very good at learning from experiences and conversations in other countries but Norway is very close to us and we have had a lot of conversations here in Vienna this week. NGOs in the Nordic countries, how can we step up? How can we get a better understanding of what is going on in other countries and how can we get our governments to meet and step up together? And we have made plans for that, so I really look forward to what we can get from that. You mentioned overdose deaths. I suppose that's the biggest problem right now. How can you also talk about other kind of problems or challenges or barriers? Our data may be not... There may be not that good. Maybe we need to also look into that to get better data. But it seems like the overdose deaths have stabilized over the last two decades. That's not good. We might have, with what we've done with the DCRs and the diamond treatment, heroin treatment, we might have succeeded to prevent it from exploding the death rate. But we have a problem with people actually going for treatment. If you look at our most at-risk population of users of drugs, it's only about one third who is in contact with our treatment system. And that's really, really not good. So that's also what will happen now. We have to look into what's going wrong here. Why is our treatment system obviously not that attractive? What can we do to make them more attractive? That's going to be a big issue. We have had so-called treatment guarantees since actually the psychosocial treatment guarantee from 2003. And a medical one from 2015. But something is not working. We really need, especially in the medical treatment, OST treatment, to create low threshold access. So you can just go there. And if we can't find the doctors, we could copy the Canadians when they open vending machines. We really have to ensure that people have access to medications easily as a real alternative to very deadly illegal market. Do you think something like the safer supply programs in Canada could work in Denmark? Yes. We need it desperately. Let's say we are in the end of your term in the parliament. What would make you happy? So what could be the success which you say that, OK, so I really done something for this country? I'm really hard to satisfy because my standards and goals are really, really high. But we have to see as soon as possible a decline in mortality among people who use drugs. I also, and that's really hard to check upon the de-stigmatizing of people who use drugs. But it's so necessary. I want to see a scale up on the funding for their own organizations because we need them in developing policies and treatment services and other services. These are some of the things. And I would be very, very happy if they are completely decriminalized. It is not that prohibition has been a disaster. Really cost so many lives. Prohibition is a disaster still. So people who use drugs have nothing to do in the criminal system for what they do with or to themselves. We need to take them away from the criminal system and have a public health approach. So of course decriminalization is the most important for me. But it's going to be a tough one too. In Denmark you have to be able to count to 90 because there are 179 parliament members. But I'll do all I can to make it. Thank you so much for the interview. And I hope next time we will speak then you can report about success in the parliament. Good luck to you over. Thank you.