Alex Kral, Distinguished Fellow at the nonprofit RTI International, will give a talk on “Overdose Prevention Sites: Global and Domestic Research, Policy and Implementation” at 1 p.m. April 4.

This event is free and open to the public, but participants must register for the Zoom link.

In this presentation, Kral will provide an overview of harm reduction principles, review global evaluations of overdose prevention sites, and dive deep into community-based research methods and results from US-based evaluations of overdose prevention sites. Like all harm reduction strategies, overdose prevention sites were conceptualized and first implemented by people with lived and living drug use experience. The local evaluations have been rooted in community-based research practices and have uniquely considered how to conduct research in a way that minimizes the potential harm to the operators and participants of these stigmatized and legally ambiguous services.

Kral is an epidemiologist with expertise in community-based research with urban poor populations and drug policy. His policy and evaluation research has included syringe services programs, overdose education and naloxone distribution programs, supervised consumption site programs, and drug decriminalization policy. He is currently the principal investigator and co-investigator on several National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Arnold Ventures supported studies of the relationship between substance use, criminal legal involvement, infectious diseases and overdose, and federal and state drug policies.

This talk is sponsored by the Minority Health Disparities Initiative, and it is an installment within the Health Equity Grand Rounds.