For over 15 years, Professor Vladimir Mendelevich has been a leading advocate for effective and humane drug treatment in Russia. He has been outspoken in his support for the introduction of opiate substitution treatment in Russia, despite ongoing hostility and resistance from the medical establishment, law enforcement agencies, and politicians. 

He is the author of more than 470 scholarly articles and 39 books.  In 2007, Mendelevich received the International Rolleston Award in recognition of his contribution to global harm reduction advocacy efforts.

Until January, 2001, Robert Newman was president and CEO of Continuum Health Partners, Inc., a $2.2 billion hospital network in New York City. Prior to the creation of Continuum in 1997 he was CEO of the Beth Israel Health Care System for 20 years. He is now President Emeritus of Continuum and director of The Baron Edmond de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute of Beth Israel Medical Center.

For the past 35 years Dr. Newman has played a major role in planning and directing some of the largest addiction treatment programs in the world—including the New York City Methadone Maintenance and Ambulatory Detoxification Programs, which in the mid-1970s treated over 33,000 patients annually. He has also been a strong addiction treatment advocate in Europe, Australia, and Asia. Throughout his career he has championed the right of drug-dependent persons to treatment access and choice of provider, and the right to be cared for under the same conditions as apply to the management of all other chronic medical conditions.

Dr. Newman is Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. 

Director
International Harm Reduction Development

Daniel Wolfe, MPH, is director of the International Harm Reduction Development program at the Open Society Institute and an advocate whose work has included community organizing and public media campaigns to repeal discriminatory legislation, boost AIDS funding, and raise the public profile of people with HIV. From 2002-2005, Wolfe was community scholar at the Center for History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University’s Joseph P. Mailman School of Public Health; from 2001-2002, he was a Revson Fellow at Columbia University in recognition of his “substantial contribution to the city of New York.”

Formerly the director of communications at GMHC, the largest and oldest AIDS nongovernmental organization in the U.S., Wolfe has written widely on the intersection between drug policy and HIV prevention. He co-authored a working paper commissioned by the HIV/AIDS Task Force of the Millennium Project of the United Nations to examine the effects of UN and national illicit drug policies on the spread of HIV in countries with injection-driven epidemics, and a survey by the Central and Eastern European Harm Reduction Network on the state of HIV and primary care for injection drug users in the former Soviet Union.

He is the author of several books, chapters, and articles in publications including the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, International Herald Tribune, The Nation, and the International Journal of Drug Policy.