Since 2002 Just Say Know has provided Drug & Alcohol Awareness Training workshops, courses and consultation to a wide variety of service providers across East Sussex (including Action4Change, Addaction, Equinox, CRI, BHT and YMCA). Informed by an appreciation of the role and importance of altered states of consciousness in all human societies throughout history, the training offers a meaningful framework with which to actually understand drugs and drug taking behaviours rather than simply condemning them.

In seeking to step outside the current mad and bad, weak and wicked, any-use-as-abuse orthodoxy of prohibition (with its roots in cultural imperialism, historical revisionism, religious intolerance, racism, sexism and class bias, not in health, safety or science), the harm minimisation orientated training explores a range of approaches and perspectives that the evidence confirms as a more practically useful way of communicating to, understanding and working with people who use alcohol and drugs, as well as offering a range of experiential exercises for trainees to participate in.

With a background in art-based workshop provision, facilitating training groups and teaching, Dave McNamara also has over sixteen years experience of working holistically with drug users and drug use in a wide range of settings. A drug and alcohol worker in Brighton & Hove since 2000, he has been delivering high quality drug and alcohol awareness and harm minimisation training for the last 7 years. He has also designed and written a drug information comic (1993)for young people and contributed to recently published drug and alcohol harm minimisation manuals (2007).