Helping Ourselves: public and private health

Whose responsibility is it to keep us healthy? And on whose shoulder lies the task to make us better when we fall ill?

Meet two brilliant thinkers and authors coming at these questions from different, yet highly intertwined, fields. Public health researcher Devi Sridhar’s new book How Not To Die (Too Soon) exposes the way self-help and health optimisation obscure the failures of policy. Meanwhile, in The Next Fix, Kojo Koram tracks a seismic shift in global drug policy, investigating the politics behind, and future of, the war on drugs.

We’re thrilled to welcome them both for a conversation about the global politics of health, responsibility and the systemic harm enacted on our bodies.

Representatives from Safe Consumption Edinburgh will be at this event, offering a brief introduction to their work.

About our speakers:

Devi Sridhar is a writer, broadcaster and world-leading expert in public health and wellbeing. She is Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and has advised the WHO, UNICEF, UNESCO and the Scottish, UK and German governments. Devi appears regularly on ITV and Channel 4 News, has a weekly column in the Guardian, tweets to over 300,000 followers, and recently became a certified Level 3 Personal Trainer. Her first book, Preventable, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Sunday Times bestseller.

Kojo Koram is an author and Professor, teaching at the School of Law at Loughborough University. Born in Accra, Ghana and raised on Merseyside, he is now based in London. In addition to his academic writing, he has written for the New Statesman, the Guardian and the New York Times. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray 2022). Uncommon Wealth won the English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and was chosen as a Guardian book of the year. His latest book is The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs.