Richard Elovich (born 1954) is a social psychologist, writer, performance artist, and AIDS activist focusing on harm reduction and low-threshold approaches to drug treatment.
A student at New York University from 1973 to 1975, Elovich dropped out to pursue life as a writer and artist after meeting William S Burroughs through his job at the Manhattan bookstore and cultural center, the Gotham Book Mart.
[16][17][18] In 1986, poet Eileen Myles invited Elovich to curate performance at the St. Marks Poetry Project,[19] and Elovich also began writing and staging his own work, including Ivan and the Lamp (1986), What the Water Gave Me (1986), My Hat It Has Three Corners (1986, with dancer Yvonne Meier), Bobby's Birthday Like That (1987) and Faking House (1987, with Pat Oleszko) at venues including PS 122, Danspace, BACA downtown and the Performing Garage.
[34][35] Elovich's activism generally sought to challenge assertions that people who use drugs were incapable of rational or healthy choices, and he was an organizer for ACT UP of needle exchange, then illegal in New York City.
[37] The judge found that the group's actions were justified through the "necessity" defense, which allows for the breaking of a law in an emergency to prevent a greater imminent public harm, and the ruling paved the way for the beginning of community -based needle exchange programs in New York.
[38][39] Elovich was also a member of Gran Fury, the AIDS activist artist collective who used techniques of advertising and propaganda to urge action on key policy issues.
He was a critic of the impact of the Russian invasion of Crimea, which resulted in closure of a pioneering program providing opioid substitution treatment,[49] and of the general inability of narcology to respond effectively to HIV epidemics concentrated among people who inject drugs in post-Soviet countries.