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Users News Australia
April 2001.
Using solidarity politics to empower multiply-oppressed illegal drug users to create user-driven rights-based movement.
Written by: Cheryl White, IDUIT – Toronto Canada
Edited by: Raffi Balian,
(this article is based upon a verbal presentation at the 12th International Harm Reduction conference New Delhi March 2001.
Because of our choices (or sometimes, lack of choices) to use illegal drugs, those of us who do so are automatically branded as criminals by definition.
For those of us who can=t easily hide or closet our illegal drug use, the term drug user has come to be the major and often only way that we are defined by communities who ignorantly believe that all illegal drug users are lying, thieving, abusive bastards.
The actual words people use to define and oppress us are much more hurtful and include junky, coke/crack-head and other terms that bash our self-esteem and help to keep us from feeling like we are:
a) worthy of demanding better and,
b) damn-well deserving and capable of taking on leadership roles within the field of drugs and drug users - not within the field of harm reduction, a field whose title necessarily implies that drugs are harmful (something many user-activists don’t believe in at all).
But as ILLEGAL DRUG USER ACTIVISTS in user-driven, user-controlled and user-focused forms of culturally diverse and individually specific movements at local, national and international levels.
Despite being the experts on how drugs are used or on how to survive using illegal drugs in a world that has declared open season on drug users under the guise of the War On Drugs, we find ourselves with few opportunities to express this expertise and to form emancipatory movement geared towards anti-discrimination and equity.
Instead, for those of us who are privileged and/or lucky enough to organize or to get a job within the field of professional harm reduction (PHR from here on), (something I’ll come back to in a bit), the majority of us still find ourselves at the bottom, being used as research subjects whose knowledge is appropriated to make programs, papers and policies that do not then employ users to work at those programs, evaluate those policies and edit or co-author those papers.
Most of the jobs that users get within harm reduction are known as PEER positions, the translation of which being dead-end, low-paying, no-benefits and no decision-making power jobs that usually end within several weeks or months.
And most PEERS wind up worse off in terms of self-esteem and safety when their jobs are over.
These kinds of experiences make illegal drug users feel worse about ourselves and have the cumulative effect of making us feel like there’s nothing we can do to make things better.
The reasons that illegal drug users have been slow (and have been slowed) in coming to politically organize ourselves are many and differ from place to place and person to person.
But there are two big reasons that need to be pointed out and understood so that illegal drug user activists (IDUA’s from here on), can figure out who our enemies are, who are alliances are, whose mistakes we can learn from, whose successes we can copy and how we can make the most equitable and emancipatory kinds of local, national and international rights-based movement to ensure an end to all the kinds of oppression that very different illegal drug users must fight against everyday to survive.
The field of drugs and drug use has been dominated historically by Traditional Addictions and Treatment Approaches and the Criminalization of drugs - both of which have had next to no success in helping drug users but amazing success in increasing the overall harms suffered by us and our communities.
And both of these approaches depend on each other to further boost their domination as the only ways to deal with drug users by defining illegal users as either victims of disease (pathologization), the way addictions/treatment approaches do, or as criminals (criminalisation), the way existing criminal just(less) systems do.
Ironically, the two work hand-in-hand to support each other’s approaches, as in the case of drug courts - otherwise known as forced treatment, where you can do your time inside or go through a totally intrusive and abusive form of treatment, including at least 3 sessions of counseling and piss-testing per week - usually more.
Thus, most prisoners drop out, choosing to do their time instead and are labeled as failures by, ironically, a system characterized by failure/abuse.
PHR, on the other hand, has pioneered the idea that some users will not/can not quit using and that workers must therefore focus on ways of reducing the harms associated with inevitable drug use.
The key tool they use to be taken seriously is their claim to pragmatism with statements to founders and communities such as wouldn’t you rather pay 11 cents for a new needle now than pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat the same individual for AIDS down the road?.
One of the best ways that PHR has helped drug users is by providing us with (sometimes) non-judgmental spaces where we have been able to learn how to better care for ourselves as illegal drug users (ie: needle exchange, street outreach, educational campaigns, access to methadone programs, and referrals for detoxes etc.,), and by working on changes to drug laws by demanding the decriminalization of currently illegal drugs and the recognition that drug users deserve the same basic human rights and access to public health that legal drug users take for granted (and a good deal of this particular kind of work has come from the input of illicit drug users who have been involved in PHR).
Most important, perhaps, is that PHR has proven that there are valid and effective alternatives to the two dominant approaches to drug use discussed above and it is this achievement that will allow IDUAs to also create new ways of viewing drug use/users and new strategies, created by and for drug users, which will work because we’ve already seen plenty of cases of it that are working wonderfully (users’ unions, buyers clubs, users’ newsletters, e-mail groups, small community user-support groups, etc.,).
So these are the kinds of things that IDUA’s can use from PHR - and we can also use any resources, space and support that PHR workers/activists (and there are many out there) want to share with us.
This brings me to my final point about how we can learn to be effective IDUA’s - that is the notion of working in SOLIDARITY with other rights-based, anti-discriminatory groups such as feminists, gay/lesbian/bisexual rights, anti-racist activists, anti-poverty activists and all the other kinds of categories of oppression built on peoples demonized identity traits.
First of all, there’s power in number.
Secondly, all of these groups have illegal drug users among them.
So, it is only by addressing the many ways that illegal drug users are oppressed that we can hope to end that oppression.
For example, if we allow the most privileged drug users such as white, middle-class, English-speaking, employed, male, heterosexual recreational drug users to set the agendas/strategies, then when we deal with all of their needs we will still have done nothing to address the huge problems faced by what I term multiply-marginalized drug users.
IE; those drug users who are simultaneously living with identity traits such as being of Color, being disabled, being poor/homeless, being gay, speaking Hindi, and being a youth or a senior which are all devalued more or less depending on where you are living and what combination of traits you have.
But, if we begin our organizing by having more privileged IDUA’s empower multiply-marginalized illegal drug users to take on leadership roles and participate in setting agendas, then we are more likely to cast the broadest net of anti-oppressive strategies.
By doing this, we will necessarily take care of the problems faced by the most privileged users at the top of the hierarchy of privilege.
We can only learn how to ensure that our approaches cast the broadest net by working in solidarity with other anti-discriminatory, rights-based movements (such as prison abolishionists, feminists, etc.,), to determine where they’ve got things right and where they’ve gone wrong.
We can work with PHR in much the same way as there are many folks within that field, both users and non-users who support the radical potential of IDUA’s and our goals, the primary one being, in my and many other drug users’ minds, the full legalization and regulation of all illicit drugs to ensure equal access to quality drugs at fixed and affordable prices.
Space prevents a fuller discussion of these topics, but I hope that they will at least form a spring-board to further thinking about how, as illegal drug users, we can end the oppression of all of our sister and brother illegal drug users.
As Audre Lorde has stated: “I am not free while any other [drug user] is unfree, even when her [his] chains look very different from my own” (Sister Outsider, 1988, USA - paraphrased by me).
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