Rev Left Radio - Drugs & Addiction Pt. 2: Organizing Toward Harm Reduction

Episode Date: February 10, 2019

Nate from the Person-First Harm Reduction Coalition (PSHRC) joins Breht to discuss their organizing strategies and goals in addressing the issues that surround drug abuse, addiction, and overdoses. They discuss the drug war, the panic around fentanyl, advice for other organizations, how this organizing is a form of base-building, and much, much more!  You can purchase fentanyl test strips here: https://dancesafe.org/product/fentanyl-test-strips-pack-of-10/   Find and follow them on Instagram @PFHRCMuncie   You can message our guest's organization and ask them further questions on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pfharmreduction/   Outro music: Pauper Pit by QELD  Listen to, and support, their music here: https://qeld.bandcamp.com   Get Rev Left Radio Merch (and genuinely support the show by doing so) here: https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio -------------- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante; explaining and analyzing essential works of revolutionary theory and applying their lessons to our current conditions): https://www.patreon.com/TheRedMenace Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert): https://www.patreon.com/hammercamera ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Conrad, Red O'Shea. And today we have on Nate from Person First Harm Reduction Coalition to talk about some of the work that organization has done regarding organizing around overdose and drug addiction issues in their community. Before we're getting to the show, a couple things up top. I want to mention that our friend and Conrad over at OnMass, who we've had on this show as well.

Released a new episode. It's been a couple months since he released his last episode. And I guess when he's trying to promote it on Facebook, they're being weird with it. So they're not really letting him get his reach that he usually gets. And obviously people know that I've been kicked off Facebook as well. So there's probably a bigger part of the algorithm,

sort of de-emphasizing radical left-wing pages and, you know, accounts. So, you know, he released a new episode on Venezuela. really encourage people. If you like this show, you'll love On Mass. Go check out that latest show on Venezuela, and we'll have our own show on Venezuela coming out very soon. At the very end of this episode, you will hear our friends from Across the Pond, Q-E-L-D, and their new song, Popper Pit. Want to give them a shout-out? And also, we finally have some Rev-Left merch. It's at Tisley.com, forward-slash stores, forward-slash-reve-Left Radio. Just a couple designs that we have. We kept the cost as low as we can. I think you can get a shirt for $9.99.

So if you're interested in that, we'll link to that in the show notes. And having said all that, this episode, I want people to think of as kind of part two to our drugs and addiction episode, right? In that episode, me and my friend Mel talked about the issues surrounding, you know, drug overdoses and addiction in our society and sort of diagnosed a big part of the problem. And in this episode, we have comrades on who actually organizing their community around this stuff to give a lot of tips and to show how they do it. And I think there's lots of things in here that are really. important that people even if your primary focus isn't drug abuse or drug addiction there's still some valuable things you can learn that your organization can put into work wherever you live whatever community that you live especially for those like our guests who live in the

rust belt or areas where drug addiction and abuse epidemics are really popping off so i encourage people to take these lessons to heart and with all of that said let's get into our episode with Nate from Person First Harm Reduction Coalition. Hey, I'm Nate. I'm a member of the Person First Harm Reduction Coalition. I'm on the Publicity Committee of our organization, which is why I'm here today. So as far as who we are, Person First is an organization that seeks to build power and solidarity among people who use drugs. and to utilize principles of mutual aid to provide life-saving tools like safe work kits,

fentanyl detecting, test strips, naloxone, and educational materials. Yeah, that's awesome. And I think this is very timely because recently we had our episode on drugs and addiction, and you reached out to me after that. And on that episode, we talked about, you know, sort of diagnosing the problem, talking about some of the problems, talking about what the effects are. in this episode, we're really looking to look at some of the actual organizing on the ground to combat this stuff and some of the unique strategies that are employed fighting against

addiction and drug abuse from a left-wing perspective. So I'm really happy that you reached out to me, and I'm really happy that we can talk about your organization and hopefully other organizers can learn from what we're going to talk about here and maybe implement that into their own organizing. All right. Awesome. All right. So let's go ahead and dive in. I guess just talking about the group a little bit. How did your organization get started?

Why did it choose to organize around this issue? And what were some of its founding aims and goals? So, yeah, we basically started out of our Food Not Bombs chapter. We got word that our county government had planned to build a new jail, a way bigger capacity that our current one. So our current jail has a capacity of, I think, 210 people. This one they're proposing has a capacity of, I want to say, 600. So now even more egregious than, you know, the two.

typical instance of mass incarceration. This jail was just constructed in the 90s, and our county's population has only decreased since then. So we're sort of seeing, like, a contradiction of capitalism at play here. We're talking about building a facility to cage more people in an area where there are fewer people now than there were when the current one was built. So we kind of asked ourselves, how can we meaningfully oppose this? And the thing we kept coming back to was the drug war.

So we know that a major driver of the prison industrial complex is caging people who use drugs and giving what we knew about our local area, we were sure that was the case here, too. So we looked up the numbers, and as we suspected, over 60% of people currently in jail in our county were there on drug charges. A significant portion of those people had nothing except drug charges. It's not even, you know, the typical story that they like to tell of, well, this person robbed someone to, feed their drug habit. So, you know, it's violent crime that's linked to drug use or whatever. It's literally just this person uses drugs, and we decided that's criminal in and of itself. A lot of the charges were charges of visiting or maintaining a common nuisance.

And if you're not familiar with that terminology, it's basically a catch-all for you were in an area where drugs were being used. We don't have anything more specific to pin on you, but we bet we can get you to take a plea deal if we charge you with this. So we decided early on that we can't just be against the jail. Social movements are kind of too easily defeated if they only stand against something and aren't proposing any alternative. So you know, you come off looking like, well, your criticisms are valid, but you have no plan. So we dug into harm reduction and decided that's going to be our plan. Let's demonstrate through action. There are ways to address addiction and chaotic drug use through compassion,

rather than by fighting this losing battle to try to, you know, arrest it away and basically beat it until it goes away. Well, that's amazing. I'm really happy to hear that you decided to tackle that issue in such a productive way because you're right. The left is great at criticizing everything, but what we need to do a lot more of

is figure out practical here and now ways that we can start attacking the things that we create in a way that builds support for our movement and actually goes to alleviate, the problems and the ills caused by capitalism and everything that grows out of that. So I see here a real meaningful attempt to do just that. And it's awesome. It's beautiful. Can you talk more about the area that you operate in and what the unique conditions are and sort of the obstacles that that might create for your organizing? Yeah. So we operate in the east central region of occupied Delaware

territory and so-called Indiana. The conditions here are a pretty typical Rustfeld story. So we used to have an auto manufacturing-based economy. Those jobs moved on. The unions were destroyed. There's kind of an economic void that has yet to be fully filled. And, you know, every Rust Belt town ever, it's kind of the same deal here. There's a state university here, and they sort of exist in their own bubble, except when they want to do some gross, like, patronizing project in the poorer part of town

to give their students something to put on their resume. So like most other towns in this situation, we fend, steadily seeing increasing use of opiates. At one point, we were one of the most major hubs in the United States for meth, and now heroin is just as prevalent. So what that means for our organizing is that we're largely in sort of a working class area, kind of a dispossessed area outside of university administration. There are lots of people here who use drugs heavily,

and of those who don't, pretty much everyone has several people in their lives who do. So you're not really going to meet a person that says, yeah, I've never met or interacted with anybody who uses drugs. That makes harm reduction a really important issue to organize around because so many people are looking for an alternative approach to this, you know, massive social condition besides jail or the abstinence-based cost-productive rehab industry. One of the things I always try to mention is you open up our local newspaper and there will be a story about somebody overdosing. there will be a story about somebody's body was found in a local park and it was determined they overdosed and while their friends kind of abandoned them there because they were afraid to call the cops because they don't want to go to jail. So you go into the comments of those articles and, you know, it's an internet cliche not to read the comments, but it's attitudes I think people need to see

where they basically just say like, oh, well, good, you know, like let them die, basically. And that's what I think makes this such an underappreciated concern on the left. This is an issue that's on everybody's minds here, everybody. And if we provide no approach to it, then we're going to get a situation, you know, sort of like in the Philippines, where, you know, somebody like Duterte comes along and says like, all right, well, we're going to crush this thing and we're just going to, we're going to go after it. We're going to, you know, punish these people. And it doesn't even have to be on the presidential scale. That can basically be your local sheriff. Like, that's the cop mentality. Absolutely. So, you know, Delaware, Indiana, you know, has a population of about

120,000 residents. And so if you just take a quick glance at it, you might not think that it is incredibly unique. And in some ways, it's not. But because it is in the Rust Belt, it is unique, right? Kind of as you alluded to, there is a unique problem that happens in the Rust Belt, specifically, especially when it comes to drug abuse and addiction. And the connections between manufacturing moving out of these areas and those the ability for people to really have a life and a solid reputation and a comfortable living was wiped out from underneath their feet and replaced with walmarts and service industry jobs that don't pay nearly as enough with with no benefits that goes on to hurt people's sense of self-worth and you know disillusioned them and and strip

them of any sense of a future and so a lot of those people will turn to drugs to numb that sort of pain. And then as you say, the reactionary solution, quote unquote, is to just unleash fascist violence on the problem as opposed to addressing some of its root causes or engaging in mutual aid, which helps people overcome their problems or at least not die in that moment, et cetera. So, you know, the Rust Belt as a whole, do you think it's, is it fair to say that a big chunk of the opioid epidemic does happen inside the Rust Belt? I think it does because something to consider is that a lot of these jobs, these kind of like manufacturing-based jobs, require, you know, repetitive motions, heavy labor, that kind of stuff takes a toll on your

body. It causes pain. And we kind of know that a lot of the way this pipeline gets started is somebody gets prescribed pain medication for a chronic condition. The pharmaceutical companies say, oh, well, this isn't addictive, but they know what fucking is. They lose their job. job, they lose their insurance, they can't afford the pain medication without it. And so you turn to the street solution. You look for people selling pills. You look for heroin. You look for anything to kill like legitimate pain that you're facing. Yeah. So the other side of the sort of emotional or psychological pain I was talking about is the very real physical pain that comes from, you know, hard labor of the jobs that do still exist. That's incredibly fascinating and incredibly tragic. I do

want to move on and talk about harm reduction a little bit. Let's talk about harm reduction and some of the misconceptions regarding it specifically. So what is harm reduction? What does it mean? And what are some primary misconceptions about it? Yeah, well, I think the biggest thing to clear up right now, the sort of biggest misconception that there is in this particular moment, is that harm reduction as a term has been kind of co-opted by liberal discourse. so in this last election cycle we kind of started to see the phrase like vote for the lesser of two evils that fell out of favor i don't know like maybe people finally figured out that telling people to vote for evil isn't a great selling point um instead people decided to just go ahead and grab the phrase harm reduction recuperate that into liberal capitalism so just to get it out front that's not what we're about we're not about telling you to vote a certain way or or to vote at all all, really, we're doing a completely different thing that falls outside of the bounds of

electoral politics. So what harm reduction is is a broad approach to a number of behaviors that carry some inherent risk. So most often, it's used to refer to people who use drugs, but it's also used to refer to things like safer sex practices, reducing self-harm, you know, all those things that, you know, these behaviors carry some sort of risk with it, and it's about minimizing that. risk. It's a model that looks at material reality and acknowledges that people are always going to engage in certain risky behaviors, particularly in this, you know, racist, homophobic, capitalist

hellscape that we live in, people are regularly dehumanized, and rather than moralized to them about not doing this or that, you know, you're making bad choices, you know, sort of individualizing this. What our focus is on is reducing that risk as much as possible. So we think that a focus on abstinence is the only approach to drug use. Not to say that it can't be an approach, but to posit it as the only approach, that's exactly as ineffective as abstinence-only sex education. Much like how in that field, the inverse of abstinence-only education is comprehensive education that includes safer sex practices, our efforts focus on safer drug use. So if someone decides they want to quit, great, fantastic, we're going to hook them up with

whatever resources we can to help them meet that goal. But our focus is not on pushing people to quit. It's not on moralizing to them. It's on meeting people where they're at. And the goal is making any positive change. So the most common objection people kind of bring up here is, well, isn't that enabling? Are you encouraging drug use? We say, no, it's not enabling. The drug use is going to happen with or without harm reduction. But without it, a lot of people are going to die along the way, they're going to get diseases, they're going to overdose, these preventable behaviors that with the right interventions don't have to happen. Personally, I have strong objections to the whole idea of enabling, the idea of hitting bottom, whatever, because I think what it

comes down to is this notion that we have to make sure that people who use drugs suffer as much as possible in the process, that they're put at risk for disease, that overdose is necessary because that could be somebody's bottom and ignores that for a lot of people overdose isn't the beginning of some reform process it's it's their death it's the end for them and it puts forward this idea that we need to socially marginalize these people who are already some of the most socially marginalized people out there the idea is maybe we can ostracize people into embracing an abstinence-only model the whole concept of enabling is bullshit and all it accomplishes is getting a lot of people killed. So we're the opposite of

that approach. We're not saying the only way is to quit. We're saying you can make any positive change. Yeah. Now, I love that analogy to save sex and comprehensive approaches over moralizing abstinence-only approaches. And the very same enabling argument that operates in the world of, you know, drug use also operates in the world of sex ed discourse. It's a way to say, to say anything other than abstinence only is to encourage kids to have sex. And that's obviously a fallacious argument in that realm as it is in the realm of drug use. And talking about the idea of, you know, letting people hit rock bottom or whatever, it's kind of like accelerationist logic. And for many folks, as you alluded to, rock bottom can literally be death. So the idea that everybody needs to

hit that rock bottom before they can get, you know, serious help is actually, is very, very dangerous for a lot of people, they'll never come back from that rock bottom. Do you agree with that? yeah it's very closely linked and it's kind of it's the it's the nicer version of those newspaper comments that say we should let people die it's we need to let people hit bottom and that sees the people who you know do have their kind of low moment and have an epiphany and you know sort of change their behavior but it doesn't see the people who you know they just die that's just the end for them yeah exactly well yeah Great point. What sort of actions does your organization take part in? And what are some of the primary strategies or tactics that you all employ?

That question kind of goes back to our origins as a group opposing a jail. So we wanted to, on the one hand, look at ways to address chaotic drug use that don't involve caging human beings. What we did is pull together a mass kind of popular front to utilize a diversity of tactics against building this jail. So that's been largely successful. Several groups who don't even necessarily share our whole radical critique have come together in opposition to the jail. I don't want to claim all that credit. I'm not going to say, oh, if it wasn't for us, this wouldn't be here. But I do think we did make it a priority to raise consciousness. We wrote up a zine of our analysis and critique, and it was actually republished on its going down early last year.

We made it a priority to get that out there. So we'd go to county council, county commissioner meetings. talk to people in the audience, you know, we weren't there to argue with the people in charge, we were there to argue at the people who are already showing up to these meetings and already kind of have their issues that they want to talk about.

We'd hand that out, you know, we'd get it out to people in local, you know, sort of the liberal resistance groups. The kind of like, I don't know, like indivisible and those kinds of groups, we'd get that material out there. We'd get it in churches, bars,

coffee shops, basically anywhere that people congregate, and we'd focus on raising consciousness among people who, for better or for worse, are going to be seen as more legitimate than a group of political radicals. You know, this sort of analogy on the left to any sort of electoral or inside the system where these groups are already putting effort into that kind of organizing anyway. So if we can convince them to do it for something that's important to us, why wouldn't they? You know, like, is our radical cred is not being called a liberal on the internet? Is that more important, you know, is that more important than utilizing any means necessary to

oppose this jail and build compassionate options for people who use drugs? I don't think so. I agree. So doing what we do, we've set up tables, places. We've talked to several parents who said their kids overdose, they called 911, they send cops and medics, and since their son or daughter was over 18, the cops, you know, threatened to hit the parents, not even the person using the drug, just the person who loved them, provide shelter them, they threaten to hit those people with a charge for maintaining a

common nuisance. Jesus Christ. Yeah, and that's a felony charge you can catch if you allow someone who uses drugs to live in your house or use your car. Wow. Yeah. So that carries up to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine. What you have in that law is essentially a legal mandate that any adult person who

uses drugs should be homeless. Right. And not be able to use your fucking car even. Right. Wow. Yeah, and, you know, doing legal reform around those sorts of issues, no, it's not revolutionary, but at least people won't be punished for being good parents, loving their kids. So people can kind of look down on electoral work.

It's definitely not my favorite way of doing politics. It's not what I put my personal energy toward or what I excel at or what I believe will ultimately provide a solution. But some people dedicate all of their activist time to that. And if we can convince them to take up those issues, why the hell wouldn't we? If we can't convince them to become communists or whatever, at least we can redirect some of that, I guess, hashtag resistance energy. We can get that into an actual material cause instead of just outrage and whatever the hell Trump tweeted out this time. So we've got the local sort of, you know, like mainstream liberal opposition on our corner. And that was kind of leg one of what we hope to do.

Now, the second leg of that, sort of the main thing we're talking about today is this more radical, more direct action-oriented grassroots harm reduction work. We started grabbing supplies, bringing that stuff together, distributing safe work skits. That's things that people who use drugs might need, like sterile water, alcohol fats, cotton swaps, you know, cookers, sharps disposal boxes to safely dispose of their use needles. condoms, educational literature about safer use, you know, all that stuff. We call our kids everything but the needle is where we're at. Operating a needle exchange requires state approval, so we're not trying to get arrested, but we're trying to get as many people the stuff that they need. Eventually, we hooked up with another harm-resuction org that's based in Bloomington.

They go by the name the Indiana Recovery Alliance. They supplied us with naloxone to reverse overdose. so we started training and distribution on that we worked out now worked up now to giving out fentanyl test strips basically anything we can think of to help people who use drugs avoid disease or overdose enable them to revive someone if they do OD empower them to sort of within that community you know if you're with somebody and your buddy ODs you don't have to worry about what's going to happen if I call 911 or they're going to call the cops am I going to get arrested you have what you need to revive them right then and there.

Amazing. During this process, we're also bringing people into our organizing. So it's not just us providing this sort of service. We're talking with people. We're having these conversations. We're asking them to come organize with us. And what we're doing is demonstrating our political theory through practice. Yeah, so that is absolutely amazing.

And that's the exact sort of tactical approach that people should really, internalize and take seriously regardless of what issue they're organizing around because what you did was you first unleashed a political consciousness raising effort that laid the groundwork for your organizing you formed tactical alliances with other organizations or people in your community who were sympathetic to your goals even if that includes liberals fuck yes that's an important part of this whole project and then you went about getting the supplies necessary to actually do the work then you engaged in training and education and actually the material work of making sure people don't die from overdoses. And in the process of doing that, you've started to bring in people to your

organization, which is a form of base building, right? It's a form of organizing not just to network with other activists, but to actually bring in apolitical or depoliticized people to, if not your way of thinking, to your actual organization itself. So from start to finish, this model is the exactly appropriate correct model for going about tackling an issue in your community. And so, you know, I get your organization, all the props in the world for doing it that way. And anybody that says working strategically with liberal organizations is bad as just somebody who spends all their political time and energy online and doesn't actually do real world shit. Because when you're actually trying to get something done in your community, that involves forming coalitions a lot of times. It involves working with people that might not be fully convinced of your entire political ideology, but do share your interests or your goals around this one issue and are willing to help.

And to turn that down because of purity, ideological purity, is absolutely absurd and utterly counterproductive. So, you know, applause to you and your organization for doing it right. Yeah, like, if the only people we organized with were other Marxists, other anarchists, like, it'd just be us. Yeah. That's in the city. That's like 10 people. It's a smaller community. Yeah, it's 100,000, 120,000 people in your entire, you know, community.

So, yeah, exactly. It's so easy at that point to just say, well, get the fuck. out of here. Exactly. Well, yeah, good on you for doing it. Keep it up. Moving on, you often hear the slogan on the left, you know, in our left spaces, solidarity, not charity, right?

But oftentimes, especially when it comes to mutual aid programs, the line can be blurry here. And many organizations, including our own here in Omaha, we wrestle with this issue sometimes. So how do you hold yourselves accountable to your community and what aspects of your organizing around harm reduction, push it towards solidarity? and away from merely vertical-style charities. Solidarity, not charity, is a phrase that, you know, having grown out of a Food Not Bombs chapter,

that's something we're very familiar with. And in part, it's a really organic thing with this work. Because just due to where we live and operate, this is an issue that your average person here gets it. You know, on that basic level, they get it, they understand it, they've experienced it. It's just the material reality of this place. It's something they're close to.

It has a basis in their lives. And a lot of those misconceptions about drug use, most people here know that it's bullshit. So we'll occasionally have some reactionary or some, you know, like university-type CSL doing our work. And they may try to lecture us about enabling or whatever. The far more common thing we get when people see us is like, holy shit, this is great. This is exactly what we need. How can I get involved? Can you teach me how to use naloxone?

Can I take some of this stuff for my friends? I know this person or that person who would really want to be a part of this. So there's not this whole, like, well, people would never go for it approach that you sometimes hear about when people propose these as, you know, this is how we should do drug policy. The people close to this issue will absolutely go for it. It's the people in power who won't. We've had more than one person get in touch with us by messaging our Facebook page or emailing us or whatever, just saying, hey, I OD'd the other day. and my friend I was with revived me and I asked how they did that.

They said that was naloxone. I asked where they got it and they said it came from you guys. So I want to see what you're doing. How could I help? Wow, that brings a tear to my eye. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah.

It's, you know, the first message we got like that, I was like, wow, holy shit. And that wasn't even one person's story. That's been several stories by now. So people who use drugs are still, even this laden to the drug war. They're a very marginalized, stigmatized group of people in our society.

So if you show solidarity with them, you're going to get it in return. You know, if you're going in without judgment, giving them tools they can use to literally save their lives, save their friends' lives, they're going to be in your corner. They're going to agree with what you're doing. They're going to say like, hell yeah, thank you. In part, a lot of it just happens organically. But we also can't just sit back and rely on this perceived organic nature. to translate into solidarity.

So we're very conscious about enabling and enacting a nothing about us without us mentality. Our membership is made up almost entirely of people who use drugs. For those who don't, they're close to someone who does, and they want to provide that solidarity. So me speaking personally, I'm not somebody who uses drugs, but I have several members of my immediate family who do. they've been kind of involved in chaotic drug use, so it's a situation I'm close to, even if I'm not personally affected. Our decision-making is consensus-based, so we're very careful to make sure we're never in a situation where someone who doesn't use drugs is dictating what our work should look

like. We're not positioning ourselves as saviors to this social ill. We're working together to provide mutual aid in the true sense of the term. mutual aid as it's defined is not we're providing this service to you it's this is what we're doing and we want we want to involve you you know we want you to be involved with this as well right yeah there's tenant organizing that goes on here in omaha in one story that always sticks out to me in the course of that organizing was a bunch of my comrades you know teamed up with this tenant and where they were going to go confront the landlord, and the tenant was sort of hanging back

when everybody was getting ready after they talked to go and confront the landlord and make sure that this person gets the thing that they were trying to get accomplished, accomplished. And the tenant didn't start really going with them, right? And they looked at him and said, like, come on, like, you're with us. You're going to come with us, if that's okay with you. And they said, like, his smile just lit up, right? He was actually not just having a third party take care of something for him,

but they were actually saying, come actively be involved in this effort. we have your back, you're part of us, you're with us. You know, that sort of solidarity, which you're saying that you also do as well, is so essential. And people really like that feeling of agency that it gives them when they're no longer just an atomized individual, but they can join up with the ranks of people who are willing to show them solidarity and have so much compassion for them that even though they may be strangers, they're willing to come and help them with their personal issue. That is the absolute foundation for building up. you know mass support for what we're trying to do in this world and and it's you know it's it's a little bit

at a time it's it's a drop in the ocean here and a drop in the ocean there but it does add up it does transform people's consciousness and it does get them involved in material ways so yeah i love hearing stories like that yeah it's you know if you're not involving the people that your work is for in your work then you know what the hell are you doing you know how are you how are you going to guide your process if the people who are closest to the issue aren't guiding it with you. Yeah, absolutely. And I really hope organizers take that entire explanation you gave for how you make your organization about solidarity and not charity and weave it into their own organizing. I know I say that a lot, but I like to pause on those moments. And this is a question that a lot

of organizations have. And so here is one answer. You know, here's a really good, solid answer that you can be creative with and find a way to make it work for you and whatever topic or issue. organizing around. So that's great. Let's talk about fentanyl. There's a lot of sensationalism, oftentimes incredibly absurd and panic and ignorance around the issue and prevalence of fentanyl in our society right now. Oftentimes, this panic veers into the absurd when it posits that merely coming into skin contact with the substance could be fatal. So let's sort of correct the record a little bit here. What is fentanyl? What is the truth about the narcotic? And what should people know about it generally. Right. So fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. It has a medical use. Sometimes it's

used as an anesthetic in hospitals. Actually, just recently, my mom had a surgery where fentanyl was the anesthetic option. It's created with this kind of medical use, but like any other opioid synthetic or not, it'll get you high. The high is shorter than a heroin high, so that sometimes leads to people re-upping before they really should. This is a difficult topic to talk about without. contributing to the sensationalism around it. Fentanyl was at one point used recreationally as fentanyl. A lot of the problem with it now is that it's being added to drugs that are not being sold as fentanyl and people really don't know what they're getting. A lot of people think it's just in heroin, but in reality

it's being added to basically anything, you know, Coke, Molly, Xanax, whatever. The takeaway message is test your shit. The real danger lies in not knowing how potent the fentanyl is, how much of it is present in the substance, or even that it's present in the substance. And ultimately, that's the source of a lot of overdoses, is people taking drugs that have potent fentanyl in it that they don't know is in there. And just that very fact has led to a lot of panic around it. So, like you brought up, there's this idea that it's some mythically powerful substance

that can kill you just by touching it. And that's not true. Fentanyl can't be absorbed through skin contact. You can actually see on our Facebook page a video of somebody from another harm reduction organization, they just take fentanyl and pour it onto their bare skin just to help bust that myth. And it's a particularly important myth to bust because what happens is people are suddenly afraid to administer naloxone to revive their friends, even if they've got it on hand, because they're afraid of getting skin contact with this fentanyl when there's absolutely no reason to fear it, at least not for that particular reason. reason. So it's something to approach with nuance. Yes, it's dangerous. Yes, it leads to a lot of overdoses. But most of that danger comes from a simple lack of knowing that it's present, knowing how strong it is, and assigning this sort of mythical status to it. I'd say the most

important thing is, you know, get fentanyl test strips because even if you're in a situation where you think what you bought was just Somali, you think you just got some Xanax, you know, you've got to test that before you use it because you have no idea what it's cut with. There's very little out there that's just purely the substance that it's marketed as now. So test that. Make sure you know what you're getting. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And like a simple way also is to buy a bunch, because they're pretty cheap if I'm not incorrect, to buy a bunch of test strips and, you know, maybe hand them out to friends or whatever if they ever come at a party and they come across people using cocaine or using Molly or something, which, you know, probably happens a lot for people that are in those circles. To have that on hand and to be able to test it is one simple way that you could probably take to, you know, help avoid catastrophe. Yeah, you can buy them as an individual. They cost about a dollar a strip. So, you know, that's something that'll get you through whatever party you're going to if you're not a regular user. It's definitely something to keep on hand. Yeah. So we open this conversation with mentions of the war on drugs. Can you talk a little bit more about the war on drugs and how far from helping addicts, reducing harm and alleviating epidemics, it actually contributes to them and perpetuating.

them. Yeah, so one thing we like to do is reframe what the so-called war on drugs is. It's kind of become a cliche on the left to say the war on drugs is a war on people, but it's a cliche for a reason, and that's because it's true. The war on drugs is never waged by equipping people with means for safer drug to use. It's never waged by going against the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the substances and market them as non-addictive, knowing full well that they are, addictive, it's always waged by going after regular working people who use drugs. We don't even call it the war on drugs. We call it a drug war, because from our perspective, that's what it is. It's the state engaging in warfare over control of the flow of drugs into a

given area. They're fighting for their turf, just like the drug cartels we hear so much about fight for theirs. The result of this isn't any sort of help or assistance to people who are negatively affected by drugs, it's a criminalization of their very existence. And it's a way to funnel them into the prison industrial complex that profits from their misery. And the drug war is used by reactionaries like Trump, for example, to, you know, like what we're seeing right now, militarize the border. This leads to children being separated from their parents, incarcerated into ICE detention centers, people's lives being lost at the border. And the drug war, the fear of drugs, the idea that all these drugs are coming across the southern border is one of

the main pillars of the argument used by reactionaries in this country and I assume others to really militarize that border and become more aggressive and violent at the border. So, you know, it expands like all issues well outside of its own domain and seeps into all these other domains that we care about. Yeah, absolutely. It's the panic around drugs is so potent. It's so powerful that it can be used to justify a bunch of other horrendous policies that really wouldn't stand on their own. Yep. I mean, Duterte's entire election in the Philippines, I mean, not entirely, but largely,

was this sort of reactionary response to drug epidemics in their society. And so we can really see how it escapes to the point where you prop up a fascist in the Philippines, you know, or somebody like Trump uses it as fodder for his absurd policies. And so it's incredibly dangerous. And I think people that listen to the show understand that, but it's still worth reminding people, especially younger or newer comrades, just how horrific the war on drugs actually is and just how utterly ineffective it is. It does not solve anything. It just creates a fuck ton of more problems on every single front. It never solves anything at all.

Yeah, the only people that it's good for are people who operate the prisons. Exactly right. Okay. So let's zoom in towards the end. of this conversation, and it's been wonderful and amazing, and I really am so happy that we did this, but one or two more questions before we wrap up. What advice or startup tips would you give to other organizers who may be interested in doing work in their community just like you around these issues? So the first thing I'd want to offer is a word of encouragement. I'd say that you're

going to be shocked how many people get it, how many people will get right on board and do the work with you. Beyond that, my real advice is if you know someone who uses drugs, don't assume you know what's best for them. Ask them what they actually need. Listen with open ears. Try to figure out a way to make that happen.

And if you're someone who uses drugs, start by organizing your circle of people who use. Work toward building power. Get some money together and start building safe works kits. Start getting those out to yourselves and other people in the community.

It can be tough because a lot of people who use drugs are slow to open up. The stakes for talking to the wrong people are jail, and they don't know who they can trust. So have people you organize with that they do trust, have people from the community that they've seen before, that they can talk to. It can take a lot of going to places like homeless shelters, you know, free meals, places like that, and just talking openly about harm reduction until people realize that, well, you're not a cop. So we do shit like we leave our literature in public bathrooms because we know that people might go in there to shoot up. We've had a few people contact us that way that, you know, they found one of our pamphlets in a sink. So clearly it's been effective.

So find other communities to build solidarity with. So we do outreach at the local gay bar, those of us who are, or LGBT. We talk about transgender health when it comes to things like injecting hormones. These are people who are obviously very conscious about taking preventative measures against things like HIV. So it's, again, it's a community that understands the importance of public health and prevention. And it takes a lot of meeting people where they're at, a lot of building trust. It's a lot of hard work at the beginning. But it's also something that you'll be surprised to see how many people already agree with the radical approach here.

And it's just, it's power that we've got to build. And it's something that if we don't do it, the far right's going to do it. So this is something that is of the utmost urgent to start doing on our own. Yeah, absolutely. Where can listeners find and support your organization online? We're on Facebook. Our page is just the name of the organization, Person First Harm Reduction. Coalition. You can find us on there. We're on Instagram. Like and share us. We have a donate button.

If you're so inclined to give us money, please give us money. Know that anything you give us is going to be used to purchase harm reduction supplies. So we have no organizational overhead. It all goes into funding actual harm reduction. I also want to shout out while we're at it, Indiana Recovery Alliance. They're the people who provide us with naloxone. They've been super helpful in working with us to get started up in a lot of ways we couldn't do this without them so big ups to them check them out as well yeah i'll definitely link to them in the show notes comrade it's an absolute honor to be able to speak to you it's wonderful to learn about your organization and to be able to platform this conversation so that people all around the country

can learn from what you're doing in indiana and and you know weave it into their own organizing in their own communities so thank you from the bottom of our hearts here at rev lev for coming on and you know all our all our love and support and props in the world go to you and your comrades for doing this essential essential work and doing it effectively you're doing a wonderful job and we're happy to be able to amplify this to the rest of our listener base thank you so much crawling out the pool prepared with all of those we've fallen with it's all amiss the thoughtlessness of all the pigs who brought us this and taught us it's a fronless wish to ever see the light a day and taught us with the crawl they give and won a statue like the way got us breaking rocks for them not a break me got we got us from them. Got to make a lot for them on the way I watch for them. More than asbestos is Victorian sweatshap, where the Tories then got. The bourgeoisie hedge-chop. Victorious then what? The planet still burns.

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