The alternatives to drug use that were offered to me were AA, or “jails, institutions and death.”  It wasn’t until after stays in dozens of treatment centers that I learned of evidence-based treatments like methadone or dialectical behavior therapy. Back then, I was told that I just needed to do more service and pray harder, and that I shouldn’t be on prescribed medication to help manage my mental health.

In short, I have felt misunderstood my entire life. I needed a community and a home, somewhere I could talk about my use. I needed a place where I could talk about the fact that nobody believed me or took me seriously when they knew I was on drugs.

I wanted to reach all those folks that, like me, had nowhere. I wanted drug users to know that there could be community elsewhere. So I helped create Urban Survivors Union, the first successful national drug-user union in the United States. Through this, not only could I deal with other drug users, but I could deal with people who were not drug users as well. I wasn’t trying to hide who I was anymore. I was trying to promote public health and change the conversation.

Suddenly, other drug users were valuing what I was saying. They were listening to me and realizing that they had been duped. We are at the precipice of the basic necessity of meaningful inclusion of the people most affected by hundreds of thousands of deaths.  

The book sensationalizes my story as a woman who uses drugs, as all too many such narratives do.

I agreed to be interviewed by Travis Lupick for what became Light Up The Night: America’s Overdose Crisis and Drug Users Fighting For Survival because I truly thought the book would make a difference. I thought the book would be about the larger world of drug-user organizing, rather than being focused reductively on me. I hoped its publication would have an impact in two ways: influencing people on the outside to better understand people who use drugs, and exposing other people who use drugs to the world of connection offered by drug-user organizing. 

I thought Light Up The Night would promote that vision. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is not how I would have chosen to tell my story, nor is it how I wanted to be included in the story of a larger movement. Instead, in its singular focus on me and one other individual, it often descends into lurid, melodramatic accounts of nuanced issues in my life such as domestic violence and raising biracial children in the South. These are stories which Lupick, as a young white, middle-class Canadian man, is not conceptually equipped to tell. 

The book sensationalizes my story as a woman who uses drugs, as all too many such narratives do. It is riddled with inaccuracies about my life and my organizing. Where the text is not factually wrong, it veers into some of the worst, most harrowing parts of my life, which I related to Lupick never thinking the book was centered so solely around me that these stories would be central to the narrative. The text, I feel, cannot be distinguished from tragedy porn and it erases my strengths as an organizer. 

Despite being hurt many times by those I came to trust too quickly, I am prone to giving people the benefit of the doubt. In fact, I had trusted journalists too quickly before, and lived to regret it. Yet I put aside my misgivings and engaged with Lupick, because I thought that the book would advance the mission of drug-user organizing. I found the interviews concerning sexual and physical assaults I’d endured, and the moment I’d learned my daughter had died, deeply unpleasant. But unfortunately, these sorts of experiences are common for people who use drugs when we engage with journalists. 

There has been a lot going on over the past year, as there is any year in the high-stakes activism that we do. Despite coming back from death’s door early in 2021, I spent a lot of time speaking with Lupick after I first read excerpts of Light Up The Night that appalled me. I implored him to make vital changes to the book. With the publisher’s deadline approaching, he did make some changes based on my feedback, but not nearly enough. It got to the point where I was begging. Finally, I was reduced to doing what people do when they don’t know what to do: I shut down. 

Now that the book has come out, I’ve gone from feeling terrified and discouraged to deeply ambivalent. I know how the book has affected me. However, I’m a white woman with a graduate degree, whose ongoing connection to core relationships, including my mother, has been key to my literal survival. I worry about the upheaval this book will unleash on me both professionally and personally, but ultimately, I believe I will survive this violation of my privacy. 

My main concerns now are how the book will affect drug-user organizing and how it will affect the outside world. Our movement cannot recognize itself in a book which reduces the story of national drug-user organizing to two white women, leaving drug-user leaders of color as footnotes. 

How will this book land beyond the choir? Will this be a story that is problematically told, but ultimately involves some positive change for a prevailing narrative shaped by books like Dreamland? Will this book help force public health to live up to the imperative it’s been outlining across two administrations to meaningfully include people who use drugs? Such impacts are possible despite the book’s flaws, and I hope they happen, even if that remains to be seen.

I want to be clear that my intention is not to “cancel” Lupick. I bear him no ill will. Some of his work has value. The problems with his book reflect wider problems with journalism, of which there have been many egregious examples. And when Lupick was approached about the writing of this article—which was written with the consultation and support of the whole USU leadership team—he said that he supported my right to tell my story, which I appreciate. 

Telling our own story may be the only way we can ensure that our vital work is faithfully represented.

I just want to state that Light Up The Night is not the story of empowerment and victory over adversity that is my truth and the truth of the national union’s work. 

However, this book has motivated us as drug-user organizers to tell our own story and record our own history, so that is one positive to emerge. 

For this more complex and authentic truth, stay tuned for an upcoming episode of Narcotica, in which veteran Urban Survivors Union leaders such as Isaac Jackson, Shilo Jama and I will discuss the founding of the first three USU chapters and the eventual founding of the national union. 

This will be the first part of an ongoing effort to document our history ourselves. Telling our own story may be the only way we can ensure that our vital work to keep our communities alive is faithfully represented.

Photograph via Pixabay

The post I Want to Reclaim My Voice From “Light Up the Night” appeared first on Filter.

I can laugh a little about it now, but it still makes my blood boil. How many more of us have to die? Just how fucking many? All because almost no one cares about people who use drugs.

It was back in 2004 when I had that terrifying experience. I was fairly new at drug injection, and had no access to sterile supplies or reliable information. Older drug users and their knowledge were my only hope for staying safe.

I started to run fevers, and to develop abscesses on my body that weren’t connected to any injury or injection site. One evening, I found the courage to walk into a local pharmacy and ask the pharmacist what happens if your blood becomes infected. He answered very matter-of-factly.

“You die, dear. You die.”

In the hospital, I had no idea what the diagnoses they had given me meant, neither the MRSA part—referring to a group of bacteria that cause hard-to-treat staph infections—nor hepatitis C.

But I learned many lessons. One was that we need to inform ourselves when nobody else takes the trouble. Hospital policy and our medical system create deadly barriers for people who use drugs. We are then not able to access the help we need and are left to deal with life-threatening infections by ourselves. When they have security searches and room sitters, leave us in pain and withdrawal and refuse to allow any guests for us, we leave against medical advice.

Here I am again. Here is the truth, after seven or eight months of shame and secrecy.

My developing these infections had really been a toss-up, it turned out. People who inject drugs are at their most vulnerable to hep C transmission in their first two years of injecting. I would hypothesize that this vulnerability has only increased at a time when more people, in my experience, now begin their drug use injecting, rather than coming to it via snorting or smoking.

I hoped I would never have another experience like that, but that is not my reality.

Here I am again. Here is the truth, after seven or eight months of shame and secrecy. Throughout that time, I have been hiding wounds and abscesses. Terrified, I have taken different assortments of antibiotics from Canada, and watched myself get closer to death day by day.

Medical PTSD and a Life-Threatening Emergency

For a few years before the pandemic, I traveled as part of my job. Every other week, I was in a new city. I was on methadone, but the clinic and its requirement of regular attendance, together with all the hassle of guest-dosing while I was away, made this all but impossible.

If you’ve ever been forced to participate in methadone guest-dosing, you’ll know that it’s expensive as shit, and they do all they can to make it inconvenient and inaccessible. So instead, I would often just get whatever I needed to be well in whatever city I happened to be in. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but this was the only way to travel without the insanity of the methadone clinic.

They told me that I had failed at the treatment they’d offered.

That’s why I tried to move from my methadone clinic to a buprenorphine doctor. It would allow me to travel without dealing with the restrictions of the clinic. I tried to make the switch, but it was a total disaster. I wound up being thrown out of the clinic for missing days due to travel and drug use. I tortured myself trying to transition, but ultimately couldn’t do it.

With my head down, I called my methadone clinic and asked to come back. They were less than kind; instead of welcoming me back and helping me, they told me that I had misused the clinic and had failed at the treatment they’d offered.

Despite everything, I still could not believe they would deny me all services. How could they treat me this way? I had been a client of that clinic for over 10 years, paying upward of $14 a day. When I think of the money alone that I must have brought them during that time, surely that gave them some incentive to treat me with dignity and decency? They branded me a failure instead.

The truth is, for all my struggles, I did well during my years at this clinic. I graduated college and grad school. I lost my daughter to an OD and had my leg amputated, and I kept going. I became the executive director of Urban Survivors Union and a national leader in harm reduction. But to this program I was a failure.

I began to look for another clinic that would take me. But this was hugely problematic. My benzo use was a problem, then my Ambien use; places wouldn’t take me unless I quit those drugs first. I have been on benzos and Ambien since I was 16—including the entire decade I have been on methadone—but they didn’t care. They would not move my dose of methadone up past 40 mg, which wasn’t enough.

I ended up traveling one hour each-way every day to get an inadequate methadone dose.

The one clinic I eventually found that would take me was miles away. So I ended up traveling one hour each way every day to get an inadequate methadone dose—they would not move my dose up past 40 mg—all when I had a clinic five minutes from my house that wouldn’t allow me to return.

After eight months of this, my frustration reached an all-time high. I was using, because the methadone dose wasn’t enough to hold me.

Ever since right after the pandemic started and our drug supply went wacky, the dope I was doing had been strange and getting stranger. At Urban Survivors Union, we were donated the money to buy a  mass spectrometer. This is how we discovered the horse tranquilizer xylazine in the drugs I was using. Without the mass spectrometer to indicate what was behind the most frightening injection wounds you could imagine, I would have surely died.

But I was too traumatized to seek help from the doctor. My 2004 hospital trip was only one of many scarring experiences. I am disabled and have vision in only one eye. I spent years being mistreated and harmed after being hit by a car and losing my leg in 2014. My PTSD is real.

So what did I do? I began treating myself with antibiotics I was able to procure, and made very clear to my loved ones not to ever try to make me go to the hospital. And my health got worse and worse. As my friends urged me to go to the doctor, I tried to think about all the reasons I want to live. I tried to be brave and strong. But all it amounted to was me curled up in a ball, trying to breathe.

I had lost all the weight I could lose. I was pale as a ghost, exhausted and struggling to breathe. My hair was falling out.

My injection wounds were just one of many side effects as my body was slowly poisoned. I was scared, for me and for everyone else who might be injecting this poison thinking it was dope.

I had lost all the weight I could lose. I was pale as a ghost, exhausted and struggling to breathe. My hair was falling out. I was trying to cope with this while getting off of benzos and Ambien as fast as possible.

I finally decided that the shame and secrecy had to stop. I reached out to my colleague who is an epidemiologist.

My colleague convinced me that I needed to seek medical help for my wounds and met me at a sympathetic wound care doctor. Turns out, I had a 2.9 hemoglobin, was having a medical emergency and needed to go to the emergency room.

This is when I fell apart. I could not stand a hospital, the treatment. I could not face the hateful people I would be forced to deal with. I could not deal with the withdrawal I would most certainly face if I went. I said I would rather die, and I meant it. But Don, my partner, took me to the hospital. As he drove me down I-40, I was on the floor of the car, hyperventilating and hysterically crying, “I can’t do this!”

Like every other experience of this kind, it will deter me from seeking help again.

My colleagues worked on making a plan so we could better ensure that I would avoid emotional abuse at the hospital. They did everything they could. I had health advocates with me; my colleagues themselves came to offer support.

I am here to report that while all of this made it possible for me to get a blood transfusion and get some help, this trip to the ER was just as painful and traumatizing as many of my other experiences. We face policies designed to violate our basic human rights, and we face stigma: We are treated as if we did this to ourselves and deserve our condition. On top of being scared and in full withdrawal, this was another experience with hateful nurses and indignant doctors, with a complete inability to listen to a patient and respond to basic needs. Like every other experience of this kind, it will deter me from seeking help again.

Not Your Mama’s Heroin

Drug use is simply different than it once was. As my good friend always says, “This ain’t your mama’s heroin!” I feel like I need to scream this from the rooftops. So many of our policies, bad enough in their own right, are connected to drugs and situations that are no longer relevant.

So many health care providers still operate as if we are dealing with heroin, which we are not. We are dealing with fentanyl and tranquilizers and never-before-seen cutting agents. We are dealing with street prices during the pandemic that double and triple and prompt desperation. Rather than getting clients on stable methadone doses as an urgent priority, clinics continue to throw up barriers. Our access to anything that looks remotely like safe supply is nonexistent.

The drug-user health clinic that I run in North Carolina has been seeing skin and soft tissue infections unlike any we have known before. People identify cuts and wounds that “just appeared” from nowhere, just like my own.

We use fentanyl test strips, but these unsophisticated tools aren’t enough when there are so many substances in the mix. Drug-checking resources must be upgraded everywhere.

Regulators look for things they can count before they issue help. I suggest they count the bodies lining up at their feet.

Urban Survivors Union has been working with methadone state regulators around the country, trying to make changes to methadone policies while the country is closed. We are fighting in hopes to reopen the country with policies that actually have the ability to save lives.  We must deal with our broken medical system that condemns people who use drugs and violates our human rights with little to no thought.

We speak to the regulators and they say they are sympathetic, but it does not seem as if they are able to make any real change. Regulators look for things they can count before they will issue help. Well, I suggest they count the dead bodies lining up at their feet.

Drug-testing equipment saved my life. We have a treacherous drug supply with deadly poison mixed in. I am the leader of a drug-user union. If I can die from our poisoned drug supply, so can anyone. We must act now to get the safe supply and resources that we need. We must not be silent, ashamed or scared. We must talk, even if we are hated. We must scream, if that is what it takes.

Please fight with us. Stand with us. Help us in ways that are useful. Listen to people who use drugs and develop policies that place our health first. We cannot afford anything else.

Thank God for Nan Goldin, the artist and advocate whose project funded Urban Survivors Union’s purchase of the mass spectrometer. Her swift action in response to the pandemic emergency saved not only my life but many others. Thank you, Nan. You are a true hero of mine. Thank you to everyone at USU, the USU methadone team, to my friends who are scientists, to Nab and Roxanne, to my friends Erica and Allison who cared for me when I was at my worst, and to my lover and friend Don. You kept me alive day by day. I love you all.

Here is a video, created and developed by USU and produced by Knina Strichartz, to thank Nan from all of us.

Photo by Jake Espedido on Unsplash

The post I Hid My Wounds for Months and Nearly Lost My Life: Stigma Kills Drug Users appeared first on Filter.

This is not only her truth. It is the truth that so many of us are taught, internalize and eventually believe, without question. We have become comfortable with blaming drugs and drug users for everything.

That is how, after I began using drugs like heroin as a teenager, my identity shifted from that of a young, creative girl to a criminal, selfish woman. We have created a destructive identity for people who use drugs, and this story is almost impossible to live beyond.

Like so many of my fellow drug users, I have sat in jail cells and felt my spirit and my fight dwindle, as I internalize the scapegoating of drugs and drug users for all of society’s ills. We are taught that we are broken, untrustworthy—and then our families and loved ones are taught the same. The story is reinforced, our identity hijacked.

What if we could create a new identity for ourselves?

So many of us are trying. We have user unions and networkers all around the world. I’m the director of one of them: the Urban Survivors Union a national alliance of drug user unions in the US. We organize, write and represent around this issue, among many others. But when it comes to scaling these programs, there is little movement and even less funding.

Why is that? There is no shortage of people who use illegal drugs—and I’m not talking in the past, like all those celebrities who are happy to tell us about their former drug use, now that they’re safely “in recovery”—but right now. Even if you exclude marijuana and non-prescribed use of pharmaceutical drugs, millions of Americans use illegal drugs every year.

This should be a powerful constituency—one that refuses to accept the damaging identity foisted upon us or the harmful laws that societal perceptions facilitate. Yet the vast majority remain silent.

“I Cannot”

I recently returned from the International Harm Reduction conference in Porto, Portugal, which was a chance to focus on what we truly need to make progress in this movement. At the closing session, Dr. Carl Hart, the Columbia neuroscience and psychology professor, author and drug policy reform advocate, issued a stirring challenge to the 1,200 delegates.

“You gotta get out of the closet about your drug use!” he declared. And despite his support for our work, he clarified, “I’m not talking about the drug user unions.”

“I’m talking about the ‘respectable’ people,” he continued. “People in suits, like me. Well, white people…”

Dr. Hart has been public about his own use of drugs such as methamphetamine and heroin. And his point was, the burden of the demystification and reframing of drug use shouldn’t fall on the most marginalized members of society—those who are most likely to be victimized by law enforcement and punitive laws. It should fall, instead, on drug users whose privilege gives them some protection.

Yet right after his powerful talk, I received an immediate reminder of why this has not happened.

I sat with people in Porto—members of our harm reduction movement—and watched as they became visibly angry about his call for people who have power and privilege to come stand with those of us who don’t.

I watched as they made excuses. “I cannot, I have a good job.” “I cannot, I am a doctor.” “I cannot, it would destroy my family.” “I cannot, I am afraid.”  

I cannot, in other words, because my life is too comfortable and I cannot risk the privilege I have to fight for something as minuscule as drug-user rights.

That is the problem. People keep thinking it’s all about drugs, but it is about so much more. It is about personal liberty and social justice. It is about caring for our fellow human beings. It is not about getting high, which may seem optional and frivolous; it is about everything so many of us say we stand for, but just don’t have the energy to fight for. We just are living too good to think about the millions of people in prison, whose lives have been stolen and destroyed.  

You only have an illusion of safety. You are only safe until you are not.

I don’t mean to make out that those of us in the drug user unions are all heroes. It may look like we made the choice to come out of the closet—wrong! Perhaps a few of us decided to come out, but mostly we were outed. We didn’t have a choice—it was made for us, by law enforcement, by members of our own families, by others who pointed the finger.  

But what our stories should tell you is that even if you are privileged, you only have an illusion of safety. You are only in the closet until you are not. You are only safe until you are not. And so acting on behalf of us is also acting on behalf of yourself, and of everyone.

My 75-year-old mother, a longtime history professor at A&T University, has never broken a law in her life. She used to feel the same as those folks in Porto. Somewhere in her mind, she always thought I was exaggerating about how I have been treated by doctors, by police, by systems designed to “help” me. She used to believe she had rights, that if people behaved well, they did not have to worry. Only those of us breaking the law need fear. Maybe, she thought, the police misbehaved sometimes, but certainly not as a rule.  

She believed this until she, too, had an experience which says was the worst moment of her life. It was life-changing for her: She finally realized that I and others were not safe, that the police were not people who protected us, but people we needed protection from. She was shown something very different about the country she so believed in.

You see, I have been targeted by the police department where I live in Greensboro, North Carolina for running an underground exchange when syringe service programs were illegal in this state. Because I have a history of selling drugs—and “once a dealer, always a dealer”—I have been accused of using the exchange as a cover to traffic and sell drugs, among other ridiculous allegations.

In September of 2013, my mother was caring for me at her home after I was involved in a hit-and-run which eventually resulted in the amputation of my right leg.

Police raided her home, brutally, and she bore witness as these officers violated her space, her rights and those of her disabled daughter and teenage granddaughter.  

Some of the evidence they used to obtain a warrant to forcibly enter my mother’s home with assault rifles, military lasers, dogs, and full swat gear was the bandages, other wound-care items and medical trash (no syringes) that were being used by my home health care nurse.

Police involvement in my life has been difficult to share with others because it is so outrageous, people tend to think I could not possibly be telling the truth.

If this can happen to my mother, are any of us really safe? Are our freedoms real, or simply illusions?

Take a Stand With Us

I believe user-led programs are the heart of harm reduction. If we lose sight of this, we lose both our roots and our best teachers—people who are targeted and who are paying the ultimate price due to inequitable, racist drug policy.  

This includes passing drug-induced homicide laws, charging friends and loved ones with murder simply for being with a person who is using drugs. In addition to human rights violations, these laws guarantee increased overdose deaths by creating a huge incentive for overdose witnesses not to call for help.

But people who don’t bear these deadly and dehumanizing consequences have an important role to play, too.

It’s to come out about their own drug use, to stand with the rest of us, and to underline, through their obvious success and functionality, that most people who use drugs, of any kind, do so without significant problems.

If you have privilege and truly believe in the rights of people who don’t, isn’t it time you considered making this sacrifice?

Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show that only about 10 percent of people who use drugs struggle with chaotic use or addiction. In order to create a new identity for people who use drugs, we must hear from the remaining 90 percent. We need to hear the stories of people who use drugs in non-chaotic ways while working, paying taxes and raising children. We need your voices as we fight to end the unjust imprisonment and persecution of millions of drug users, fueled by stigmatizing and inaccurate media portrayals.

I’m not saying this is easy. It takes courage and there are consequences, even if only social ones, for everyone who comes out. But if you have privilege and truly believe in protecting the rights of people who don’t, isn’t it time you considered making this sacrifice?

Only when our allies are willing to see us as humans—people who must be heard, respected, and most importantly, defended—will the image that society has of drug users like me as crazy, lazy and criminal begin to dissipate.

That’s why coming out as a current drug user is an act that can drive real change.

Photo by Carlos Arthur M.R on Unsplash

The post It’s Time for People With Privilege to Come Out About Their Drug Use appeared first on Filter.

After some moments of confusion and complete despair and grief, my mind shifted. I found myself instead experiencing rage, bitter anger and fury. Rather than listen to this news, I attacked it and fought it. I screamed at my mother, God, the air, who-the-fuck-ever I could scream at.

In this moment, I wanted the person who gave my daughter the drugs to pay. Her friends, her boyfriend, I did not care. I wanted to hurt this person, punish them.

I felt these things despite having experiences that most mothers who go through this do not have. As a person who uses drugs, I have lived the other side of this. I know that no one gave my daughter drugs wanting her to die, or even to have anything bad happen to her. The person who gave her the drugs—heroin, contaminated most likely with fentanyl—is not responsible for her death. They are not responsible for the poisoning of the US drug supply with fentanyl, nor for the drug policies which make people use alone, secretly and full of shame. US governments and the culture of prohibition can take credit for all of that.

I am sharing this because I now know from experience how easy it is to misdirect blame.

In the agonizing days that followed, I watched as my daughter’s entire community in Greensboro, North Carolina—friends from high school and church, friends who had struggled in all the ways she had—came together with love. Utterly distraught, we all moved forward together into a future without my daughter.

I am sharing this because I now know from experience how easy it is to misdirect blame. Even though I have spent my life fighting against bad drug laws, and know in my heart what the problem truly is, I found myself right there. I found myself blaming the wrong people. It was as if the grief and pain were too much to bear, but anger? Well, that felt better. It felt more powerful.

Too many people know the pain I am talking about all too well, and have also experienced that same anger. And politicians and prosecutors—rather than accepting responsibility for the consequences of their own failed policies—are increasingly exploiting this pain and anguish to make scapegoats of supposed “drug dealers” through drug-induced homicide laws.

These powerful individuals are leveraging the debilitating powerlessness of people like myself, a parent who has lost a child to overdose, to justify charging individuals with murder or manslaughter. They mislead society into believing this response is necessary and appropriate, so our loved ones do not die in vain. They are the ones who truly deserve the anger of people like me.

The outcome in drug-induced homicide cases is two lives lost instead of one—and a false appearance of retribution, justice and revenge.

Drug-induced homicide laws were designed to target major cartel dealers, yet they are overwhelmingly used to prosecute friends and loved ones of an individual who has lost their life due to an overdose. Those impacted most by drug-induced homicide laws also include people selling on a small scale to support their own use. All too often, these individuals have few options for procuring a sustainable income due to their criminal records—thanks, once again, to the drug war—which effectively exclude them from the mainstream economy.

The outcome in drug-induced homicide cases is two lives lost instead of one—and a false appearance of retribution, justice and revenge.

It’s time to do something about this. #Reframetheblame “from people to policy,” is a campaign launched by Urban Survivors Union, the national drug user union where I serve as executive director. It’s an amazing opportunity for people who use drugs and those who stand in solidarity with them to sign what we call a Do Not Prosecute Directive.

These directives are designed in the tradition of a Do Not Resuscitate order. We sign them as a way of taking control of our lives, or at the very least, our deaths. We sign them as a powerful way to declare that we don’t want our lives used as propaganda to continue a drug war that has brought nothing but pain.  

The Do Not Prosecute Directive states:  

“I do not want to be part of your bloody drug war that has incarcerated and killed millions. If I die of an untimely accidental overdose I ask that you do not use my accidental overdose as a tool of your drug war  to blame and charge others with murder or homicide. If anyone is responsible for my deadly overdose it is drug prohibition and drug policy, and our government’s insistence that we double down on a racist and classist drug war policy that has proven ineffective over and over again.”

On August 31 this year, to coincide with International Overdose Awareness Day, more than 4,000 people from all around the country signed this declaration. But it didn’t end there. You can sign a Do Not Prosecute Directive here to show that if the worst happens to you, you do not want people around you to be blamed and persecuted.

The criminalization of drug possession and sale results in the jailing of millions. It leaves us at the mercy of a multi-billion dollar illicit market that conducts no checks and incentivizes production and sale of more potent substances.

A public health-centered approach requires an entirely different set of policies. Naloxone access and distribution, Good Samaritan laws, fentanyl test strips, drug-checking stations, treatment on demand and medication-assisted treatment (MAT) have all been shown to be effective in reducing overdose death among people who use drugs.

I am particularly amazed at how little we are doing to make MAT accessible to anyone and everyone who needs it. Methadone and buprenorphine cut mortality rates by half or more for people with opioid addiction who use them long-term. The reason such vital information, accepted internationally at a scientific level, is not better known in the US is the same reason that drives drug-induced homicide laws: stigma against people who use drugs.

Urban Survivors Union is asking folks to stand up to this stigma. Please talk to your family members and loved ones about overdose and drug-induced homicide laws, and #reframetheblame today. There is no substitute for honest conversation. Protect yourself and the people you love who use drugs. Unite with us as we demand that our voices be heard, both in life and in death.

To support #Reframetheblame, you can sign a Do Not Prosecute Directive today. You can find more information about the campaign here.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

The post The Rage of Overdose Grief Makes It All Too Easy to Misdirect Blame appeared first on Filter.