Drug Users Are Forming Unions To Protect Their Rights And Safety
Self-organized groups of opioid users are working together to stay alive and fight the stigma of drug use -- even if they’re not trying to quit.
Some days, Jess Tilley sits and talks with the parents of teens who’ve begun using heroin. On others, she lectures medical professionals on how to approach opioid users ― traveling to conferences to talk to colleagues about needle exchanges and drug-testing strips.
At 41, Tilley has two decades of experience working with people who use drugs ― and even more years as a drug user herself. Tilley is the founder of the New England User’s Union, a self-organized group of primarily opioid users working together to stay alive and fight the stigma of drug use, whether or not they’re trying to quit.
Jess Tilley, founder of the New England User's Union, smokes a cigarette outside her home.
Sitting at the table of her colorfully decorated house, which doubles as the union headquarters, under a huge framed poster of pop icon Grace Jones, Tilley said the essence of user self-organizing is the same as with any union.
“My grandfather was part of an electrician’s union because they weren’t getting paid enough,” she said.
With 287 members divided into chapters around New England, NEUU is one of several unions of drug users around the country. Like labor unions, tenant unions and many other counterparts, drug user unions operate on the premise that people facing a common problem should work together to fight the systems that perpetuate it.
In the case of drug users, that means challenging laws that turn people struggling with dependency into criminals, educating each other about ways to stay relatively safe while using often-contaminated street drugs, and fighting the social stigma and internal shame that can make it even more difficult to escape self-destructive patterns of drug use.
The users’ unions represent an extreme version of the increasingly widespread philosophy that it’s better to keep people alive than to insist they have to be ready to quit before getting any help. It’s a philosophy that still comes under a lot of fire. Across the country, officials and voters routinely close down needle exchanges, ban supervised sites where people can use drugs more safely and even deny funding for the distribution of the emergency overdose treatment naloxone.
The question of how to address the use of dangerous drugs is getting increasingly pressing. Opioid overdoses claimed the lives of 64,000 people in 2016 alone— more than the toll of HIV deaths at their peak in 1995, or car crashes at their worst in 1972. As the death toll has climbed, particularly among the middle class, responses have begun to shift. Where criminal justice once dominated U.S. drug policy, there’s an increasing focus on providing help like methadone clinics and other medication-assisted therapy— a form of treatment that’s proven far more effective than abstinence-based programs, and certainly prison.
For more: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/drug-user-unions_us_5a257c26e4b03350e0b86c00
The First Count of
Fentanyl Deaths in 2016:
Up 540% in Three Years
The First Count of Fentanyl Deaths in 2016: Up 540% in Three Years
Some cacs killing themselves with the quickness.
nah..im pretty sure these are real authentic deaths