People Who Use Drugs are, as a group, often a part of leftist groups, but looking at discussions of PWUD is useful to leftist causes for one particular reason above many others: it works as a proxy for how other groups will be treated when they can be properly dehumanized, criminalized, and from there one is forced to contend with just how easily groups are going to be put through this in order to make them acceptable targets for hatred.
PWUD, drug users, junkies, tweakers, crackheads, whatever your preferred term, are all part of a group that is criminalized, stigmatized, and frankly, killed whenever possible through neglect, carelessness, or through the most profound and insistent acts of alienation possible. Being a PWUD can bar you from so many services it is frankly absurd, and when harm reduction or drug policy come into the discussion, how we are lefv out is even more apparent.
to address this dangerous, lawless criminal’s obvious offenses in order:
1. fentanyl is an incredibly dangerous subject to work with in bulk, and one that is very dangerous to use, but the myth of police coming into contact with it accidentally and ODing from it is one that is used in order to justify violence toward drug users of all sorts, both ones who use fentanyl and ones who use drugs which “may contain” fentanyl, a category that can be stretched to cannabis if an officer is desperate enough to be sure about it. if it convinces police to carry Narcan, then that is an accidental benefit, but for the most part, it is used to justify measures of caution that are vastly unnecessary. Fentanyl overdoses dont occur just from handling fentanyl.
2. Anyone who claims that Narcan encourages overdose is either lying, incredibly behind on their knowledge of drugs, or both. the idea that opiate users are taking doses they know could lead to an OD so they can get as high as possible and then get narcanned after they OD is ridiculous not only because an OD is an awful experience in just about every way, the experience of being Narcanned is so awful that frankly, the first thought many have upon being “brought back” is that they wish they had just been let go. Narcan rips the opiates off of your opiate receptors, which reverses the overdose occuring by sending you into withdrawal on purpose. from here, one can correct the main cause of death during an OD, that is, a lack of breathing but the sudden change, similar to how drugs like Buprenorphine act by binding more effectively to opiate receptors than any other drug, is basically going from so high you may die into the worst withdrawals possible. thats why some have suggested ambulances start carrying subs as a post-narcan treatment: it will help aid outcomes by making it so that the person who is now breathing again is at least not in active withdrawal while they try to get them the care they need. Narcan parties are the same as “rainbow parties”: ridiculous fantasies of people who dont know what life is like
3. People joke about how civilization was influenced by the desire to cultivate beer, which is how much beer is a part of civilization. Beer and cannabis are both sold legally in numerous preparations, liquor stores are incredibly common, and drug companies already prepare drugs in different fashions for different uses, company to company, so on. the famous Peach-Mint Actavis taste is well-known, and if it were decriminalized and made again it would be an incredibly lucrative product! Being able to buy actual Percocet, or any number of blue 30mg oxycodone pills (aka Perk 30s) or to buy pure cocaine mixed with coconut flavored powder to recreate one of Mexico’s favorite treats would absolutely be in line with how people enjoy drugs already. In Amsterdam, the number of different psychedelic truffles available is incredible, and with the genetics works that growers have been doing lately, the number of strains of Cubensis mushrooms available is growing rapidly with no sign of stopping. Nights of cocaine and booze capped off with a few blasts of crack and a few xans with a blunt for a nightcap would not be everyone’s vibe, but it would be the vibe for some. that doesnt even begin to cover how many MDMA pills and LSD blotters there are out there, and how fun a dispensar of those would look. And even with fentanyl, making it so that users can inject, insufflate, or smoke known doses would make it so that a drug once considered a scourge could become a drug used by those who respect its incredible power, who understand it as such. Why can we not use drugs in these ways?
4. to continue on, for those who wish to stop using certain drugs, what’s to say they can’t use others recreationally? someone who is okay with their weed smoking and occasional cocaine habit but wants to try methadone therapy would not have to be forced to lie about their sobriety, and instead get the help they need with honestly given advice attached. not advice that tells them to stop, but rather about how best to balance their use for their own safety and to make their lifestyle easier to maintain. For those with a drinking problem, therapies based off of LSD being widely available would provide a classic solution yet again. Decriminalizing and legalizing while also offering therapeutic services with drugs would solve the potential problem posed by these services not being as effective as we wish: a strict legalization like Measure 109 posited could easily lead to the exact sort of prohibition enacted on MDMA and MDA in the first place!
PWUD are, in many movements, canaries in coal mines. when police come after us, social services stop serving us, when we begin to lose the battles we fought so hard to win, it is a sign that progress we made previously is being lost. When a group treats PWUD within a community poorly, it indicates that they plan to expand that treatment to the rest of the community. When PWUD are forced to go without basic services, we all suffer.
