When building anything, your first step is to see what you're working with:
what do we have?
what are we missing?
what is broken/needs fixing?
The first step to building a better world is harm reduction. Only then can we truly move forward!
Principles of Harm Reduction
from the national harm reduction coalition @ harmreduction.org
Accepts, for better or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them
Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe use to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others"
"Establishes quality of individual and community life and well-being — not necessarily cessation of all drug use — as the criteria for successful interventions and policies
Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm
Ensures that people who use drugs and those with a history of drug use routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them
"Affirms people who use drugs (PWUD) themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use and seeks to empower PWUD to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use"
Recognizes that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination, and other social inequalities affect both people’s vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related harm
Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be associated with illicit drug use
It’s May of 1977. Newsweek reports on a new, cosmopolitan social trend: “a little cocaine, like Dom Perignon and Beluga caviar, is now de rigueur at dinners... the user experiences a feeling of potency, of confidence, of energy.” Before, cocaine was “scary” to young, white americans. As of 1977, cocaine is sexy.
White girls "do" cocaine. Black girls "do" heroin. At least, that was what we were taught. Big whoop, people use drugs! But by teaching citizens to associate Mexican immigrants and “the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities … and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” Boy, did it work. Mainstream news almost always bases conversations about drugs on crime [7]. The Nixon Administration used the evening news to fire up a moral panic that depended on hysterical “societal reactions against certain drugs and drug users” [5]. Sensationalist media preys on our culture’s values, hopes, and fears to pull in the largest audience possible.
American mass media is made to entertain, not to inform. It’s news, not legal evidence. The news thrives on exaggerated scandals and drama to maximize profits. Forms of mass communication like radio and TV programs, newspapers, ad campaigns, and even streaming services like Netflix release information to the public all at once. With such a wide reach, whoever controls the media controls the culture.
Crime and drug media (like TV shows and news stories) are told from law enforcement’s perspective. We are taught that morally good, clean people don’t use drugs. We are told scary stories about dealers in “The Ghetto”, told to “just say no.” We are shown scary photos of faceless “addicts.” We treat drug use as a crime because of a political agenda. Instead of recognizing real harm, the news industry and government interests work together to represent drug use as a “social problem” to be exterminated.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Rev. ed. New York: New Press, 2012.
Montagne, M. (2011). Drugs and the Media: An Introduction. Substance Use & Misuse, 46(7), 849–851. doi:10.3109/10826084.2011.570609
Drug Policy Alliance. “A Brief History of the Drug War.” From https://drugpolicy.org/issues/brief-history-drug-war
Murji, K. (1998). The agony and the ecstasy: Drugs, media, and morality. In R. Coomber (Ed.), The control of drugs and drug users: Reason or reaction? (pp. 69–85). Westport, CT: Harwood Academic.
Murji, Karim. “Agony and Ecstasy: Drugs, Media and Moral Panic.” Policing Drugs. 1st ed. Routledge, 1998. 121–138. Web.
Manning, P. (2013). Drugs and Popular Culture in the Age of New Media (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315871080
Ayahuasca may be incredibly healing—but most people can't afford it.
The prohibitive cost of ayahuasca ceremonies is a result of biopiracy, the commercial exploitation of or monopolization over biological material like medicinal plant extracts without compensating the indigenous peoples or countries from which the material or relevant knowledge is obtained. This capitalist exploitation often takes the form of patenting the organisms or knowledge in a way that restricts use and takes away access by indigenous practitioners.
Doing this can deplete natural reserves of the species, cause the extinction of endemic living organisms, privatizes cultural practices, and restricts access to cultural identities and practices while giving access to those privileged enough to pay for it. This is essentially another form of colonialism--formerly colonized countries continue to be exploited for their cultural resources, which exacerbates power inequalities between wealthy colonizing countries and industrializing ex-colonies.
