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4 –
Daily Update
– DAY TWO – Tuesday 5 April 2011
Creating a
catastrophe
‘OUR REGION IS FAMOUS FOR ITS HIV EPIDEMIC,’
Olga Byelyayeva of Ukranian harm reduction programme
VIRTUS told delegates in the
Drug users speak
session.
‘We have 3.7m people living with HIV, a zero-tolerance
policy, and high levels of imprisonment.’
Withdrawal pain was not treated as medical pain in the
region, she told the conference. ‘We also know of one
woman who was refused painkilling drugs after surgery, and
tied to the bed. She escaped, and the stitches came apart.
So, as a result of stigma and discrimination, she died.’
People who confessed drug use were also vulnerable
to intensive interference from state agencies, which could
include having their children taken away, she told
delegates. Doctors were very often so intimidated by the
severe control regulations that they refused to treat drug
users altogether, leading to things such as multi-drug-
resistant TB and amputation of limbs.
‘If you ask me why this situation exists I can quote a
representative from the Ministry of the Interior I spoke to
last week – because they don’t want the diversion of
drugs to the black market. But out of 11 tons of illicit
drugs seized in the Ukraine last year, a total of 2.6g were
diverted methadone.’
Her organisation worked through client management
and protection, as well as documenting cases of refused
treatment, and had set availability of analgesics for drug use
as its advocacy target for 2012. ‘It is important to show that
these strict policies don’t just effect drug users, but all of
those who need drugs to kill pain, such as cancer patients.’
Challenging stereotypes, changing perceptions
‘I’M AN EMPLOYED PERSON ABLE TO
GO ABOUT MY JOB AND EVERYDAY
LIFE
, whereas other people are the subject of
fear and stigma,’ James Rowe told delegates.
A university lecturer in Australia, he had ‘20
years of injecting drug use, with periods of
hiatus’, he said, and had completed a PhD on
‘the farcical drug policy in the middle of a
heroin glut’. This was ‘a policy that determines
whether people are looked after and cared
for’, he stressed. The stereotypical view of
injecting drug users was as homeless, sex
workers or mentally ill, views that were shaped
by the media rather than objective, rational
understanding. ‘The public stereotype of drug
users is, to quote one Australian newspaper,
as “infectious objects of repulsion”.’
His university work involved educating
future social workers and others who were
getting their information from these sources,
he said. ‘Could I sit back and let a visible
minority of injecting drug users continue to
be society’s scapegoat? I thought, “why not
design my own subject?”’
He has delivered the course,
The
sociology of drug use
, since 2003. ‘It’s
about the damage caused by how we
respond to drug use rather than the drugs
themselves,’ he said. The most powerful
thing had been the willingness of students
to challenge the stereotypes on which
repressive policies were based, he told
delegates. ‘As soon as people realise I’m
one of those people, and don’t fit the
stereotypes, their attitudes completely flip.
I’m someone whose drug use is just one
un-extraordinary aspect of my life, not the
junkie stereotype they expected when they
walked in, because everything these kids
believe has come out of these newspapers.
They find themselves in a position where
it’s inconceivable to hang on to their
support for the law enforcement agenda,
and they become passionate advocates of
harm reduction.
A question of pleasure
‘MY OVERRIDING CONCERN WAS
TO PRESENT A PICTURE OF
INJECTING DRUG USE
that we don’t
often see, and one from the perspective
of injecting drug users themselves,’
Dayle Stubbs told the
Drug users speak
session. A recently-graduated honours
student, she had conducted research
into pleasure and injecting drugs that
had raised important issues for the harm
reduction movement, she said.
‘We need to make pleasure a more
central part of analytical frameworks,’
she told the session. ‘People inject
drugs because it’s pleasurable – it’s the
elephant in the room.’
Previous research into pleasure had
tended to focus on ‘party drugs and the drug-taking activities of the socially
privileged’, she said. Her research had been a qualitative study using in-depth
interviews to bring forward the perspectives of people who take drugs. ‘We
need to give more primacy to subjugate knowledges. People are capable of
making sense of their own experiences and we – by which I mean everyone in
the harm reduction movement – just need to listen.’ One emergent theme had
been that pleasure was not a singular, stable experience, she said. ‘It’s different
things to different people, it’s nuanced, layered and contextual, and sometimes
it’s quite unremarkable. But it cannot simply be reduced to the absence of pain,
which is why abstinence doesn’t work with so many people.’
People wanted to talk about pleasure, but were just not given the opportunity,
she said. ‘Why can pleasure be such a problem for harm reduction? Injecting and
addiction are automatically conflated, and there are also questions of moralism. If
your starting point is harm, it can sometimes make it difficult to hear about
pleasure. I hope we see more research driven by, and for, people who use drugs
that acknowledges that harm does not have to be our starting point.’
Dayle Stubbs:
‘People inject
drugs because it’s pleasurable.’