 It's my great pleasure to introduce the final speaker of our conference opening today. One of the things I love most about working in the harm reduction sector is the opportunity to meet people who inspire me. And Manique Tula is a woman I just met a few months ago at the San Diego Harm Reduction Conference, and I immediately wanted to hear her voice here at our conference today. Manique is the new executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition in the United States. Many of you will know the Harm Reduction Coalition both for its amazing work domestically, as well as those of us who work internationally as one of our key international partners doing advocacy at the UN level. Led for many years by our good friend Alan Clear, and now passed over to our great friend Manique Tula. I welcome her to the stage. Thank you. What are y'all doing? Yeah? It's good to be here. I want to begin by acknowledging the land on which we gather is the traditional and unceded territory of the Danea Nyaka. I almost got it. But I wish to pay my respects to you, Elder, and to the traditional custodians both past and present. Thank you for allowing us to be here today. So the Harm Reduction Coalition is a national organization in the United States, and it's got offices in both New York as well as California. I live in California. It's my first time to Montreal. It's my first time to the International Harm Reduction Conference. I'm really honored to be here. I got a lot to learn from y'all. I've been with the coalition now for about eight or nine months. And for those of you who don't know me, I've spent the better part of my life at this point as a harm reductionist. And it's an absolute dream of mine to work for the organization in this capacity. And following in Alan Clear's footsteps is both an honor and a huge responsibility. And frankly, Alan, I don't know how you did this shit for real. So before I left California, I've got a really supportive family. And my son said to me, he asked me if I was nervous. And I was like, yeah, I'm slightly terrified. And always a source of support. He said, ma, don't try to be too charming or too witty or too intellectual. Just be yourself. So OK. The harm reduction movement itself reflects the dogged perseverance outsider politics and the gnarly attitudes of all the imperfect people who make up this bad ass community. Say that. Bad ass community. I said it in San Diego and I'll say it here. I can't believe that most of us still like each other after almost 30 years together. And it's almost inconceivable that a small group of angry activists have managed to set the pace for the rest of the world when it comes to working with and loving people who use drugs. For most of us, harm reduction is the most sensible, humane, and loving approach to working with people who use drugs. We know that the opposite of addiction is not abstinence. It's bonding. And for me, this approach isn't just a way to work with people professionally. It's personal, deeply, deeply personal. So let me tell you about the story of a 20th century American family. My family story isn't very different from the millions of people, the millions of families who have been caught up in the web of chaos created by extreme poverty, generational, societal, and institutional trauma, cycling in and out of prisons, exposure to stigmatizing, and sometimes deadly diseases like HIV and Hep C, untreated mental health issues, and homelessness. The list, I could go on and on and on. And every single one of these issues affected my family, every single one. So it's no mystery to me why a lot of people turn to drugs to cope. Johann Hari says it really well. Eventually, people can no longer bear to be present in their lives. So I come from four generations of people who use drugs. In the 1930s, my grandfather on my mother's side started using heroin, and he did it for, I don't know, about 40 years before he died of an overdose. My grandmother, Mary Ellen, gave birth to my father, Darryl Lee, in the middle of Ohio, when she was just 16 years old. It was her second pregnancy. Her first aborted against her will at 14. And before she left the operating table, her tubes were tied. Mary Ellen drank every day of her life until she died from untreated breast cancer at the age of 51. That's how old I am right now. And she always wondered why she could never bear children because they never told her what they did to her. Darryl Lee was raised by Aunt Mabel, and he never knew his daddy, and he always wondered why his mother abandoned him. He experienced depression and anxiety at a young age, but he didn't have any words to describe that because he came from a culture where you don't put your business out on the street. So he kept whatever he was feeling to himself. My father's untreated mental health issues continued to grow as he made his way across the country to Los Angeles in the 60s. Here in the nickname Johnny Dollar, because I guess he had this habit of asking his friends for money. Dollar was whip smart, but he had a bit of a temper, made it hard for him to hold a job for more than a few months. And like most of his generation, he loved and drugged freely, and it wasn't too long before he picked up the needle. And when he did, when he did try heroin, he said it was like finding his purpose. Day in and day out, it was all about the hustle. And eventually it caught up to him. I know he served a few bids and penitentiary, and when he got out the last time he vowed he was never going to shoot dope again, and he didn't, but by that time crack had flooded the streets of LA. And I've often said that he probably didn't get the virus, meaning HIV, because he put down the needle and picked up the pipe. And I don't think Daddy ever completely forgave himself for what he saw as failings, but what I eventually came to understand were inevitabilities, caused by a system that was designed to keep the haves divided from the you will never have. The house, y'all, is on fire. In 1971, US Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act in response to the single convention on narcotic drugs, and this act, we know, prioritized law enforcement over treatment and support. In the 80s, the political hysteria surrounding crack in the US led to passage of even more draconian policies, rapidly populating the new for-profit prisons that started popping up all over the country, and not surprisingly, those new prisoners were primarily what? Black and brown men like my father. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander talks about this phenomenon at length, and if you haven't read it, every harm reductionist in the world needs to pick up this book. She makes a compelling argument about the war on drugs being a means to destroy black people in the United States by flooding our most vulnerable communities with crack. And as the media trained its camera lens on crackheads and crack dealers and crackbabies, public concern about illegal drugs escalated. And while Nancy Reagan was telling people to just say no, Los Angeles police chief Darrell Gates founded DARE, the drug education program, which was quickly adopted across the country in spite of its lack of effectiveness. Gates also stated that casual drug users should be taken out and shot, something that has a familiar ring to it in 2017. Today, incarceration rates for young black men are staggering. The US imprisons a larger percentage of the black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. And the viciousness of assault on communities of color waged in the name of the war on drugs fuels multiple systems that are designed to commodify bodies and keep them churning through the prison industrial complex. This is slavery by another name. And like so many colonized countries around the world, the United States is a house built on foundation of racist ideology and racial violence. The house that racism built has been on fire for a long time, but now the children of the colonizers are beginning to get burnt. Tens of thousands of white families across the country are grappling with the fucked up loss caused by capitalistic greed and harmful drug policies that have been killing black and brown people for centuries now. We're living in an area where the average life expectancy of the white American man without a college education is declining. And what's killing the white working class isn't simply diabetes or heart disease or consumption of fatty foods. It's alcohol-induced liver failure along with overdoses of opioid prescription painkillers and heroin. For working class, white guys, things ain't looking so good. Almost 50 years have passed since Nixon launched his war on drugs, and our communities are no better off than they were then. I've come to believe that we've replaced nooses with bullets and pills with needles. And as horrible, as horrible as it may sound, the opioid crisis could very well be the great American equalizer. In just 10 short years, heroin in the U.S., like Canada, has increased almost fivefold. It cuts across all social groups, ages, genders, and it highlights the link between overprescription of opioids and the crackdown by law enforcement. In a country of 319,259 million opioid prescriptions were written in 2015. Ground zero in the opioid epidemic isn't in some exotic, Taliban-controlled poppy field. It's not in some drug cartel fortified compound. It's right here in the local pharmacy in the middle of every city and every town in North America. But our new president has the answer, yeah? Last week, we witnessed a wholesale rejection of science that would make your former Canadian Prime Minister Harper blush, right? It was a directive to escalate the war on drugs by bringing back the harshest, most aggressive sentencing because it is the right and moral thing to do. That's what they said. On Thursday, U.S. Health Secretary Tom Price threw decades of evidence out the window. You were talking about evidence throughout the window when he launched an attack on the effectiveness of methadone and butte, stating if it was just, if we're just substituting one opioid for another, we're not moving the dial much. And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, on Friday, a new directive from our Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, yeah, instructed prosecutors to bring back harsher sentencing. So our Attorney General and our president believe that we can arrest our way out of the opioid prices by locking away more people in cages. And not that it would matter that much to them, but he should be reminded that the U.S. is 5% of the world's population and holds 25% of the world's prisoners. What? So that's the answer. The current regime believes that our borders are the reason behind the opioid epidemic, and their answer is to build a wall, lock people up who don't or can't conform to society's rules, deprive people of the basic right to affordable health care, and to continue to distract us with mind-numbing, anti-intellectual and soul-crushing narratives about Muslims being in danger and Mexicans overrunning the borders and closer to home that drug users are bad people who lack a moral compass. This stigmatizing rhetoric does nothing but keep us distraught, distracted, and divided. So the first hundred days of this presidency ought to be engraved in our memories as if in granite. We are speeding away from the past and fast approaching a hard-to-define future. The rise of xenophobia and intolerance is not limited to the U.S. It stretches across oceans, across international borders. And the recent elections show us just how angry and divided we are. International borders aren't necessarily what divide us, but fear-based rhetoric is. Brexit, the French presidential election, the Turkish referendum, the rise of the alt-right in the U.S. All of these point to the increasingly dangerous polarization of the global proletariat and the ruling class. Many people are beginning to believe that the elite ruling class have failed. And it's not a secret that even after decades of seeming progress on racial issues, that America remains an incredibly segregated country. On a day-to-day basis, most Americans closely interact only with people of the same race. And that impacts our policies. The majority of our lawmakers are white, and thus might be more likely to come into contact with people who are afflicted by the opioid crisis. Then say, I don't know, the black drug users who were suffering during the crack epidemic in the 80s. And it means that a lawmaker might be more likely to first-hand, to witness first-hand the impact of the opioid crisis, which in turn might lead them to support more compassionate drug policies. So it's common sense, really, when one person relates to another person's suffering, it's easier to empathize. So what can we do differently? And I ask the harm reduction community. Think about who your neighbors are, and think about who you see when you're walking down the street. Think about who you see when you go to the market, when you go to your places of worship, when you drop your kids off to school. My circle is incredibly insular. We all drank the liberal Kool-Aid a long time ago. But people, even the harm reduction community, we need to get out of our bubbles. And we need to confront racial and class differences, or we will continue to fall victim to divide and conquer. And there's evidence this can be done. In the science of equality, Rachel Godstill and her co-authors proposed several tactics that seemed promising. Present people with examples that break stereotypes. Ask them to think about people as individuals rather than as groups. Task them with taking on first-person perspectives. And increase contact between people of different races, classes, and life experience. The point is that personal contact helps build empathy, and this is basic harm reduction. And activists who are interested in tearing down discriminatory barriers have to take the lead in this work. The Harm Reduction Coalition has a new North Star statement. We're still working on it, but essentially the Harm Reduction Coalition creates spaces for dialogue and action that help heal the harms caused by racialized drug policies. Embedded within this statement is the importance of remembering who historically has borne the burden of punitive drug policies and what lessons we can learn from their suffering. The idea is to bridge, not polarize. In closing, we're living in a world that at best is indifferent, or at worst is openly hostile toward drug users. We've heard several times today what's going on in the Philippines. Deterte has vowed to wipe out drugs with his sacred call for change and has already resulted in the deaths of more than 7,000 human beings. Deterte and millions like him characterized drug dealers and drug users as weak-minded immoral criminals who are either trying to kill themselves or kill somebody else. But when I look around this room, that's not who I see. I see people who are risk takers. I see people who are change makers. I see people who are bridge builders. Look around this room, y'all, and tell me who you see. Say it out loud. Call in response. Who do you see? Who do you see? I'll wait. Y'all ain't been to a black church? Can I get an amen? Look around the room and tell me who you see. People. Who else do you see? Bad-ass people. What? Change makers. That's right. We're harm reductionists. And across the world, newly-active social justice warriors like us are hungry for a shared, cohesive sense of direction. We need the strength and clarity of purpose to break free from our defensive posture. And that requires thoughtful and intentional knitting of our movements together, collaboration. Every member, every member of our community holds pieces of the solution, even if we're all engaged in different layers of the work. So I hope in these next few days you'll find the inspiration and the encouragement and the fortification that you'll need to continue fighting for what you believe in. Welcome to the International Harm Reduction Conference, where we are honoring our legacy and envisioning our future together. Thank you.