 Good afternoon, I'm Peter Sharus and this is stories from the front lines that reporters live video sessions on harm reduction responses to the crisis today. We will discuss what's the situation in the UK. I have two excellent guests with me need these from release UK human rights and drug policy reform NGO based in London. And that's elsewhere from your inputs the European network of people who use drugs. Both of them have been working in drug policy reform movement for a long time need not thank you so much for accepting our invitation. Hi. Hi. Thank you. So, before we start to speak about drugs, let's speak a bit about the general COVID situation in the UK. It seems that your country was really hit hard by this epidemic. So one of the countries with the diverse deaths rates in Europe. And now we hear from the news that the government is easing lockdown. So things are getting back to normal what some people think it's too early. If you have any opinion on like what what how do you see the general response to this this epidemic in the UK. Any of you please. Well, I suppose that I would say we probably went, I think I think it's clear we went in two weeks too late. I mean friends of mine from France and other countries was what's happening. What are you doing. My family definitely locked down much earlier than I think many people did actually look down much earlier than the government told us to the government really underestimated the ability of the British people to comply with the advice and people have really, really some of our government officials haven't applied but the British people definitely have more of the vast majority of British people have. So I think there's been a real problem in the delayed start. I have to say the public sector response has been really very, very creative and very, very flexible and very responsive. I think the government has been a bit lost and I think they're now compounding it by coming out to early the epidemic of the lockdown I mean. Yeah, I would reflect what Matt says to me I think you know, certainly at release as an organization we were recognizing that things were moving very quickly in terms of the pandemic and that the UK was not in a good situation and in fact we made a decision to move people to work in two weeks before the official lockdown. And I think that was largely because we recognized that the people that we provide legal services and drug services to are really vulnerable group. I mean, these are most of our clients have a history of heroin and crack cocaine use. They have comorbidity, low immune systems, and if they were to catch the virus. They would suffer the worst aspects of the virus, including death and in fact unfortunately we've lost a couple of clients during the crisis that we're aware of. So from our perspective it was what was responsible it was making sure that we were protecting the health of the people that we work with and we didn't want to put them at risk because we were traveling around on the tube or, you know, in contact with people who who could result in one of the most deadly infected and, you know, we'd likely be fine but the clients were our main priority. I think we have real concerns about the fact that we're moving too fast out of the lockdown and I think many of us in the field are going to continue to work remotely based on those principles of protecting the health and well being of the people that we work with and that we care about. Thank you for taking an online survey to assess the situation, the drug situation. Do you have any like preliminary results of that? We're just in the process of analyzing it. I'm delighted to say that we have Professor Judith Aldridge from the University of Manchester who's doing that work at the moment. And some of the initial results that we find is that the market has been remarkably resilient. There are regional differences in terms of purity around, for example heroin and crack cocaine. And this is the most popular drug as usual. And in fact I think that more people are using cannabis which is not surprising considering how anxious this whole situation can be. And so they're using cannabis to relieve that anxiety. Similarly with some of the benzone drugs as well. One of the things that we published early on with Vice was the behavior of people who supply drugs, which again was very responsible, which is unsurprising. But using PPE, social distancing, cleaning, the wrapping around drugs, so really taking steps to protect their clients, which I think kind of feeds into a kind of wider narrative that we've all been working on for years, which is to try and challenge the idea of the drug dealer as this kind of dangerous evil person. They're human beings who are serving a market. This market continues under lockdown and like all suppliers, they are trying to be responsible in this crisis. So, Matt, you said that you are running a harm reduction program with the organization locally. So can you tell us what is the situation on the streets? How did this crisis affect people who use drugs? Yeah, we were in a very fortunate situation, which is we've been offered some funding to do some development work within the UK on peer led harm reduction. And in fact, the funding fell to pieces just before the COVID-19 pandemic started, but it had meant that we'd started to run a pilot in my hometown of Bath, following a stock out in the local pharmacy needle and syringe program, which had led to lots of sharing and dangerous practice. So we started to work with some of the local, what we call friendship suppliers, these are people selling drugs, but selling drugs to support their own habits rather than necessarily having hotels and living in Caribbean islands. These are people struggling themselves to survive. So we had a couple of these people starting to give out of these friendship suppliers giving out needles and syringes. That also provided a platform for our peer to peer and the locks on distribution as well. So when the pandemic arrived, harm reduction services necessarily to protect their staff pulled back started to have social distancing offering NSP by delivery. So we scaled up and it was also very difficult to use the community pharmacy schemes because you got to queue for a long period of time. And then people would only give you one pack of needles and syringes after you queued half now for them. And that was really not working for a lot of drug users. So we were able to sort of, I think double the number of secondary NSPs we were providing. We had one mobile group of drug suppliers also giving out needles and syringes while they were selling to houses were doing it. We had a number of meeting up points also giving out needles and syringes and we also backed it up by running a delivery service as well so that we've been delivering around picking up in some of the rural areas. I'm picking up people who are socially isolating at home delivering methadone to some of our peers socially isolating at home. So really it's been a really great response and it's led drug users to really start identifying much more overtly as a drug user group and thinking together the first secondary NSP set up by somebody other than myself has also just gone live. So again it's just it starts to show this community network process taking place. And we've been recently written to by the director of public health in our local area to thank us for our response. I just read an article in the independent written by young Hamilton, and it says that the UK's drug policies allowing a social genocide to go unnoticed. So it's like quite quite a dramatic description of the situation that you agree with this, or how do you see this. I think he is referring to like the unappropriate rules for prescription of opiate substitution medication so and then the system is not based on evidence, and it is just lets people drive. I think I think the reality is it's the opposite. In fact, what we've had is a highly punitive system in the last 15 years. I ran OST services and we have general practitioners and specialist services involved in thousands of people being on OST. Now we started to create a much more flexible system where people were able to focus on positive game they didn't have to pretend to be using not to be using drugs. And we showed people know we created this really dynamic partnership between general practitioners and drug users that was helping people think about progressive change. And the system seemed to clamp down because the government wanted to focus on criminality, and there was this big ideological push towards recovery. We've seen a decline in treatment numbers rising over those deaths surprise surprise because we know these two things often go hand in hand. And suddenly COVID has forced the government to do what they should have and drug service to do what should have been done all the time. We've got weekly take home. We've got fast access to treatment. We've even got some choice when I guess they prefer people to be on group and orphan. But if you press you get onto methadone. So I think now in some parts of the country we've even got no heroin assisted treatment as well. So, no, I think this COVID pandemic has shown drug services at their best in fact not at their worst. And I think the key is that we need to carry this on beyond COVID. So this is the new not going back to the progressive no regressive model that we've had for the last 15 years. Yeah, we completely agree with that. I think what we saw at the start of the crisis was a perculean approach by drug treatment providers who shifted thousands and talking 10s of thousands of people of daily supervised consumption or daily pickups onto weekly or 90 scripts. And, you know, that is there are risks involved in that. And I think it right at the start the big concerns were around, you know, risk of overdose and diversion. And we've had lots of Matt and I are working quite closely together in the UK and there's a group of us working on making sure this model continues post the crisis post COVID 19 to ensure that people can get access to the treatment that they need. And they are respected within the treatment system. So I think some of those concerns around diversion, for example, didn't. They didn't come to fruition. People were very much wanting to hold on to their scripts. They weren't selling them. But then there's a conversation about, well, if they are diverting them into the market, is that really a bad thing. And in fact, we had a conversation last week about why is it with this population that we always see it as devious if I divert their medication that they can't be trusted with their medication. How many of us know aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers who give out, you know, their sleeping tablets, which are also controlled drugs quite regularly to family members, which is diversion. So why would this group do we sort of diminish that experience, which often, you know, and I think Matt talked about this last week in a meeting, which often can be a very caring approach that you see a friend who is in pain because they're withdrawing. So you give them some of their method to take away that pain and to take away those withdrawals. So, you know, what we've seen is that the concerns that were identified at the start weren't worn out. But what we have heard is really positive feedback from the clients, from people in treatment saying they feel trusted, they feel in charge of their own treatment plan. They like the idea of having key workers phone them up rather than having to trips into time for meetings on a regular basis, which costs bus fares and often this is a population that hasn't got much income. So I think there are so many positives that come out. This is the one silver lining that I see from this crisis. We're working hard with Matt and others and with the drug treatment fighters and with academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to start to build the evidence base to push for this system to be retained post COVID-19. And that will be a battle, I think, because you'd still have that ideological position within government that any liberalisation is a way of pursuing reforms in the drug laws. What we're actually talking about is good treatment that respects people and meets people where they're at and has them involved in the decisions around what they need in terms of their medication. It's interesting, it's coming up in all discussions in this series that people actually don't want to go back to the normal, let's say the normal which was before this pandemic because people working in the drug field seeing that this crisis opened up new possibilities to breaking down the rules which were outdated. So do you have any discussions about any new innovative ways which were not possible before? Maybe some new opportunities for drug consumption rooms? Is there any discussion on that? I think a couple of issues. I mean, I think one thing we're starting to think about is what do we mean by the process of supervision and support for people on LSD. So one of the arguments of drug treatment providers is we get people to be supervised or at least daily dispense so that we can keep in touch with them, we can help them know and monitor them in case they have problems. In reality, we make people then have to go to pharmacists where they see other drug users, they might see other drug, they might see drug suppliers on the way, they might be harassed by someone who wants to buy their prescription on the way out. And actually, sometimes when we give people take homes and then follow them up virtually, we actually offer all of the support without any of the complications that might have previously been in place. And I'm really happy to see drug treatment providers starting to have that sort of conversation about, we could do this differently and offer people much better support in the future. I think the big missing piece and again it's one of the key areas where government, the Home Office into fear in public health is where we as the professional field and also as drug users have argued for crack pipe distribution, which is a key missing component of the harm reduction response in the UK always been important because of hepatitis C, but now doubly important because of COVID-19. And the fact that we can't give crack pipes out to people so we're giving out advice like this, you know, you're an input leaflet that we've given out in 20 countries in multiple languages. There's no point giving advice to people not to share pipes if they don't have pipes to not know so they can actually not share. And the fact that our home secretary blocked the professional field and public health England from going ahead with a crack pipe distribution scheme, because it was seen as somehow akin to liberalization highlights are all too often politicians interfere in drug policy and don't follow the science. Absolutely. I mean I think what the discussions in terms of drug consumption rooms and crack pipes is that real reform in the UK is only possible at a local level at the moment. And I don't know what Matt thinks but I think that this government it's highly unlikely that we will see national reforms anytime soon. And as I said, there is a growing body of professionals police public health, local councils. Those in the medical profession and he has providers who are coming together and saying right. Okay, we're not going to get this nationally we need to stop expanding energy, focusing on reforms through that mechanism. What we need to do is work locally so one of the things this week is the University of Kent, Professor Alex Stevens is bringing together people from across the UK to have a webinar on DC ours, and to start to look at the evidence of how we would do this how we achieve this what mechanisms need to be in place in order to protect drug treatment providers who are establishing drug consumption rooms through say for example a memorandum of understanding the police public health and the providers and the local authorities. So that work is is continuing in the UK. We're aware of at least two police areas that we can't say obviously in a public setting, who are really committed to trying to implement these facilities in the future. So those conversations around drug policy reform and harm reduction enhancement have not ended in the UK. It's just that we're we're refocusing on the local rather than the national. Last time we spoke with Norwegian colleagues and they said that the government there is considering substitution for stimulant users. I mean it's, it's like very few discussions about this, although I think it would be a really relevant issue to discuss how what do you think about this prospect of having stimulant substitution programs in the same way as we have opiate substitution programs. We've done it for years in the UK. I think I'm a fortunate minority practice not majority practice but we have cocaine prescribing back in the 1960s. Dick Pates was prescribing amphetamine dexamphetamine to people using amphetamine sulfate at Cardiff drug and the Cardiff addiction services. So we've had, and then John and John Marx was also prescribing cocaine up in in Liverpool as well. So we have had some good examples around the country it's always remained very minority practice. There's a new UNODC guidelines on the treatment of stimulant use which they don't talk about as dexamphetamine as a substitute for stimulants but they do at least acknowledge that it is a good pharmacotherapy that hopefully I think will provide some support to other people to get a better look at stimulant prescribing. It's a key logical issue. Peter Blanken's work here from the Netherlands highlights its effectiveness both for methamphetamine users and cocaine users. So really I think it's a tool that we're not actively using. I mean there are clearly some concerns around people getting psychosis but I think Dick Pates' argument was that population that do get psychosis in treatment probably would have got psychosis in the community better than they get in a supported environment than abandoned in the street. It's a safe supply of all of the substances is a really important conversation and I think you know it's absolutely right. It's kind of a minority practice within the UK and to some degree historical life. It's one of the conversations that again has been emerging because of COVID what we have seen is a significant increase in benzo, straight benzo use in the UK, and certainly there is interest from drug treatment providers of looking into prescribing benzos to substitute street use of the substances so I think this is another area that we'll see developments on in the next few months. So as far as I know the benzos are linked to opiate overdoses as well right, opiate overdoses that's especially in Scotland so what is the... So they gather patents, yeah. So what's the situation with overdoses now in the UK and access to maloxone. There are very, very high levels of access to naloxone. I mean it's mostly through take home naloxone. I think we've started to realise particularly after Euromaid did a sort of peer audit of take home naloxone a couple of years ago. We realise that no take home naloxone gets us so far, but it really does target the treatment population and really the population we need to reach is the active drug use in population. So that's where peer-to-peer naloxone is much more effective. Interestingly in the UK we've seen actually recovery peer based groups coming in and as part of their giving back to the community and actually doing great work in Glasgow and in the north of England to actually distribute naloxone through to the active drug using community and then groups like my own in the west of England which are more actively based drug user groups. So we definitely make sure that naloxone is widely available and people are widely skilled in using it. We had a spate of overdoses last year, which two overdose deaths which caused the police to do some drug testing in our area. We introduced peer-to-peer naloxone and four lives were saved within the next three months. So I think once we give drug users the skills and the resources, they step up and can save each other's lives. So the best transformers are using community. My peers now are so proud of their capacity to look after each other and care for each other. And naloxone is a core part of the response in our community. Again, I think this is something that's really come out of the situation with COVID and the lockdown is, you know, when we did analysis on the availability of and the scale of naloxone provision at release. It was very important, which was 2018. We estimate it that it was only one in three people who were opiate users were actually getting access to it. And prior to the crisis, you know, drug services bought in a huge stock of naloxone and distributed it to really high levels. The question is, why does it take a global pandemic to do that when the UK has the highest rates of drug-related deaths on record in seventh year in the row. We account for what is it one in three of all overdose deaths in the Europe. It's great. And I think we're all celebrating that, but we need to continue to remember that this needs to be practiced, whether there's a global pandemic or whether there's not. And we must work to protect the lives of those who are at most a risk of overdose. We must systematically plan for it as well, because one of the challenges that we have these very erratic patterns of ordering, it also creates problems to the pharmaceutical companies in terms of responding. So one of the things we need to do is start to have a much more consistent model. One of the things we've called for is is a national budget for buying naloxone. So actually there's, there isn't, there's not a penalty on people who actually successfully distribute naloxone. Unfortunately, we've got a very, very localized approach to drug treatments in the UK. So that, in reality, that was one of the ways of coping with austerity was to throw everything into the local area. However, as Nebe is saying, it does open up its very new opportunity, particularly with police and crime commissioners and local public health officers starting to say we want our area to do things differently. And then it becomes a shift in operational policing and public health policy, not a change in the fundamental war around drug control. And one of the most vulnerable groups during the pandemic are prisoners. So do you do you have any information what's happening inside of UK prisons? I've heard that there were some plans to release some prisoners, but I think after it was failed. Yes, it's been well thought, you mean the government's behavior and this is absolutely disgusting. You know, if we can have Southeast Asian countries releasing tens of thousands of people. And you know, I think the most recent figure that I saw was about 55 that may have just gone up to over 100 people released. In fact, this morning, a BBC journalist reported that there is increased cases of COVID within the prison system. I mean, this is a petri dish for the virus itself. And beyond that risk, beyond the real risk to health because of the virus is also the conditions that prisoners are having to live in because of the lockdown 23 hours a day in a cell. They're not getting out for exercise. They're not able to see their family for family visits. They're not able to get properly fed because of the situation in the canteens where they come to eat. I mean, this is not only a health disaster. It's a human rights disaster. And the fact that we are the UK and we are allowing this to happen is disgraceful. And one of the most egregious things that I think was when they released the rules on who should be released. There were lots of different kind of complex when that complex with rules that would dictate when someone could be released from prison say they had six months left on their sentence that type of thing or it was a nonviolent offense. They explicitly excluded juveniles who are being convicted of any drugs offense, including possession, who were in the youth custodial estate scale and the reason they said this is well, you know, they were asked by the secretary of state for prisons was asked about this in the parliament and was asked why are children is specifically excluded and they said well, if they're being held in custody, it will have been a serious offense. That to me again, it's just a kind of dereliction of duty here. They really just don't care about this population. I think this is again, you know, the UK has a lot to be ashamed of in this crisis, a lot. As evidenced by our high rates of deaths from COVID-19. But this too is one of the shameful events, I think. Yeah. What about the homeless people because they are the other vulnerable groups. And it was a real challenge in many cities to provide shelter for for homeless people. How did how did the cities manage with this problem in the UK. I have to say the homelessness is one of the areas where the UK can be very proud of its response. I think the scenario where the homeless system has really stepped up. So the government initially put plans in place for 5000 homeless people to be or street homeless people to be drawn off the streets. 14,000 people came forward in the initial wave. Now, many of those dropped away quite quickly because the hostels were really not very good at coping with people with quite severe mental health problems with surrounding alcohol problems, active injecting going on. Some of these hotels had a thousand people in them and they were quite challenging environments. And I think some people also chose to move into slightly safer places on the street, particularly because it was nice weather, there were less people on the streets. So there were for some people that became a preferable place to be. There was an attempt by the government then to pass the buck back to local authorities to say look we've given you quite a lot of money to to manage the problems but they've asked them also to manage huge amounts of different problems. And then they said well do you mind housing all these homeless people as well. And the local authorities said you've got to be crazy we can't afford to do all of these things you're asking us to do. And then that led to them to say well no, that won't be our fault trying to duck responsibility. The founder of the homeless magazine in the UK big issue said it would be a human rights violation to put these people back onto the street again now that we for once in a generation, have them all off the streets. And that's led to a very healthy public debate which I think at the moment is forcing the government to come up with pretty radical solutions to house these people in the short term and to give you give longer term housing. And I've just seen some of the peers I know who are now living in hostels. One young woman who woman in her 40s has been living on the streets now in our area for about 10 years. She said her chest health has just dramatically improved since she one came onto script and two went into a homeless hostel. No, I think that many individual stories happening to thousands and thousands of homeless street homeless people across the UK, and now the public pressure to get them housed. I think that's good. That's that's one of the silver lining to this epidemic. I agree with Matt. It is a silver lining. I just want to see the proof in the pudding. I mean this government's great at announcements, but I'm not sure I trust them enough to follow through and they put it, you know, the announcement was made Sunday week ago, which was on the same day that Dominic Cummings was being signed and and quite correctly criticized in the press. So they make this big announcement like look how good we are look over here. But you know, our view is that that's money that was already committed to the homeless to try and deal with the homelessness crisis in this country back in January so it's not new money. There's lots of kind of like we're making promises that 3000 people will be in permanent accommodation by the end of the year. This is a complex moving situation. And also to what we're seeing in the streets of London and it is an increased new population of people who are homeless, those who have lost their jobs because of the crisis, who have been kicked out of their accommodation. So our concern is that one, this government hasn't always been great and following through on policies for the most vulnerable and in fact, with 10 years of austerity under conservative governments, successive conservative governments, we've seen more damage to the most vulnerable in our society than arguably we have in the last 15 years. I'd like to see the preface in the pudding and our organization will be working directly with people who are homeless to secure long term housing with them for them. So one motif which came up throughout this discussions we made with different countries was that wherever we have strong peer involvement. Things were going faster and the response was much more effective than in countries where there is no, there are no strong peer led organizations. I think that in the UK that now this crisis somehow revealed the importance or underlying the importance of peer involvement. Yeah, look, I think, I mean, it's been an it's been an extraordinary time for us because we mobilized well through the 1980s and 90s we had a lot, a lot of response where drug users know ran illegal needle exchanges for the official needle exchanges came into play. There were really dynamic drug user groups across the country doing, working in Moss side in places where the police couldn't go there were drug user groups letting their homes be used for secondary NSPs. As we came out of that epidemic Tony Blair came in and started to re demonize people who use drugs, which was when I personally came out as a drug user in objection to that. And then we got caught in this five year battle which was where we got caught between the Department of Health and drug czar's office, getting into this fight with each other where essentially we became the battering ramming. We were destroyed by people who didn't even care enough to oppose us directly they just use us as a tool to fight each other with and destroyed work that we did putting together 45 drug user groups in a in the world's first unified network of all types of drug users. That's then led to the drug users in the UK being very, very reluctant to want to organize together again. We've all tended to return to our local areas and there's been a lot of good local work going on, but nobody's really wanted to come back to and recognize despite UK drug users playing quite significant roles and input in your input in various different networks around the place being technical advisors, but we've never had a network and we were just coming back together again tentatively thinking about working together, uniting all the different types of recovery active and service user groups, and then covered here. And suddenly it's forced us to talk to each other again. It really gave a momentum to talking to get to each other again. And yeah look I mean things have really have really moved forward it's reminded us of our commitment to each other. It's reminded us of the good work we're all doing back in our local areas, and it's created the sense of solidarity and also because particularly release has this particular pivotal role in the UK as one of our longer standing drugs NGOs that has played a role of bringing together and I think that's been, we can all really say no to release has helped us find our objections and come come together and found a way of working together which is something I hope will be an enduring legacy of COVID-19. I think it's a privilege it's my favorite single of every two weeks. It's a joy just all these, and I think what's beautiful about it I don't know if you agree Matt it's just this. It's people that who had been polarized by policy and by funding mechanisms over the last 10 years because of a push to recovery as defined by abstinence, rather than recovery being defined by the individuals on experience. But it's so respectful and there's just such a common, some common desire to help people who are at the kind of an end of the wedge of all of this the most vulnerable and it's a it's a real joy you mean it's a beautiful thing to say and it's a real privilege to be on those calls and to hear all of those brilliant people who know so much more than I do. I think we've found a way past our differences so we do disagree quite fundamentally on some issues know the recovery groups. We jokingly laugh about them as being happy clappies and they see us as a bunch of junkies all committed to our using and the fact that we can sort of laugh about that with a British sense of humor. That doesn't become the focus of the difference. What brings us together is that we are all in our local areas, caring for the community and doing something very respectful and very dynamic ways. And, okay, we may see our drug use slightly differently from each other we may define active drug use or active addiction or talk about it in different ways. When it comes to the delivery of secondary NSP when it comes to the delivery of peer to peer naloxone or crack harm reduction or mutual aid. That is has a consistent theme through it which is drug users loving other drug users and for me, that what brings us together and I don't care whether people get their own self support in a different way than I do. That doesn't matter to me so much. There used to be a lot of discussions in the UK between these two different streams of drug treatment like recovery harm reduction is that still a kind of ongoing debate or it's already settled. I think I think we would say there's probably ever progressive or what we would call a progressive recovery movement I think one of the things as active drug users we've done is we've learned to see the difference between the recovery industry. And this recovery self help movement and they're different. It's very easy to typify them as being the same because they sometimes use similar language, but actually the recovery self help movement is a group of drug users, really caring and looking out for each other and looking now doing social activities running cafes doing mutual aid doing, no doing a whole load of things which are really mutually caring and supportive. Interestingly, more and more of them are doing peer led harm reduction that they're taking on the peer to peer in a lock zone. They're now starting to follow some of our lead in terms of doing secondary NSP. And for me that's really exciting and now look I think we can, we can see past our differences I think sometimes you become so focused on the differences that you lose sight of what actually unites you. And I think sometimes when you focus on what unites you, the differences seem less important. So it sounded, you sounded quite optimistic about it, you know this crisis brought up a lot of solidarity in society. How do you see the future. I mean we can we can expect a big economic slowdown and some economic crisis, which can affect our community so how do you see that. Well I think the big danger is the economic crisis I mean I think no it's likely that the economic crisis will kill far more people than COVID-19 ever did. Even though we let COVID-19 kill far too many people than it should have done in the UK but even so I think the financial crisis that comes will will kill far more people. And I think we have a real choice as a society do we use this as a transformation in moments around things like the green climate change know we're going to have lots of people unemployed. Does this now become a way that we green our society. And similarly when it comes to drug treatment. Do we carry on prosecuting people and putting large numbers of people in prison or do we actually realize the huge economic benefits of drug regulation. Let's bring no legalized cannabis start to have a no regulated market for all drugs. Let let us pay for our own drug treatment. Let's pay for our own harm reduction and probably we could cover social care as well within the profits so why don't we just move to a much more rational society and also involve us in regulating ourselves rather than trying to police us because actually if you look at the growth of cannabis social clubs 30,000 people conservatively in the UK now involved in collective growing and supporting of each other. That's what happens when you allow people to respond collectively as communities here led naloxone support groups of what's that groups going out and caring for each other that's what happens when drug users are trusted. People give them take homes and not selling their scripts. That's what happens when drug users are trusted and that should be the new normal if they go backwards. Well we will lose all of the good will that's been built up in this period. I think just to add I mean the first response when the crisis hit from drug treatment was harm reduction, wasn't it? It was like, how do we sort out OST? How do we make sure that people have enough injecting equipment to keep them safe? How do we get naloxone out there? That was the first response from everybody. There was, and I feel that that kind of reembraced harm reduction in a way that it hadn't been for a few years. And that was happening within the treatment sector anyway. There's been some really significant developments amongst the organizations who delivered drug treatment in the UK in the last three or four years would be a bit longer. So I think we were already kind of moving in that right direction along with like the recovery groups coming along and coalescing around schools that we all share and that's like people should not be treated as criminals. They should not be criminalized because of their drug use. That, you know, we need to treat this as a health issue. That's what's important. So I think there was a kind of rebalancing going on anyway but COVID just sort of accelerated that to a degree that we wouldn't have maybe experienced without it. I'm hopeful that we can retain that. I am concerned that the economic crisis will actually lead to more austerity. The government has said that that's not on the cards but they've had 10 years of it. It's an easy answer for them rather than taxing their friends. I agree with Matt. I think cannabis regulation is very likely. Cannabis legalization. I think that was likely anyway. I think we're looking at a conservative government that is led by someone who is essentially a libertarian who is close to industry and was having conversations arguably within number 10 with Canadian and US producers who are operating legally. My concern is that that could result in the cannabis clubs, for example, being sort of estimated by this that they are sacrificed at the altar of capitalism, but also to that the opportunity to bring in social equity models. Because people will know what those are where we expunge previous records where we make sure that those who are over placed and over imprisoned benefit from the market because of their their previous so-called illegal activity in the cannabis arena. So I think those are the things that we will be fighting for. And I think it will be a bit of a battle because of where this government is at ideologically when it comes to economics. One of the things and, you know, obviously, one of the things that we expected to happen under COVID was potentially a reduction in policing in the month of the lockdown and we were shocked to see that in fact, the Metropolitan police are responsible for London managed to carry out the highest level of stop and searches on record for seven years in a month. How they did that we still don't know that's a pretty amazing outcome. But again, it was black people being targeted and you know obviously we have what's going on in the US with George Floyd step and the protests and the reaction which we understand that comes from the face of pain and it needs to express itself and it's awful and this is structural racism and we're seeing similar things in the UK. Okay, people are not dying at the hands of the police. They have done in the past. They have they died at in police custody. But what we are seeing are black and brown people being targeted by police being handcuffed as a matter of routine. And those things are really concerning and so I think that conversation within the cannabis regulated discussions and the policy is it is really important if we want to tackle drug policy reforms not going to cure racism in society, but it could ameliorate some of the damage by reducing the parts that the police have to harass black people in the UK. Bruce Alexander, I met with him just before the cannabis legalization in Canada, and he was saying to me I don't support it. I actually said look I think we are going to lose our small industries we're going to know we've built up this really great culture under medicinal cannabis use with this informal regulation and big business is going to come in and swamp this and of course he was absolutely right and I think we need to learn from this in how we think about deregulating and particularly that's the concern of this government who tend to favor big business models rather than supporting something that might be more health oriented and particularly we've got an amazing kind of a social club club up in the northeast in the team T side, which is now not just running cannabis social club and doing medicinal cannabis advice. They're also running mental health service support. They're having welfare people being some of the most complicated people who mental health services can't respond. I've been referred to the cannabis social club management. And I think when we start to see this is what could happen if you start to release. In fact, this was the coalition we brought back at the end of the 1990s to the government to work with the government. So now we are here we are 15 years later coming back again. And let's hope our government responds a little bit more constructively this time rather than trashing on me even as they did last time. Thank you for mentioning this. I mean the cannabis reform issue because I think it's extremely important, not only in the UK but all over Europe we see this discussions and we have been working for cannabis reform for several decades and now we see that it's coming but not in a way we would like to see it. And I think we need to have more, more clarity and more discussions in the European level about the, and even after Brexit we consider you as part of Europe. So, thank you very much need and Matt for for joining me here today and thank you for all those who watched us live on Facebook. Please stay with us, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and stay informed and stay safe. Thank you very much. Goodbye.