 So next is my very great pleasure to introduce our last speaker for the day. After Judy, we've got a bit of a variety show to wrap up, but first, Judy Chang is the Executive Director of the International Network of People Who Use Drugs, Input. Judy has worked in the HIV and community-based health and development field for 15 years. She brings over 20 years of lived experience as a woman who uses drugs as a client of harm reduction services. During the course of her work, she's worked in India, China and Thailand. I think this list needs to be updated, Judy. I've seen you work beyond that. She holds a Master's Degree in International Development and a Bachelor of Arts in Writing and Contemporary Cultures. Above and beyond all of this, you know, Judy took on the role of Executive Director of Input about a year before I took on the role at HRI. And I have watched her with absolute awe, like break open doors, take seats of power and really bring the community of wasted places it's never been before. So I am so excited to have Judy here to close our closing ceremony. Thank you for that lovely introduction, Amy. OK, so I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the Wurundjeri Wurrung people of the Kuling Nation. Sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land. So it was actually in 2019 I was asked to do the closing ceremony in Porto. And I was not, unfortunately, I was not able to attend, but it does feel very serendipitous because it meant I could do the closing ceremony this time and I find myself in Australia, which is the country that I grew up in. So thank you, High Reduction International, for inviting me. So the brief that we got as panellists was to be forward looking, but I do feel compelled being in Australia to do some looking back and also some digging into or some of my personal, some of my personal experiences. So as Naomi mentioned, I've been in the position of Executive Director of Input for six years, but I don't really, I don't often or speak to often about my personal experiences or really dig deep. You know, partly that could be to do with entrenched internalised stigma. But also, you know, one of the reasons is because I think that our role as drug user advocates is should not only be limited to telling our personal stories. And, you know, we don't want to be reduced to trauma porn. So without doubt, there is undeniable power in sharing our personal stories and there are lessons to be learnt, but we are also analytical, tactical and strategic advocates and also brilliant service providers. So Australia is where I began my career as a woman who uses drugs from the age of 14. I was definitely privileged because of the strong user rights advocacy that has gone on for decades, that has gone on for decades. I was able to easily access needles and syringes, whether from fixed sites, pharmacies, vending machines or delivered to my door in mobile vans at 3 a.m. in the morning. You don't really get that anywhere else. It was in Sydney that I started on opiate agonist treatment, which I've been able to continue in India, Hong Kong and now Italy. Because of sex work, I was able to survive, earn money, pay rent and regulate my life. It was definitely a safety net. But it was also the place where I learnt the universal shaming and stigma that comes along with coming out as a person who uses drugs or not being able to hide drug use. Without doubt, I've also been privileged enough to not be systematically hunted down and targeted by police in the ways that indigenous and First Nation people have been in Australia. But it is almost impossible under the war on drugs to not experience violence as a drug user, and this violence happens with impunity. It was always it was also the place where it was constantly drilled into me that I should be ashamed of what I am. So I just want to break. So why then? As drug user advocates, do we stand up in the face of stigma, shame and criminalization? It is sometimes said that all activists bear a wound that activism is grounded in the belief that all is not right with the world. And we are thus driven by compulsion to work to right the wrongs. Many of us may have grown up on the sidelines, but this this means learning to reject other people's interpretation of the world. Being a first generation migrant, I already understood marginalization and felt the silent rootlessness and emptiness of unbelonging that many of us many of us do, but the especially black indigenous people of color, gay and non-binary. And this means we've had to develop basic survival tactics early on in life. I grew up as a ward of the state and from the age of 12, spent my adolescence and refuges and care homes attending a selective school in Sydney. So spending spending my days with a group of young women and that we're told that we could achieve anything in life. But in the evenings, you know, then I was back in care homes and refuges and living with, you know, a group of youth who had experienced abandonment, abuse and, you know, there's rarely this talk about, you know, futures. So the reason I speak about this is because, you know, some of the lessons that I learned from this and I had to learn at early on that there definitely is no equal playing field, that our whole lives are arbitrarily shaped by laws and policies and application of those laws and policies. And these expand and contract our horizon of possibilities and affect how we feel about ourselves. So the war on drugs is the biggest, most entrenched policy failure of our time, with many vested interests that keep that system going, creating so much harm around the world, especially impacting black, indigenous people of color, poor sex workers and migrants, amongst other oppressed people. It's because of criminalisation that good people are spending time in cages for simply using or holding a substance. Many of us have lost people, people we love to the drug war. And it's because of the war on drugs that children are growing up without parents, that people lose their jobs, are expelled from schools, cut off from social protection and disconnected from freedom, family and friends. As drug user advocates, we all know that feeling of being chipped away at. We are constantly up against the stereotypes that we are, if not immoral and criminal, then passive and capacitated and unable to make sound opinions, let alone affect political and social change. In looking forwards and envisioning a future, we must not be satisfied with superficial tinkering, but expose the script of the war on drugs and change the way people use drugs are perceived and how we see and talk about drug use itself. Changing narratives around drug use is recognising that drug use is an inherent part of human existence and always has been and always will be. We're criminalising substances that have been and will be around longer than any of us. There are political motivations for portraying us as weak, immoral and helpless. And it's not only prohibitionists who are into the world of drug use, interested in pushing this view. More often than not, we are merely tolerated, patronised or coddled up to to use as tools in other people's agendas. But from my experience, people who use drugs are the best people I have known. The thinkers, the thinkers, the misfits, the pleasure seeking, the funny and fun loving, the adventurous risk takers. And what does it say about our society that we punish the risk takers? When it has always been the risk takers who drive the engines of social progress, who experiment, who refuse societal norms and break new ground, whether in music, art, science, economics, politics and literature. It should come as no surprise that it is the most authoritarian governments that are held bent on punishing difference. In denying services and basic treatment and taking away people's freedoms. So when fighting back, we must not be content with piecemeal reforms or trade-offs that substitute one oppressive system for another, but fight for a complete overhaul. Framing drug use and dependency as a disease rather than a criminal offence or defining people who use drugs as a patient rather than a criminal does not automatically do away with social control nor stigma. We're simply swapping one type of oppression, moralizing with another, pathologizing. And these are not binary opposites. Prohibitionist imperatives bleed into health systems and responses all the time. Across jurisdictions, we see compulsory drug detention or compulsory treatment being forced on people. Where conditions are often measurably worse than prisons. It's a perverse situation made more perverse because it's happening under the guise of help and support. As advocates, we push for the scale up of harm reduction. But in many cases, the roots of harm reduction have been sold out to moral agendas of abstinence. So most of the time in harm reduction programs, we see the primary indicator of success being whether people continue to use drugs or not. And within harm reduction programs, many of us or within OAT programs and those familiar with them, many times we're also punished if we are defined as bad. And this involves cutting doses or expelling from programs. You know, in these programs where characterized as good patients, that is docile and compliant or bad patients, combative and non-compliant. This dichotomy is a manifestation of drug-related stigma, forcing us into respectability politics that does harm. Decent care should not be subject to whether we use drugs or not. In looking forwards, people and equity must be at the centre. And these two elements were reflected in the global aid strategy and the global fund strategy. So then it is drug user groups that offer the best way to give people positive connections to identity and experiences, to our identity and experiences so that we can lift all boats. Drug user-led networks collectivise demands for more and better services, for decriminalisation, for full decriminalisation, and they are the best antidote to stigma and discrimination. The movement is about refusing to quietly bear the stigma and shame and letting drug use rot in the closet of shame. It's about action and taking control. To refuse feeling cowed and constrained and refuse being rendered invisible, because invisibility forces us into second-class existence. But criminalisation decimates and is decimating our movements with hundreds of thousands of lives lost to the war on drugs each year through overdose and neglect. Coming out as an active drug user is a risk in and of itself, and stress and burnout is heartbreakingly all too common. And yet we continue and find new ways and adopt new strategies to survive, especially as we're up against a growing chorus of anti-rights and anti-gender movements that are well-funded. In looking forwards, and I know it's been mentioned a few times throughout the conference, but I just want to emphasise the importance of rooting ourselves in broader social justice movements. Like these movements, such as anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, racial equity, Indigenous rights movements, the drug user rights movement is about resilience and fighting back. It's about refusing to buy the live respectability politics of what is normal and what is not. It's about changing the narrative. It's about rights. It's about what I as a human being can do with my body. And just paraphrasing Cassandra Frederick from the opening ceremony, she mentioned that we must demand more of partnerships. We want more than lip service. We want to change the status quo. And we want to make sure that we don't use the mask. We put down the master's tools. If we really need to affect change, we also need to be redistributing power and resources. We need donors to step up and stop stigma from affecting funding decisions. If the drug policy movement is serious about social justice, then there needs to be a tipping point where having non-drug users leading on representing the needs and perspectives as people who use drugs is considered as egregious as having, say, men leading the women's movement. And white people speaking for Black, Indigenous and people of colour. We can't be committed to decolonisation without decentering. And that means for people, organisations and governments. Surviving prohibition and still fighting should not be taken for granted. Still fighting and surviving should not be taken for granted. It does damage to shout and have no one listen. So I just want to end on an excerpt of an Audre Lorde poem, a litany for survival. And when the sun rises we are afraid it may not remain. When the sun sets we are afraid it may not rise in the morning. When we are loved we are afraid love will vanish. When we are alone we are afraid love will never return. And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.