 Let's end the war. We're drug users campaigning for an end to the war on drugs. I'm speaking here today on behalf of the international network of people who use drugs. We're here to say that the war on drugs ten years on has failed completely. We are saying here that the governments are talking about the need to renegotiate, but they're not negotiating because all they believe in is dogma. This is a policy process driven by political expediency, not by public health. We are saying that it is time to put public health first to recognise that the only science-based policy on drugs is harm reduction, needle exchange, opiate substitution therapies and involving drug users for change. We are here today ready to negotiate the peace. We are today sick of our people being abused, being murdered, being tortured, being offered restricted health care, being thrown out of housing, having their children taken away from them. It is time for change. We call on the United Nations to stand for its founding principles of human rights. We cannot have a drug control programme that breaches the very fundamental principles of which the United Nations was formed. It is time to put human rights first and to end the war on drugs and to give human rights to my community. My name's Matt Southwell. I'm the project manager for the Euro-Input, which is the European network of people who use drugs, and I'm also a local organiser for the Drug User Group, West Country Respect. So if we're looking at the history of drug users organising in the UK, particularly among the sort of injecting drug users, people using opioids, people on methadone, that group of drug users, really the history dates back to the HIV era. So around the time of the HIV epidemic, we had an Irish drug user called John Mordant, and he was one of the first people to speak openly as a drug user living with HIV. And he helped set up an organisation called Mainliners, which was an organisation for people living with HIV, who are also people who use drugs. Yeah. Hi. My name's Andrea of the New Mordant. I'm from London, and I'm the mother of Beautiful Millie, who's 12, and an ex-injection drug user and AIDS widow. John Mordant was my life partner. When he died, which was March the 24th 1995, I decided to establish an organisation to honour his memory. To continue to give drug users a voice in the struggle against AIDS and the criminalisation of drug users. There's John and his mum, and his dad. There he is. That's quite a nice one of John, isn't it? Oh, that's a great t-shirt. Keep the love alive. Back in 88, a few people who had been in the same rehabilitation programme came out of the rehab, knowing that 13% of that rehab, Phoenix House, were already living with HIV, and they formed Mainliners, and it was the first HIV drug support group in this country. He was the founder of Mainliners London. Most of it was supposed to be peer support, peer education, but of course we had big draws full of needles and condoms. What was the point of being there if we weren't going to help people not get this virus? Most of the people in the organisation were already living with HIV and AIDS. I came into this movement because people were dying of AIDS. It really wasn't more complicated for me. It was completely unnecessary, and I needed to help people who were already sick, friends of mine, and also make sure other people didn't get the virus. So really, the John Wardont Trust was to gather as many people as we could to just lobby in their own treatment centres, so methadone clinics, make sure there were always needles available when people were still using on the streets. I think in retrospect it was a kind of healing thing because I couldn't do anything about John's dying, but I could maybe stop somebody else from dying, and that mattered. Now, I was involved in the health service as a health service worker in the east end of London, and I had learnt my trade with the gay men's organisation, so I'd been taught community organising, but from the gay community's perspective. So when I started working in the National Health Service as a harm reduction worker, I spontaneously used a community organising approach and we helped develop drug user groups, we worked with peer educators, and our service was renowned for its very progressive response. Now, all around the country at the same time, there were small drug user groups running secondary needle and syringe programmes, so these are taking needles and syringes from formal programmes and giving them out offered in very marginalised communities or working class communities where services couldn't go or didn't go. So many drug user groups responded spontaneously because our friends were dying of HIV. Erin Omara, she's the editor of Black Poppy. Grant McNally was a hep C expert, Bill Nellis. He was the founder of Methadone Alliance. Peter McDermott, this guy, he was one of the Liverpool harm reducing... He's actually a researcher. Ah, take a picture of a lovely Alan. Alan Perry was one of the kings of Liverpool harm reduction. In the 70s, the British weren't content with minimising the harm of drug abuse. They adopted the American policy of trying to stamp it out altogether. Prescription drugs were no longer widely available and addicts who couldn't kick the habit had to find illegal sources. The result? By the end of the 80s, drug addiction in Britain had tripled. In Liverpool, there was so much heroin around, it was known as smack city. In Britain, doctors who hold a special licence from the government are allowed to prescribe hard drugs to addicts. Dr. John Marks, a psychiatrist who runs an addiction clinic just outside Liverpool, has been prescribing heroin for years. If their drug takers determined to continue their drug use, treating them is an expensive waste of time. And really, the choice that I'm being offered and society is being offered is drugs from the clinic or drugs from the mafia. Regardless of whether you stick them in prison, put them in mental hospitals and give them electric shocks. We've done all these things. Put them in a nice rehab centre away in the country, give them a social worker pattern on the head, give them drugs, give them no drugs. Doesn't matter what you do. 5% per annum, one in 20 per year, get off spontaneously. Compound interested up, that reaches about 50%. 50-50 after 10 years are off. They seem to mature out of addiction, regardless of any intervention in the interim. But you can keep them alive and healthy and legal during that 10 years, if you so wish to. By giving them drugs. It doesn't get them off drugs, doesn't prolong their addiction either. But it stops them offending, it keeps them healthy and it keeps them alive. So we then use this to put a known volume of pharmaceutical heroin into the patient's cigarette. The National Health Service will pay for the heroin, but not for the cigarettes. Oh yes, yes, of course. It's the patient's own cigarette, but with the National Health Prescription put into it. And heroin isn't the only stuff to come in and out of here. Clithero also fills prescriptions for cocaine. And that's 100% pure free-base cocaine. In other words, crack. What are the dealers around the area of the clinic think about it all? Well, there aren't any around the clinic. You've taken away their business? Exactly. There's no business there. The scene is disappearing. So if you want to get rid of your drug problem, which presumably all societies do, there are ways of doing it. But you have to counter your own moral and political prejudice. Dr. Marx, how would you reply to critics who would say that you're nothing more than a legalized dealer, a pusher? I'd agree. That's what the state of England arranges, that there's a legal controlled supply of drugs. The whole concept behind this is control. Julia says she's now able to have normal relationships to hold down a job as a waitress and to care for her three-year-old daughter. What would you say to people who would ask, why give addicts what they want? Why give them drugs? So they can live. So they have a chance to live like everyone else does. No one would hesitate to give other sorts of maintaining drugs to diabetics. Diabetics have insulin. It's no different. It's the same. I need heroin to live. To this day, my favourite drugs are opiates and psychedelics, but, you know, I'm a mother now and I'm old and really is my priority and I can't really put that in any risk. People always want to know, why did you start injecting drugs? I mean, you know, as if, or any drugs, why did you get into it? It was there. I was, you know, always into things that were dangerous, you know, something exciting. There was so much noise. I mean, the media and still to this day on and on about this, you know, and it's like people have this vicarious, it's almost perverted interest in death and destruction and so on violence and so I wanted to know what it was all about. You know, I was a kid and I needed to understand what the hell was going on. So, and, you know, later I realised that it was a great way for me to dumb down the feelings of, oh, I'm too fat. I'm not intelligent enough. I'm not pretty. I found out quite quickly that I had to keep dosing and then you're, you know, we're talking addiction then. We're talking, you know, you're on the merry-go-round. Yeah, what do you know at 19? You know, what do you know about the world? And, you know, so to find yourself suddenly in a criminalised community, you just carry on, right? You just carry on because your body is driving you. I'm in pain. I need to get this drug. I'm going to do anything for it. You know, the violence, the police, all of those things become unimportant and it becomes a normal part of your everyday life. So, I think that in itself is one of the biggest tragedies of the drug laws as they stand. You know, because people who quite often come from trauma are re-traumatised, you know, by, you know, violence on the street, getting arrested over and over again, getting HIV, which is completely unnecessary, or other viruses. My response was somewhat unusual that we were working within the National Health Service and doing this community organising model. And we did that for 10 years. I went from being a harm reduction worker to being a senior manager and running like a team of seven drug teams with, you know, thousands of people on opiate substitution therapy, needle and syringe programmes, all of the different systems. And I was progressing on a health service management career. But then Tony Blair came into power and he shifted from what was the British model, this harm reduction approach, to suddenly promoting drug treatment. But because we were criminals and we, as drug users, we were committing crime, therefore putting us on methadone was a way of preventing crime. For me, that really caused huge offence. Now, we had been working as drug users alongside the professional response and within the professional system as workers, and we had been a part of a shared community response. And suddenly we were demonised and told that we were criminals and no longer welcome in services. And so that made me think, right, I'm going to now tell people that I'm a drug user. So at that point I came out publicly and did a TV documentary where I came out publicly as a drug user. People think that if you take drugs, you can't care about your health. Not true. Like many recreational users, I control my drug taking and look after myself. By choosing to take ecstasy, I'm seen as collaborating with the drug's menace of causing the needless deaths of teenagers and contributing to the ever rising rate of crime. However, I totally reject this. I care deeply about what happens to our society and as a drug user, I'm sick of having my life attacked and being forced outside the law. So I've decided to speak out to show why drugs should be legalised and regulated. My employers immediately heard about it and I lost both my job in the hospital and I also lost my consulting company because my main client was the criminal justice system and once I told them I was a drug user they couldn't have a criminal training their staff. I lost my ability to raise money for my family and then I also threw myself into setting up a UK drug user movement and then when that was sabotaged by the government that really kicked the spirit out of me and really for the first time in 20 years I started to have a really quite serious problem with drugs. So for 20 years I'd been a non-problematic user, hard partier but non-problematic and really once I became very demoralised and I lost my hope then drug use overwhelmed my life and I got into quite severe dependency with crack and heroin nearly lost my house and really got myself into quite a lot of financial problems. So at that point I really stepped back for a couple of years looked at my own healing, recovered myself and restored myself in terms of my comfort with who I was I still went back to using drugs but in a much more calm and controlled way and then I was ready to come back again and be an activist. Society in general all they could see was that people were in a mess and that was the only thing that was ever projected so the media, dirty junkie, thieving junkie he would kill his grandma for a shot of dope etc so it wasn't until the last few years maybe the last couple of decades that people started to see images positive images of drug users in the media and actually part of the work of John Mordentruss was this magazine, The User's Voice and I said to everybody at the beginning there will be no negative portrayals of drug users said look we don't need any more negative portrayals there's tons of people who will do it for us what we have to put out there is the needle exchange programs were setting up the advocacy we're doing we're literally taking other drug users by the hands and taking them to the clinics we are clearing up areas where injection drug users on the streets are leaving clean needles because they're homeless so we're going and picking them up and putting them to the health authorities out of the way in Symbines so there were lots and lots of initiatives that we took on and I'll tell you two stories about the drug user groups in the UK so the first one was an organisation that I was first involved in called the Dance Drugs Alliance and this was a collaboration between clubbers and free partiers and we included all like DJs, VJs, musicians, club organisers, dancers we really had a very celebratory approach to our drug taking for us drug use wasn't a hugely problematic issue it was something that was very much something that was part of our social lives and we were proud of and happy to take part we were frustrated that we were criminalised so at a certain point we started to work with Mixmag which was the big UK Dance Drugs magazine we wrote an article with them which was called 18 Things You Should Know About Taking Drugs and it was the first time where we went through systematically and told people not what not to do but what they should do so it was giving people advice about hydration teaching people about dosing teaching people about how to manage bit to understand what happens when they're being sick what it tells them about their drug taking and it took our expertise as drug users and it mixed it with the journalist from Mixmag who came up with this funky way of telling the story as this list of 18 things you should know and it was revolutionary at that time to talk just positively and practically about how you could safely and optimally use drugs another group I was involved in was called the Crack Squad and a Crack Squad was a group of peer educators or we were peer educators who used crack cocaine and now at that time all the professionals were saying crack is the exception to harm reduction it's such a dangerous and demonic drug that you can't use it safely and abstinence was the only option now we thought this was ridiculous because if a drug is dangerous and difficult to use and high risk then you need harm reduction even more, not less so we learnt strategies of self-regulation we learnt strategies of how to manage your dosing how to manage the different ways of taking the drug and we really learnt and interrogated the drug and we came up with a charter that taught people how to use the drug safely but most importantly we formed a partnership with the Royal College of General Practice and this is the organisation that coordinates general practitioners in the UK and we ran training courses for them where we showed them our lives as crack users we taught them about the different health risks associated with taking crack and we taught them about how those GPs they could support people who were having problems with crack but to practically engage in those problems like looking at lung health, heart health nasal health sores on the face, weight loss so really when we broke it down the GPs were able to firstly lose their stigma and discrimination against us as crack users because they started to work with us and understand us and secondly they practically broke the issues down and so they were a series of health issues that then they as GPs could easily respond to and it led to a transformation of work across the country and the Royal College of General Practice came up with some transformational guidelines on crack cocaine that had been written through this partnership with people who use drugs and it really changed the way that crack was managed in the UK There was something that HIV did to a lot of drug users that is very difficult to describe but it made them suddenly realise that they were agents of change in a way that they'd never really been given the opportunity to be before that they even could be agents of change positive change, you know that the only positive change before was coming off drugs now they could stem HIV epidemics you know it's massive in a way There's more people starting to recognise that we have a particular set of technical expertise as well that makes us just not nice to work with it makes us essential to work with we can do things that other people can't do we can reach places that other people can't reach and we can develop responses to problems that other people just don't understand and now I work at the United Nations level I work with the British government I interact with senior policy makers and the fact I'm a drug user is seen as an asset not as a problem of course I'm not saying people are completely comfortable with it but it's much much better than it was 20 years ago Magnus are you ready? The question that I'm pulling to you all now is how have we decided to today found the European network of people who use drugs? Yes! The biggest challenge is the internal change that has to happen before people can see oh you know wow I can really help in society you know I'm not just a junkie on the street in fact I can prevent HIV I can teach about hepatitis C I can provide clean needles to peers I mean these are really really important things and you know I got to say this right my recovery from addiction could not have happened without my activism there's no question about it for me being an advocate for clean needles and those prevention and all these things drug policy reform they cut me off drugs you know because I knew I was functional in the world then I was providing something that was going to help if I look back at the beginning of our movement most of that early generation the early generation that preceded me are now dead they all died of HIV, they died of overdose my generation was the first generation to really survive because we have access to antiretroviral treatments we have access more to methadone and opiate substitution therapy needle and syringe programs so now it's expected that we will leave lead much longer and fuller lives that wasn't possible to the early generation I cared for 60 of my friends who died of HIV in a 10 year period in the 80s and 90s and that really brought home the potential challenges of drug taking now in reality if we're looking at North America now we're now losing even more people to opiate overdose and I think that really brings home that there is always this catastrophic challenge that is affecting our community maybe HIV one day, maybe opiate overdose another day it may be the murders in the Philippines another day and as a community of organisers we need to be able to pivot and change to respond to these different challenges both at home and among our brothers and sisters abroad just one more point about this business of all the people that we've lost I think if we don't remember them and honour their memories then what are we actually without them these movements would never have happened anyway and for a long time to be honest I would talk to particularly John of course because he was my life partner but lots of people after they died I would be what do you think we should do about this and John you know like and this doctor is being an asshole and I would talk people would think you're insane why are you talking to the dead how can they help you if they remembered the strategies they would use oh maybe we did take a picture of the UN then that's definitely the UN at the New York AIDS Summit I think that was 2001 as of 1998 the non-governmental organisation started to address the UN and that included drug users and drug users living with HIV and that was important so we would go to the United Nations or the European Parliament and just tell them about our lives and what needed to happen the movement of people who use drugs has grown into a global force for change and we continue to grow, learn and unite around the demand for equality and social justice from activist beginnings the international network of people who use drugs are also now visible and heard within global decision making spaces we are articulating the problems brought about by prohibition and navigating spaces which have traditionally dehumanised and dismissed us the movement is more than just the sum of our personal experiences as we have the expertise to determine our own solutions and vision we are the international network of people who use drugs we're a global, peer based organisation that seeks to promote the health and defend the rights of people who use drugs we work to challenge stigma discrimination and the criminalisation of people who use drugs and its impact on the drug community's health and rights I started using drugs in my teens so when I was 13 starting from alcohol understanding that alcohol is also a drug then also marijuana I got very involved in the rave scene in Sydney in the 90s moved to exploring with acid, ecstasy speed I was about 18, 19 started using heroin and started injecting heroin I was lucky in the sense that I was in Australia so we did have easy access to harm reduction services where I was and I've also been on methadone and buprenorphine for the last 20 years my involvement in the drug user rights movement it's given me my life a lot of direction it's helped to give me purpose and meaning and it's also been able to give me meaning in a way that I can process the personal experiences that have happened in my life and rather than listening to society which may read those experiences or interpret those experiences as negative being connected to other drug user activists has been able to reframe my life experiences and I've been able to harness what's considered negative into something positive and into a force for change one big success over the last since inputs been in existence is the movement itself I think a lot of people would have thought that a global movement or a global organisation representing people who use drugs could never exist it has been built up since 2006 and thanks to a lot of the original board members the original staff from all over the world who really came together and made a dream of having a global drug user organisation network become a reality as input the global network of people who use drugs across a wide array of issues that face and that are relevant for people who use drugs so that includes pushing forward decriminalisation and legalisation of drug use we work on HIV AIDS so working and advocating for harm reduction we work on issues related to hepatitis C tuberculosis overdose as we are currently in the middle of an overdose epidemic the death penalty extra judicial killings and other rights violations faced by people who use drugs how we work towards pushing on these issues and pushing our agenda including on decriminalisation can be broadly separated into three categories so one we advocate at the UN level to make sure that we are bringing the voices and inputs and perspectives of people who use drugs into global decision making spaces and pushing back and making sure they take into account our needs and our perspectives we also aim to bring voices from the national level from the grassroots to impact on global decision making and global level spaces whether that's at the UN AIDS program coordination board the United Nations of Office on Drugs and Crime the Commissioner on Narcotic Drugs WHO and others as we look around the world different strategies have worked sometimes direct action is more successful in Canada other times it is negotiating with policy makers and being at the table and negotiating with governments and at times learning their language and their processes which can be incredibly bureaucratic and change can seem incredibly slow but I think we really need to have that two pronged attitude to how we do things because change does happen at all levels we also publish our own documents and do our own research based on community consultations we're pushing back against the idea that experts know best about our lives when we know that we're the experts in our own lives that we should be able to shape decision making that ultimately affects us as input we also support wherever possible the development of drug user led networks around the world and we provide technical assistance and capacity building as well and I think through doing this it helps us to stay really connected to the ground and to the national and regional networks I feel very fortunate to be part of the drug user rights movement I think there's a cadre of really amazingly talented, intelligent dedicated people that I haven't found anywhere else and we're all doing this in the face of extreme stigma and discrimination oppression in a lot of context and I think the work that has been done is made even more impressive because of all the pressures that were put under it's really important that we're all there for each other and connected because at the end of the day there's not that many of us around