The artwork was placed as a “gift” to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey outside of the State House.
The massive, 800-pound “heroin spoon” sculpture has re-emerged.
This past June, the guerrilla art exhibit sat in front of Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, for about two hours before it was hauled away by city workers.
The spoon appears burnt and bent at the handle. The artist, Domenic Esposito, said the purpose of the massive symbol is to “protest and hold accountable the people who in our minds have created this epidemic that has killed close to 300,000 people.” Purdue Pharma is the maker of OxyContin.
Gallery owner Fernando Louis Alvarez was arrested and charged with obstruction of free passage, a criminal misdemeanor. But a judge has since agreed to erase the charge from his record upon completion of one year’s probation.
Last Friday (Oct. 26), the 10.5-foot-long sculpture re-appeared in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. But this time, the artwork was placed as a “gift” to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey for her efforts in holding Big Pharma accountable for its part in fueling the opioid crisis.
In June, the state of Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, accusing the company of recklessly promoting its opioid painkillers “without regard to the very real risks of addiction, overdose and death.”
The lawsuit is the first in the U.S. to name company executives. Many other states, cities and counties have sued Purdue Pharma as well.
“Purdue peddled falsehoods to keep patients away from safer alternatives,” Healey stated in her complaint. “Even when Purdue knew people were addicted and dying, Purdue treated the patients and their doctors as ‘targets’ to sell more drugs.”
A group of mothers who have lost children to drug overdose peacefully rallied beside the spoon sculpture on Friday.
The artist Esposito has personally been affected by the opioid crisis. He described the toll that his brother Danny’s nearly 14-year addiction to heroin, which began with OxyContin and Percocet, had on his family.
“My mom would call me in a panic… screaming she found another burnt spoon. This is a story thousands of families go through. He’s lucky to be alive,” he said according to the Hartford Courant.
“The spoon has always been an albatross for my family,” he added. “It’s kind of an emotional symbol, a dark symbol for me.”
Lovato’s mother, Dianna De La Garza, discussed the singer’s early recovery in a recent interview.
Demi Lovato has been very open with the public about her struggles with sobriety and mental health, and on July 24, she raised serious concern among her fans when she was taken to the hospital for a suspected overdose.
Now, Lovato’s mother, Dianna De La Garza, has announced that her daughter has been sober for 90 days.
As De La Garza said on Maria Menounos’ Sirius XM show, “She has 90 days. I couldn’t be more thankful or more proud of her because addiction being a disease, it’s work. It’s very hard. It’s not easy, and there are no shortcuts.”
Menounos asked De La Garza if she knew what triggered her daughter’s relapse. She said, “I can’t really say for sure. I really don’t know. It can be any number of reasons.”
Before her overdose, Lovato released the single “Sober” in June, where she apologized for falling off the wagon. De La Garza admitted, “I knew that she wasn’t sober. I didn’t know what she was doing because she doesn’t live with me and she’s 26.”
De La Garza found out about her daughter’s overdose when she received a text that said, “I just saw on TMZ and I’m sorry.”
“Before I could get to TMZ, I got the phone call from her assistant and she said, ‘We’re at the hospital.’ So then I knew, OK, she’s not gone. She’s here. And I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And the words that I heard are just a nightmare for any parent: ‘Demi overdosed.’”
When she got a call from her daughter’s assistant confirming the news, “I said, ‘Is she okay?’ And she stopped for a second and said, ‘She’s conscious, but she’s not talking.’ I knew at that point that we were in trouble,” De La Garza told Newsmax TV.
On August 5, 12 days after her overdose, Lovato released a statement on Instagram telling the public:
“I have always been transparent about my journey with addiction. What I’ve learned is that this illness is not something that disappears or fades with time. It is something I must continue to overcome and have not done yet… I now need time to heal and focus on my sobriety and road to recovery. The love you have all shown me will never be forgotten and I look forward to the day where I can say that I came out on the other side. I will keep fighting.”
Though I’ve developed tools for dealing with heartache and anguish in sobriety, this level of grief is a sadness on steroids against which I feel futile and frightened.
My father’s older brother, Stephen Dale, died at age 69 in mid-August. He was more than the family’s patriarch; he was its ballast, its mooring. The home he made with my aunt Linda served as safehouse to a chaotic tribe on holidays, birthdays, and just-for-the-hell-of-it pop-ins.
Uncle Steve and I enjoyed a relationship where calls and text messages about long-debated or joked about topics would rouse the other in real-time. “Hey Uncle Steve, guess what I just saw…” We lived our lives in each other’s pockets — an intimate, instant-access closeness that is simply irreplaceable.
He died very suddenly. One day he was there; then the next morning, before I could even reach the hospital, he was gone. Massive heart attack. By the early afternoon, I was writing the obituary, a prelude to the eulogy I would deliver days later.
But this is not an obituary, nor a eulogy. This is about what happens next — when a recovering alcoholic, like me, finds himself mired in grief and unable to anesthetize himself with drugs or alcohol. It’s about the specific attributes of grief that, I’m finding, are particularly dangerous to people in recovery. And it’s an attempt to identify with my peers who may have suffered similarly but, as often happens to me, couldn’t quite congeal their disjointed feelings into a cohesive narrative.
Grieving has peculiarities and pitfalls for those of us in recovery. Let’s discuss why.
Pain That Many Know, Reactions That Few Experience
Everyone in recovery has heard the cliché: “Bad things don’t stop happening just because you got sober.” In my seven years of sobriety, my wife has miscarried and, during her next pregnancy, I had a small stroke a week before our son was born.
And given the recovery forums in which we now find ourselves — AA meetings, SMART, sober networks, etc. – most of us see death. We witness fellows with a common disease relapse and die. A record 72,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2017. I personally knew three of them — people who, sadly, literally couldn’t get clean to save their own lives.
But Uncle Steve is different. He knew more about my past, my present and my psyche than anyone save my wife. He was incredibly well-read and unyieldingly tolerant, a combination that made him my chief counsel and safest sounding board. He was flesh and blood that, given a world of other options, I would have chosen to be my flesh and blood.
A lot of us have Uncle Steves, that most special of relatives. Upon losing that person, anyone — normie or alky — suffers a harsh blow. We feel like a piece of our foundation has been uprooted, part of our shared history deleted. There are secrets about us that die with our Uncle Steves. They leave an unfillable hole, forever, and we know it.
For those of us in recovery, though, grief of this depth has its own oddities and perils. Strangely, upon learning the terrible news, our initial reaction can be both validating and shame-inducing: When I learned that Uncle Steve had died, my very first thought was “Shit, I can’t drink over this.” And because I knew I couldn’t, I knew I wouldn’t; the work I’d done in sobriety was about to pay off again, big time.
Though comforting, this survival-minded reassurance brought an unsettling guilt exclusive to recovering addicts: the self-congratulation of passing a tough test to sobriety. It was just the beginning of what has become an ongoing struggle to rectify grief with recovery.
Disruption, Deserved.
Many of us in recovery have struggled mightily with both temperament and resentments. As someone for whom anger has been a tremendously burdensome issue, one AA literature passage that has always resonated with me is from the Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions. In the chapter discussing Step Ten, it cites justifiable anger as an emotion that “ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it.” Alcoholics are inherently tone deaf when it comes to the level of outrage a given situation warrants – usually, we overshoot it considerably.
In sobriety, then, we work to temper most of our emotions — good and bad — to find a balance most of us never knew. My dramatically downplayed demeanor has been a crucial element to my recovery. In this space a few months ago, I discussed the importance of limiting the amount of people, places and things that can “anger, intimidate, or otherwise derail” us. In my opinion, this is as true a marker of sober progress — and maturity — as exists.
Grief, however, sticks out from this everyday mantra like a sore thumb. Especially when we lose someone of Uncle Steve-caliber closeness, deep sadness is not only justified but altogether appropriate. In fact, lack of sadness could be considered insulting to the deceased… our dead loved one deserves our emotional disruption. We owe our Uncle Steves that.
For those of us whose recovery includes maintaining healthy habits and routines, the combination of a broken stride and broken heart is uniquely troubling. The aversion we’ve built up to emotional disturbances can be a disservice to our sobriety in these instances.
Since my uncle’s passing, I’ve found myself nipping around the edges of a turbulent sea of grief, afraid to do anything more than dip my toe in lest I drown. Though I’ve developed tools for dealing with heartache and anguish in sobriety, this level of grief is a sadness on steroids against which I feel futile and frightened.
More than anything, I fear that wading into these waters may lead directly to diving into a bottle; as far-fetched as that may seem for those of us with longstanding recovery, this guarded approach to our most valuable asset — our sobriety — is entirely understandable. In grief, however, it can become a hindrance — a defense mechanism stranding us ashore, emotional landlubbers.
At least a portion of this procrastination, I realize, is rooted in fear of a less drastic reversion. With seven solid years of recovery, I know the chance of a physical relapse from this is slim. For one, it would be the absolute last thing Uncle Steve wanted. Whether they were in recovery themselves (my uncle was not an alcoholic), our Uncle Steves are vital aspects of our sobriety, and drinking or drugging upon their deaths is undoing part of their legacy. For that reason, among others, getting drunk over this is a nonstarter.
No, what many of us fear upon losing an Uncle Steve isn’t physical relapse, but rather regressing to a state of heightened emotional vulnerability. In addiction and fledgling recovery, we were often hypersensitive and underprepared to meet life on life’s terms. Now, atop solid sober ground, meeting death on death’s terms feels like a rare, even unique scenario capable of causing a catastrophic earthquake.
Sure, I’ve been shaken in sobriety before — but not this violently. I’m afraid of the aftershocks of so seismic an event. In recovery, we have healthy fears not only of drinking and drugging, but of revisiting the level of emotional rawness that made us stuck in addiction in the first place.
Gradually, in recovery we’ve pieced our lives back together, and we don’t want these blessings to unravel in one calamitous emotional nosedive. This may ring particularly true with the multitudes of addicts who, like me, also have struggled with depression. Regardless, everyone in recovery can recall a time when emotional fragility made us unable to adequately function. As a husband, father and career communicator, it’s that panicked, fuzzyheaded state that I most fear.
Like hard truths in early recovery, though, I’m finding that Uncle Steve-level grief has a ready-or-not resonance. When we lose someone that close, there’s simply too many things in our day-to-day lives that remind us of the deceased. Almost daily, I find myself reaching for my phone to share something Uncle Steve would find equally interesting or humorous. The resulting double-edged sword leaves me both missing my uncle and mad at myself for forgetting, albeit momentarily, to miss him.
And more frequently, during fleeting moments of calm in my crowded-with-blessings sober life, Uncle Steve is there, quietly commanding attention. Ever patient, his spirit seems to loom as large, or as little, as I can handle in that moment. I swallow manageable doses of sadness with limited side effects and reassurance that, like in recovery, more will be revealed.
That last sentence would have made for an artful sign-off, but life — or death — seldom provides such tidiness. As much as a loss can be a learning experience it is still, on the whole, a loss. And, like some of our worst acts in full-blown addiction, sometimes the knowledge and growth bestowed in recovery aren’t enough to offset the bad with the good. Some transgressions can’t be wiped away with transcendence.
Uncle Steve has been gone two months and I, a recovering addict whose present peak required a series of bottoms, still subconsciously — and egotistically —expects this is building toward something grander than the inglorious absorption of tragedy. Often, our post-relapse recoveries from addiction have been linear, accruing wisdom and utilizing lessons learned. I keep waiting for Uncle Steve’s death to ascribe to a similar, simpler healing process – an expectation that has proven persistently misguided.
No such revelations exist. In the end, those of us who struggle with addiction, despite being affected by grief in ways that differ from others, must deal with it in the same fashion: imperfectly, inconsistently, and with ultra-personalized feelings toward the dearly departed that were endearing in life but alienating in death. Unlike recovery, there’s no program for losing our Uncle Steves.
“I think that you never really get there, but you definitely get better at being alone and observing yourself.”
Singer Boy George is soon releasing a new album with Culture Club for the first time in two decades, but he might not have made it this far if he were still focused on the drugs, he says.
The singer and style icon (born George Alan O’Dowd) recounted the positive impact that sobriety has had on his life in an interview with USA Today.
“You have more time. Your life is not centered around one obsession. But it takes time. I’ve always regarded myself as a work in progress,” he said. “I think that you never really get there, but you definitely get better at being alone and observing yourself.”
The singer has had a long, public battle with drugs and has lost several friends and colleagues over the years to drug overdoses. Reflecting on what inspired him to try and get sober, the singer spoke frankly.
“I think it’s all quite well-documented. Some of it’s true, some of it’s not. When you’re in the eye of the storm, you don’t see a way out of it. For me, it was really just a series of events that led me to an AA meeting,” he recounted. “As much as I didn’t want to be there, I also knew that’s where I needed to be. So you could call it a point of realization.”
He also says that there was no one dramatic moment in which he suddenly realized he needed to turn his life around, but rather a spark of realization that he needed to get better.
“So many bad things happen to people when they’re in throes of addiction and it’s almost impossible to say what is the ‘rock bottom’ that makes you stop. Sometimes it’s just a chance encounter or a moment of clarity,” he said. “For me, I was just brought to a place where I was able to stop and go, ‘OK, this is not my life. This is not what I want to be or where I want to go.’”
When asked how he felt about the new generation of LGBTQ artists who haven’t felt the need to hide themselves, he answered that he was glad that they could come out to a world more accepting of them.
“It’s interesting. Without people like me, (David) Bowie, Oscar Wilde, and whoever came before taking the kinds of risk that we took however we took them, maybe there wouldn’t be a situation where you didn’t have to think about your sexuality—that you can just factor it into what you do. I suppose, in a way, that’s what I always wanted,” Boy George answered.
“So I guess the answer would be I’m delighted for those people, because I’ve always wanted to live in a world where your sexuality, your race and your age weren’t important.”
More than half of Americans now support legalizing marijuana. But for some kids, it’s a life-changing treatment.
While the federal government sits on the fence regarding marijuana, more than half of Americans support legalizing it. But for the families featured in Weed the People, marijuana is medicine for their children.
The documentary follows five kids whose parents have chosen to treat their child’s cancer with cannabis oil, either as a supplement alongside other treatments or as an entirely new avenue of treatment after others have failed.
Despite their non-recreational use of marijuana, the families have to overcome legal and regulatory obstacles to get the medicine they believe their children need.
Weed the People is produced by former talk show host Ricki Lake, who was introduced to cannabidiol (CBD) when her late ex-husband was seeking relief for his chronic pain and ADHD. CBD does not induce the high associated with THC, but does deliver the therapeutic and medicinal effects of cannabis.
“I want to get people seeing it as medicine, seeing what it was able to do for these children, and fight for this medicine to be available to everyone who needs it,” Lake said. “It’s a human rights issue.”
Some of the families in the documentary saw their children’s tumors shrink, or even disappear, when using CBD—even if they were using CBD in place of other treatments, such as chemotherapy, entirely.
“You can’t say the ‘cure’ word, but how else do you explain it?” questioned Lake.
However, some professionals warn against treating cancers with CBD alone and expecting miraculous results. “Relying on marijuana alone as treatment while avoiding or delaying conventional medical care for cancer may have serious health consequences,” cautioned the American Cancer Society (ACS).
So far, the ACS says, CBD and other such compounds in marijuana have been found to slow the growth of or destroy tumor cells in test animals or tissue samples in dishes, but not humans.
However, some pediatric cancer treatment providers do advocate for allowing the use of marijuana compounds in treatment, especially in the case of pain relief or end-of-life care.
Despite growing support for legalization coming from both health experts and everyday Americans, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, which is defined as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
However, one CBD-based drug, Epidolex, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—which is a substantial, if narrow, first step towards legalization.
“Anyone who looked at her would have known that she was very sick and that she needed attention,” said the family’s lawyer.
A Pennsylvania county has agreed to pay nearly $5 million as part of a settlement in the case of a teenager who died in jail after guards ignored her worsening medical condition during four brutal days of heroin withdrawal.
Despite the costly payout, it’s not clear whether the Lebanon County Correctional Facility death will lead to any policy change—but attorneys say it sends a message that even small lock-ups need to take care of inmates who are physically dependent on drugs.
“The days of viewing people addicted to drugs as junkies unworthy of sympathy and care, are long past,” Jonathan Feinberg, a civil rights attorney representing the family, told the Associated Press. “It’s a very short chain of events that leads to death.”
When 18-year-old Victoria Herr was arrested in March 2015, she had a 10-bag-a-day heroin habit. She’d been picked up when police looking for her boyfriend found drugs in their apartment. It was her first time in jail, and she warned staff about the amount of drugs she’d been doing and told her cellmate she was worried about how bad the withdrawal would be.
For four days, the teen was vomiting and had diarrhea. But the jail only gave her Ensure, water and adult diapers. She couldn’t keep down any liquids and became severely dehydrated. The day before she collapsed, Herr begged for lemonade during a phone call home to her mother.
“Anyone who looked at her would have known that she was very sick and that she needed attention,” Feinberg said. “There was a complete disregard for her needs, which can only be tied back to the fact that she was addicted to drugs.”
On March 31—four days after her arrest—she collapsed in the jail and was rushed to the hospital. She went into cardiac arrest, according to the Lebanon Daily News, but lingered for days on a ventilator before finally dying on April 5.
The fatality, her lawyers said, could have been prevented if jailers had simply taken her to the hospital sooner for intravenous fluids.
Although opioid withdrawal does not always lead to death, it can be fatal in cases of severe dehydration. That possibility has prompted some jails to begin offering medications—like buprenorphine—to ease withdrawal, and sometimes continue use for long-term treatment.
Despite the hefty size of the agreed-upon payout in Herr’s case, an attorney for the jailers stressed that no one actually copped to doing anything wrong as any part of the settlement.
“The case was resolved amicably,” the attorney, Hugh O’Neill, told the Associated Press. He declined to say whether the county had changed any policies since the teen’s death. The county administrator, Jamie Wolgemuth, issued a statement to the local news highlighting the fact that state police and the Lehigh County Coroner did not send the case to prosecutors for “further inquiry.”
Regardless, lawyers for Herr’s family framed the settlement as a win for correctional accountability.
“It’s certainly one of the largest settlements in at least the last 10 years involving the death of a prisoner in civil rights litigation,” Feinberg told the Lebanon paper. “When there are breakdowns in the way a prison is run, and when those breakdowns cause harm like the unimaginable harm that was caused to Tori Herr, this suit shows that prisons and staff will be held accountable.”
Deputies found 5 pounds of yet unidentified drugs stuffed into four packages secreted away underneath the man’s pickup truck.
A Mexican worker crossing the border for his job flagged authorities after he discovered a cache of drugs stuck to the bottom of his truck.
The unidentified driver—who lives in Tijuana but works in California—called the San Diego Sheriff’s Office Thursday morning after spotting something unusual apparently magnetized to his fender, according to ABC affiliate KGTV.
When deputies showed up, they found 5 pounds of drugs stuffed into four packages secreted away underneath the pickup.
Afterward, the man’s neighbor told authorities he’d seen some men messing with the truck the night before.
“It’s our feeling that someone targeted this car because he could cross the border every day with the SENTRI pass and they were probably waiting to collect the narcotics later today,” Sgt. Tim Chantler told the TV station.
The SENTRI pass allows for quicker border-crossing in separate commuter lanes, which could make SENTRI users more tempting targets.
The driver is not suspected in the botched drug-running operation because he alerted authorities to the packages.
“I would be checking my vehicle every day before I cross the border,” Chantler said, “because if you get caught at the border you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
Police are awaiting test results before specifying what drug they found in the hidden packages.
The use of unsuspecting drivers as so-called “blind mules” has become more common in recent years—though until relatively recently, the government denied such things ever happened, according to the San Diego Tribune.
Until 2011, federal prosecutors routinely put DEA agents on stand to testify that “blind mules” were a fantasy made up by desperate defense lawyers hoping to spring their clients.
But that year, feds changed their tune after the FBI recorded a conversation between drug traffickers talking about a blind mule operation involving a fourth grade teacher.
Though that find forced feds to admit blind mules were real, it’s still not clear how common they are.
“Over the course of my 31-and-a-half years, I say it is rare—I’m talking very rare—to find somebody who doesn’t have some knowledge or isn’t implicated in some way of having narcotics in their vehicle,” Joe Garcia of Homeland Security Investigations told the California paper in 2015. “It’s just uncommon.”
The Colorado couple say they have been “injured by a conspiracy to cultivate recreational marijuana near their land,” according to the lawsuit.
A couple of disgruntled property owners in Colorado are taking their neighbor to court over growing cannabis, which they claim has brought down the value of their property.
According to the original lawsuit filed on behalf of Hope and Michael Reilly, “growing recreational marijuana is ‘noxious, annoying or offensive activity’ by virtually any definition because marijuana plants are highly odorous, and their offensive smell travels long distances.”
The lawsuit, filed in 2015, saw its first day in Denver federal court on Monday (Oct. 29). Colorado has had a legal market for cannabis for adults 21 and older since January 2014.
The Reillys, who own a little over 100 acres of rural property in Rye, Colorado, say they have been “injured by a conspiracy to cultivate recreational marijuana near their land,” according to the lawsuit.
It’s now up to a jury to decide if the Reillys have a case. Similar lawsuits against state-legal cannabis operations have been filed in California, Massachusetts and Oregon, according to the Associated Press.
The neighbor targeted in the Reillys’ lawsuit is Parker Walton, who purchased 40 acres in Rye in 2014. Since then, he has built a 5,000-square-foot indoor cannabis growing and harvesting facility on his land, to sell his product to retailers.
The defense says it can prove that the Reillys’ property value has not been harmed. In fact, according to the AP, the defense will argue that tax valuations of the couple’s property have gone up over time.
Lawyers for the Reillys are suing under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), federal anti-racketeering laws established to target the Mafia in the 1970s. In this case, RICO allows private parties to sue claiming their business or property has been damaged by a criminal enterprise, AP explains.
If they can prove their case, they may be financially compensated for three times the damages plus attorneys’ fees.
According to the Safe Streets Alliance, which filed the Reillys’ lawsuit, the lawsuit could impact the future of other state-legal cannabis operations.
“In addition to shutting down the operations targeted in its suit, Safe Streets hopes that its use of the federal racketeering laws will serve as a model for other businesses and property owners who have been injured by the rise of the commercial marijuana industry,” reads its website.
Nearly 5% of Massachusetts residents may be battling opioid use disorder, according to a new study.
Health officials in Massachusetts are expressing concern over the results of a new study, which suggests that more residents are struggling with opioid use disorder than previous research had suggested.
Using information culled from a database for public health information, the study authors found that the number of individuals in the Bay State who have either received treatment for addiction, or who qualify as addicted but have gone undiagnosed, may be as high as 4.6% of residents over the age of 11.
That number is significantly higher than previous records, which suggested that addiction rates hovered at just over 1%.
The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health, and sought to determine the annual prevalence of opioid use between 2011 and 2015.
To do so, researchers used the Massachusetts Public Health Data Warehouse, which links information on hospital and emergency room visits, prescriptions and insurance claims, among other sources, from more than a dozen state agencies.
Patients are identified with their own unique number so it is possible to track a single individual who may have been admitted to a hospital or ER or received treatment from first responders.
Researchers looked at information on individuals who, based on such encounters with the health care system, had been or could be determined as suffering from opioid addiction—and identified 119,000 people, or 2% of the state population over the age of 11 in 2015.
From there, they used statistical methods to estimate the number of people who would be considered as opioid-dependent but have not received any treatment.
That formula brought the total number of individuals up to 4.6%, or 275,000 Massachusetts residents over the age of 11 years. Previous research, which determined the 1% rate, was based on national surveys that interviewed only those people who had sought help from the health care system for opioid-related issues.
Response from the Massachusetts medical community was largely positive in regard to the study’s findings. The Boston Globe quoted Dr. Joshua A. Barocas, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center, who said, “[The study] is a good wake-up call. Our pool of people who are at risk for overdoses is potentially higher than we thought it was.”
The study also drew criticism from Dr. Silvia S. Martins, director of the Substance Abuse Epidemiology Unit at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Her response stemmed from what she viewed as a broad definition of opioid use disorder, which may have inflated the statistics.
“The analysis could have been done in a more precise way,” she said.
When we demand answers without a deep, authentic understanding of the problem, we wind up putting band-aids on gangrene.
As I wandered into the opening plenary at the 12th National Harm Reduction Conference in New Orleans last week, something felt off. It wasn’t just the four white-robed women on stage, solemn and elegant in contrast to the mostly grungy, tattooed crowd. It wasn’t the massive indigo chandeliers, which cast a somber blue over the room. It was an energy I couldn’t quite place at first. Then, slowly, it washed over me.
Grief.
Throughout the morning, as various speakers mounted the stage, the story of grief unfolded. The harm reduction movement is grieving the loss of one of our pillars, Dan Bigg, who died suddenly last August. We are grieving the political landscape, feeling vulnerable and scared as overdose deaths continue to mount and hard-won reforms in drug policy are reversed through a tide of drug-induced homicide laws and other punitive policies against drug users. And we are grieving the conflicts, hypocrisies and dysfunction present within our own movement that at times threatens to tear it apart.
My last report on a harm reduction conference for The Fix was in 2014. At the time, I described harm reduction as a community standing at a crossroads. The 2014 conference in Baltimore embodied the culture clash of a movement that had started as a radical underground community of people who use drugs being overwhelmed by mainstream and professional interests. Tension crackled between old and new, as did fear of co-opting and straying too far from its radical roots. Now, four years later, some of those tensions have boiled over.
One of the plenary speakers in New Orleans, Micah Frazier of The Living Room Project in Mexico, described the harm reduction community as a family full of love and dysfunction. With gentle admonition, Micah urged the crowd to watch how we treat each other and to be careful of how we engage in conflict.
Another speaker, Erica Woodland of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network, offered a blunt account of how he had left harm reduction six years ago over concerns about the lack of black leadership in the movement and the devaluation of black expertise.
“I got divorced from y’all,” Erica said, to a smattering of laughter. “I came back; we’re dating!” But he warned that the reunion would be brief unless harm reductionists could show capacity for change.
Harm reduction has changed in the past few years. Several of the largest organizations have experienced a shift in leadership as white, male executives who held power for decades have been replaced by women and people of color.
In fact every speaker touched on the need for a “changing of the guard” within harm reduction. They pointed out that the movement, supposedly centered around racial justice and recognizing the dignity of people who use drugs, does not always practice what it preaches. They criticized the prevalence of white, male leadership, while queer staff, people of color and active drug users are often reduced to underpaid “peer outreach” positions or token members of panels, trotted out for the public, then silenced once the cameras are gone. They stressed the pitfalls of sacrificing long-term vision for short-term gain, warned against co-opting by the public health system, and urged the crowd not to forget its roots.
Change is coming. Change must come, the speakers insisted. And transition is not always pretty.
Their words seared right through me.
A few months ago, I left my position with the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (NCHRC) after eight years as their advocacy and communications coordinator. The decision was voluntary, but born from a place of pain. The organization had recently gone through its own changing of the guard and the process had, at times, been ugly.
In fact, the past couple years of my life have been marred by grief as the organization I have loved and helped grow, an organization that has done so much to advance harm reduction in hostile territory, has been tested and torn by the tension between demand for change and resistance to it. These past years have involved a lot of soul searching for me as I have second-guessed past decisions and wondered if I have allowed enough space for the voices of people most impacted by the drug war to lead.
The plenary was an epiphany. All this time I had bathed in private shame thinking that NCHRC was alone in its struggle, uniquely unable to have tough conversations without dissolving into anger and defensiveness. Now, for the first time, I realized that the movement has been changing and hurting across the whole country. We had never been alone.
The heaviness of this opening plenary hung over me for the remainder of the four-day conference. Even the siren call of New Orleans—the bright lights of Bourbon Street and hot gumbo spice—could not penetrate the fog. I don’t think I was the only person struggling. Even as other attendees greeted old friends and met new ones in between workshops, you could feel grief and tension hovering over everyone. There was no relief from it, not even in the blizzard of breakout sessions.
I tried to attend some breakout sessions, of which there were a dizzying number including topics such as fentanyl, friction with police, racial justice, indigenous healing, queer drug use and much more. The breakout sessions seemed designed to ask questions, but not necessarily to answer them. This frustrated a lot of people. I overheard many grumbling conversations in the hallways about how such-and-such a panel had not provided a “solution” to the problem being discussed. Years, perhaps even months ago, I would have felt this way too. Today I feel differently.
A couple of years ago I attended a town hall meeting hosted by activists and founding members of Black Lives Matter. After over an hour listening to them talk about racism and oppression, a white woman in the audience asked the question that had been burning in my brain the whole time: “How can we fix it?”
The speaker responded by politely suggesting that the young woman have conversations with family and friends about racism. The woman sat down, seeming dissatisfied with such vague marching orders. I was disappointed myself and, I’ll admit, a little appalled that the speaker didn’t seem aware of the importance of giving people concrete actions so that they stay engaged in the movement. But today I see the wisdom in that answer. The speaker didn’t give that young woman, or me, an easy answer because we weren’t ready for one.
Lately I have come to appreciate conversations that do not end with solutions. Most societal problems are so complex that any “solution” that can be discussed in a 60-minute panel is probably bullshit. Most of us know surface level things—racism is real, drug policy is killing people, there are too many people in prison—but we don’t truly understand the history or scope of these issues, especially if they don’t directly impact us. We want a quick recap of current affairs and a quick fix, but when we demand answers without a deep, authentic understanding of the problem, we wind up putting band-aids on gangrene.
This, I think, is what the conference was attempting to do—to encourage discussion and exploration and self-reflection, not to provide instant gratification.
I left New Orleans without answers, but with a great sense of responsibility to seek them, even if it takes a lifetime.
Members of Harriet’s Apothecary open the conference with calls to be mindful and present. Image: Nigel Brundson
