@sizlingh @vincentrado hey I get it. I work for a “nonprofit “ company that puts on a giant week long dirt rave in the desert outside Reno every year. Every year the population of attendees (which caps out more than 70 and less than 80 thousand people) alienates me a little bit more and after a 3 year Covid break , my outlook this year was exceedingly grim: being paid 14 bucks an hour to build a city for people seemingly hellbent on transforming what started as #cacophonysociety utopian dystopia into a bucket list destination point for billionaire tech bros to hashtag influence whilst wearing similar outfits purchased from wish dot com by searching “raver fashion” or “*name of event redacted*fashion”. Anyway the public face of harm reduction for a week long drug party of over 50 thousand people is something called the #Zendoproject and they provide a service they call #psychedelicharmreduction which mainly consists of providing a chill space for people to go if they have a bad trip or psychiatric crisis related to ingesting psychedelics. To be fair , you can chill at the zendo if you are experiencing any psychological problems but if you’re freaking out a super chill hippie will chill with you and use his zendo training to help guide you back to a nice landing/integration. Or, if you are locked in a time loop of infinite unimaginable horror in which 66,400 beetles with the face of your grandma are eating your intestines from the inside of your body while you slowly burn to death forever , as can sometimes happen (25-c-NBOME is a hell of a drug) they might just say fuck it and put you in an ambulance to Reno because it’s above their training. They are always nice enough to liberate whatever drugs you have on you that shot you into the hell dimension before they call the ambulance -we all know pigs follow ambulance , and by peeling you from your shit they are often keeping the grandma beetles and you from having a long dark night of the soul in county jail for possession. Anyway when I heard about this place I was like well that’s cool and super rad and all but what about if we did like, other kinds of harm redux shit? I am a lifelong drug user () with 10 plus years on both sides of the syringe as a street outreach warrrior ,I had recently been experimenting with ‘legitimacy’ (IT DIDNT GO WELL)taking a payed gig for a establishment public health charity that happened to house Nevada’s first (legal)syringe exchange program. This after me and a couple other dope fiends, college kids, and grieving mothers started a grassroots campaign to decriminalize syringe access in Nevada. Yes when I moved here you could be charged with a felony for having an unused needle in your pocket. 2 years later we got an overdose prevention/free up the naloxone bill passed. I’m proud to have been a part of that shit but I’m not just virtue signaling here. I thought maybe this “participatory culture” party that I worked for might like to be on the leading edge of best practices for every kind of drug user so I started blasting the zendo people and some medical staff with my experience and ideas and I got fucking crickets. For years. UNTIL THE FUCKING BLOW STARTED TO TEST FOR FENTANYL that’s literally when it became real to these people. A couple of years ago a few comrades and I decided that we were going to forego seeking approval from the millionaires we work for and just offer the first ever overdose prevention training and naloxone distribution to fellow staff..totally non compulsory, if interested. I went to one morning meeting and announced “hey I work for DEPARTMENT NAME REDACTED and we are doing an overdose prevention training tomorrow night at NAME OF BAR REDACTED and just wanted to invite you all to attend. It’s at 8. Drug user stigma kills. Hope to see you there’ That was it. Immediately after I made the announcement I got a face to face with the scary boomer ex marine who is the head EMT. “Why are you doing this?”
“So people won’t die.”
What are your qualifications.
Certified community health worker with certification to facilitate “train the trainer” naloxone trainings , training others to train others. (I know)(Train trained trainer trainings)
Do you think our community is at risk?
Are you fucking serious? Do you want to wait around for someone to be the first opiate related poly drug poisoning casualty out here before we do the policy? I don’t because I have a profound fear that whoever that person might be , will be a friend and fellow worker. One of the hundreds and hundreds of working class people who move out here for 3-6 months to build the city and then make it #leavenotrace when it’s over, every fucking year, because we don’t leave all of our dependencies and dual diagnoses at home when we come out here to WORK. it’s just a matter of time. Unless we start carrying narcan. Scary marine guy mutters something and just walks away whiles I’m in mid rant. The next night we do the training. Over 200 people showed up. That’s like a quarter of the paid staff. I had no idea what to expect. We gave out like 12 cases of naloxone. People were hungry for the information and access. Only one person from the circle of ‘founders’ and upper echelon attended and was amazing. After the training he thanked us and told me that the reason none of the actual founders came is that they unfortunately were clinging to a viewpoint (popular with lots of other #boomers for some reason)Basically they think that they attendees are like little children and if they know that there’s narcan everyone will just run out and start banging heroin. And you know…stigma. Which brings me at last to my real point - DRUG USER STIGMA EQUALS DEATH. I believe those of us with a dog in the fight need to get out of our echo chambers when feasible and possible , and counter stigma with the light of truth, the truth of reality and the reality of our own personal badassedness. I am not a former drug addict or a recovering injection drug user. I’m not clean cuz I wasn’t ever dirty. No matter what my status is my measure of self worth , my worthiness to be treated with humanity and dignity should not be dependent on my abstinence from drugs and alcohol. Or adherence to one family of drugs over another .And neither should anyone else’s. I’m a proud drug user and no ignorant psychonaut boomer or anyone else is going to shame me with some hypocritical hierarchy of socially acceptable methods or varieties of drug use. Every time a hypocrite “good” drug user shames tweakers or junkies on social media another one of my comrades dies alone in a casino toilet. That’s what shame and stigma does. you’re right though. Most of these insufferable fatuous pseudo woke psychedelic influencer people do not give a FUCK about harm reduction. Which is crazy to me since every time I do good pure LSD or MDMA my compassion is supercharged. I used to think that was universal effect but uhh..,anyway TLDR but I’d love to know what is making you cringe in the world of psychedelics thesedays. #Psychedelics #Harmreduction #Druguserliberation #stigma #boomersamiright