Mission and Vision
Recovering Justice was formed in 2013 to highlight the harms created by current drug policies and their negative impact on people who use drugs, their families, and communities.
We believe that the criminalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs is inhumane, ineffective, counterproductive, and costly.
Our diverse group, “People of Substance,” shares the experience of human rights violations through arbitrary state surveillance, fear of state violence, imprisonment, and state-sanctioned child removal.
Our Vision
Our vision is to find peaceful solutions to end the war on people who use drugs
Our Mission
Our mission is to change policy and create culture change. We create bridges between people, policy makers and the wider community for authentic stories to be told and heard.Too often we have been pathologized as either sick or criminal and our stories are told by others to justify punitive drug policies and harsh sentencing. By reframing our stories in a policy context, we aim to address the systemic injustices faced by our communities. We achieve this through various means such as training, campaigning, collaboration with policymakers and politicians, and partnering with diverse organizations creating alternative narratives and giving platforms to people who are often excluded.
What We Do
We believe that the biggest barriers to finding help and community are often not the substances people use but the systems. People of Substance are not the problem; we are an integral part of the solution.
The prevailing approach of criminalisation, underpinned by the so-called “war on drugs,” has not only failed to address the root causes of substance use but has also exacerbated the stigma, harm, and isolation experienced by those affected.
Evidence increasingly shows that punitive measures do not deter substance use; rather, they obstruct pathways to recovery by marginalizing users, limiting access to support services, and perpetuate a cycle of harm and recidivism.
Recovering Justice advocates for a top down approach based in evidence-based policies and services that prioritize health and human dignity.
“When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it’s because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don’t want to acknowledge.”
Gabor Maté
Training
Stigma training
We believe that stigma is created in policy, enacted directly through state organisations and indirectly through charities set up to serve the community This definition allows us to challenge entrenched attitudes and beliefs within the sector, before we even discuss wider social attitudes.
By approaching stigma in this way we get radically different solutions and empower individuals and communities to ask for what they need, organisations have unintentionally turned people into service users rather than people they serve. We have been doing stigma training since 2017.
An essential part of reducing stigma is to change the language used when discussing drug use. Our trainings equip organisations with the right skills, knowledge, and training so they can speak truthfully and safely about their own internalised stigma and reduce this in the workplace.
Community Events
The development of our success is hinged on the growing and increasingly diverse network of community members we attract. The coming together of people with shared and lived experience. To create change, we need to join the dots and develop a unified voice to challenge current drug policy and be part of developing solutions. We always include people in recovery, current drug users, drug reform organizations, academics, policymakers, law enforcement, the criminal justice, and health services.
Recovering Justice is a campaign defined by lived experience and validated by scientific evidence to show that drug policy reform would have profound benefits to current and former drug users, their families, communities, and society as a whole.
Problematic drug use is a health issue, not a criminal one. The work Recovering Justice does is predominantly with affected communities to empower them to use their voice of lived experience in a positive way for change. These voices are used to engage and inform policymakers and those in power at a local and national level as well as other organizations involved in drug reform.