The following is a transcript of the presentation given by Fiona Gilbertson at the Scottish Drugs Forum
Introduction
I don’t like standing on stages. I’ve not done it for a long time, and when I used to do it, there was a pool, and you would all be throwing money at me. So I’m a little disappointed, to do you know? And I say that partly because it’s funny, it’s absolutely true. Also, I work for a sex worker organization, and part of it is that we’re stigmatized here.
Activism and Community Engagement
I think when we talk about rights and activism, where does that stop and start? What communities should we be interacting with and working with? I’m really nervous, and I’m not here today for me. I nearly cried when I listened to that. Do you know what? We’re talking about nobody should be getting infected with HIV now. Do you know? It’s not cancer. We know exactly how people get this, and we know exactly how to prevent it.
Personal Journey
Standing on this stage two years later after being diagnosed when I was 21, I thought this would be awful. You know, we all thought this would be over, and it kind of is. It’s completely tragic that this is happening. Regarding justice, in 2013, there was a group of us at that point. I think we were all in long-term abstinence-based recovery, and we watched a film called “The House I Live In.” I don’t know how many people in this room have seen “The House I Live In.”
The War on Drugs
You know, I nearly showed a clip from it. I imagine everybody has seen it. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a little out of date, but it talks about the war on drugs, specifically an American one. It describes the war on drugs as not a war on drugs; it’s a war on minority communities, and it’s a war on poor people and people of color.
It describes the war on drugs as a Holocaust in slow motion, and this is what we’re seeing right now. When I watched that film, I was in long-term recovery, abstinent in recovery. I was going to all these lovely, inclusive spaces where we all support each other. Everybody’s like, “We’ve been in this lovely little tent,” and outside, there is a war. What we were told in those spaces is that you can only be responsible for yourself; you help a person who comes through the door, and we do the best that we can.
Then I realized we have to have a voice in this because, as somebody who has had problematic relationships with drugs on and off for quite a long time, what I realized is that the relationship that was most problematic to me, most devastating, and most traumatizing was my relationship with the criminal justice system. It’s what kept me going back time and time again. Also, once I got to that place, it was harder to come back. It’s harder to come back with a criminal record. It’s harder to come back when you’re being pursued every single day by the police; that’s what was happening.
Amplifying Voices
What we said is that we also need to amplify the voices of people in recovery. For me, I don’t define my recovery as abstinence-based anymore; that’s not my path, and it was for a long time. I’m not going to get into what my path is because it’s not important, but what I realized is that our voices were being co-opted. We were being held up as the 10% of people who use drugs and end up in treatment.
We were being used for horrible, horrible policies. We were average people at conferences, and it made me really uncomfortable. People would stand on stages and say, “Well, I started using cannabis when I was 13, and then I was injecting.” You know, there was no analysis within that. So we said, “Let’s not be tokenized. Let’s actually tell our stories, but tailor our stories from a rights-based and policy perspective.”
Building Bridges
That’s what we try to do. What we noticed was that all these organizations, like Transform Drug Policy Foundation and Release, had all these stereotypes about what the recovery community was. The recovery community had stereotypes and stigma around drug policy. It was like, “We don’t want a free-for-all for drugs. Drugs really hurt us,” and all the rest of it.
So one of the first things we did was bring the Transform Drug Policy Foundation to one of the recovery bars. They were really worried, saying, “This is going to be awful. These people are religious nuts.” What happened was people just really started communicating with each other, and they got it.
Collaborative Training
The thing that we thought would be the most difficult turned out to be one of the easiest trainings—bringing a policy organization together with people from the recovery community. So that’s a lot of what we do. We take our lived experience and use it to create fundamental change.
A Movement Beyond the Individual
I want to build a movement so that I’m not the person you see on stage because we need to understand these stages. I have a huge level of privilege, and I learned this from the sex worker community. We always acknowledge our privileges.
One, I’m a woman, and I’m really lucky not to have children. I say that because if I had young children in the house, I probably couldn’t talk about lots of the things I could talk about because social services would be at my door, and I would be judged for that. So I can speak from that point. I’m older, so again, I’m not going to tell you whether I take drugs or not; I’m not going to get into that because that becomes a polemic.
But every time you see somebody like me, there are at least 20 or 30 people you won’t see, and for their days, they spend more time in prison than they will in rehab. They’ll have been infected with preventable diseases like HIV and hepatitis C. They’ll have spent time in prison, and we talked about it.
Understanding Trauma and Community Loss
I think it’s wonderful that we’re talking about these East studies, but instead of saying this is within the individual who used to be deviant, we need to understand that our families are sick because as children, something tears. If we can broaden that to see our culture is failing people—poor people, people who don’t have resources—because my trauma lies in the multiple times I was arrested, the multiple times I was hit by police, the multiple times my partner went into prison and was never offered rehab. Everything you see should be known by those who have gone through that because we have a drug policy that tells us that you cannot criminalize drugs; you criminalize people, and you’re criminalizing people.
Personal Experiences with the Criminal Justice System
So when I talk, it’s not a big story. It’s just like, “This is what happened.” I was using heroin. You know, probation was a huge embarrassment. But at that time, there were no services. There was a huge media campaign to just get rid of drug users, and it was horrendous. They put them on islands, put them in cells, and let them die. The police were being pressured to do something, so their solution was to arrest us. You could be sent to prison for tiny, tiny amounts of drugs. They were going to police the real obsesses, and what happened was that all the safe injecting spaces were shut down under police pressure. From there, we became the AIDS capital of Europe.
The Ongoing Crisis
You know these stats better than I do. With this glass called “crime reduction,” I think it was about 9% of the population had HIV 30 years on, and we still have the same problems. It’s utterly insane. We don’t do service provision. I’m in a room with people who do amazing work, but you’re doing it under the most colonized conditions, and the fundamental thing that keeps us all stigmatized and traumatized has never changed, and that’s the Misuse of Drugs Act, which underpins the war on drugs.
It’s really bizarre; people talk about the unintended consequences of the war on drugs, but they are not unintended consequences. Nixon, when he set out his war on drugs manifesto, wanted to disrupt the African American and peace communities. They spent millions on false propaganda around those drugs and then identified heroin and crack cocaine. The policies that were written ensured that those communities were just flooded with men going to prison and women, and years later, you have traumatized communities.
Solutions for Change
So, I’m sure we all know the problem, but what we talk about is the solutions. One of the things I’m most proud of is that we worked with the Durham PCC and modeled it after Rufus from Switzerland. Here in the UK, Madame Rose Rufus had a similar problem in Switzerland in the late 80s. Community leaders said, “You need to get rid of these people.
We want them in prison.” She said, “Well, that’s fine because you’re a citizen, but I’m the Prime Minister, and my job is to look after every single citizen. These people are my citizens, and I’m going to treat them as such.” She got people in a room, and they developed heroin-assisted treatment. In Switzerland, you can see what people here are actually working on, and nobody’s ever died in that program. Nobody’s ever become infected with blood-borne viruses.
The Role of Funders and Government
And actually, I think this is not that important anyway. It’s about funders and government. See, people can access treatment in ways that we’re doing. When you stop shaming people and they realize that the war is maybe something that’s going on inside them, you get to look at that. But as long as you’re thinking, “I’m a burden,” you can’t deal with anything; you just have to deal with surviving the next day.
The Need for Inclusion
I hope you’ll indulge me. Part of the Recovery Justice movement is to create a movement. What does that movement look like? At first, we thought it was going to be the recovery community and drug policy people. But now I don’t know, we’re not even just people in recovery anymore. We’re people who have been affected by drug policy. If I can put it that simply, it means that if a mom comes into our organization, she feels welcome.
If somebody comes in who’s being put in prison for selling drugs but has never used drugs, well, they’re part of our community too. There’s a huge community area, and I don’t know where it starts and finishes, but what I realize is that if we don’t look to the next organization that’s just on the outside and build, we’re going to be sitting in rooms, and there will be 200 of us next year, and maybe the next year, there will be 300. But we’ll be talking about the same issues.
Challenges in Partnerships
Some of our partnerships have faded. I’m going to talk about how the sex worker movement taught me how important it is to check prevalence and to look at who’s not in the room and bring them into the room. Once you’ve brought them into the room, put them on the stage and let them say whatever it is they need to say.
This feels a bit weird at the moment, where I’m getting my hope and my passion, which I’ve really been struggling with. I mean generally, you said they allocate the “what’s,” and it’s like, how can we do this without numbing ourselves? Oh, okay, am I either going to numb myself, or like Riya? You know, it all just seems so overwhelmingly dark right now.
Finding Hope in Community
I’ve been really privileged to be part of the Psychedelic Society and the Breaking Convention. Regardless of what those organizations stand for, the way they collect and the relevance of their degree. I was at the Breaking Convention this year in London; there were 1,400 people. It was put on entirely by volunteers, and they crowd-funded. You know what?
There’s a way of being dynamic, and I think we find those ways by going to the edges of places. It was really weird. I didn’t realize before how much judgment I had and how much propaganda I had in my head because I was thinking, “Breaking Convention? They’re all going to be wanting to get high. They’re all going to be wanting to, you know, they’ll just be like hippies.” When I got there, they were talking about drug deaths; they were talking about human rights; they were talking about the need for community.
Unity in Human Rights
There were panels on all those things. Now, those things don’t affect those communities, but they realize, like, we either move forward in human rights together, or we’re going to fall on our single issues. The other thing at Recovery Justice is that we have been talking about regulating all drugs. To me, it was like I had this rush to find legitimacy through referencing science, statistics, and evidence—all the evidence that we can gather that will give me credibility, that will give people who use drugs credibility, and then we move forward with that.
The Importance of Storytelling
Now, I’m realizing that we lose something when we do that. Like you said, when you listen to stories, you listen to people, and we form unions with each other because we meet at a different level. I realized new movements are conservative in their scale. While heroin-assisted treatment is basically legalized heroin, we have to be really careful when we’re talking about cannabis and other substances because bringing in Big Pharma and big industry in Scotland is probably not the way to go. I feel a little tense about that.
Reflecting on the Past
I also know that we need to look at the other issues. For me, it’s all drug policy. The other thing I’ve been thinking about really deeply is that I was part of ACT UP many years ago. I’m really privileged to be here, and I’m really sad that there are a lot of people not here. But when it first happened in Scotland, there was nothing.
There were no HIV services. What we did was sit in small rooms, and there would be drug users that came in. There would be mothers, and we found a common purpose. We found our similarities, despite a lot of differences. When funding came in, we started competing against each other for that money, and we let professionals tell us how to live our lives and how to be in the world.
The Impact of Funding on Community
I’m not dissing any of the service users. It’s not about that; it’s about the structure that happens at those points. I met with a group of people recently, and when the drug treatments came in, we lost our communities. We lost harm reduction because we just became dependent on the system.
So when we’re talking about having heroin-assisted treatment, we have to make sure we keep the best of everything. We stay alive, we find homes, and we don’t end up in prison. But let’s not forget that what got us there was sitting in those disparate places together.
The Future of Drug Policy Reform
I think it’s astounding that we would have a buyers club for heroin. I mean, we’ve got cannabis clubs, and that keeps the community connected. I don’t know what it will be for Scotland because you folks are the people who will work out what that is, but let’s not lose our communities. I hope to be very much more. What I will say is that we need to remember drug policy reform is not about drugs.
It’s not about people who use drugs. It’s not about people whose family members are using drugs. Like every other movement before, it’s about human rights. It’s about freedom from oppression. It’s about freedom from criminalization. It’s about freedom from poverty, and it’s about freedom from stigma.
