Familiarity With Drugs Helps a Group Speak for Users

[groovedaddy]

SAN FRANCISCO — With a couple of old desks, a beat-up couch and an off-white white board, the office space at 149 Turk Street, in this city’s seedy Tenderloin district, is hardly remarkable. A collection of worn detective novels sits on the bookshelf, a couple of American flags hang limply from the wall and a coffee machine constantly percolates in the back kitchen.

It is the tenants who set 149 Turk apart: a ragtag group of current and former drug users who make no apologies about their fondness for illegal narcotics, intravenous experiences and the undeniable rush of getting high.

“If you pass a drug test,” joked Gary West, a member, “you’re outta here.”

But the group, the San Francisco Drug Users’ Union, has more on its mind than simply turning on, tuning in and dropping out. The union is one of several groups in the United States and Canada that advocate for the rights of drug users, following the lead of older European drug user organizations. Their goals are often varied, but carry a common refrain: to represent the political interests — and practical needs — of chronic drug abusers, a sometimes grim agenda that includes everything from providing clean needles to finding safe places to nod out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/us/drug-users-union-in-san-francisco-seeks-voice-in-policy.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120312

[Warpy]

1. I moved to Boston in the late 60s from Dogpatch

and I was green as grass to a lot of gritty urban realities. I landed in a neighborhood that was all students and drug addicts. Since I didn't want to be a victim, I befriended the addicts. It worked, too, although it was embarrassing living in the only apartment in the building that hadn't been broken into.

I really wish someone would stand up for them. Ending the drug war would give them clean and predictable drugs at a price they could pay while working. The experience in the UK of a pilot program that gave hard core users their drug of choice at a steady dose dropped street crime by 80%. And ten years later, half the users had tapered themselves off, leading me to think that illegality itself feeds addiction in some way.

These people are not subhuman, far from it. Criminalizing them is not working, has not worked, will not work. Likely they'd be invisible in the larger population were drugs not criminalized, as they were before the first anti drug laws were passed a century ago.

[saras]

2. They sure demonstrate the problems with grouping "drugs" and "drug users" together

Their values and attitudes have little or nothing to do with the large majority of drug users I've encountered in my life - legal or illegal - except in the eighties, when the hipster/fratboy/cocaine thing was at its peak.

I read about these folks - fourteen-year-old multiple drug abusers, seekers after the "high" - but I haven't, at any point in my life, spent much time with them. Shulgin's friends make sense to me as drug users. These folks don't - I just don't get it - and it's hard to see much commonality in their interests in making drugs more available.

Much as I support everything they're trying to do, I'm half tempted to oppose them just because the concatenation of "drug users" and this particular subculture would be so damaging to the long-term goal of making more helpful drugs available to people who don't have issues managing their drug use.

No concept of "drug user" that does NOT include users of Adderall and caffeine is going to be of much intellectual use to America.

What was originally meant by "turning on, tuning in and dropping out" is what most DUers have already done. "Turn on": become aware of the fact that our society is built on lies (one good trip will show you this intimately, but it's not the only way) "Tune in": start getting your information from the real world as you abandon the social illusion (this was originally referring to the fantastical delusions of fifties consumerism) and "drop out": stop supporting that world and start directing your energies to supporting a functioning community around yourself.

So not only does this group not speak for me or mine, their very structure is a validation of right-wing myths about drug use.