One huge band, many songs
“New drugs, old drugs — it’s still rock & roll” ♥ There are more things that bind us than separate us
By Leah McLeod (Users News Editor)
Around the office, the User’s News team has been singing a very bad Billy Joel song. It goes: “Everybody’s talking about the new sound, honey, but it’s still rock & roll to me”.
When I was a teen, I was outraged to hear this easy listening popster daring to claim the punk and new wave of my rebellion as part of one big genre — rock & roll. How dare he not understand how far we had come from those who had gone before us! As far as I was concerned, punk was closer to free jazz (another love of mine) than rock & roll! The older I get, the less I care about labels and the more I get the spirit of “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.
Our version of this awful earworm is, of course, “New drugs, old drugs — it’s still rock & roll”. Now I’m the oldie, trying to bring together different generations of people under one umbrella. This is our attempt to lose the labels that divide us and rejoice as one big community of people who use drugs. When I first became involved with NUAA, we were still entrenched in our roots — people who injected mainly opioids — and a fair bit of coke. We had used the usual on the way — amphetamines, acid, mushies, and many of us smoked cannabis, but our core identity was tied up in the daily injecting of opioids.
It’s important to remember the context of this. NUAA started during the fight against HIV/AIDS. Coming together as a community was about survival — which meant making sterile equipment available. We also began focusing on reducing other risks, like overdose, dirty hits and abscesses. Injecting drug users were also top of the list for getting hep C and we further tightened up the way we used to avoid a life of exhaustion and possible painful death. During those times, harm reduction mostly meant the Needle and Syringe Program and the Opioid Treatment Program.
But the world moves on. Drugs changed. Our community developed and grew. With the heroin drought in 2000, many people added ice and pharmies to their usual repertoire of heroin and cannabis. We began to think of ourselves as poly drug users, moving across a range of drugs and a spread of experiences.
We also knew we had to embrace younger users, to keep the drug user movement charged up. They were doing different drugs, including new synthetics, in different ways. NUAA began to embrace a wider community of people who use all sorts of drugs, taken all sorts of ways, for all sorts of reasons. Many tribes under one banner. I backed the NUAA position that people who use drugs were an assorted lot, just like the broader population we come from. We insisted that not all drug use led to ‘problem use’ and that anyone who used an illicit drug, however infrequently, was part of the one community. It was our view that there were as many reasons for using drugs as there were people who did them. If you’ll forgive me for quoting one of the most trite singers of the 20th century, it’s all, you know, rock & roll.
And I meant it — and still do. But for a time, very secretly, as a daily opioid user in love with the needle, I kept the smug opinion that anyone who didn’t inject or didn’t use a substance on a daily basis was a dilettante — a potterer, a dabbler, a try-hard, an outsider.
I’m ashamed I ever thought this way. This kind of thinking is no different from the stigma and discrimination we accuse non-users of who do not understand us and fear us. I now firmly believe that every time we judge another’s behaviour — whether it’s to think that someone is not ‘enough of a user’ or to think that someone else’s behaviour is deviant (“at least I don’t inject”; “at least I don’t shoot my methadone”; “at least I didn’t use when I was pregnant”) — we are playing into the hands of prohibitionists who think we are all scum who belong in jail.
What changed for me? For sure, making the NUAA magazines exposed me to a lot of different stories, viewpoints and angles. But it has really been the growth of the DanceWize NSW program at NUAA which has pushed me to embrace inclusion.
DanceWize NSW supports mostly young people who combine drugs and music at festivals. I was exposed to a wonderful group of people younger than me, who embraced their drug use in unfamiliar ways. At first, the DanceWize NSW program ran in parallel with the rest of NUAA, not quite intersecting. But then things changed – at least for me. As I worked more closely with my DanceWize colleagues and volunteers, I stopped seeing the differences.
I realised that people who use drugs belong together, as one community — that there are more things that bind us than separate us. We are united by the attitudes of people who think all drug users are freaks — at worst evil, at best weak. By the shame spiral we fall into when we are told we are defective, problems to be fixed, disappointments. By the drug laws that see us getting ‘correction’ and separating us from success, power, safety and self-worth for the crime of taking drugs. By the media’s use of illustrations that stereotype us as fucked-up, dirty people in dark alleys, unhealthy, abandoned and heartsick. By the limitations others place on us.
We are also bound by wonderful things. Like our desire to bring fun and wonder to the exploration, expansion and experience of our worlds. By our energy as we support each other with equipment, information, friendship, a helping hand. By our amazing resilience as we continue to survive and thrive through the dangers thrown up by the illicit nature of our use. By our belief that we do not need to be abstinent to be dazzling and captivating people. By the way we continue to contribute to our society and grow as individuals despite being heaped upon with injustice and humiliation. And by how we find ways to be loving partners, motivated employees, caring parents, staunch friends, faithful sons and daughters, visionary artists, actors and musicians and much more.
Time changes. Drugs change. Laws change. But whatever our fancy — ‘new’ drugs or ‘old’ drugs or a bit of both — snorting, injecting, smoking, eating or shafting — it is time we joined together as one community of peers that stands tall as we support each other. The older people nurturing and mentoring the younger ones. The young revitalising the movement of people who use drugs. Both are represented in this issue of UN, proudly telling their stories to improve the health, dignity and human rights of other people who use drugs. So hear us roar in numbers too big to ignore as we rock hard, together as we should be. One huge band. Many songs.
