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Harm Reduction and Organizing to Alter Paradigms & Perceptions

What If Drug Users Organized Like Unions?

A San Francisco coalition of drug users is out to change the way that people perceive them.

The name of the group was only meant to be a placeholder. Until the union’s rank-and-file could settle on a more permanent title, the organizers needed something to write on their grant applications and to give to community center staff when signing up for meeting space around the Tenderloin and the Mission. It was during one of those meetings in late 2009 that someone suggested San Francisco Drug Users’ Union. It wasn’t a name calculated to win the endorsement of a focus group, but then again, neither was the organization. 

Three years later, the name has stuck.

“It really says what we’re about unequivocally,” says Isaac Jackson, senior peer organizer and co-founder of San Francisco’s first drug user group. They could have gone with a more politically palatable designation, but the group wasn’t founded to be politically palatable, he says. The name is unapologetically self-descriptive because drug users shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. “Drug use in and of itself is not a negative. Having the name we have kind of ensures that the people who join are comfortable with their identity.”

Even in San Francisco, a city considered to be at the forefront of progressive (or, alternatively, permissive) drug policy in this country, the idea that drug use merits a union ― and not a stint in rehab or a prison sentence — is one that still raises eyebrows. But following in the tradition of other North American user groups which have sprouted up in cities like Vancouver, New York, and nearby Oakland, SFDUU members aren’t just interested in making drug laws less punitive, they want to change the way that people see users. As a philosophy, theirs is strikingly straightforward: people who use drugs are citizens too.

When the union finally moved into its permanent digs after spending its first year roving from community center to clinic to office space around the city, the landlord was happy to have them. With a rescue mission, an SRO and a windowless beer hall all within throwing distance of the space’s iron-gated entrance on Turk Street, it was the union’s willingness to sign a five-year lease and pay for new wooden flooring that most appealed to the owner of the railroad office suite.

The group’s charter and membership roster were of less concern to the neighborhood at large as well. In an area of the city long associated with poverty, substandard housing, homelessness, and crime, the sudden appearance of a scruffy union with a strange name was met by the surrounding tenants with shoulder-shrugging equanimity.

“We’re just a group of self-contained adults holding meetings,” Isaac says matter-of-factly. While a few local dealers dropped in at the first meet-ups, none have returned since, evidently satisfied that the union was neither a “narc group” nor a source of competition. Since then, says Jackson, there have been no complaints. “We’re good neighbors,” he says.

The union may not sound like a “typical” crowd of drug users, but as Jackson argues, there’s no such thing. Case in point: Isaac Jackson, Ph.D. Bespectacled, soft-spoken and sporting a bushy beard of more pepper than salt, 56-year-old Jackson looks more absent-minded professor than meth addict.

Asked about his early life, he describes none of the predictably tragic rites of passage one expects from a regular user. Growing up in New York City, he did not spend his childhood surrounded by addiction. As a teenager, he didn’t fall in with the wrong crowd. In his late-20s, he received his masters degree from a private college in Manhattan and in 1992, he was awarded a doctorate from MIT’s Media Lab. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-30s, freshly transplanted to San Francisco, that he first sampled what has since become his drug of choice.

Jackson says he doesn’t like to talk about his educational background. “People” -- and by people, he certainly means reporters -- “always want to talk about how I went to MIT,” he says. But while a Ph.D. with a crank habit might strike some as a novelty, he says his current place in life owes more to his work with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Jackson went to work with the organization after losing his high-paying tech job in the dot-com crash, falling into a prolonged depression and quickly letting his self-medication slip “out of control.” After a few run-ins with SFAF outreach workers, Jackson scored himself a job passing out syringes, condoms and racy but informational zines targeting gay speed users. It was during those years that Jackson taught himself to use “responsibly” — to set schedules for himself and to put certain obligations over the pressing desire to get high.

It was also during this period that he became versed in the philosophy of harm reduction.

Coined in the 1980s by British public health specialists working to control the spread of HIV/AIDS among intravenous drug users, the term “harm reduction” has since become shorthand for any policy that puts the welfare of someone who engages in victimless illegal behavior over the need to penalize that behavior. In drug policy, this might mean establishing needle exchanges or simply ensuring that users can access health and other social services.

But when Jackson started to seriously consider forming a users’ union in late 2007, it was with one considerably more radical initiative in mind.

That year, the San Francisco Public Health Department sponsored a symposium on supervised (or, safe) injection sites — facilities where intravenous drug users are invited to shoot up under the watch of medically trained staff. While such services have existed for decades in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, the symposium was largely inspired by the success story of Vancouver-based “Insite,” the first legal SIS to open in North America.

Looking at the available data, it’s hard to argue that Insite is anything but a success story. Since opening its doors in 2003, the project has been credited by dozens of studies with reducing needle sharing and the transmission of bloodborne disease, while acting as a one-stop-shop of other health, rehab and other social services, for an otherwise difficult-to-reach demographic. Maybe most importantly, of the nearly 500 overdoses that occurred at Insite during its first year of operation, thanks to the two trained nurses on staff, none resulted in death.

Jackson calls that symposium the union’s “catalyst moment.” Before attending the event, Jackson had watched a documentary about the role the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users had played in pushing their city’s government towards its uniquely progressive stance on drug policy. Now, with a specific goal in mind, Jackson turned a colleague, Ned Howey, who in turn recruited a local housing activist named Alexandra Goldman. In 2008, the three started holding meetings. The following year, the group applied to the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) for seed money.

Three grant cycles later, both Howey and Goldman have left their leadership roles, but Jackson is as determined as ever to achieve his “big goal.” This summer the union hosted a design exhibit, inviting a handful of California designers to create their own model sites, based on the preferences of union members.

To read the rest of this article, please click on this urlink.