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Join the UK Harm Reduction Alliance UKHRA is a membership organisation; the constitution requires members to
The life of a drug user activist is extremely wearing. I've been a methadone maintenance patient since 1975, and have felt the need for an organization that represented our interests since attending a clinic appointment one day, only to find that a new doctor had taken over, and was slashing everyone's dose to a maximum of 20mg a day. There was no tapering involved, and it didn't matter what dose you were on. People were being reduced from as much as 120mg a day, to 20mg a day - effective immediately - and if you didn't like it, you could get your treatment elsewhere. Of course, there was no elsewhere. And so when I went back to school a few years later, I began to equip myself with the skills that I felt I needed to become an effective user activist and advocate. And so after I completed my post-graduate studies in 1986, I started working in drugs research and founded the Mersey User Group. I'd been inspired by the Dutch junkiebond, and by the patients of Dr. Ann Dally, a private psychiatrist on Harley Street who had been suspended by the GMC leaving her patients high and dry. These patients had banded together with the aim of establishing their own clinic - a goal they sadly never managed to achieve, but an inspirational project nonetheless. (Anyone who thought that the field had moved on since the mid-eighties will have been disappointed to see the same sort of situation coming around again with a recent spate of GMC actions against private doctors that left many patients in the lurch yet again. If there's one thing I've learned about the drugs field over the last quarter century, it is that if you wait long enough, everything will come back into fashion eventually.) And so along with a small number of comrades, we struggled to build the foundations of a drug user self-organization movement in the UK, long before it was fashionable, during a period when most people working in the field thought it a ridiculous idea. By the mid-nineties, I'd had just about as much as I could take of the drugs field and began to look for work elsewhere. With a partner, I started a technology company, providing networking solutions to local businesses and I believed I'd left the drugs field behind completely. Unfortunately though, I began to grow concerned about the banal stupidity of the New Labour government's statements on drug policy. The agenda was shifting away from the public health-based perspective that we'd struggled so hard to establish during the last half of the eighties - a policy supported by Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative governments - to a new policy based upon abstinence and crime control measures. As a result, when Gerry Stimson published his article 'Blair declares war: the unhealthy state of British Drug policy' in the International Journal on Drug Policy, I couldn't help but be concerned. And when he announced a meeting to seek a strategy to respond to these changes in Manchester last year, I couldn't stop myself from going along. I hadn't intended getting involved with the drugs field again. It was actually the last thing that I wanted. But sometimes, you just don't have any choice. I was energized by the degree of commitment that I found at that meeting. Over 200 people had attended, and almost all of them were passionate about the need to halt the direction that British drug policy was taking. Consequently, when people were volunteering their services in various capacities, I offered my computing skills, offering to design a website and establish mailing lists that would allow all those who were interested to maintain contact. As a consequence of this work, I found my way onto the Executive of what was to become the UK Harm Reduction Alliance. This wasn't something that I'd wanted to take on particularly, but as I was administering the mailing list for those who were at the core of building the organization, I couldn't help but be party to their discussions, and as those who know me will happily attest, I'm an opinionated so-and-so, and so I couldn't help but make my feelings made on most issues being discussed. Which is not to say that I didn't have reservations about my involvement in this particular project. Today, there is a wide range of user self-organizations, all of which need people with skills, insight and experience of treatment services in order to build those projects up. I spent a fair amount of time agonizing over whether my time might not be more profitably spent devoting my energies to those projects instead. However, the UKHRA managed to retain my involvement because of the degree to which it has displayed a genuine commitment to being an organization that is made up of clinicians, researchers and service users working together as equal partners in an attempt to ensure that British Drug Policy is based upon Harm Reduction principles. US journalist Laurie Garrett has won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the global disaster presented by HIV and AIDS, but during her researches she came to the conclusion that the solution to this problem did not lie in advances in medical technology, but rather in a return to basic public health measures. In her latest book, 'Betrayal of Trust', she describes what she sees as a collapse of public health programmes in countries across the world. The UK has been able to avert the disasterous levels of HIV and AIDS among injecting drug users precisely because of our adoption of a programme of Harm Reduction based on simple public health principles: ie, giving people the motive to change their behaviour, via information and education, and then giving the means to implement that change through the expansion of opiate agonist maintenance treatment and needle exchange programmes. Somebody had to stand up and resist that tendency, and the UK Harm Reduction Alliance stepped into the breach. Recent events and announcements by the Home Secretary may mean that the New Labour government is finally getting a clue about what constitutes and effective and meaningful drug policy. I'd like to think that by providing a focus for the broad array of dissent from researchers, practitioners and users, the UK Harm Reduction Alliance has actually played an important role in that policy u-turn. Unlike much of my earlier activism then, I feel that our collective involvement in the UKHRA has led to a significant accomplishment, and I look forward to further such accomplishments as a consequence of our campaigns in the future. For more information on the activities of the UK Harm Reduction Alliance, our discussion lists or membership of the Alliance, we have a website at: http://www.ukhra.org Peter McDermott,
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