Surviving Fentanyl:
Resisting Racialized Drug Profiling.
Harm Reduction Coalition creates spaces for dialogue and action that help heal the harms caused by racialized drug policies.
Harm Reduction Coalition recently adopted the above “North Star” statement as a way of framing our work. I have been thinking a lot about the statement and how I understand it. There are a few important components. First, it is a statement of action: we create space, we want dialogue, we want action. Second, it acknowledges our desire for healing — as individuals, as a community, a global network of people who people who use drugs, those affected by the drug war, and their allies and loved ones. Third, it explicitly acknowledges that US drug policy is and has always been racist.
Let me repeat: the drug war is racist. Read Michelle Alexander. Watch 13th. Everyone should know this already. If you don’t know it, please learn it. We cannot proceed as harm reductionists without this lens on the work that we do, without having it inform each and every conversation we have about the harms caused by the drug war.
So why am I writing this today? This is my first attempt at putting pen to paper in an effort to call out grossly negligent reporting, and to reclaim the narrative from the mouths of the DEA and the mainstream media. Part of my commitment to addressing the “opioid epidemic” is to be more outspoken about bad media and to craft my responses through the lens of our North Star statement. As harm reductionists, we need to do better at holding the media as accountable as we hold police and politicians.
I woke up this morning to my friends and colleagues from Massachusetts posting an article from the Boston Globe that screamed from the page: “N.E. fentanyl deaths: ‘like no other epidemic’. The article focused on the DEA’s concern about the toll that fentanyl is taking on New England states. I read it, wondering what the DEA had to say about the public health crisis, the human crisis, the unimaginable and constant wave of death that is devastating my home.
What I learned is that law enforcement organizations need more money and that menacing foreigners are poisoning the good people of New England. Interesting. Classic racialized drug war propaganda in the service of increasing dollars for law enforcement. No mention of the public health response or ANY evidence-based interventions that can reduce the death and destruction happening to our friends and family. No mention of the bad policy decisions and supply-side interventions that created this mess to begin with. Just the same old story of brown people from Mexico and the Dominican Republic flooding the market with fentanyl to kill the unsuspecting citizens of Massachusetts and New Hampshire (racialized subtext obvious: white citizens).
From the Boston Globe article (my emphasis):
“Fentanyl is manufactured death,” [DEA Special Agent] Ferguson said. “Whatever can be likened to a weapon of mass destruction and the effect it has on people, it’s fentanyl.”
“The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels are chiefly responsible for the region’s fentanyl trade,” said Ferguson. “They typically procure fentanyl or its chemical components from China, process it in Mexico into powder and pills, and ship the synthetic product to local distributors.
The result is menacing — a metastasizing foreign-organized drug trade that is fueling a deadly crisis of addiction and stretching law enforcement to its limits.
“The introduction of fentanyl has changed the way we do business,” Ferguson said during the interview at the agency’s Boston headquarters. “It’s like no other epidemic that I’ve come across in my 27 years at DEA.”
In Lawrence, a major gateway for the fentanyl that reaches New Hampshire and Maine, distribution is handled primarily by Dominicans — many in the country illegally — who have established a working relationship with the cartels, Ferguson said.
The distribution network often resembles a family business, law enforcement officials said. Many of the middle-men and dealers are related, while others are recruited by acquaintances. Much of the profit is sent back to the Dominican Republic or other foreign countries, where the money often is used to buy beachfront villas and hillside estates, Ferguson said.
This is the language of war. This is the assembling of the pieces in a board game. It’s brilliant and obvious and cruel, really.
Villains: Mexicans, Chinese, Dominicans (read: “illegal aliens”).
Weapon of Mass Destruction: Fentanyl.
Victims: New Englanders (read: white).
So how do you fight a war? You equip your military with more and better resources, in this case, the DEA. You create fear and desperation and you position yourself as the solution. It’s a great article really — kudos to the Globe reporter and the DEA guy for a well-crafted, racist, fear-mongering call for more money and while you’re at it, tighter immigration laws. 45 will love that. He was just quoted yesterday saying this about gangs:
“And you’ve seen the stories about some of these animals. They don’t want to use guns because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die.”
Not even going to honor that with any additional commentary.
So what do I want instead of this kind of story? Believe me, I’m certainly not saying that fentanyl is no big deal. Farthest thing from it. I currently live and work in the Bay Area of California, but I’m a New England native and my family is still back there and it is my home. I worked in harm reduction for almost a decade in Cambridge, Massachusetts running a drop-in center and syringe exchange program, and the small town I grew up in has been struggling with heroin use since the 1980s. I’ve lost a lot of friends. I get word that the participants of my program where I worked and loved for many years are dying every week. The devastation of drug use in New England is certainly not new, but the escalation of use and death that that region is experiencing now is of epic proportions. I talk to my sister who runs a drop-in center in Lynn, Massachusetts and other friends working in Boston and Cambridge and Western Massachusetts and the reports of deaths are constant, the loss is overwhelming and it is traumatizing for people who use drugs, people who love people who use drugs and those who have dedicated their lives to providing non-judgmental services to people with the hope that they will not only survive, but thrive and find freedom from harm however that looks for them.
So I suppose that all I am saying in my relatively unsophisticated critique (hey I’m not a blogger or a journalist or a researcher or a writer) is that we need to be louder. We need to drown out this fear-mongering nonsense about “foreigners” being responsible for all the opioid deaths in this country. We need to talk about how people are SURVIVING fentanyl (because they are), how they’re learning to be safer, how they’re adapting to such a dangerous drug environment that doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. We need to make sure that every single person who uses drugs has naloxone — that they have a pile of it actually. That they have access to voluntary, evidence-based, and humane drug treatment. That they have access to clean supplies and a clean, safe environment to use in. That they have access to health care and shelter and god forbid, a home. That they are treated with dignity. That we are critiquing and working to dismantle our racialized drug policies and working to end mass incarceration every day. We need to have stories from the perspective of people who use drugs and their allies. We need to value science and evidence and what is real, effective, pragmatic and humane. We do not need more law enforcement and they don’t need more money. This is not the fault of menacing brown people who have flooded unsuspecting communities of nice white people with drugs. Get your shit together people.
Happy Friday.