#vandu

I'm planning to start a solo TTRPG Star Wars campaign in the near future, so I'm brainstorming some NPCs! I created most of them specifically for this game, but I also decided to add a couple of my old SW characters because I want to use them for *something*.

"Se acostumbraron a subestirmarlo ...

Y él se acostumbró a sorprenderlos" 🎭

Critics of mandatory drug addiction treatment-- e.g. critics of the US drug court movement-- *rarely* engage with the extensive literature created by critics of psychiatric coercive institutionalization, e.g. disability rights scholars, mad pride advocates, and neurodiversity advocates. (Yet their central political projects are extremely similar and fundamentally overlap!)

Neither the critics of mandatory addiction treatment, nor the critics of coercive psychiatric institutionalization, ever much engage with the *extensive* and *elaborate* political philosophy literature on (legal and/or medical) paternalism vs. anti-paternalism, (over-)criminalization, political legitimacy, etc. (Yet the latter fields have made countless key clarifications and arguments that are clearly extremely important for the goals of these critics of coercion!)

The sociologists in critical addiction studies and adjacent fields rarely ever engage with the analytic philosophers of addiction, nor philosophers of medicine, nor philosophers of autonomy (nor free will, nor psychology, nor mind, nor practical rationality), etc. (This is only *barely* beginning to change a little bit, e.g. with the release of the interdisciplinary "Routledge Handbook of Science and Philosophy of Addiction" a couple years ago, and an interdisciplinary UK conference last year.)

And almost *none* of these groups (with the semi-exception of some sociologists) *ever* engage with the literature of drug user self-advocates, such as the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) or the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). (Even the "Routledge Handbook" ignores them!)

[Vince] Tao cautioned that while policy may change at the “top level,” how it actually rolls out and impacts people who use drugs remains to be seen. That’s why VANDU and others will be keeping tabs—particularly on the actions of BC police under the new regime.

I’m a little late in sharing this one, as it came out last Thursday, but this is a fantastic discussion with Garth Mullins, a long-time activist with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) and the BC Association of People on Methadone.

"Now there was a pair of porta-potties there and a VANDU member stationed to keep them safe and clean. From that vantage point, the need for a needle exchange was so obvious and so dire that Livingston just went ahead and set one up.

“You called them poison parties,” she recalls. “You would see someone handing a needle they had just used to someone else to use it. So I thought we had to have [clean] needles. If you’re going to see that much public drug use and you’re going to see someone hand someone else a needle, you can intervene and say, ‘We have some needles here.’”

So on the corner of Main and Hastings, right outside the Carnegie Community Centre’s front door, out in the open and obvious for everybody to see, VANDU and PHS [Portland Hotel Society] set up a table, pitched a small tent over it, and opened a needle exchange.

“The VPD came and smashed the table and broke up the tent,” says Townsend.

A game of cat and mouse ensued. The needle exchange was busiest at night, and so each evening, around ten, Vancouver police officers parked a pair of squad cars on the corner outside Carnegie and left them there for a few hours. With police vehicles stationed directly beside the VANDU table, drug users refused to stop there for clean needles.

Townsend watched this from the Washington Hotel, directly across the street from Carnegie. Each evening, he created a distraction, the cops left, and then, from the Washington, a team grabbed the table, tent, and a large bag of clean needles, and rushed across the street to set it all up.

“We’d call the police and tell them that people were unbolting the mufflers of all their cars that were parked outside the Carnegie,” Townsend recounts. “So they would run back and move them. And then, when they moved them, we put the tent up.”

The cops wouldn’t bother with this hassle every night, so once the table was up, they often left it alone. The trick was to take the corner. “It was a weird battle for space,” Townsend says. “This police sergeant said he was going to break the table over his knee if it was put up again. So late at night, in the evening, there was a mini battle between us and this sergeant over who was in control of the area.” The war of attrition eventually wore the police force down. “We just kept on putting [the table] there,” Townsend says.