Harm Reduction in a Pandemic

Harm Reduction in a Pandemic--What We've Always Been Doing,

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But there’s another side to me. I believe in science. I believe in risk management. I believe in emergency preparedness. In fact, my husband and I were something like preppers for a while, without the conservative bullshit and class privilege the name implies. I use condoms with clients. Whenever I can, I have at least some savings stored up. I weigh out my molly so that I don’t use more than is safe for my brain at one time, and I wait patiently for three months so I can roll again--I like to avoid neurotoxicity and I want to keep the magic.

Wecertainlydidn'tinvent sexwork--riskisheretostay Photocredit:wikimedia

I have always been willing to take risks to feel alive. It’s a part of my identity. Way back when, I was a couchsurfer, staying on strangers’ couches all over Europe and welcoming large groups of people I’d just met at a pool in Palm Springs into my home. One year, I hosted seven handsome Austrians who took up the entire available floor space in my small SF apartment. My roommate baked them a cake covered in sprinkles.

When my husband asked for an open relationship, I was excited to have a new alternative identity to embrace. Later, in a triad with two lesbians, one of my favorite parts was going to the grocery store together, out and proud in public. When the pandemic began ramping up in the U.S., but before it presented a real threat to me and my community, I found myself very torn. I wanted to do the right thing, to protect the people around me. I knew the guilt would be enormous if someone died because of my irresponsibility. Formerly homeless, I had recently become secure in my housing situation and I wanted to leverage it: I realized that, from my newly privileged position, I would have the ability to make safety choices not everyone else would. I also am very used to not trusting scare tactics--DARE and the entire drug war have taught me that official government sources do not effectively communicate actual facts about risk. I don’t want to think of myself as the first person who slams the door shut to the world in the face of danger.

My last meal before California went into lockdown in March (a lockdown we never really fully came out of) was with a new friend and activist. She was visiting me to pick up these amazing “Sex Workers Rights are Human Rights” shirts I had been selling for her at conferences. She was so cool, and I really really wanted her to like me and my family. I was not cool. My anxiety was palpable. I’d had a cough from postnasal drip since September, and I was stressed out that she would be scared of catching something. Over dinner, which was delicious, I started to choke on a piece of food and had to step outside. I saw people down the street stare at me coughing and gasping for breath with looks of sheer terror. I came back inside, and confessed to my new friend that my obvious stress was from being torn between identities--the sex worker/couch surfer who would never be afraid to help a fellow human being choking on the street and the part of me who wanted to be smart about my safety and do what was right for my community. I didn’t know how to weigh the risks. She totally understood, but we reached no firm conclusions. I haven’t seen her in person since.

As the pandemic wore on, reality hit: Californians were not just supposed to flatten the curve but were actually charged with avoiding all people whenever possible for the next one to two years. I began to reconcile my identities, finding a groove that worked for me. I marched because Black Lives Matter, and I wore a mask. I hugged a beloved partnery person I hadn’t seen in months who met me there. I don’t regret it. She died of a blood clot three weeks later, and I will always be grateful that I got to hold her. I went to another friend’s outdoor funeral, and made the decision to eat inside with the family afterwards-another decision I don’t regret, as his beloved aunt snuck me some of his ashes so I could do my own ceremony for him. I saw my immunocompromised foster mother, but set up camp in her backyard and hung out with her by the pool instead of going inside. It seemed like nobody else’s public reaction meshed with my values. My foster mother and many others spoke of pandemic restrictions as a communist conspiracy against Christians. My hometown gained national attention for an outdoor maskless caroling protest against what my foster mother’s pastor referred to as “cowardice. ”

My liberal friends essentially engaged in a pissing contest, with the winner being whoever most completely isolated. Their mantra: wearing a mask is no big deal, and only selfish idiots refuse to wear them. I see them constantly insulting people who don’t “get it” across Facebook. They have no compassion, for example, for the panic attacks that wearing masks can bring on--as soon as I get far enough away from a grocery store, I have to rip off my mask and do deep breathing to calm down. I become a klutz--I lose body awareness as I fight to stay calm in my mask. I wear one anyway, whenever I go to the grocery store, but I recognize that the switch isn’t easy for many--and is not likely to happen when your pastor and your president are both telling you that masks are unAmerican.

Photocredit:NicoleReynolds,USUmember

I hugged a beloved 'partnery' person I hadn’t seen in months who met me there. I don’t regret it. She died of a blood clot three weeks later.

Despite my liberal friends arguing on Facebook that you need a mask any time you are outdoors, even if you are far away from people, I certainly am not about to wear a mask on an empty beach with my family. California closed the only accessible hiking trails near my house for no real reason, causing my disabled sugar daddy who relied on them for mental healthcare months of anguish. They weren’t making decisions based on actual risk factors. It seemed they were focused on the “look, ” and seeing people happy outdoors was a “bad look, ” even if it was a low-risk activity. And they didn’t care that much if their safety advice was completely impractical or impossible for the very people who are most at risk.

And, worse, the people loudest about the need to socially distance often turned out to be the most inconsistent. Gavin Newsom, the California governor who instituted some of the strictest social distancing requirements in the nation, got caught with his pants down, eating with multiple other households around the holidays indoors at French Laundry, one of the most expensive restaurants in California. It fueled hatred from people like my mother, and--combined with the hard line he had taken--caused more people to reject anything he had to say at all.

They kicked my deaf girlfriend Jackie and her autistic son onto the streets. They hired poor people to guard homeless encampments.

A third group of people enraged me the most. They just used the pandemic as an excuse to be assholes. They kicked my deaf girlfriend Jackie and her autistic son onto the streets because the son had to live at his father’s part time and they were worried about the risk. They hired poor people to guard homeless encampments in Santa Cruz with tasers and not let people out--true story! My sugar daddy’s girlfriend was hired there!

I noticed that my leftist, activist, and drug-using friends were in the same place as me. We didn’t feel included in the debate: we knew the risk was real, and we also knew that complete abstinence from human interaction ranged from being very impractical to constituting a death sentence. We are at risk from overdose when using alone, and we have always relied on each other to sustain ourselves when the entire world is against us. And financially, we often have very little say in our housing and survival situations. Some of us gave into conspiracy theories about COVID (“it’s all fake”), some of us doled out impractical advice (“homeless women should wash their hands with water after using hand sanitizer only twice”), and some of us tried to explicitly frame the conversation in terms of harm reduction, but more of us just continued the best we could, bending or making up the rules as we went along, fighting for each other and pulling each other up--as we always have whenever we are warned that something that we view as intrinsic to our survival is dangerous or deadly.

My household--my immunocompromised sugar daddy, my husband, and I--had to decide how to respond. Our first decision was to not be shitheads, and we made this commitment out loud to ourselves. We knew we couldn’t let the pandemic prevent us from housing Jackie and helping her son--even though it meant a higher risk. We also realized that telling her what to do with her body or life wouldn’t work, so we were opening ourselves up to having a household member who was not in step with our risk-taking norms.

We also decided to view risk as a budget, rather than take every piece of advice in a black-and-white way. When trying to drink less, you are more successful if you don’t view a single drink as a loss of everything you’ve fought for. That will only make you binge if you eventually slip up. It’s the same with everything. Having Jackie live with us--and not being controlling or assholish about her more libertine behavior--meant that we were using up some of our risk budget. ** Instead of throwing caution to the wind because hey, we were already somewhat exposed, we reduced harm by distancing in other ways. Jackie cut back on sex work voluntarily, and I kept my sugar daddy as my only inperson client, even though it meant much less financial independence. We reduced our trips to the grocery store, wore masks, and rarely ate out. We tried to exercise outside and find happiness in new ways.

We learned as we went along. I discovered I don’t feel joy from replicating everything via webinar. I declined an invitation to a zoom rave, deciding to focus on saving up for a wild EDM experience for me and my loves postpandemic. My husband gardened. When the liberals finally realized there was no good reason to close outdoor activities, my sugar daddy resumed swimming and walking, regaining much of the mobility and some of the mental health ground he had lost earlier in the pandemic.

Ana and I were rolling around on the sand, frolicking in the water, and generally forgetting that one of us could die. I don’t regret it.

Photocredit:Alex,thatveryday

I had planned a weeklong event at my childhood campground to spread my dad’s ashes. When it rolled around nine months later, we went despite the pandemic and the raging wildfires that had forced us to evacuate our home. We invited my sister and her boyfriend as well as my long-distance person Ana to visit us. We staggered our visitors, giving them their own tent. We were privileged--with my sugar daddy’s financial support, I was able to use a soccer-mom level of organization, which helps in any risky situation. We kept everything outdoors and I brought rolling papers to make joints for everyone, knowing ahead that we wouldn’t be able to puff puff pass. We set up a handwashing station and I regularly bleached the kitchen area. It worked fairly well with my sister. I made sure I was the only one who cooked and I kept my hands clean. It did not work with Ana. There was absolutely no way I was going to leave Ana to stand six feet away from our group as I hugged my husband, my sugar daddy, my girlfriend, and her son. All it took was a little molly and Ana and I were rolling around on the sand, frolicking in the water, and generally forgetting that one of us could die. I don’t regret it, but lesson learned--if I want to socially distance myself from a friend, they better bring someone to hang out with, because in no way am I going to ostracize someone I love.

I also learned that, like harm reduction with drugs, harm reduction with COVID means facing down peer pressure. I cannot count the times that I was asked to take off my mask or come inside someone’s home even when I tried to say no--even when I knew that person was on Facebook saying people who don’t distance deserve to die.

It reminded me of a time I had been getting ready to khole with my ex boyfriend and we only had two unused syringes. I needed a way to precisely measure out both the ketamine and, for later, some alcohol to eventually store some 4-AcO-DMT. I gave him a clean syringe and used the other for alcohol before I muscled the K. He couldn’t believe I was willing to put a needle into alcohol and then into my body but wasn’t willing to mess around with his used syringe--when we had two new syringes on hand! No matter how many times I explained that he was an organic being and the alcohol was, well, alcohol, I could see the rage and hurt on his face that I wouldn’t share his syringe. I slammed my head on the fake wood table, speechless, imprinting the ugly “wood” pattern into my memory. Standing on the street as my mother’s next door neighbor yelled at me for not dining inside at restaurants when there was perfectly good take out available, I pictured the table’s cheap veneer over and over.

Finally, I did activism that took advantage of the pandemic, much in the same way that shitty people tried to take advantage of it to harm us. With USU, I helped write a letter demanding methadone take homes so that people dependent on opioids didn’t have to go to dangerously crowded clinics daily or use supply increasingly poisoned with fentanyl. We organized sex workers to push back against dangerous legislation. My fellow organizers and I taught vulnerable people in our communities how to access pandemic assistance, getting Jackie and others back on their feet.

Drug users, whores, and poor people around the world have still never escaped the HIV, overdose, tuberculosis, or viral hepatitis epidemics.

And now, here we are, almost a year later. The pandemic is ongoing. And drug users, whores, and poor people around the world have still never escaped the HIV, overdose, tuberculosis, or viral hepatitis epidemics. Long after everyone important in the US is vaccinated, we will still be fighting these and probably COVID too. And we can’t just block ourselves off from humanity forever. We need each other, and we need harm reduction. But we can do our best to stay as safe as possible, to protect each other, and to choose our own limits.

*All names changed! **Although we viewed risk as a budget-like situation from the beginning of the pandemic, we found the language to describe our strategy as a “budget” from this NPR interview.