Know your local podcaster

garth mullins is fighting the drug war with the Crackdown podcast

> WHAT DO YOU DO?

I’m Garth Mullins, an organizer with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users [VANDU]. I make a podcast called Crackdown, and I’m a musician.

> HOW DID CRACKDOWN BEGIN?

I’m an old-school dopey and I used heroin for a really long time. I’ve been on mostly methadone recently. But it means I’ve experienced two officially declared overdose crises—one in the ’90s and the one now. A year or two into this one, I was working with a lot of people at the VANDUand we just didn’t like how the media was representing our struggle, talking about the drug war, and representing us.

I’d been getting a little bit of skills in radio documentary making. I’ve also been playing in punk bands forever, so you learn a little bit about the recording process and the mixing process and all that, because you have to do it all yourself. So I thought this could be a good contribution and we started making the podcast five years ago.

Crackdown is the drug war covered by drug users as war correspondents. We try to cover it from the movement’s perspective. There’s a social movement of people who use drugs who are fighting for our rights to be decriminalized and not die. And we’re sort of trying to produce radio storytelling documentaries that go issue by issue through the drug war and explain to people what it’s like on the inside.

We’re irregular, posting like once every six weeks. We don’t have a day or an hour when it comes out. But we make audio documentaries, right? A lot of podcasts are just people talking or interviewing. We take you on a little journey, so it takes a lot more work. We also have an editorial board, so we have a democratic activist process behind the podcast that’s involved in all of that. So, it’s a little bit slower to make. It’s slow radio, but it’s worth it.

> HOW’S THE RESPONSE BEEN?

I played in lots of little bands, so I’m used to playing to rooms with 12 people in it, and they’re the people in the other bands. So I was prepared for it to be like that, you know—[that] nobody would care or only people who were involved in making it. Or maybe [people] making other podcasts might care.

But we went right to the top of Apple’s Canadian podcasts. We won some pretty prestigious awards—the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize for Investigative Journalism, the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s Impact award, and the New York International Festivals Radio Award. We did pretty good.

I was frankly shocked, you know, when we picked up thousands and thousands of listeners all over the country—and the world. We hear from office holders. Ministers of the Crown listen to us. And we hear from them. But most importantly, people who are drug users, who are isolated out there in the world—they don’t have any organization to go to or anyone they can talk to—they listen in and they write back.

> WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT THE CRISIS THROUGH DOING THIS THAT YOU MAYBE WOULDN’T HAVE LEARNED OTHERWISE?

What I realized is something that I’ve known as an organizer, but it’s really come home for me, is that it’s not that the government is missing some information, or they just need the right study, or the right person hasn’t been at the right meeting. It’s not like that. They know exactly, in detail, how many of us are going to die in the next fiscal quarter or whatever. They have models that predict it and they know that more people will die if they don’t do something. And they mostly choose to do nothing. I’m sometimes facing people sitting across the table from us who do not care if we live or die. So that’s been reinforced to me.

Then, in the last couple years, there’s a whole bunch of people who are blaming addicts for all the world’s problems, saying things like, “Elect me for mayor, I’ll hire more cops and stamp out this issue,” you know? You get an up-close, granular view of the human condition, and I don’t mean us [drug users]. I mean the people on the other side of the drug war—the deep, deep cowardice. This sort of, I don’t know what you call it, necropolitics. You know that this city is just all the way back built on blood, to its founding, and you can never escape that.

> HAVE YOU SEEN THE WORK MAKE A POSITIVE IMPACT AT ALL?

I think we’ve changed a little bit of the journalism culture in Canada. Six, seven years ago, people used to talk about the drug war and drug users a lot differently. There were kind of two modes of storytelling. There was the “zombie scumbag criminal,” you know, that sort of right-wing way of describing us. And then there was this political centre, mushy liberal middle way. That was kind of like, “Oh these poor helpless waifs, they need to be saved.” They didn’t give us very much agency, so I think we’ve shown our agency and our ideas loud and clear. And I think that’s changed a little bit of the way that people talk about the drug war in Canadian journalism. GS

Crackdownpod.com | @garthmullins