Building a Global Movement

Building a Global Movement: Documenting Its Rich HistoryDr. Jay Levy, Deputy Director, INPUD

Establishing and building a drug user rights movement is a process undertaken in huge adversity: people who use drugs the world over are criminalised, stigmatised, and socially excluded. Human rights are endemically violated. People who use drugs experience discrimination, social exclusion, rejection, drug shaming, defamation, violence, and exclusion from service and healthcare provision.

In this context, forming networks and organisations that represent communities of people who use drugs faces almost inconceivable barriers; inconceivable but not insurmountable.

In 1981, the first drug user group was established in the Netherlands. Since then, networks of people who use drugs have sprung up all over the world, with the drug user human rights movement growing at an astounding rate, given the context in which people who use drugs must organise. The burgeoning movement has grown from strength to strength, has faced barrier after barrier, exclusion after exclusion. These networks and movements, coming together both informally and formally, representing people who use drugs in all their diversity, have come together not only to demand an end to violations of human rights, an end to stigmatisation and social exclusion, but fundamentally to ensure the inclusion of their voice, the meaningful involvement of communities of people who use drugs in fora that relate to them.

But we mustn’t forget that these networks came together both to advocate for the needs and rights of the communities they represent, and additionally and crucially to provide life-saving services required by their communities, notably the provision of sterile needles and syringes. The provision of these services from peer to peer is in this context of social exclusion, this context of huge gaps in service and healthcare provision for people who use drugs. Time after time, people who use drugs and their communities have had to fill gaps left by the societies in which they live.

The growth of the drug user rights movement has been imperative and considerable, and has come to be collectively represented by a global

network, the International Network of People who Use Drugs, INPUD, accountable to communities all over the world. The move to a regionally representative Board, with each seat elected by respective global regions and therefore accountable to the regional community, was in discussion for years, amongst INPUD individual members, staff members, and Board members; many thought that it would never be accomplished. Finally, it was voted on in the International Network of People who Use Drugs’ meeting in Malaysia, in 2015. This vote was momentous, and marked the beginning of INPUD’s new chapter as a network of networks. Though INPUD retained individual membership and platforms for communications of individual members, the organisation immediately grew through the membership of – and accountability to networks globally.

The achievements of the movement – from the grassroots, to national, international, and global levels – have been so important, and the work of drug user networks has resulted in the increasing empowerment of people who use drugs all over the world, and the movement is increasingly well placed to tackle emerging threats and dangers faced. These are not few and far between.

And yet in spite of all of these successes and achievements, little is known and documented for posterity with regard to the movement’s milestones, successes, and challenges. The good and the bad alike must be documented if we are to learn the lessons of the past, as we look into the future. That’s why for the first time we are embarking on an ambitious project to document how movements of people who use drugs form, how individuals and networks come together, and how the movement has been able to maintain and grow momentum, all in a context of criminalisation, marginalisation, and oppression. We are working with our friends at Rights Reporter Foundation, documenting the lived experience of people who have been involved in the drug user rights movement over the years – as well as making use of archival material. We’re well overdue to concretely document an incredible movement, such incredible people, journeys, and stories. And it’s a wonderful thing – and a wonderful, inspiring movement – to be a part of.