Arika  Archive Menu
Accessibility Settings

text size

colour options

monochrome muted color dark

reading tools

isolation ruler
Colourful collage of drawings and photographs, showing support don’t punish messages and activists.

Gesturing to What is Possible: Drugs Users Supporting Each Other

Gesturing to What is Possible: Drugs Users Supporting Each Other

In 2020, Peter Krykant established the first grassroots mobile safer consumption site, reliant almost entirely on volunteer labour and providing as safe a venue as possible for Glasgow’s most precarised drug users. Aura Roig is the Director of Metzineres, a community hub founded in 2017 as the first integrated harm reduction programme by and for women and non-binary people who use drugs in Catalonia.

Drawing on these experiences, this wide-reaching conversation with Juan Fernández Ochoa will look at mutual aid practices based on the lived and living experiences of people who use drugs. Challenging the idea that all we can do to respond to structural violence and neglect is ask the state for services, this conversation will instead contemplate what kinds of [systemic] change are made possible when we prioritise people supporting each other.

Aura Roig Forteza is an international advisor on harm reduction, human rights and gender. She is the founding director of Metzineres: Providing Shelter for Womxn Who Use Drugs Surviving Violence, the first harm reduction program only for women and non-binary gender people in Spain.

Juan Fernández Ochoa works with the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) as the global coordinator of the Support Don’t Punish campaign, a decentralised initiative promoting mobilisation to end the “war on drugs” and build sustainable alternatives. Juan believes in full-spectrum harm reduction and collaborates with Abolitionist Futures

Peter Krykant is Project Lead with the charity Cranstoun leading on new and innovative ways to create system change through implementation of evidence based harm reduction practice. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Release Drugs. Peter brings his own personal experience of public injecting drug use and criminalisation to his work and activism, he opened the first (unsanctioned) drug consumption room in the UK which operated from a decommissioned ambulance in Glasgow at the height of Scotland’s drug death crisis and Glasgow’s HIV outbreak.  He works closely with a range of leading academics, politicians and organisations like Transform Drug Policy Foundation, Leap UK and Drug Science to help shape and outline key practical measures to tackle in particular Scotland’s drug death crisis.

Documentation

1 video

Access

Audio Description

Audio Description is when visual information is described by someone speaking. Sometimes this is provided by a specialist audio describer and sometimes speakers will self-describe for the benefit of anyone unable to see them. Each event may have a slightly different version of Audio Description: For some events, an audio describer will be assigned to a person who cannot see the event, and will provide 1-1 audio description for them. Sometimes this might be done via a head-set during in person events, or via a separate audio channel during online events. Other times, audio describers will verbally communicate to everyone attending.   more

BSL

The live spoken elements of this event will have live British Sign Language interpretation; the simultaneously interpretation of spoken English into signed language and vice-versa as required.   more

Live Captions

This event will have Live Captions; a verbatim transcription of dialogue into text as it is spoken live. In-person, the text will appear on a screen beside or behind the speaker. Online, the live captions will appear along the bottom of the screen. The captioner for Episode 11 is Andrew Howells. more

See general Access information for Mutual Aid event

?
This site uses cookies for analytics. See our Privacy Policy for more. OK Opt out
×