Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet.
This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.
Release was founded in 1967, meaning we turn 60 next year 🎉
This funded PhD opportunity to study 6 decades of our history has just been announced, supervised by @tobyseddon.bsky.social and @alexmold.bsky.social
Take a look, share, and apply by 27th March!
bloomsbury.ac.uk/drugs-civil-...
Also I couldn't be more glad at the demonstration that threatening a Manchester suburb with the threat of drug decriminalisation is a fucking stupid political strategy for Labour.
Many families will know people who have had their lives destroyed by criminalisation.
So what?
(1) Interpersonal violence is an important drug-related harm that should be addressed by harm reduction programmes
(2) Interpersonal violence is an inevitable consequence of the War on Drugs: Harm reduction should aim to end that war and pursue peace.
Finally, alongside being displaced, other intersecting identities also exposed people to greater violence. This was true of women, migrants, racialised people and older people.
💣 ARMED GROUPS: Several people I spoke to had been forced to leave their homes by armed groups because they used drugs. They arrived in Bogotá without a social network other than the one provided by drug markets. That made them even more vulnerable to the all the other sources of violence.
🤝 PEERS: The structural conditions of scarcity, poverty and criminalisation make interactions between peers on the street fraught with danger. Small disputes (e.g. literally over a broken match) can escalate quickly to serious violence.
🦹♂️ CRIMINAL GROUPS: When one group ‘controls’ a drug market, they violently enforce their own rules. When there is competition, navigating the drug market becomes delicate and dangerous, as groups use violence against customers prevent rivals from operating.
🚓 POLICE: Despite Colombia’s decriminalisation of personal drug use, people who smoke basuco and live on the street still face police violence. The risk of violent encounters with police pushes them into more hidden spaces, where they are more vulnerable to…
The violence was perpetrated against them by police (and so-called “vigilantes”), armed and criminal groups, as well as by peers in the community itself.
Among people I spoke to, interpersonal violence was often the very first thing they mentioned when I asked about harms related to using basuco.
Excited to share the first published paper from my PhD project - an ethnographic project studying drug-related harm among people who smoke cocaine (basuco) in Bogotá, Colombia. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mfcN3PEro...
Restore Britain will, without apology or fear, deport the third world orcs who break into our country, rape young women and then expect the British to tolerate their presence. There is finally a political party that will defend our home, our people, our shires. Restore Britain.
The UK parliament now has an MP who is openly racist and far right. This is, for the current era, new ground, and it will be interesting to see how - if at all – other MPs respond.
His MO has always been “The real problem with [Bad Thing] is the reaction to [Bad Thing]”. The effect is to shut down criticism and defend the status quo.
New PhD studentship opportunity! Research and write the history of Release, supervised by me and @alexmold.bsky.social! bloomsbury.ac.uk/drugs-civil-...
The question, though, is whether the harms become even greater for those that do 'evade' a ban, and how that changes the equation. Drug policy is one area where the evidence suggests the harms for those people (i.e. people who use illicit drugs) are vastly increased by prohibition.
If the issue we are facing now is polarisation then the solution is to be found in between fascism and anti-fascism, racism and anti-fascism, authoritarianism and democracy
Maybe then that's not the clever, reasonable argument some think it is...
Let's all just take a breath and remember that AI assistants are Dunning-Kruger Clippy.
On #WorldAIDSDay, remember that people are still catching HIV from sharing injecting equipment. And this can be prevented. #HarmReduction
On the morning of Keir Starmer's conference speech here's a new post on an odd psychopathology in British politics - our main parties don't like the people who vote for them - the dreaded Professional Managerial Class. And so they are acting out like a divorced dad seeking cooler voters. 1/n
www.bbc.com/news/article...
An estimated 13,000 opioid-related deaths have been left out of official drug deaths from 2013-2022 - 50% higher than previously known.
This means what was already dire numbers were actually worse than expected. But would things have been different with this info?
Call from Palestinian Scholars to boycott the European Society of Criminology #EuroCrim2025
Link below
Exactly this. Let’s not give the drug war yet another tool to mask the real problem.
More information on the L&SERWFL Trophy final between Clapton CFC Women's First Team and Dulwich Hamlet Reserves at Maidstone United today 🇵🇸✊
www.claptoncfc.co.uk/2025/05/25/c...
A nail biter! I’m sure you’ll be back on top next season 🏆
Also sceptical of this supposed 60% reduction in reoffending - surely the people who "volunteer" are those most motivated to reduce these behaviours anyway? Plus, is there not a risk that this drives people to find arousal in ever more extreme ways?
I'm not an expert in this by any stretch, but I am uncomfortable with 'do this or stay in prison' being presented as "voluntary".
www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
Nice one, congratulations!
🔎 Special Issue Alert 🔍
This Special Issue seeks to provide ways in which we can understand drug-related violence. Submission Deadline is September, 15th, 2025.
Link: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...
#InternationalDrugPolicy #DrugRelatedViolence
