Andria E-Mordaunt Woman of substance
After witnessing a horrific act of violence on Camden High Street
in 2004, and being maintained on an opiate painkiller for a congenital spinal
condition, I began doing outreach with injecting (and other) drug users on
the streets. These were mainly African-Caribbean, homeless and often poly-drug-users.
A year later, I was walking home one summer evening when a guy asked me for
money and cigarettes. I was tired and just wanted to go to bed, so I said,
“sorry, no” to both requests and attempted to walk on by.
Then he asked: “Well, do you have any filters then?” Filters are
used to draw drug solutions into the syringe without the impurities so often
present in street drugs.
I was so shocked by the question I turned round and snapped: “How d’you
know I’m not the friggin’ drug squad?” Sheepishly, he replied,
“I just know you’re not...”
Then we began a long conversation about using needles, Aids, hepatitis and
more. “We don’t care anymore; most people ‘out here’
don’t care whether they share works or not,” he said.
“I just don’t believe that!” I replied. “How can you
not care if you get a potentially fatal infection?” This man was around
25, working-class, pale-faced but not underweight, so I assumed he may not
have been ‘out there’ for too long.
I just want to ensure street injectors can regularly get clean needles, never
share them and get a legal supply of the drug of their addiction. The problem
with street work is maintaining connections with people when cops are constantly
moving them on.
I
continued: “I don’t believe you don’t care about sharing
needles; maybe you are just finding them hard to get hold of. Do you know
pharmacies that sell them. Aren’t the local outreach teams giving you
clean works?”
“What’s an outreach team?” he asked.
When I asked him how long he had been on the streets, he responded, long enough
to know that there was never an outreach team around at this time in the evening.
Understandably, the people who work in drug projects want a life at the end
of the day. Opening shop between 10am and 8pm is the norm, though there are
a small number of outlets in this huge city that sell works when people are
more likely to be buying and shooting dope.
I told him about the thousands of people just like him all over the world
who had decided to spend their lives, preventing other injecting drug users
from getting blood borne diseases and that seemed more engaging to him...
“Well, have you got any drugs you can give me then?” he asked.
“Depends what drugs you mean. Coffee? Codeine? And in case you are not
aware, most of the drugs ‘we’ like are controlled drugs so under
the law if we buy or sell (or give) them to one another, we are breaking the
law.” Not that I really gave a damn about that, but I needed to know
whether he was an undercover cop. Ach! Street outreach in the early days of
the 21st century.
That was a year ago. A few weeks later, I read that Camden Town had the highest
number of street drug users in inner London, but the smallest number of treatment
slots. In 2004, I’d offered to address a small meeting in Camden organised
by the Drug Action Team trying to get support for a Safer Injection Room (SIR).
I was told that wouldn’t be necessary. Later, when I asked why the SIR
had not been set up, I was told the key worker pushing for it had moved to
another job, and that it had been put on the back-burner. In fact, London
has never had an official SIR funded by public money or sanctioned by the
government, though their provision was recommended by the home affairs select
committee in 2003.
To date, in Camden, the criminal justice parts of drug work have won the day,
while people are often seen shooting up and/or piping crack and/or heroin
on doorsteps.
Where have all the outreach workers gone?
