Monthly Archives: September 2021

2 Experimenting to the Future w/ Sheila Vakharia

Podcast Episodes

“Harm reduction is a dynamic response to a fundamentally hostile world … a strategy of resistance that at its best can build justice and is love.” – Karen Ward*

 

“Meet people where they’re at”, is easy to say but hard to do. It is the root of harm reduction, where our ability to imagine a better future comes from. But, what does that mean for treatment? Sheila Vakharia has witnessed first hand the punitive nature of our currently existing treatment. Now working to support the imaginings of an abolitionist social work, Dr. Sheila Vakharia, the Deputy Director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement for the Drug Policy Alliance, comes on the Drug Futurisms Podcast to explore another possible world where treatment does not resemble a prison, but a space of care.

 

Treatment like prison was a reform. Unlike prisons, however, people need access to be supported, “treatment” in the sense to be treated well, treated with support, and given the space to treat their pain, on their own terms. 

 

Edited by Marcel Rambo

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Show Notes:

*Quote from Vancouver activist Karen Ward: https://twitter.com/kwardvancouver/status/1292667853091426304 

[1] We reference a few times Mariame Kaba’s (2020) “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice” by Haymarket Books

[2] Sheila Vakharia and Shira Hassan talk, “Harm Reduction, Abolition and Social Work”, here: https://youtu.be/_iFwX_Jzunk

[3] Carstairs Catherine (2006) book is “Jailed For Possession” – which references the history of the abolition of the RCMP in the 1920s

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1 The Dose Makes the Future w/ Ryan Marino

Podcast Episodes, ,

“The dose makes the poison” – Paracelsus (Father of Toxicology)

 

To get to a different future we not only have to imagine what could be, but help others see what is. Few have spent more time busting the myths of the present and the past as Ryan Marino (@RyanMarino), an Emergency medical toxicologist who takes the ambivalence at the root of the word, “toxicologist” seriously, he has spent years online, and elsewhere busting myths surrounding fentanyl & naloxone in the United States. Recently he was interviewed in the New York Times when a police officer had a panic attack that was attributed as a fentanyl overdose.

 

Claire & Alex talk with Ryan about the future he would like to see drug policy go in the US and beyond, as well as about why he keeps “toxic” plants, and what we can learn about the ambivalence between poison and medicine when we think about dose.
Edited by Marcel Rambo

 

Help us imagine better drug futures by having a conversation with a friend, sharing the podcast or supporting us at patreon.com/DrugFuturisms

Notes:
New York Times article on the San Diego Police Department: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/san-diego-police-overdose-fentanyl.html
William James – the Nitrous Philosopher: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/
G. Henderson (1988), on “Designer Drugs” and the potential for fentanyl to replace heroin, https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/designer.drugs.history.html
Alex Stevens & Fiona Measham (2014) “The ‘drug policy ratchet’: why do sanctions for new psychoactive drugs typically only go up?” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.12406

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