It’s taken me decades of re-education to really understand how systems failed me and that I am not the one needing to change. As a 15 year old girl I was let down by the education, justice, housing, child protection, and health systems. And so I internalised that nobody cares and so began a long journey of self that existed within binaries. Clean, dirty; worthy, unworthy; healthy, damaged; well, crazy. A complete disconnection from trust in justice, fairness or safety.

I found drugs at a young age, and credit them with being the only reason I am still here today. Drugs are a solution to many things for many people. For me they led me to a subculture that gave me connection, love, music and joy. They took my pain away, body and soul. They opened my mind to looking beyond what is taken as fact about why things are like they are and eventually they allowed me to process my trauma and survive.

But, along the journey I have been stigmatised and despised. I have been medically intervened on, my bodily autonomy has been disregarded and I have been mandated into “treatments” that sold me my identity as a “diseased, deviant, criminal, addict”, that my morality was “sick”, and that I was insane and powerless. These treatments required perfect abstinence and a “spiritual/ religious” awakening to be redeemed and worthy of a place in our society, but only if I continued to pay my penance by always identifying myself as having been a bad person before I was saved. Repeat until “cured”.

Society holds a special form of self-righteous contempt for those who break its “rules”, yet most aren’t based on anything other than power imbalances and untruths that function to protect those that don’t need protecting. Our National Drug Policy, with its sprinklings of word salad about harm minimisation, focuses almost exclusively on the rhetoric of “drugs are bad” and drug users, especially those that would dare inject, need to punished or cured. When you are vulnerable, a victim and are caught up in the machine of treatment services it is hard to actually see the injustice. The individual is made to be responsible for the things they have had to do to survive within a very hostile landscape.

This realisation came by way of the wisdom of age, a philosophy degree, a Master of Social Work and my own experiences of working within the AOD treatment sector. People who use drugs are not bad, and if the household AIHW data is anything to go by, we are at least half of all adults in Australia. For those people, and for that 15 year old girl I couldn’t help back then, I am willing to do all I can to be of use to change this broken system. I proudly identify as a peer and stand by organisations like Unharm that are part of the fight for our basic human rights and for legalisation in Australia.

I remember all the entirely avoidable lost lives of loved ones, and the impact on their families, and hope that one day those in power will just listen to us.

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