It Affects Us Too--Time to Give a Fuck About Africa and the Global South Now
Trump is going to fuck the whole world. It's time to get your shit together
On Friday, February 22nd, 2025 I received a text message from Lucia Bird with a copy of the final report that had been compiled using all the research and data on the composition of street drugs and the state of drug use/trafficking that we had collected in west Africa, and was scheduled to be published Tuesday, February 25th. Yippee! Finally! I was starting to wonder if the project had been abandoned for some [funding] reason. After the report was published, it was immediately syndicated by large media outlets. I’m shook! If you’ve not already read the report or the news on it—it’s time. If you don’t read it, I’m just going to assume that you are very unserious about harm reduction. I have NO patience for anyone’s apathy anymore.
Since very early in my advocacy career, I have been cluing myself into the global drug market by constantly checking global drug checking results, tracking drug trafficking routes and patterns, keeping an eye on drug policy in countries illicit drugs are commonly manufactured in, and searching the clear web for new synthetics/research chemicals on the market that could be used as an adulterant. I have been able to reasonably predict the inevitable arrival or adulteration epidemic of a number of drugs like N-Ethylpentylone, 3 and 4-CMC, Nitazenes, and Synthetic Cannabinoids. It’s frustrating to say the least, because even when there’s an obvious pattern emerging in a foreign drug market, the only entities trying to do damage control are drug law enforcement agencies—meaning we are absolutely cooked. People were not following then, and now, understanding the drug markets is more challenging than ever. We are all woefully unprepared and it’s about to get a hell of a lot worse.
Harm reduction was a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and because people who inject drugs were increasingly contracting the virus from shared tools, distributing clean needles entered the picture. The harm reduction movement has seemingly forgotten about HIV/AIDS and bloodborne infections. Infectious diseases respect no national boundaries—did everyone forget about Ebola? Hell, even COVID? We’re still dealing with that one in case anyone somehow forgot. To cause further distraction and confusion, some folks who want woke points have been revising history and giving more credit to the Black Panther Party and Young Lords than they are due for pioneering parts of the harm reduction movement. I have spoken on this many times before, but the tl;dr is that these groups were socialist and communist. That’s literally what what these types of groups do… The BPP was extremely anti-drug (re: opioids), typically did not allow active users to be involved (chapters demanded sobriety), and some of the heaviest opposition to needle exchanges came from Black and Latin American communities in this era.
Indeed, they took over Lincoln Hospital to offer healthcare services for community members, but the drug program was for alcohol and heroin addiction treatment only. I recognize that the main reason they resisted in this manner is because the government and medical industrial complex is implicated in being involved in using drugs, law enforcement, and medical institutions to commit genocide on Black and brown people—But the anti-drug sentiment was still an underlying motivating factor, and we’re kinda losing the plot when we call aggressive sobriety or drug diversion programs and initiatives sometimes masquerading as harm reduction… harm reduction (*cough* psychedelic medicine movements *cough*). Minority communities are still the most disproportionately impacted, due to racism and capitalism. The U.S. has contributed to destabilization of dozens of regions, fueling the drug trade and influencing ineffective and disastrous global policies that do nothing to reduce the prevalence of drug culture.
Since beginning work on the Kush project in April 2024 till today, I’m realizing the many layers of how out-of-the-loop everyone is on drug issues internationally. I guess I expected other groups to be far more informed than I, because most have far more resources than I do, much more formalized education on these topics, and have been involved more professionally in specific aspects of research on this topic. However:
For some reason we all expected, myself included, the global south to have access to analytical resources. How would they have that when some of these areas don’t even have a stable power grid, amongst other infrastructural problems, and very low GDP?
Places like Sierra Leone do not have compassionate care for people who use drugs AT ALL.
Many folks are clueless about how drug trafficking works today. The reagent kit that UNODC distributes looks like it was developed in the 80s. Barbiturates? Are you deadass? This is all that some government/law enforcement agencies have to analyze their substances with and people wonder why it takes so long to identify drug overdose crises in places like this. For the last 10+ years, “research chemicals” and Novel/New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) have been on the rise. Often (but not necessarily always), coming from China. These substances can be obtained in whole or in part directly from the country of source through the mail, cutting out a number of “middle men”. They also can be disguised as something as innocuous as a household cleaning product.
No matter how hard you try, you can’t use precursors to determine where a chemical may have been derived. Especially since nearly everything these days can be concocted from a handful of fully synthetic chemicals, some of which are either legal or unregulated entirely. The unorthodox precursors I’ve encountered as of late have left me and others stumped, because a chemical used in GERD medication or SERMs as a precursor to a psychoactive substance with the base structure of a nitazene (but isn’t an opioid) was not on anyone’s BINGO card.
All this to say, the reagents may or may not react at all to these new substances, and when they do react, nobody’s going to have any idea what the reactions mean because they weren’t tested on these things. It could even give misleading information because reagents work by giving a colorimetric reaction to molecular structures. That’s why Melatonin, LSD, and apparently GERD medication will all react the same on a reagent like Ehrlich, despite them being wildly different chemicals.
I believe many governments are focused on the wrong drugs. Ever since Fentanyl (and now Xylazine) put the US in a chokehold, so much of the world has been anticipating the same fallout and instantaneously framing these substances as culprits with very little, but often 0 evidence or rationale other than it’s the boogey man of the century, and blatantly ignoring other harmful drugs right under their noses. Up until 3 days ago, you could not find a single article about Nitazenes or Synthetic Cannabinoids in “Kush”, despite the preliminary findings having been released in June 2024. All publications were still speculating fentanyl, PCP, tramadol, and/or human bones.
China is not the only country involved in drug manufacturing and trade that’s fueling various epidemics. Another issue of so much focus being directed in the wrong directions.
If we’re appalled at how terrible shit has been for all this time AND with US interventions and initiatives, imagine the shitshow it’s going to be now. Trump’s freeze on foreign aid has already begun to take its toll.
Youth RISE (Resources, Information, Support, and Education) is a global network of young people with lived and living experience of drug use, as well as those impacted by punitive drug policies, that empowers young people to engage meaningfully in harm reduction and drug policy reform, advocating for health, human rights, and policies that reflect their realities. Youth RISE is facing an unprecedented financial crisis due to U.S. President Trump pausing PEPFAR funding. I can speak to this specifically as a board member of the organization, but I imagine that many global harm reduction and public health organizations are at risk and it’s too soon to know what the full extent of the fallout will look like. Believe it or not, I had written most of this before this cursed press conference happened.
Whether people want to accept reality or not, what is happening in these “shithole countries”, as Trump has called them, does negatively impact the US—public health will inevitably be impacted by spread of disease and the increase of drug trafficking, drug overdoses, and related crimes. Underscoring this seems to be the only way to get some people to take action because apparently humanitarian aid is a waste of taxpayer money (and the bloated military spending isn’t?).