Why Am I the Only Harm Reductionist Giving A Shit About Africa?

We can collectively do so much

As some/many of you may know by now, I spent a couple of weeks in west Africa, in Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, to help unpack what’s going on with their street drug supply, primarily “Kush”. The report on preliminary findings was published Wednesday, June 12th. Give it a read if you haven’t already.

This is my 2nd official field research project in another country, and in the African continent. My work in South Africa hasn’t been highlighted much. I’m not sure the research paper ever got published (and if it did, I wasn’t included as a co-author to my knowledge, even though I explicitly requested it). I think it’s still somewhat ongoing, and I do have content that needs to be edited that talks about it more in depth, and why the drug checking was needed. If you believe that ARVs are in the street drug supply because of something Hamilton Morris aired, then this applies to you, too.

However that’s not the topic at hand. What I want to reflect on is what I have learned doing work in these places that people are unlikely to even visit, let alone do humanitarian or harm reduction work there. In these places with extreme poverty/wealth divides, low GDP (or all its economic value is extracted through exploited labor or other corruption by colonial/imperial/authoritarian governments), etc. you realize that there’s a lot of work that could be done (fairly easily with our knowledge and resources) if anyone actually cared or paid attention. Maybe people assume Africans don’t have much to contribute, but there are actually many advocates amongst us if people would just look.

They’re working with far fewer resources than many of us are, and even amongst the global networks that we’ve built over the years in harm reduction, they’ve ultimately been left out of entirely—and when it comes to the Global South, honestly, they’re barely considered either (although I understand that language barriers can make it more challenging, but many of Africans fucking speak English, among other languages outside of their native tongue that may be derived from their ethnic group or is specific to the region, like French, Spanish, and Portuguese). Considering how much drug trafficking flows through and from these areas, its proximity to the Middle East and India, it’s development from China, various other neocolonialism, etc. it would actually be productive for us all to be paying more attention.

I believe that even black Americans typecast Africans and their issues and write most of them off, or believe the propaganda—like they (in a broad, normalized sense) would actually do something as barbaric and nonsensical as dig up graves to smoke human bones, or abuse HIV medications like recreational drugs (why the fuck would anybody do that?), so it’s been a blessing to be able to actively partake in solutions, and debunking these ridiculous claims, but I’ve only been able to do that because I regularly visit Africa, and even when I’m on vacation, and make a point to connect with people and organizations there doing similar work (which is what I have done for the last 10 years since getting my passport and being able to afford travel).

There’s a lot more I could say, but don’t want to because I don’t want to waste anymore of my time typing into the void as if it’s going to change anything. Support me on Open Collective, so I can do outreach without running out of money in the middle of the project again, at risk of being potentially stranded or delayed. Thanks.