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F
abrice Olivet is keen to apologise for not making it to
Seize
the Day!
, where he was scheduled to address the morning
session on service user groups. A close friend – ‘a long-term
survivor of Aids and hepatitis C’ – died just before he was
about to leave for the UK. ‘I was very, very sorry to miss the
conference,’ he says. Bloodborne viruses are an issue he’s
used to dealing with, having been involved in ASUD (Auto
Support des Usagers de Drogues) since 1993, a year after the organisation
was formed. ‘At the beginning it was only a little magazine made by a few
users, for users, with some money from the government’s anti-Aids plan,’ he
says. ‘The following year we became an association.’
ASUD is based in the Belleville district of Paris, with a ‘small squad’ of
four staff, and with branches in Orléans, Nimes and Marseilles. Most funding
comes from the French government, along with some money from Aids
organisations, and it maintains very strong links with groups across Europe.
Historically, its aims have been to fight discrimination, promote a human
rights approach to drug use and to campaign against prohibition. Its most
effective tool, however, remains its magazine, published four times a year
with a print run of 15,000 per issue.
Olivet is also a published author, recently editing a book called
La
Question Métisse
on the history of mixed-race people in France up to the
Algerian war. He gravitated to ASUD through harm reduction activism,
becoming president in 1997, and the association remains a full-time job.
What was he doing before all of that? ‘I was a junkie,’ he laughs. ‘For ten
years from when I was 17. It was the beginning of the ’80s and there was a
very big heroin scene in France. I discovered that it was very easy to find, but
hard to get the money, so I went to prison. I stopped in order to save my life.’
Afterwards he ‘tried to forget everything about drugs’, graduating in
history and teaching for a while. ‘But I was getting back to activism because
of the Aids movement, which was very strong in France.’ Government support
for ASUD was largely a reaction to the HIV epidemic among injecting drug
users, he says, with the medical authorities wanting a direct connection to
drugs users outside of criminal justice channels. ‘Sometimes I wonder if
now, at this moment, it would have been possible to create a drug user
organisation in the country. I don’t think so.’
Is that because of Sarkozy and the shift to the right? ‘I think it’s more a
slow evolution since the beginning of the 2000s,’ he says. ‘First was the end
of the Aids epidemic – the epidemic was very frightening for society because
they knew drug users could spread the virus out of their community very
easily through sexual relations. There was a lot of apocalyptic fantasy about
Aids, and because of that they were absolutely ready to try anything. The
government’s support for us was based on a big, big fear.’
Government policy changed to encompass harm reduction, and the IHRA
conference in France in 1997 was also a milestone, he says – ‘that had a
major impact’. However, falling infection rates brought about by the adoption
of harm reduction measures also meant a drop in support for user
representation, he believes, compounded by the ‘medicalisation’ of drug use.
‘Here in France the term is ‘addictology’ – the science of addiction. It
takes the scientific part of harm reduction to talk about drug use as a
chronic disease, and classes drug users as chronically sick people for life.
So this has also meant very bad things for drug user representation – the
whole question of citizenship has been forgotten and we are now only seen
as patients, as sick people. It’s radical medicalisation.’
Presumably, as in the UK, this goes hand-in-hand with stigmatisation? ‘In
a very paradoxical way there’s more stigma now than 15 years ago,’ he says.
‘Then drug users were seen as delinquent, as people who were against the
law, even as some kind of social revolutionaries, but at the same time as
people who were responsible for their acts. But now, with this representation
as sick people for life, the view is that
toxicomanes
– as the French say –
cannot be responsible for their lives, for raising children, for anything, so you
can put them in prison or put them in treatment for life. It’s a very bad
representation, worse than before, and the paradox is that there are more
people who take illicit drugs now than 15 years ago.’
As a result ASUD has had to tone some of its activism, he says. ‘We
were a kind of a mass movement, because a lot of the people who wanted
to fight against Aids joined with us. At one point we had about 25 groups
with us. But we’re not activists like we used to be, trying to change the
drug laws and things like that. Now many French drug users don’t want to
be identified as such.’
Part of this, he believes, is the result of changing patterns of drug use,
particularly regarding heroin. ‘You don’t find heroin in the streets so much,
for example – you find substitution treatments for sale on the black
market. Heroin users are coming more from the middle class and they
tend to smoke rather than inject. Some are coming from the dance and
techno scenes, taking heroin to come down from other drugs, and they
absolutely don’t want to identify themselves as drug users.’
Intolerance towards drug users is on the rise, even among people who
take drugs themselves, he stresses. ‘That’s the terrible thing. Crack users
are mostly in Paris, mostly black and Arab people, and they are the most
stigmatised. Cannabis users say “heroin users are terrible”, heroin users
say “crack users are terrible”, and so on. No one wants to appear as an
addict, there’s no unity. People with jobs, with families, do not want to
identify themselves as drug users. In the UK you have politicians who can
say they’ve tried drugs but in France that’s impossible. A French politician
would be absolutely
burned
for saying that.’
Given that wider context, is he worried that government funding will
eventually dry up? ‘We’re supposed to represent the patients of the drug
services, so we are institutionalised into this medicalisation system –
they’re funding us because of harm reduction services, not because of
drug user representation.’
ASUD, however, has lobbied hard for the introduction of consumption
rooms in Paris, although at present it looks unlikely that the campaign will
succeed. ‘But we have succeeded in putting the subject on the political
agenda,’ he says. ‘We have a very well-organised substitution treatment
system – 130,000 people take substitution medication – but at the same
time French drug laws are still very hard. We tried to highlight this
contradiction of a big harm reduction system and repressive drug laws that
do not allow tools like consumption rooms.’
He is cautiously optimistic that attitudes will change, however. ‘We have to
be. I think the future for us, I’m sorry to say, is to be included in something
bigger, such as the wider harm reduction movement or human rights. If we
stay as we are, a simple drug user organisation, we are going to disappear.
But if you look at the worldwide situation there are big changes going on – in
the US, which is a major actor in the drug war, and in South America, for
practical, economic and security reasons. The context is not in favour of
developing drug user representation like us, so we’re building a network – with
professionals, with citizens, with sociologists, even police forces, if we can
find them – to say “stop this craziness of the drug war”, that all the experts
agree is not a good way to manage the situation.’
DDN
www.asud.org
7 March 2011 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 15
Profile |
Fabrice Olivet
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘Toxicomanes – as the French
say–cannotberesponsible for
their lives, for raising children,
for anything, so you can put
them in prison or put them in
treatment for life.’