North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (NCHRC)

Posted: Sat, Apr. 7, 2012, 3:00 AM
I would have been dead

By Whitney Englander

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Whitney Englander fell out of a tree in her native Oregon
when she was 12 years old, suffering a severe concussion that led to
blinding migraines controlled by powerful painkillers. An attempt to wean
herself from prescription narcotics after college backfired. She ended up
managing the pain with street drugs. In 2004, she overdosed on heroin.

“If my boyfriend had not had naloxone I would have died in an abandoned
warehouse,” Englander, 32, said in an interview. The experience started her
on a path to recovery.

She wrote the following commentary after a United Nations organization
endorsed a resolution supporting the use of naloxone by medical personnel to
reverse opiate overdoses, which is the standard of care in the United
States. The UN resolution does not address the use of naloxone by lay people
trained in community programs, which is the the focus of a Food and Drug
Administration workshop on April 12.


My family does not have to face every holiday, every birthday, every joyous
occasion with the heartache of having lost a child, a sister - me. My family
was spared a lifetime of regrets, questions and the unimaginable pain of
losing a part of themselves. Because I survived a drug overdose.

At a March meeting in Vienna, Austria, the member states of the United
Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) came to unanimous consensus to
pass a sweeping overdose prevention resolution with the potential to affect
millions of lives worldwide. The resolution urges countries to incorporate
overdose prevention strategies into their national drug policies and to
adopt the standard of care proven to reduce death by opioid overdose. Most
importantly, the resolution affirms the urgent need to address a global
epidemic that is, in most cases, preventable.

The emotion in the room was palpable as the resolution was being passed. I
held each breath as member states debated a few punctuation marks, a few
words, and then suddenly, the resolution passed.

It is unthinkable that in some parts of the world the medication naloxone,
which safely and dependably reverses the deadly effects of opioid overdose,
is not available to those whose lives depend on it. Whether the medication
is withheld because of misinformation, lack of education, or at worst,
because of the belief that some lives aren’t worth saving, the results are
the same. Without naloxone, people die when they could have been saved.

I happen to be one of those people. There was a time when my life may have
seemed disposable, when others would have thought me not worth saving. Today
I am proud to be a woman in long-term recovery. What that means for me is
that I have not felt the need for drink or drugs for almost seven years. I
am the mother of a precious baby boy, a wife, a daughter, an active
community member, and a public health advocate. I have had the honor to
volunteer with multiple charities, work as a public servant, and pay taxes.
But the only reason I am able to do this is because eight years ago, someone
I was using drugs with had naloxone. Had a fellow drug user not had the tool
on hand to revive me, there is a strong likelihood that my breathing would
not have been restored, my heart would have stopped, and I would have died
in an abandoned warehouse at the age of 24.

My experience is not unique. A recent article published by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported over 10,000 reversals like
mine in the United States, where naloxone was administered by non-medical
bystanders witnessing an overdose. Naloxone has been used for decades in
operating rooms and emergency rooms and by paramedics. Politics should not
stand in the way of safe and effective medication that saves lives, but
sadly it often does when the lives of drug users are concerned.

The great triumph of the UN’s overdose resolution was the ease and lack of
controversy in which it was passed. I am proud of the international
community for what it achieved in Vienna - a commitment to preserving human
life.

Whitney Englander is the government relations manager for the Harm Reduction
Coalition and lives in Washington, D.C.

I’m a one-woman film crew and this project is very dear to my heart. Please help me continue to tell this important human rights story.

Also, April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

In this documentary, 11 North Carolinians, current and former sex workers and/or advocates, share their experience with the common goal of reducing violence perpetrated against sex workers. Sex workers often do not report crimes committed against them because they do not want to incriminate themselves; criminalization of sex work protects the perpetrators. What types of violence do sex workers experience? What can sex workers do to avoid violence? What else can be done to make sex work safer?

This first video was created in six weeks in partnership with the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition. Funding has run out, however.

Help me create new footage showing these and other current and former sex workers in their daily lives, facing the challenges they discuss in the interviews, and to continue to edit extant footage to address sub-topics such as the philosophy behind decriminalization of sex work, using communication to avoid violence, condom use for sex workers, and transitioning out of sex work if one chooses to do so.

I recently received feedback on this work from MediaStorm’s Eric Maierson, which, when implemented, will greatly help to finesse the project. I also recently began doing volunteer work for the Duke Center for Documentary Studies, which will put me in touch with master filmmakers who can give me further direction on this work.

Sex workers are anti sex-trafficking. It seems obvious (of course they have an interest in making the industry as safe as possible), and yet you might not know this because sex workers rights activists have not gotten any air-time from the major anti-trafficking organizations……..

Policy will soon be introduced that encourages police to use discretion when when applying prostitution laws and to consider less formal action in certain situations.  The policy also states that the safety and security of sex workers is paramount.

audaciaray:

This essay originally appeared in the 2012 Momentum conference anthology ebook. I know this is a bit long for Tumblr, but this is the full text of the article, and I wanted to make it available online for people who aren’t at the conference for my presentation of the same title and/or want to…