DRUG USERS AND ADDICTS ARE "SELF-ORGANIZING" IN BRAZIL

Celia Szterenfeld's "Pedagogy of Harm Reduction" Takes Root

Finally, someone can answer my question of 15 months ago: What ever
happened to that law to decriminalize drug use that was proposed by
the administration of then-president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso?

The National Congress, in January 2002, amended (read: gutted) the
legislation in mysterious ways, but no commercial press agency
reported what happened to the bill that almost, but did not, make history.

Here on the Narco News Team, we've been asking about that law for 15
months... and nobody knew, not even the activists or experts in
Brazilian drug policy we interviewed knew...

But, at last, we found somebody who knows:

Celia knows.

"In January of 2002, Congress passed a law in Brazil," begins Celia
Szterenfeld, director of PIM, the Integrated Program of the
Marginalized, a non-governmental organization that works with addicts
and sex workers who want to organize themselves to fight for their
needs and wants, based in the chaotic coastal city of Rio de Janeiro.
"The law instituted Drug Courts according to the model used in some
parts of the United States. For drug users, it doesn't change things
much. Users are told to enter forced addiction treatment facilities,
or go to prison."

Beyond the vague and unreported nature of that January 2002 law, not
even that weak reform has been implemented, she tells us. "Here in
Brazil, sometimes they pass laws but the laws don't stick," she
continues. "This law hasn't been used much. To make a law work, you
need to create structures. It often depends on what the local
governments do."

But Szterenfeld - unlike some drug policy and harm reduction activists
and organizations in the United States who would be happy with a
program of Drug Courts, with forced treatment instead of forced jail -
is not pleased at all with the new law.

"We are totally against drug courts," she explains.

Understand this well, kind reader: She and her colleagues, based on
their street-level knowledge, are so strongly against drug courts
that, she informs Narco News, they have contracted lawyers to file
lawsuits against individual medical doctors who participate in the
forced imposition of "treatment" on addicts: "Because," she, a
psychologist, notes, "it is unethical."

"The root problem of implementing drug courts," Szterenfeld explains,
"is that they violate the Brazilian Constitution and the right to not
be forced to provide evidence against yourself. If they force you to
submit to periodic drug testing, they are violating the
Constitution."

The Self-Organized Addict

The political stance and strategic wisdom of Szterenfeld and her
colleagues who gather in Rio de Janeiro this week (see related story,
Part I of this series, "A Drug Policy from Below") is this: They don't
go asking or begging authorities, cup in hand, on bended knee, for
little scraps called "reform."

Instead, they start with the needs of the people, and fight tooth and
nail to make the authorities comply with the real desires and demands
of an increasingly organized populace.

It may be difficult for many people without direct experience with
drug users and addicts, especially those in the "developed world" who
trust the Commercial Media to give them "information" about such
matters, to believe that it is possible for "drug users" or other
criminalized sectors on the imposed margins of society to be
self-organized. I mean, aren't druggies supposed to be disorganized by
their very nature and definition? That's what the media says. That's
what authority says. That's what the medical establishment claims.
That's what the university professors, with notable exceptions, teach.
That's what people are led, falsely, to believe.

But here it is, happening someplace in a country called America: An
increasingly self-organized population of drug users - hard drug users!
Cocaine and crack users! - is standing up, together, and fighting for
dignity, for justice, for freedom, as other groups that society had pushed
to the margins - racial, religious, or sexual minorities; as well as gender
and economic majorities - have done, with success, in some open societies
already.

In a splendid irony, Celia Szterenfeld tells that her passion for
justice in her native country of Brazil was born, paradoxically, in
the United States, in the early and mid 1980s, when she was a student
at Columbia University in New York.

"I am primarily committed to fighting the AIDS epidemic," she tells.
"I lost many friends in New York in the 1980s. And now I work with
Civil Society in Brazil. The work we do is to foment the
self-organization of marginalized groups."

The Road to Self-Organization

The road to self-organization began in 1991 when Celia and others
participated in fomenting this activity among women in the sex
industry - the people the world calls prostitutes; as if any form of
labor in which we sell our bodies, fingers, brains, eyes, ears, to
others out of economic necessity, is somehow distinct?

"In 1994, we started organizing drug users. There had already been,
since 1991, an organization of families of prison inmates. An
important political leader of the prostitutes, Gabriela Silva Leite
had traveled to Europe for international meetings in 1988 and 1989 and
returned and started organizing..."

By 1993, the wildfire of self-organization had spread to the extensive
transvestite sex worker community in The Marvelous City. That moment
was, indeed, a kind of turning point.

"On any given day, there are 3,000 women and transvestites working the
street, in 20 different locations. We don't have a red light district
here. It is more disperse," says Szterenfeld. "How many sex workers
are there in total? In the neighborhood of Copacabana alone we
estimate there are 5,000 sex workers. In Rio de Janeiro, unlike in Sao
Paulo, we don't have a system of pimps. The women and transvestites
are independent. They have organized themselves that way."

"By organizing, I mean, first, they used to have no solidarity among
themselves," recalls Szterenfeld. "One could be preyed upon by a
client, harmed, beaten, killed, and only very rarely would another do
anything to stop it. But now, they train each other to write down the
license plates numbers of the cars that pick up others. They train
themselves to recognize the model of a car, the color, other
identifying features..."

"Today there is very little client violence," she notes, "except
against the transvestites. But the trannies are becoming very
organized. They don't have children and family problems like many of
the women workers. Not a lot of them, here, want sex-change
operations... only five to ten percent, at most, want to be operated
on. And, of course, they are very bold and brave already."

Limiting the Power of "Authority"

As a result of the self-organizing processes of the marginalized sex
workers, the situation has, over the past decade, improved
dramatically. The organized workers limited the spaces in which Power
- - licit or illicit - could harass and harm them. "There is still
sometimes a police raid, especially before Carnaval, when the
authorities want to make headlines," she explains. "But here the law
says that you can't be arrested for soliciting, for standing on the
corner... It is illegal for hotel owners to provide rooms for
prostitution, and it is illegal for someone to be a client, a John...
but the clients are never prosecuted. There are some regulations about
nudity, especially in commercial hours... But the police are not daily
harassing and arresting the sex workers like occurs in so many other
parts of the world."

The same organizing principle, says Szterenfeld, can and is being
applied, now, by drug users and addicts in Brazil, limiting the spaces
for authority to harm them further.

"We are developing a pedagogy of Harm Reduction," she adds, in a reference
to the landmark work of the Brazilian Paulo Freire, author of "Pedagogy of
the Oppressed," one of her formative intellectual influences. Another
influence, she notes, comes from the United States: The part of the
feminist movement of the 1970s that did not end up allying with Churches
and patriarchs in censorious anti-sexuality campaigns, but, rather, the
part of the movement with roots in the work of the Boston Collective,
authors of "Our Bodies, Ourselves," disseminating information directly
gathered from below.

And yet, although the ideas of the Boston Collective and even Paulo
Freire have long taken root in sexual politics inside the United
States, and, regarding drug policy, although there are Harm Reduction
organizations there, and other organizations like Act-Up and the
heroic Medical Marijuana clubs, the concept of the self-organization
of hard drug users has had less success in the giant drug consumer
nation to the North than it is enjoying in Brazil.

"Why do you think it has happened here?" a colleague asked me today. I
can venture a guess: Brazil is not a drug producing country. It is a
drug consuming country. It has the second largest volume of cocaine
consumption in all America... second to that in the United States.

A Model for Drug Consumer Nations

As a consumer nation, Brazil has emerged as a superior laboratory of
Harm Reduction regarding hard drugs than that of the United States.
Whereas, in some brave parts of the U.S.A., clean needles are
distributed to addicts (the same happens here, but through the good
work of a different organization that we will report on in the coming
days), and of course the highly successful Medical Marijuana movement
is at war today with the occupying forces of the Federal State in
Washington DC, users and addicts of hard drugs in the North have not,
so far, succeeded in self-organizing in a manner that effectively
limits the maneuvering room of Power to repress and oppress them.

Self-organization, Brazilian style, has arrived.

The Pedagogy of Harm Reduction in Brazil has the potential to turn the
drug policy reform movement, internationally, on its head, and turn
drug policy with it. In the United States, among some drug
legalization activists, there is a tendency that discounts "harm
reduction" efforts as being too piecemeal, too "acceptable," too
"lite," too slow... and it may be that something is lacking from some
of those efforts (although our tendency at Narco News has always been
"let a thousand flowers bloom and let drug prohibition die the death
of a thousand cuts")... But let me try, kind reader, to explain the
difference...

When we think of traditional "harm reduction" efforts in the United
States, we tend to think - sometimes correctly, sometimes not - of a
social worker or medical "authority" offering clean needles or drug
treatment to addicts, in a traditional "social program" type
setting... Something more associated with charity and "do-gooderism" -
and the self-perpetuation of bureaucracies and medical or psychiatric
"authority" over individual autonomy - than of self-organization and
empowerment...

But in Brazil, power is surging from the other direction: Drug users
and addicts, like other marginalized groups such as the aforementioned
sex industry workers and family members of prison inmates, are taking
control of their own daily lives without waiting for the government or
any authority to give permission. They advance, and Power then has to
adapt to the new realities they assert from the grassroots level. The
governmental reforms come as a response to self-organization; they do
not precede or cause it.

This is significant for many good reasons but an especially powerful
one is this: As drug users and addicts organize from the local level
upward and outward, they politicize themselves, they train themselves
and each other in the skills of democracy and how to move government
and media structures that had previously either ignored them or
repressed them or both. This Brazilian Harm Reduction movement has now
become the dominant tendency in a national drug legalization movement
previously led mainly by people who simply, and justly, want the right
to smoke marijuana: but those sectors have long been led by the middle
classes and upper classes, as in the United States.

Breaking the Class Wall of Drug Policy Reform

The Brazilian Harm Reduction movement has broken the class wall of
drug policy reform: the leaders, the spokespersons, and the organizers
are not representing others; they are presenting themselves, with all
the power and wisdom that can only be found, on this planet, from the
ranks of the masses.

Thus, when Celia Szterenfeld and her colleagues sit and strategize,
and discuss grand global events, such as what will occur in 2006 when
the nations of the world must renegotiate international drug
enforcement treaties, she can comment that she and the others should
tell Brazilian President Lula da Silva to refuse to sign the proposed
renewal of the current treaty that imposes drug prohibition on all
lands.

And she and they can discuss something that large, that international,
(the people telling their president what to do! Imagine!) with the
knowledge that, because they are organized from the bases, they have
an attainable shot at creating the conditions so that their elected
president could take that bold step; one that, if the President of
Brazil did it, he would surely be joined by leaders of other Latin
American nations and probably others from distinct continents.

Thus, they surge from the bases of the many corners of this vast
country, from so many horizontal directions at once, upward toward
those in power. And those in power, soon, right now, in fact, must
offer a genuine response.

It is no longer an option, in drug policy, to marginalize the masses.
They, we, you, are coming to topple the disastrous policy of drug
prohibition through the authentically democratic principle of
self-organization.

This, already, is not your father's drug legalization movement of
white shoe libertarian lawyers and college educated counterculture
marijuana enthusiasts, although they are very welcome, too, at the
table... This is a movement that reflects the authentic face of the
world, and it is looking you directly in the eye. When it looks back
at you from the mirror, you will know, kind reader, that victory is at
hand.