In 2017 I wrote an article for The MAPS Bulletin, called ‘The Elephant in the Room: The Need to Address Race in Psychedelic Research’. Over the last seven years, I have been an advocate, and advisor within the psychedelic assisted therapy space, with the intention to reduce harm and expand access for communities most impacted by the war on drugs. As someone who finds psychedelic exceptionalism quite dubious, it’s been nourishing to deepen my entanglement with the drug policy reform movement, as well as harm reduction more broadly. I am grateful to all the people who have been working to create access to safe consumption spaces, support services, housing and health care for drug users, as well as dismantling harmful policies woven into the drug war and creating reparative policies that can tend to some of the wounds. However, I notice another elephant within the drug policy and harm reduction space: the lack of attention to grief.
Despite the horrors unfolding in this time, grief remains taboo in the Western world. There are little to no public spaces to be with grief and very few practices available to us to metabolise waves of sorrow as and when they crash into our lives. As a result, many suppress their grief or hide it from public view because if it does spill over into the public realm, individuals face being pathologised or even sectioned under the mental health act. The lack of space for grief is entangled with Western imperialism and assimilation but thankfully, many communities around the world still have intact, communal grief practices. Given this context, it’s unsurprising that grief is also absent from the context of drug policy and harm reduction in the West.
In my view, drug use and grief are deeply intertwined in the context of late stage capitalism. Many people use drugs (legal or illegal) to numb or bypass challenging emotions, including grief. We seek to escape the painful realities that many of us experience due to state violence and other forms of systemic and interpersonal harm. Grief is further challenged by the illegal status of drugs, as those that die from drug use are often seen as deserving of death, with their loved ones robbed of the chance to bereave their deaths without stigma and criminalisation hanging over them.
However, to me, grief is not limited to bereavement; it can also arise from experiences of oppression, displacement from homelands, loneliness, the loss of former versions of ourselves as well as poverty and illness. Given the lack of tools we have in the West to acknowledge, communally share, or let alone process these experiences, it’s understandable that many of us rely on drugs to keep us somewhat detached from the pain and grief of it all.
In ‘Animals and Psychedelics’, Giorgio Samorini detailed the wide range of animals and insects that deliberately get intoxicated, suggesting their use is a natural impulse. Like our animal kin, I believe that humans have an inherent need to alter our consciousness from time to time; however, we have the cognitive ability to notice and reflect on its frequency and motivations. Samorini noted that drug use significantly increases in animals when they experience oppressive conditions, such as enslavement within the factory farming system. Similarly, humans often use drugs in greater frequencies and amounts to numb the pain of surrounding challenges and harms.
With an ongoing overdose crisis occurring across the world in varying degrees, happening alongside a mental health crisis in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot of distress surrounding people and communities. This is particularly pronounced in Western nations, who are experiencing unprecedented rates of loneliness and mental health struggles, which has been noted to increase substance use, and especially impulsive use. Drug user activism is incredibly important to highlight these struggles, and change the material conditions around drug control and the lives of those using drugs through decriminalisation and legalisation. However, I feel we are missing a crucial component by glossing over the impact of grief, its connection to drug use and harm reduction.
While I was based in Berlin when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, I witnessed the huge wave of overdoses that took place when clubs re-opened – a trend seen in other Western nations. My sense is that people were seeking to numb or bypass their grief through taking drugs and partying hard, inadvertently ending up in harmful situations. If more support were readily available to acknowledge and process grief during this time, I wonder if many overdoses could have been averted. If we are serious about reducing harm for drug users, surely that must involve attending to the emotional conditions that make drug use feel like the only option to navigate the pain?
Changing the narrative on grief
What does it look like to change the narrative and bring grief into harm reduction? To tend to the emotional dynamics alongside material conditions and policy? First, it’s important to acknowledge that people who frequently use drugs, whether recreationally or not, likely take them as a means to bypass challenging emotions, arising from personal hardship or as a reaction to the state of the world. This is understandable, given the polycrisis we face, from climate change, increasing poverty, political uncertainty and war. To reduce harm in this context, it’s important for people using drugs to have more choices available to navigate emotional discomfort, including grief.
Next, I feel we need to map and introduce other personal and peer based strategies that can support people to “metabolise” grief, so that they have more choice available when it arises. Examples of this can include somatic practices to reduce stress, tension and create more ease in the body. Solo or communal grief rituals can also be supportive as a means to process sorrow and harmful experiences. There are various somatic tools and embodied rituals of this nature in my book, “Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community”. Therapy is not accessible to many; so peer to peer models are likely to be more impactful in the long run.
It is important that we reckon with the way that grief is impacting people at this moment and ensure, over time, that people have more possibilities to navigate grief than using drugs at a frequency that is not supportive for, nor desired by them.
We must continue focusing on rights and changing the material conditions that create harm for people who use drugs, while acknowledging the emotional dynamics and distress that is also leading to harm.
