How do we tackle misinformation when talking about drugs is considered subversive? Last month, I took part in ‘Hacking Fascism: Misinformation, Health and Drug Policy,’ a course that brought together harm reductionists, activists, educators, health professionals, users and others interested in the topic, mainly from Latin America.
The free course of 13 sessions was developed by Las Barbies Testeadoras del Bajío. Together, we explored concrete strategies for confronting censorship and authoritarian narratives that, under the guise of moralism, criminalise bodies, pleasure, and autonomy of people who use psychoactive substances. It was an educational experience that gave us tools to understand the impact of prohibitionist narratives on our communities, as well as a space to stimulate and refine our skills to respond to restrictions of our rights as people who use drugs.
How collectives can hack fascism
One thing became clear to me after taking this course: as a collective, we can support and care for each other more. The course itself showed us the importance of coordinating our efforts. When activists from different spaces and platforms coordinate their work to raise awareness about harm reduction, we can take the narrative off the page and put it into practice, even for those who are still just discovering how to think differently about drugs.
To better understand this experience, I want to tell you how I came to know the Barbies. Like many people who work in harm reduction through local projects, we are always looking for proposals that shake up our ways of doing activism.
I first arrived at La Testería, a drug checking and harm reduction project in the Mexican city of Aguascalientes. This helped me to decentralise my view of harm reduction in Mexico and learn about what this collective was doing outside the capital.
Understanding the full spectrum of harm reduction means recognising that organisations alone cannot cover the complexity of the work. Harm reduction is intersectional; users experience multiple realities marked by different forms of oppression, and we cannot understand them all from a single perspective. Furthermore, this work is not isolated; it is interwoven with other struggles. That is why we need to build networks of work and affection to better influence our territories.
It was precisely in this commitment to working in alliance that I learned about Las Barbies Testeadoras del Bajío: they’re a union of several collectives (La Testería, El After, La Eriza, and Viajx Seguro) that share a desire to do things differently with drugs.
The course was born out of this collective, initially designed for 50 people to attend. However, when they published the call for applications on their social media, the predictable happened: the Barbies’ account was closed by Meta without any prior notice, something happening frequently with harm reduction organisations. They had to open a new profile, rebuild their audience and use alternative channels to reach people. In the end, the course was a success: they received 255 applications from nine different countries across Latin America.
While this was an overwhelming number to manage, it also highlighted how widespread harm reduction organisations are with growing fascism, authoritarian and intolerance towards drug use across nations. The response to this growing threat is exhaustion, as Raúl Lescano, one of the course speakers from Peruvian organisation Proyecto Soma highlighted. Fascism creates algorithmic, legal, and moral barriers that wear us down, seeking to eradicate our conversations.
But despite these challenges, we continue to come together. People still want to unite and resist in large numbers, and want to build the tools and knowledge to confront the narratives that deny us autonomy over our own bodies.
The growing right-wing threat in drug policy
We currently find ourselves in a situation where our rights are defined and limited by our socio-economic status and identity. We are also witnessing an escalation of prohibitionist and violent actions from the Global North (like the extra-judicial execution of suspected drug traffickers) that impact and disrupt the path that users and collectives have been building.
At the beginning of 2025, the US froze its foreign aid and ended key programmes like PEPFAR and USAID. The impact was immediate: INPUD documented closures of organisations, mass staff layoffs, shortages of syringes and naloxone, interruption of treatments, and the collapse of the community peer models that supported harm reduction worldwide. In this context, it has been crucial that community work does not become a competition for survival in the face of lack of funding, but rather an opportunity to feel and work in a more united collective.
I am writing from Colombia, where the situation is no less serious. The United States’ decertification of my country for its “demonstrable failure” to comply with international anti-drug trafficking commitments, and the financial consequences this brings, is a demonstration of how the drug war is a tool of political oppression.
As a project, the drug war has been successfully exported worldwide, funding violent regimes that use military and police interventions to control populations in the name of public safety and drug trafficking – disguising the fact that the drug industry grows in violence due to its uncontrolled nature.
Why is harm reduction in Latin America PUNK?
In the face of growing fascism, violence, and misinformation, it’s urgent that we come together to pool ideas, resources, and take action. With right-wing movements using manipulating emotions through hate speech to promote exclusion and social control, we must counteract with a politically active form of radical care – one that does not ask nor wait for permission.
With this on the table, Latin American harm reduction has proven to be punk for several reasons that emerged in our discussions.
First, because the community is the root of caring for and recognising users. Building community has turned us into a dissident group that does not accept moral abandonment and can build people’s dignity, with a clear understanding that all lives matter.
Second, because as a member of Brigada Callejera de Chile mentioned in the last session, fascism represents the deepening of harm. And in the face of that, our punk strategy is clear: as long as there are people who support mutual care and building the collective, we will find ways to resist authoritarianism and reduce harms together.
Third, as Poncho Chávez mentioned in the course, Latin Americans are characterised by a deep sense of rootedness to our territories, we are better at breaking down efforts to isolate us from our surrounding communities and environment. This helps us to understand historical disputes and political positions that lean towards protecting everyone’s rights.
Fourth, pleasure should be freely felt, encouraged, and promoted as an anti-fascist political decision. Every person deserves to feel enjoyment and should not be punished for seeking pleasure from substances. This is especially the case in criminalised countries, some get to use drugs without the fear of state surveillance and violence, and in regulated nations, where people continue to face criminalisation if they are unable to afford to enter or participate in legally regulated drug markets, which denies them the choice of how to manage their own pleasure. Denying people the right to safely manage their own pleasure is a political decision, one that removes people’s right to their bodily autonomy.
Finally, harm reduction in Latin America stems from autogestión: the resourceful self-management we see everywhere of people and organisations working hard to get what they need to keep going. We know that if we don’t hustle, our ideas will die. That’s why collective fire is essential. And despite our resource limitations, we have managed to take concrete action, raise awareness with larger and larger audiences, open up spaces for public debate, and show a new way forward.
Long live punk and harm reduction!