Garth Mullins is an activist, musician, podcaster and writer. His first book, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs, is about growing up with albinism in Western Canada, coming to adulthood through punk, activism and heroin, and organising as a person who uses drugs during an overdose crisis.
This is no tale of addiction and decay in the tradition of William Burroughs’s Junkie. And it’s not a recovery story. “Part memoir, part manifesto”, Crackdown is a candid and defiant account of the devastating impact of drug prohibition on people who use heroin.
Heroin is also a main character in the book – but neither a hero nor a villain. Mullins describes using the drug for the first time, aged 19, as “passing through a golden gate to a calm, protected space”. Years later, trying to quit in a cramped student room in London inspires a poetics of dopesickness, blending the rhythms of the BBC shipping forecast with the convulsions of withdrawal: Low Biscay losing its identity. Pulse rising slowly. Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Restless seas. Doom increasing.
The first time he walks into the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), Mullins discovers “a revolutionary space: a place for fighting back”. Fentanyl soon shows up in the Canadian drug supply and Vancouver becomes ground zero in a new overdose crisis. Surrounded by death, negligent politicians and a media spreading moral panic, Mullins works with VANDU to save lives, promote harm reduction and spread the message that the real danger is not the drugs, but the drug war.
Towards the end of Crackdown, Mullins writes, “it [is] so much easier to scare people with a simple story than explain the nuances of reality”. TalkingDrugs asked him about the tales behind the book, and why this story must be told now.
CH: Why did you write a memoir? How did it feel to write so openly about your heroin use and activism?
GM: I’ve always thought whatever vehicle gets the ideas out there is what I’m all about. I’ve played in bands my whole life. I learned politics from punk rock. I’ve had radio shows. I had a column in a newspaper. I do a podcast. This is the first book.
It didn’t start out as a memoir. It was more like a manifesto. And while I was writing it, this right-wing backlash blew up in Canada and marched all over the world. I realised I needed to go upstream of the policy discussion. Go into people’s feelings, into the culture, into these places where the right-wing is now nestling. Because the right wing doesn’t have an evidence-based policy discussion. They have a fear-based emotional discussion. [I realised] my own story might be a little stronger than a book full of footnotes.
There’s this guy in the book, my best friend Jeff. He looked at an early draft on the drug war in Canada and said, “Wow, this is really interesting, but it reads like an encyclopaedia. This isn’t you, man.” So I switched.
It was a little difficult talking about all that personal stuff. But I’ve interviewed a lot of people on [the] Crackdown [podcast] who shared their stories with me in great detail, with great trust. And I thought, “Shit, if I’m asking other people to do it, I should be able to do it myself.”
Before getting into the drug war, you write about other political movements. How were these similar or different to drug user activism?
It’s hard to compare because it had such a personal impact on me. The drug user rights movement helped me shed a lot of shame. [It] was incredibly liberating to me personally. I never could have been having this conversation before I was an activist in this stuff. I feel like, looking back, I was moving towards it.
I was seeing all the injustice in the world. But I thought the injustice I’m facing, I’m the author of my own problems. Until I started to read more and talk more to other people in the movement and get rid of the shame.
But there’s a lot in common. The same tactics work for everybody: civil disobedience, mass action, solidarity, coalition building, the way we developed campaigns. I was able to bring my skills from other movements, from the picket lines of strikes, from mass mobilisations against global capitalism, to help the drug user movement. But I also went through quite a learning phase. I didn’t just show up and say, “Hey, I know how to organise.” I just sat at the back for a long time.
You write about worrying that people would judge you for using heroin, about squats in Vancouver with “no junkie” rules. Where does that prejudice come from, even in movements that oppose state violence?
Back in the day, there was no nice polite word, “people who use drugs”. No harm reduction. It was a small radical idea. So there was almost universal hate of drug users. We were pariahs on all sides.
In Vancouver, there’s a lot more comfort in the movements I’ve grown up with organising alongside drug user activists. That’s because we’ve had this overdose crisis and it’s been profoundly affecting. The working class of Canada is starting to wake up and realize this is a working-class issue. We’ve done a lot of work, getting solidarity with unions.
Marginalised groups have to fight their way into some movements. In British Columbia, the labour movement has a racist history. Groups of people have had to fight their way in. I’m not saying it’s the same thing for drug users, but there is a kind of parallel.
You write about experiencing ableism as a child, and later the importance of Indigenous people in the drug user movement. How does the movement work across differences?
This is an ongoing process. There is Indigenous membership and leadership. Particularly Indigenous women have played a key role in leading VANDU. But it hasn’t always been easy. There are still groups of people who probably don’t feel very welcome. In the downtown East Side where VANDU is, one street over is Chinatown, and we have very few Chinese Canadians in the movement. There are structural reasons. We’re the inheritors of systemic racism. We still have to fight it.
But when people organize together, I see how that changes things. That’s the magic. That’s where people immediately understand, “We have a lot in common here. We’re facing common enemies.”
There’s a very detailed chapter on methadone. Why was that important?
I wanted to show people biopower and surveillance. The way the system comes to claim you. So that by the time we got onto harder concepts, like decriminalisation, the reader is already like, “Okay, I understand more about this system and how hard people have to try by the time they get to safe supply.”
I want people to know that I’m pretty common. That everybody in my situation has tried a million things before they get to those other solutions. Not half-assed things. Complicated, labour-intensive things – to try and kick, or get on treatment, or go to 12 steps. People try a bunch of stuff before they wind up needing to get on safe supply.
There’s this right-wing myth that drug users are really coddled and they’re just handing out free drugs left, right and centre. All these lies from our Conservative Party and Trump. I wanted to push against that, but without saying that’s what I was doing. So people could understand that even gentle old methadone is this highly regulated space.
The book opens and closes with ceremonies marking death. You’ve lost dozens of friends. Why that decision to bookend your story that way?
There’s so much death. The whole activism is about death now. When I was younger, I dreamed of revolutions where everything about the world would change. And then I find myself involved in a decades-long campaign to just keep people breathing. And it seems like such a minimal demand.
To be honest, I knew I couldn’t end the book on a bad note. You can’t just end a book with, “Everything sucks. The end.” So I thought about the good moments we’ve had recently, and that was one. Community-led, Indigenous-led. Collective. It was celebrating a bunch of deaths. That was a really memorable moment where we all felt good. So many people I care about were either there or represented in the names being honoured.
Ultimately you end on a defiant note: “eventually we will win”. Where do you get that hope?
We eroded the idea that you can arrest your way out of the drug war. Even the politicians on the right can’t say that anymore. We eroded the idea that abstinence is the only way. So even the politicians on the right aren’t saying, “We’re gonna close all methadone clinics and shut off all substitution treatments.”
So we took some of the major pillars out of the drug war ideology, and they can’t build them back. They’re trying other stuff. And it’s scary. We are at a really, really bad moment where we could lose a lot. But those fundamentals are still there. The people running the backlash are trying to rob our humanity. But we fought our way back into society for recognition as human beings, and that’s not going away easily.
One of the things that made a book a logical choice is that things are complicated and you need time to explain. We have to speak to people from movements that are trying to change the world and engage people in this deeper way. That’s how you build a movement. That’s what I’ve learned.
We’ve experienced crises, waves of destruction, government abandonment. All the things that everybody else is now starting to experience as the far right and fascism stalk the world. Harm reductionists, people like us, are gonna be incredibly in demand from people who are like, “Oh my God, I’ve just woken up and how in the hell am I gonna survive this right-wing apocalypse?” Well, we’ve been surviving apocalypse all our fucking lives.
