Demo Safer Consumption Site
The upcoming demonstration site at Pelican House, which joins the 2024 Support. Don’t Punish global day of action, aims to highlight the need for harm reduction responses to the UK's worsening drug-deaths crisis.
Demo Safer Consumption Site
Leading organisations: Release, RATS
Supporting organisations: DrugScience
Participating organisations: Decrim Now
Date and time: 26th June from 5 to 8 PM
Location:Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, E1 5QJ
We urgently need safer consumption sites in the UK. These sites have proven benefits in preventing overdose deaths, reducing disease transmission, and providing support and community for people pushed into vulnerability and premature death. The sites offer a safe, welcoming space for people who use drugs, particularly those without access to adequate conditions for safe use, and improve community relations by reducing littering and public drug use.
Despite clear advantages, the dominant political forces in the UK have been reluctant to implement these life-saving and harm-reducing interventions. This unwillingness to act for the safety of our communities costs lives. In 2022, 6,112 people died drug-related deaths in Britain — the highest number since records began. Most of these deaths relate to the use of currently controlled drugs. As highly dangerous synthetic opioids, such as nitazenes, enter the drug supply, this crisis is worsening. Scotland, suffering from one of the highest drug deaths rates in the world due to decades of economic and social neglect, is set to open its first safer consumption site this summer. While this is highly promising news, we need these sites across the country.
Around the world, over 100 safer consumption sites operate successfully, including in so-called Canada where both government-run and community-led overdose prevention sites provide essential support. This two-tiered system facilitates community involvement in collective safety, a model yet to be adopted in the UK. Safer consumption sites were pioneered by people who use drugs and their supporters, who organised —often outside of the law— out of a sense of radical care and commitment to harm reduction. Their emergence and continued growth counters the punitive and oppressive approach of the ‘war on drugs’, emphasising person-centred and caring responses instead.
The upcoming demonstration site at Pelican House, which joins the 2024 Support. Don’t Punish global day of action, aims to highlight the need for harm reduction responses to the UK’s worsening drug-deaths crisis. This demonstration will create a space for distributing harm reduction resources, running rolling naloxone trainings, and engaging the community in discussions about drug policy reform, decriminalised futures, and drug user and sex worker liberation. By showcasing the benefits of safer consumption sites and advocating for their establishment across the UK, we can undermine the punitive approach and instead promote caring and supportive responses to address the highest drug-related death rates in Europe.
Join us for a day of action in solidarity with people who use drugs, sex workers and everyone vulnerabilised by the ‘war on drugs’, building bridges between people and movements to make safer consumption sites a reality — for ourselves and our communities.
Photos primarily by Nigel Brunsdon & scans of materials of the day — please do not use without prior consultation.
