‘In order for people to liberate themselves from external controls, they have to know about these controls,’ said Black Panther activist Huey Newton. ‘Consciousness of the expropriator is necessary for expropriating the expropriator, for throwing off external controls.’
For this issue, we are departing from our usual case studies about drug treatment and instead turning our attention towards RATS, a drug user union. RATS (‘radical acts to survive’) offers an alternative vision of care practices to that currently on offer through mainstream services. Our purpose in highlighting RATS is not to suggest that this organising model replaces those services. Rather, we hope that it serves as a useful comparison point, and inspires further change in favour of self-determination and community care.
RATS is a budding drug user union set up primarily by migrants, sex workers, and queer and trans people. Union members share experiences of otherisation, pathologisation, and the denial of agency and care – conditioned by their particular relations to multiple and intersecting systems of oppression.
Recognising this interplay, RATS understands all liberation movements to be deeply intertwined. While their work focuses on experiences faced by people who use drugs, they embrace a politics of radical solidarity. For instance, the union centres the needs of sex workers and combats tropes around ‘drug using sex workers’, highlighting their use to justify harm against both drug users and sex workers. RATS believes in a shared project of liberation and seeks to build collective power through dismantling harmful structures while also building a stronger, diverse, and connected drug user community.
RATS members are not willing to quietly sit back and allow fellow drug users to be punished, imprisoned and killed, and so they are ready to take ‘radical action to survive’ in order to dismantle the structures that harm, resource a more resilient community, and build power amongst people who use drugs.
RATS was instrumental in establishing the Harm Reduction Hub at Release’s offices. The hub is a low threshold drop-in harm reduction centre that offers a welcoming non-judgemental environment, safer use materials, harm reduction literature, and pathways toward further support. The union continues to steer the development of the hub through delivering the Harm Reduction School training programme, staffing out-of-hours hub shifts, and fundraising.
As a drug user union, RATS rejects the service-client dichotomy, instead working towards a shared liberatory project. Their aim is for the hub to be a space for co-production, where people who share overlapping experiences of marginalisation can build community and better meet each other’s needs.
At the same time, RATS continues to politicise the need for the hub in the first instance. The hub would not be as necessary in a world which was kinder to drug users. Prohibition means that people’s basic needs – such as knowing what’s in the drugs they use – are systematically denied. RATS makes these points clear and invites other drug users to similarly create pockets of solidarity and resistance.
People who use drugs and other groups impacted by the ‘drug war’ are made vulnerable to premature death through their interaction with systems that restrict and diminish life. To better understand their functioning, in view of dismantling them, the Harm Reduction School is required training for all potential hub volunteers.
The training politicises harm reduction, tracing harm back to its root causes. Sessions cover topics such as racial capitalism, disability justice, and sex worker liberation. At the same time, the school equips participants with skills to meet the immediate needs of their communities. This includes practical workshops on harm reduction techniques, mental health safety planning, and de-escalation skills, among others. By sharing and building on each other’s skills, whilst collectively sharpening structural analysis, RATS aims to build more resilient communities, better capable of sustainably responding to the harm they experience.
Through its emphasis on building grassroots community power, RATS embodies a radical reimagining of care by and for people who use drugs. Where healing does not result from individualised and top-down decision-making, but from practices that nurture collective resilience, connection and solidarity.
The ‘drug war’ continues, maintaining racial and social control across the globe. RATS offers a vision of grassroots resistance by cultivating power together as people who use drugs. By fostering an autonomous and politicised health and community space, the work of RATS gestures towards a future where everyone can experience greater safety, autonomy, and wellbeing.
Shayla Schlossenberg is drugs service coordinator at Release