So it begins...
Welcome to The Roads to Recovery, where I embark on a photojournalism project to document community response to the global drug crisis.
Introductions have never been my thing.
I think there are only a few people who know exactly what they’re going to say before they say it, and I’m not in that minority. Like many, I usually figure it out as I go along, and that’s pretty much the vibe of this paragraph, this blog, and in many ways, this project. What project? those of you who encountered this post through the aLgOrItHm may be wondering. Well, today marks the beginning of The Roads to Recovery, my year-long endeavor to document community response to the overdose crisis. Through conversations and photography, the multimedia project aims to inform policymakers and the public about the ways in which communities have been impacted by, and responded to, the overdose crisis, as well as the gaps that remain. The project ultimately seeks to cast light on the grief, loss, ingenuity, resilience, and creativity that have fuelled communities across the globe, and to inspire the change in attitudes, systems, and social structures necessary to prevent overdose deaths.
As a fledgling global health researcher and historian (with gracious funding from my previous universities and scholarship funders), I’ve been lucky to travel the world for research these last few years, asking folks of all backgrounds, fields, geographies, and experiences about the state of the overdose crisis in their respective communities. I’ve learned about the climate of the overdose crisis and the response in nearly every continent. I’ve shadowed nurses on methadone maintenance vans in Portugal and physicians in Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. I’ve knocked on doors of businesses, offering information on the life-saving overdose reversal drug, naloxone, and helped advocate for improved public access naloxone in Massachusetts. I have met with community health workers in São Paulo and interviewed public health activists working in Cape Town. Building off of six years in community advocacy, government health policy, and academic research, The Roads to Recovery project is a long time in the making.
This blog, however, isn’t really about the project itself. Interviews, photographs, articles, that will all be on my website. This blog is about the process. It will be a space to express anger over the stigma and racism that continues to fuel the carceral War on Drugs, to lament over how quick many doctors are to treat cancer as a disease, but to ignore substance use disorder as a disease of the same legitimacy. It will be a place to share the excitement of a great, hopeful conversation, and to comment on recent events like Mayor Parker’s proposal to defund syringe service programs. This blog will be for my rants and reflections, my curiosities and complaints, and, ultimately, for a whole host of scattered thoughts and ideas that I’ll attempt to parse in real time.
So, welcome to the behind-the-scenes of The Roads to Recovery. I hope you’ll stick around, if not for the commiseration over slow-moving change, then for the little moments of joy that remind us why we fight for such change in the first place.