People and Dancefloors

In the sixth episode of our podcast series, Anthony and Giulia speak to Mat Southwell, a community organiser, harm reduction worker, and one of the founders of the European Network of People who use Drugs. Mat was also one of the first people to introduce party harm reduction education through his work with MixMag in the 1990s.

In this latest podcast, we invited Sorcha Ryan, club and festival harm reduction lead at the Bristol Drugs Project, to talk about what inspired her pioneering harm reduction work, the wicked problems in drug policy practices and debates, and the opportunity for reflection and taking stock offered by this pandemic. We both agreed that more honest and open conversations among stakeholders that include drug users’ voices are one way forward…

In this episode, Giulia is in conversation with Hannah Head (@_HannaHead_), a PhD student, an activist, and a member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) UK (@ssdpuk). We talk about the values of harm reduction, the role of drugs in young people’s lives, her work with SSDP and the need for universities to drop the ‘just say no’ rhetoric and develop more realistic, responsible and active harm reduction approaches to drug use by students to prevent drug related deaths.

In this episode Anthony Killick and Becky Brookfield review a new BBC podcast series, Ecstasy: The battle of rave. While the series does well to interview people who were actually involved in ecstasy and rave culture throughout the ‘birth’ of acid house, it’s overarching ‘rise and fall’ narrative is typical of media that discusses drug use, and occludes a more interesting and urgent conversation about the relationship between subcultures and criminality. In particular, the series fails to make any new contribution on issues around class, drugs policy, and the closing down of raving spaces – questions which are just as relevant today as they were in the early 90s.

In episode two we focus on music festivals, the space they create for recreational drug use and the potential blueprint they offer for harm reduction.  This time Eve is in the hot seat explaining why festivals are the focus of her research and tells us more about her newest project: Festivals in Lockdown.  To participate in Eve's research on festivals in lockdown, you can answer a few questions here! 

In this podcast, we discuss a first experience of a rave during the pandemic. Albeit subjective and partial, a first-person account is a good launchpad for a broader discussion where we address media portrayals and associated stereotypes about raves, along with the tendency to blame young people’s recklessness and lack of responsibility for social, and in this case public health, ills. Finally, we question the categorisation of raves as “criminal” and as a “vector of disease”.