The end — forever out of reach. My name is Craig and I am a harm…
By: Craig Harvey
Tags: Harm Reduction, Naloxone, Overdose, Dying, Drugs

My name is Craig and I am a harm reductionist. Not just in what I do for a living, but in my life. I think risk taking is both inevitable and important, not just as we begin to stretch our wings, but throughout our life. Transgression towards the edges of acceptability is what drives art, and science.

My work is one of harm reduction. I work in drugs. Or rather I work inside mostly antiquated, risk adverse systems designed to ‘help’ people that use drugs. I’ve done this for a very long time. Not as long as others, but long enough, Twenty odd years, and I’m still doing it, which is a daily surprise to me. I’ve managed, despite a lack of qualifications deemed necessary by today’s standards to rise through the ranks to uncomfortable position of ‘coordinator’ –not manager, or ‘senior’ for that they would have to pay me more.

It’s a position I hold with extreme fear and trepidation. I make decisions. On the face of it, these decisions are arbitrary, pragmatic, solution focussed, most often in response to an issue at hand. I’m still a frontline worker, so I see the impacts of the decisions I make. Mostly, though night times restlessness and wrestling with my thoughts, I make half decent ones.

What concerns me is how ‘incomplete’ these decisions are. Either forced to be, or out of some necessity I can only half see.

I use this analogy; there is a finite amount of money on the table (money, I should add I never see, never know the size of the stacks, I just know there is some, somewhere, held by someone) Anyways, these stacks of money are piled in corresponding heaps on services. A few examples would be, Needle Syringe Program items that the Government don’t fund, but I think are important, such as wheel filters, sterile water, butterflies (increasingly so) naloxone stuff, outreach capacity.

Now, when one service needs more, say, naloxone — we are faced with the issue of moving some money from one pile onto another. Sure, we can ask for more money, but that doesn’t solve the problem in the moment. So what/who will we disadvantage?

And, I sit in meetings where they say things like “Craig runs an amazing program” or “Craig manages to run an amazing program on the smell of an oily rag” or some other such platitude. And I want to be sick with the anxiety of it. I want to run screaming from the room and say, ‘you do it, I don’t want to play any more’.

What they don’t realise is that every death I take personally. Every time someone dies, I think to myself, ‘did I miss something?’ Was that a result of poor, incomplete decision making? Either mine, or a forced decision. A business inevitability. Do I fight hard enough or have I grown weak, eroded by the sheer grind of it and the incomprehensible grief, heartache and sorrow that comes from the hundreds of empty funeral homes I have sat in, so someone is there to bear witness. To say that you were loved.

These decisions, and their aftermath erode at my soul, at my very being. I feel culpable. I suppose I’m not, maybe I am, but that debate is beyond the point. The real issue is that me, and lots of people like me are trying really hard to stop people dying, and I really don’t think we are winning. I don’t know why, the answer is too complex. Maybe decriminalisation? Maybe people could be a little less fucking discriminatory.? Maybe there could be a DCR on every corner? Maybe there could be naloxone next to the Panadol? (for the same price) at every supermarket.

I don’t know. I certainly don’t have the answers. What I do have, in spades, is grief. Hundreds of faces, spectres of all the decisions I’ve made.