Ep8 George (Kev) Dertadian, Ph.D. Addiction Research non-carceral approaches to drug use

[00:00:03] Chris Langley: Hi, welcome to the Addiction Recovery Place, the podcast to champion, addiction treatment specialists and experts around the world. I'm very, very pleased to introduce today's guest, George Durtanian, PhD, George is a social researcher who conducts field based research with people who use drugs, including the non medical use of pharmaceuticals and injection drug use.

And among. Marginalized as well as structural advantage people who use drugs. He's interested in alcohol and other drugs, the sociology of crime and deviance and social and cultural theory. He advocates for non-carceral in responses to drug use with particular folks focus on harm reduction. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Criminology as part of the School of Law, society and criminology, and the faculty of law and justice at the University of South Wales.

Welcome to the Addiction Recovery Place Podcast George, it's wonderful to have you with us today and we really appreciate you joining us.

[00:01:01] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): Thanks so much for having me, Chris. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here to discuss some of the work I do at, it's actually the Uni of New South Wales. I

[00:01:10] Chris Langley: Oh, I beg your pardon. Didn't I say that? Okay. Okay. Well, I beg your pardon on that. Anyway so we're going to jump straight in George. So tell us what drew you towards this subject and around your work.

[00:01:20] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): that I've really had a strong interest in underdog type stories for most of my life. And I think that mainly comes from my family's migrant history. So, you know, my family have lived in many different parts of the world over the last few generations from Ottoman occupied Armenian villages. They had to leave in the 1910s because of the Armenian Genocide. They resettled in Palestine and then were displaced from Palestine during the Nakba in 1948 through the establishment of the State of Israel. Then to Jordan. And then because of civil war there, they had to move again and landed in a country in what we now call Australia in the 1960s. And so for me, whenever I hear, you know, people who are just struggling for a good life or to make something to make a living, To make it, I suppose, in what is sometimes a cruel world being put down it feels unnervingly familiar to me. And so, you know, there's these really interesting things that go on when, you know, I arrive here on stolen country and and end up in more or less a middle class life you know, there are these kind of really interesting survival tactics amongst people who struggle, who draw lines between themselves and other people who are worse off than them.

And I think drugs is one of those lines that people draw a lot. And that's where I think. It brings back the interest comes back for me. So, you know, there are some really interesting double standards around whose drug use is good and whose drug use is bad. And I find that really interesting. But I think more importantly, I have a really strong inclination to kind of interrupt that kind of thinking. And that's really where my interest in drug policy and the lives of people who use drugs come in.

[00:03:11] Chris Langley: That's a very good explanation of that. And thank, thank you for explaining that to me. So what work and research do you do at the university, George? What do you currently do?

[00:03:20] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): So I'm a qualitative field researcher who works primarily in street based drug markets and with people who use drugs. And basically what that means is that my job is to spend time with people who use drugs in all sorts of settings, but in drug markets in particular. So that means hanging out with them, speaking to them, learning about their lives and how prohibition affects their lives as well as, you know other ways that they kind of deal with and manage drug use and prohibition.

[00:03:57] Chris Langley: Okay. So how long have you been doing this work for with specifically around drug use and prohibition laws and the research you've been doing?

[00:04:06] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): So I've been a researcher for the last 10 to 15 years depending on whether you count the PhD as part of that, of that process. So, you know, about five years of PhD, then 10 years after that and I also do, I teach in criminology at the university.

[00:04:24] Chris Langley: Excellent, excellent stuff. So within your research, George, what period of time was the linchpin of when things were really ramped up in terms of international consensus to punish drug use? Because it's such a wide subject and a lot more history than I than I realized. So if you can, if you can tell us a little bit about that, about the history around drug use and prohibition and how that came to be.

[00:04:48] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): Yes,

I think the timeframes are sort of similar slightly different in Australia and North America, but there is something that kind of binds those two together. And it's really colonization that begins the process of strong restrictions around drug use or the drug use of particular kinds of people, you know, first nations people.

So like during early colonial eras in both North America and in Australia, there was kind of direct targeting racial targeting in legislation. So, you know, naming populations of first nations people. As, you know, being restrict their, their drug use being restricted. And that includes in North America, you know, people who are enslaved to build the new world and in Australia to build a new country. But that isn't of course where it stops, right? So that's the sort of inception. And there's a kind of slow progression over time of restricting more and more substances for more and more people. Around that began there, but, you know, grow from there. And I think where it kicks into sort of high gear on the international stage is during the Nixon administration in the US, which is the first administration to use the war on drugs language. And it's really, the establishment of the drug interdiction agency that you still have today, those kinds of agencies that are focused specifically on finding people who use drugs. So entire agencies devoted to that, that really ramp up the war on drugs in America, and in Australia, actually the, the, the timeframe and, and, and the politics are quite different. Australia was much more ambivalent and reluctant to actually introduce prohibition, and it resisted it for much longer than other places, but eventually, especially in the 1970s, began to embrace it with much enthusiasm.

[00:06:53] Chris Langley: with the rest of the world, unfortunately, I think really as well in the United Kingdom, I think we had our, our main drug law was implemented in 1971. So, the kind of history around the drug laws is, is, is far outstretched and everything's just ramped up constantly and then obviously we had the Reagan years and.

You know, Clinton and everything else. And and here we are today dealing with this big mess, unfortunately. So with the so called war on drugs, do you agree that this is the wrong framing of the term? Because my personal opinion is that the war, it's a war on people and used to control certain demographics in society.

Sadly as your study and paper, "The Coloniality of Drug Prohibition" clearly details. Everyone has to read that, by the way,

[00:07:43] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): Thank you for reading it. Yeah, I mean, you're, you're absolutely right. There's been lots of ways in which people have challenged that, that phrasing. So, you know, there's been people who've historicized the war on drugs as a war on black and brown people or, you know, a significant form of racialized, of racial violence, a war on poor people, a war on people who use drugs.

So, you know, just communities of people who use drugs. I think all of these kind of reframings of the war on drugs are really useful. They're all true. But as I said, I think it's important to mention that the inception of these things is colonial processes and colonial imperatives, right? It was really useful for imperial powers to present Indigenous peoples as savage in order to kind of conduct processes of colonization and drug use was one of the ways in which they did that. And so, you know, that's a really important form of kind of social control that operates today, but there are really kind of much more contemporary examples of the war on drugs being explicitly a form of social control. So I mentioned the Nixon administration, right? The one that sort of started the, that actual terminology, the war on drugs, which didn't exist before then. And, you know, Nixon officials have been quite explicit about admitting that they knew that they would be lying to people about drugs and drug policy when they began the war on drugs and that they did it for the explicit reason of trying to interrupt the communities that were, at the time their greatest political threats.

And that was that was anti-war protestors and African American or black communities that weren't supportive of them. I mean, people have people from the Nixon administration, sort of openly discuss that now, right, saying that actually the reason we did this was so that we could invade the homes and lives of people who are anti-war and people who come from black communities. That was the explicit reason they made that kind of political calculation to use that term. And of course, we see the expansion of that ever since.

[00:10:03] Chris Langley: yes, because the whole policy, I believe as well as it's changed the world as well and kind of how we, you know, see people and communities and it's, you know, I've I've worked in in the field for quite a while and, you know, seeing the repercussions of drug laws and, you know, because it's not just somebody gets, you know, arrested, prison, and that's it.

They get on with their lives. That's their life completely ruined in certain States, because I mean, we, we have it over here in America. Now, if you get done for a drugs offense, you can't vote, you can't get your housing, you can't get loans, bank, there's, there's such a big uh, Implication of somebody being arrested for drugs.

And it's it's it seems to have just been ramped up significantly over the last 40 years. You stated, George, that you're a champion of non carceral approaches to drug use, which I completely agree with. Can you fully explain what this means and how it should be implemented into a wider society instead of the tried, tested and most importantly, failed models such as just punishment?

[00:11:10] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): Yeah, I think, you know, non carceral approaches to drug use are basically approaches that support people to use drugs as safely as possible or, or to support them in their goals related to their drug use. So, you know, it's important in these spaces that we don't kind of collapse everyone into the same category, right?

Lots of people have very different relationships with their drug use. Some people, you know really want to stop using drugs, and we should find ways of supporting them to do that through non carceral responses, as in, like, without imprisoning them or without policing them or without sort of requiring abstinence as a sort of first step, which is kind of a bit, a bit of a bizarre thing that some of our health systems kind of require, they require you to already be abstinent in order to enter programs that are based on abstinence, right? and that's really hard for a lot of people, you know, to sort of manage their lives when they're sort of abandoned by all sorts of social systems and also, you know, other forms of social support, like even their families, right? You know, lots of people who use drugs or become dependent on the drugs they use are abandoned by their family for reasons that are not their fault nor their family's fault.

This is about the way prohibition stigmatizes and criminalizes people. It, it forces people to the edge of society. It forces people to be criminalized and that, that creates tension between you know, young people and anyone on the age spectrum and their families, the forms of social support that they need to kind of get through the day to make a good life. And so, you know, What, what we do need is approaches that support people to their goals, right? So if your goal is to stop using drugs, then how can we support people through doing that without imprisoning, imprisoning you? And that's really important point. And it's something that I've been exploring, actually, with, you know, people with people who inject drugs at the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Center where I've been doing some research and they talk a lot about how, you know, prison for some people who use drugs is a chance for them to moderate their drug use, right? It ends up being an opportunity for them to change patterns of drug use. I mean, that's not the case for everyone. Of course, like, it can be really, really very harmful towards people's patterns of drug use. But for some people, it does provide that opportunity. But, you know, the longer you speak to people about this topic, the more you realize that police and prisons aren't the ideal place to moderate people's drug use.

They're not ideal. They cause harm in the way people are arrested, in the way people are closed off from social and familial networks. Like I said, being imprisoned is a really significant stigma that places distance between people and their families and other kinship networks. Right, so, so yes, prison can provide an opportunity to moderate your drug use, but it's not the best way to do that,

and it does cause harms along the way as well. So that's one, one kind of area. The other area is that not everyone who uses drugs wants to or needs to stop their drug use. That's a sort of huge area of of the drug use space that we really don't talk about that much, which is that some people can and should be able to manage the drug use without being criminalized as a result of that drug use and where they experience harms, they should receive health and social supports to minimize those harms, right? That's what we mean, or that's what I mean anyway, when I say non carceral responses to drug use.

[00:15:05] Chris Langley: Yeah, I totally agree with that. So just a bit of an offshoot, but why do you think alcohol and the rest of the drugs are treated so differently? Because alcohol is so accepted the worldwide and, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's literally accepted, but it's one of the most damaging substances you can actually use, I suppose, really.

Why do you think that is?

[00:15:28] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): there are these long social histories of alcohol moving Stigmatized and prohibited towards very accepted and towards more regulated. Australia has a long history of this. Australia came really close to doing prohibition of alcohol in the way that it was done in the U. S. And that was largely driven by temperance movements who sometimes I thought it was kind of the first wave feminism who at the time linked you know, alcohol consumption to domestic violence and the harms that that caused. And there's long histories of what happened when Australia came very close to prohibiting, but then shifted towards an approach that was restricting the hours where pubs could serve could serve could serve alcohol until about six. 6 p. m. And there was this very unintended consequence of people rushing from work to drink as much alcohol as they possibly could before 6 pm.

They call it the six o'clock swill in Australian sort of history, and it did not address violence, and of course increased violence as a result of it. So that happens At a time when there are increasing, there is increasing pressure or not at the exact same time, but there are sort of parallel movements for in Australia's case kind of the, oh, sorry, my lights have just gone off, the, the colonial power that is the British really pushing the need to criminalize drugs. So, substances that were available for, widely available for use, are becoming more and more restricted while alcohol then becomes the, the sort of legitimate drug that becomes less and less restricted, restricted in order to respond to some of those things. So there are lots of, kind of parallel histories between these things. So when some drugs become less available, other drugs become more available. And, you know, maybe it's an under analysis of the situation, but it's an accident of history in many ways that, that, you know, at the time when things are being cracked down on this drug is the one that was being being loosened regulation beats that we saw regulation loosen on.

[00:18:04] Chris Langley: Just seemed a lot more accepted. So, so you, you, you're a big supporter of harm reduction, George. So what. What harm reduction approach do you see as the best model the world should implement and why do you think this is?

[00:18:19] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): So I'm really strongly influenced by people like Mariam Kaba and Shira Hassan on these kinds of questions about, you know, like, What should harm reduction look like? And should it be? And for those who haven't heard of Shira Hassan's book, "Saving Our Own Lives", I really highly recommend it. She really explores the kind of activist origins of harm reduction, the mutual aid origins of harm reduction, where it wasn't It wasn't actually just about drug use.

It was about communities of people who had been abandoned by social systems. We're talking here about trans women of color. We're talking about people in engaged in street based sex work. We're talking about people who use drugs that intersect with all of those. Dynamics and really it's about these communities developing strategies to keep themselves safe from state intervention and policing and and it was this kind of harm reduction that developed some of the most innovative public policy. Or the origins of some of the most innovative public policy that we see today in the more contemporary or mainstream reduction services that we have now. And so the question that Hassan poses, and the one I think is really useful is you know, how do we make harm reduction a liberatory project and you know, what kind of harm reduction helps to liberate people who use drugs and also other people who have been abandoned by social systems to live a happy, healthy and fulfilling lives.

That's, that's the kind of harm reduction I think is. The most important and that is compatible with lots of contemporary harm reduction services like the safe injecting center here in Sydney, like needle and syringe programs, like overdose prevention sites, but it does present some really interesting questions around, for example, when you are talking about liberation and interrupting state intintervention whates that mean when you have a government service that runs a harm reduction service, right? The presence of police is really harmful to people who use drugs. And so is it ever appropriate for harm reduction services to allow the presence of police or to work with police, even if in strategic ways? These are really important questions that I think, you know, we need to start thinking about and grappling with around what's the best way to do harm reduction

[00:21:05] Chris Langley: So how, how long have you had safe injecting places where you're located in Australia?

[00:21:12] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): for over 20 years now.

So yeah,

[00:21:16] Chris Langley: Wow,

that's impressive.

[00:21:18] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): yeah, Sydney has had one of the longest running medically supervised injecting centers in the southern hemisphere and we've had another established in Melbourne. A few years ago, and there's talk of another in MeMelbourne cominglong as well. And you know, this facility largely operates on the basis that police aren't supposed to come onto the premise and they're not they're not supposed to, you know, arrest people and those kinds of things.

And, and one of the reasons this works is because there's exemptions in legislation to say that clients and staff shouldn't be shouldn't be or can't be arrested for example, it doesn't work quite that perfectly in practice. There are many reports of police you know, in my own research and others of police hanging out at the front and at the back of the injecting center of the way that they police the area where the injecting center is located and all of those kinds of things.

So, many many issues still to deal with, but nonetheless a really fantastic

service.

[00:22:30] Chris Langley: Oh, definitely. Would you say that it's, obviously it's an amazing harm reduction approach, but has there been a notable Reduction in blood borne viruses and HIV and all those, you know, very important things you have to be very aware of when you're injecting any drugs.

[00:22:48] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): You know, I am not an infectious disease specialist, but it doesn't take a specialist to, to look at what the figures show in Australia, which is the harm reduction approach that Australia has taken has almost completely eliminated HIV in the population in Australia. Not completely of course, but it is. very, very low. And that is to the credit of cocommunities of queer activistsnd organizers and communities of people who use drugdrugs whoe really championed harm reduction and mutual aid as a way to help each other reduce the spread of this virus and you know, almost eliminated.

[00:23:36] Chris Langley: That's wonderful to hear. That's great. It's very progressive. I mean, even in the United Kingdom, we don't have this. They were fighting for it, even in Scotland, and it never happened when I was living there. And it's wonderful to see that some countries are actually You know, taking part in this important program because it's, you know, something needs to be done to address this problem for sure.

So, so what role does recovery play in the future of drug policy on the non carceral approaches that you mentioned earlier, George?

[00:24:04] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): I think recovery plays an incredibly important role. I think sometimes when you're working in the spaces where I work in and you're taking, you know, critical perspectives like I do, people think that you don't take recovery seriously, and that is not the case at all. I just have a different approach to what, A, I think recovery is, and B what? Whose views matter in relation to recovery? And I take a much more ground up approach to recovery, right? It's not how does the medical profession define recovery? Although that is useful information. It's how does community, how do communities of people who use drugs define recovery and what do they want in order to achieve? Recovery to feel better to live in the world in ways that help them flourish. That is recovery. And sometimes that will, of course, involve drug treatment programs medicalized and and clinical settings. But it won't always involve those things, and I think that's the important part.

I listened to a few of your podcasts and your first guest on the podcast talked about sort of self-determination in recovery. It's really a, really an important concept, not just in the kind of the way self-determination is explored in, you know, indigenous political rights. Right. You know, self-determination is really key to those conversations, but it has a much broader application to around, you know, people's bodily autonomy, the people's right to do what they do what they please with their own body. You know, this is really connected really strongly to a sense of, you know, how do people recover? How do they feel better? Both physically in their body, but also in a world that's rejected them for, you know, certain kinds of practices, and that's where I think recovery plays a role here, recovery in terms of, you know, what does your body physically need?

And also what do you need to kind of make your way in a world that doesn't always that doesn't always welcome you.

[00:26:22] Chris Langley: That's right.

I think stigma is a big one that that word gets mentioned in every one of my podcasts, and it reflects kind of societal approach to drug use. And I think that's a very important thing to address. Certainly, I was reading that. Obviously, there are finally some grassroots showing up. There's a slight shift in policy on an international level with the United Nations the other week stating that their approach should be more of harm reduction.

I couldn't believe I was reading that when I read that. So do you see a possible future in which the old approaches to drug use and incarceration will ever change?

[00:26:57] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): I mean, I think they already are. I don't want to overstate that, right? Like, you know, even when you have. You know, excellent harm reduction services, like the ones I mentioned, there are still high levels of policing of people who use drugs, even when you have, you know, the decriminalization of, possession in places like Portugal, and that's been expanded to many other parts of the world.

You still have, you know, significant stigma. criminalization of people who use drugs in, in those spaces. So I'm not, I don't want to kind of paint an overly rosy picture, but that, that doesn't change the fact that there are strong movements to decriminalize in various different models, whether that's to de-emphasize the enforcement of drug laws or to actually remove certain drug laws in different parts of the world. That's been occurring in parts of Europe, in parts of North America, and in parts of Australia. So, you know, these movements are afoot and they're having successes in terms of, you know, of enacting decriminalization setting up harm reduction services and approaches around the world.

And I think it's a really important moment for us to be thinking about you know, what comes next, what comes after prohibition, not because that'll be a simple and easy path, but because we want to be prepared when, and if That is a possibility, and I think there are lots of really interesting and important questions to be thinking through around, you know, what we want to do here.

We've seen some really terrible models for decriminalization or even, you know, the regulation of drug use legalization or regulation of drug use in ways that sort of promised communities that were criminalized bebecause of drug use that they would be able to sort of reap the benefits of the commercialization of some of these drugs, especially in black and brown communities in America, where, you know, people have been.

priced out of business licenses. People have not had their criminal records expunged, which means they can't access those markets. All of these kinds of things that, you know, should be done in order to sort of undo or make up for the violence of prohibition are not being enacted. And it's sort of being passed overover to at least in the sort of cannabis space being passed over to big business and, and corporations.

And, you know, I don't know that that really solves the problem. You know, it's from one exploitative market, which is an underground illicit market to, you know, another exploitative market, which just happens to be legal and commercialized. So, so those are the kinds of approaches I think we really need and thinking really carefully about what comes next. And for me, it's it's always, you know, local or localized approaches, small kind of brewery type licenses for the manufacturing of. Of these products, uproducts and certainly the decarceration of drug use, you know, taking people out of prison who have drug charges, removing those drug charges from their record, ensuring that all of those kind of collateral consequences of conviction that you were mentioning a little earlier, like,, you know, not being able to vote or not being able to access business licenses and all of those things are sort of removed as barriers for those people to live a good and happy life.

[00:30:48] Chris Langley: I couldn't have put that better myself. I totally agree with every word you just said then. So thank you very much for explaining that. So we're just going to move on to a little bit about you now. So what are you currently researching?

[00:30:59] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): I have quite a few projects. One, I think that's really interesting is that I'm working with system impacted students at the university. So students who have been formerly incarcerated criminalized by police or lived in out of home care. And I'm just. Working with them to learn a little bit about, you know, what they, what value they bring to the study of criminology and law, but also all of those other disciplines across universities where, you know, we talk about we talk about state institutions, you know, public health, medicine, social work, all of these places where, you know, we talk about prison and incarceration, but we rarely ever think to ourselves. Well, there might be people who have been incarcerated in this room and the language we use to talk about these things can be quite harmful to those students. So rethinking the way we talk about about these institutions, criminal legal institutions with students and looking at, you know, the strengths that these students bring to our classroom is one project. I've just had funded with a group of colleagues from criminology here at the university from the Australian Institute of Human Rights, and that's really exciting work, which isn't only about drug use, but of course, there will be lots of crossovers with drug use. I'm also doing, work, as I mentioned earlier with clients of the injecting center about their views on drug decriminalization.

You know, what things do they support and why. You know, what models of drug decriminalization do they think will work for people who use drugs? To sort of develop a sort of happy ahappy and flourishing life.

[00:32:40] Chris Langley: My goodness. Oh my goodness. Sorry. Sorry. I was just reacting to that. Sounds, that sounds wonderful.

[00:32:46] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): It is, it's wonderful. It's really wonderful to talk to people about, you know, how they see the future of drug policy or what they see will work. And they have really interesting insights, not only in what they think will work, but also the politics of what they think is possible. And that's a really interesting conversation.

And the last thing I'm doing is a project, on media analysis of pharmaceutical dependents. So people who are. Dependent on pharmaceuticals and how that coverage differs really strongly from media representations of drug addiction in other, or, you know, addiction to or dependence on other kinds of substances and there's a really strong focus in that, in the media coverage of pharmaceutical dependence in Australia on sort of the innocence of people who become dependent on pharmaceuticals, which is very different to the way, you know, people who are dependent on criminalized substances are represented in media landscapes.

[00:33:45] Chris Langley: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's, it's, it's big news the world over, unfortunately, what's happened with the pharmaceuticals. So. And it's interesting to see diff people's differing views, as you said, from legal to illegal drugs and how that's perceived on the, on the, on the news and on the tv. So, so finally George, where, where can people find you in your research?

[00:34:07] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): They can find me on Twitter, or I suppose it's called X now @KevDertadian K E V D E R T A D I A N. They can find me on LinkedIn. They can find me on the University of New South Wales website. I'm a member of the Center for Criminology, Law and Justice, in the Faculty of Law and Justice. You know, you can find a lot of the, the kind of work that I do here and the colleagues that I do work with there as well.

[00:34:40] Chris Langley: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you for that. And lastly, is there anything else that you'd like to mention that I might not have asked you before we finish?

[00:34:48] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): Well, I think we've had a really fantastic conversation, but I think one thing that's really interesting, for us to kind of think about as an ending to this really great conversation is how we build solidarity with people who use drugs, with colonized peoples and criminalized peoples in order to sort of work with them to develop policy goals and outcomes that, you kyou know thatn with their needs, right?

And this can't just be about the way, you know policy workers traditionally conceived or researchers traditionally conceived see these problems. It has to be about doing this work with these communities. It has to be about doing it in solidarity with them.

[00:35:37] Chris Langley: Wonderful. Well, well, thank you very much indeed for your time today. I really appreciate taking your, your very valuable time away from your work. And maybe we can have you gone in six months to talk about some more of the wonderful work that you're doing, George. I've loved having a conversation with you today.

I've learned so much and reading your work has just been quite inspiring for me and I will certainly continue to do so. So thank you very much indeed for joining me to stay on the podcast and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.

[00:36:06] George (Kev) Dertadian (he/him): Thanks for having me. Absolute pleasure.

[00:36:07] Chris Langley: thanks very much indeed.

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