Drawing a Line | Mike Linnell | 20 Years of Harm Reduction
Lyn Matthews
Mike on Lyn
I remember meeting Lyn and her husband Alan in the mid 1980's when she was an outreach worker in Liverpool. Lyn has continually pushed for harm reduction the sex industry. I remember standing bemused public was blissfully unaware that we were protesting about the treatment of Thai drug users to the Thai consulate that had its entrance hidden inside the shop.
During the mid 80's, cheap, brown heroin had started to become
readily available on the streets of Liverpool. For many of the youth at
that time, unemployed, disaffected and disillusioned by the Thatcher
government, heroin became something that at least filled your day.
Before long, if you lived in an area where heroin use was high, you
were frightened to close your windows for fear of trapping someone's
fingers. Houses got burgled, racks of clothes were removed from shops
and more and more dealers set up shop. A whole new subculture was
born and it seemed a whole generation were becoming philosophically
adrift on a sea of smack
Other areas, including Manchester, had also began to experience similar problems to what we were seeing in Merseyside, as heroin began to fl ood the streets of Britain. Drug treatment at this time was draconian and punitive to say the least, and this new breed of drug users certainly found there was nothing to offer them in drug services except humiliation. With no information around drugs, hardly anywhere worthwhile to go for help, being on 'smack' was pretty grim up north. And it was not just drug use that was a risk to peoples lives, injecting drug users were at an even bigger risk of a deadly virus to which there was no cure - HIV. Thankfully, some people recognised a new, more common sense approach was needed. And fortunately, there were people around who were willing to take the risk of standing up for the rights of users.
As we in Liverpool continued to develop services aimed at attracting those who were injecting brown and selling sex by introducing 'user friendly' services, a few people in Manchester were beginning to take their own pragmatic approach to this new wave of heroin use. Towards the late 80's we were handing out a publication in our needle and 18 syringe exchanges, which came from Lifeline, 'Smack in the Eye'. 'Smack in the Eye was a cheeky little publication which gave sound information in a humorous way on safer sex and drug use. And it was through 'Smack in the Eye' that I first became aware of Mike Linnell's work. Characters like 'Grandpa Smackhead Jones' and 'Tough Shit Thomas', created by Mike, not only made users (and workers) laugh, but also gave them information which was actually useful to them. Even scousers liked it!
But for some people, including the police, the publication was too
much and was labelled as being 'pornographic' by some commentators. Soon the cry for it's withdrawal echoed through the corridors of Lifeline.
Mike's and Lifeline's defence of the publication sent a strong and
important message out to the people 'Smack in the Eye' was targeted
at - some people really were on their side. 20 years on nothing much
has changed really. Mike is still in there causing controversy, still
managing to upset those with less enlightened minds, with his creativity,
insight and wit and has over the last twenty years made an enormous
contribution to the harm reduction movement.
