Drawing a Line | Mike Linnell | 20 Years of Harm Reduction
Peter McDermott
Mike on Peter
As a writer and theorist, Peter was of crucial importance to the birth of the harm reduction movement in Britain. In the late 1980's, he wrote for and edited the Mersey (later the International) Harm Reduction Journal. Peter has written numerous booklets (McDermott's Guides) for Lifeline, that are wonderfully insightful and funny - he is frankly unique and impossible to replace. Peter is the "voice of the user" at a national level through his representation at the National Treatment Agency - and although drug user representation can often be tokenistic, nobody who has ever worked with Peter is left in any doubt he earns his place at the table on merit. I remember seeing Peter nod off and loose his teeth, whilst presenting a research paper at the international harm reduction conference in Rotterdam, although he doesn't seem to recall this.
The Alfred Hitchcock of Harm Reduction: a tribute to Michael Linnell.
One of the great strengths of Lifeline's publications is that they have always had a great appeal to the illiterate and semi-literate branches of the drug using population.
A consequence of this popularity has been the huge amounts of undeserved flattery have that come my way, as people congratulate me for the hilarious pictures that I've been drawing over all these years.
In the mistaken belief that I'm the one that draws the pictures, attractive young female injecting drug users have offered me their bodies, while less-attractive males have offered me free samples of mind-altering substances. These are the perks of being at the cutting edge of harm reduction-based drug education.
But whenever you have an upside, there is invariably a downside too. For me, the major downside of working with Mike Linnell has been a strange inexplicable tendency for some people to associate me with the character of Peanut Pete! I've always resented this travesty.
How anybody could mistake a fifty year old Scouse methadonian for a teenage ecstasy-gobbling Mancunian has always been a mystery to me. Grandpa "Smackhead" McDermott, I could see, but Peanut Pete?
And the "professionals" are no more literate than the users are.
Over the years, Linnell has made me a minor celebrity through his rather fine illustrations of the author in the various publications that I've written for him. Now, whenever I go to a conference, someone will always ask me why I'm not wearing my cigarette holder and smoking jacket?
This is a perfectly ludicrous question. They might as well ask why I'm not wearing my pyjamas and slippers. My cigarette holder and smoking jacket are upstairs in my hotel room, awaiting the postconference recreational leisure activities - a fact that many hundreds of attractive young drugs workers will be happy to attest to.
Like all great caricaturists, Linnell can't resist the self portrait and has, on very rare occasions, put his own character into his work. If any reader can successfully identify which of the stories he puts himself into, we'll send you a set of autographed "McDermott's guides" as a prize. Entry to this competition is barred to all Lifeline Employees, and anyone who attended the Third International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harm.
I've known Michael Linnell since 1986 or 1987 - when he came over to Liverpool, a still wet-behind-the-ears art student who was touched by a stroke of genius. In those days, Lifeline was a schizophrenic organization, still dominated by the dead hand of amateur psychotherapy, and Linnell represented a tiny core of Harm Reductionists who were working in the belly of the beast. Fortunately, the Harm Reduction faction won.
Whether the organization and its staff know it, whether they acknowledge it or not, throughout the nineties and beyond, Michael Linnell and his work was the public face of Lifeline. Any reputation that Lifeline gained for being a cutting edge, innovative, creative enterprise was attributable almost exclusively to Michael Linnell's work during that period.
Twenty years later, the rest of the organization is finally starting to deliver on the sort of quality and attitude that Linnell's work promises.
Of course, there are those who criticize Michael for being cynical, or for criticizing rather than offering solutions. Neither of these are accurate. His critique of the field is born not from cynicism, but from optimism - from a vision of what good services should look like, and how the people that use them should be entitled to the very best that we can offer.
And when the history of British drug policy post AIDS comes to be written, Michael Linnell will be seen as a critically important figure. His work for Lifeline ultimately defined how drugs education should be done - not just in the UK, but across the globe.
And not only does he leave behind a major contribution to the theory, but the work stands on its own as well. I have no doubts whatsoever that in another twenty years time, people will still be reading those of Lifeline's publications that bear the product of Mike's hand and brain, because even if they had no socially redeeming content whatsoever, they are never anything less than hilariously funny, and refl ect the foibles and attitudes of a particular subculture at a particular point in history. How many other drug information leaflets can you say that about? Are there any?
Of course, not everybody likes his work. Every now and again, some new rent-a-quote politician, or some up-and-coming wannabee journalist will stop quaffing the Cabernet or snorting the Charlie for long enough to recognize that there's a potential moral panic in the making here. And so no doubt the media will start monstering him yet again, whining on about the risk to our young people - as though their own policies actually did anything other than increasing drug related harm.
But for Linnell, that kind of stupidity is just part of the cost of doing business. Whenever he offends Major Bufton Tufton, the Right Hon. Anthonia Blairs-Babe or this week's version of Glenda Slag, he sees it as a sign that he's still getting it right.
We are Lifeline. Nobody likes us. We don't care.
Here's to another twenty years of getting it right.