Drawing a Line | Mike Linnell | 20 Years of Harm Reduction
Rowdy Yates
Mike on Rowdy
'Rowdy' Yates (nickname comes from the Clint Eastwood character in Rawhide) started work at Lifeline as a volunteer carpenter and always kept a touch of the 'Woodcraft folk' about him. He became Director of Lifeline and had the courage to change his mind and his working practices and steer Lifeline along the path of Harm Reduction. He left Lifeline to become a croft farmer in Scotland and run the drugs course at the University of Sterling. I remember hearing him sing an unaccompanied Irish ballad in a bar in Galway - it brought tears to the eyes of the whole bar.
In my time at Lifeline, I attended more than 100 funerals so this wasn't
some sort of theoretical debate for us. We wanted to produce HR materials for
users and training materials for other professions that cut the crap and would
actually be read. Mike was very much a central part of that approach. That
meant telling the truth, making it digestible and getting to the right readership - which is where Mike came in. It also meant being clear about what we thought was OK and not OK.
I think Mike understood this delicate balancing act better than most
- even within the organisation. (I still view Mike's cartoon of the Zoo-keeper
as one of the most telling satires on methadone prescribing ever set in
print.) And I think that's why Lifeline has had so much more success with its
publications than its many me-too producers. It's not just the fact that Mike
has an extraordinarily sharp wit and is a great draughtsman (though he is both
of those things) it's because he understood that there were some fundamental
truths that underpinned the stuff we wanted to say. 