“Some days, Jess Tilley sits and talks with the parents of teens who’ve begun using heroin. On others, she lectures medical professionals on how to approach opioid users ― traveling to conferences to talk to colleagues about needle exchanges and drug-testing strips.
At 41, Tilley has two decades of experience working with people who use drugs ― and even more years as a drug user herself. Tilley is the founder of the New England User’s Union, a self-organized group of primarily opioid users working together to stay alive and fight the stigma of drug use, whether or not they’re trying to quit.
With 287 members divided into chapters around New England, NEUU is one of several unions of drug users around the country. Like labor unions, tenant unions and many other counterparts, drug user unions operate on the premise that people facing a common problem should work together to fight the systems that perpetuate it.”
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/drug-user-unions_us_5a257c26e4b03350e0b86c00
Source: HuffingtonPost.co.uk – December 21, 2017
