The Journey of the Retired Activist Against Prohibition 2.0 (part one)

Núria Calzada is in conversation with retired Professor Julian Buchanan in Aotearoa New Zealand, in part one they explore his childhood growing up in Liverpool and his experience of drugs. This interview was originally published in the Cañamo Magazine

Julian Buchanan (b. Liverpool) now retired, enjoyed a successful career as a social worker, researcher and professor spanning more than forty years of experience examining poverty, inequality, drugs, crime and exclusion. A career pathway undoubtedly marked by the difficulties and deprivation experienced in his own childhood.

During the 1980s, Buchanan worked in the heroin dispensing clinic with the legendary Dr. John Marks and promoted the pioneering concept of “risk reduction” approach. He is the author of dozens of articles and book chapters on engaging with problematic drug use understanding the damage caused by prohibitionist drug policies, he’s been an advisor to various international Journals and Editor and Expert Advisor to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In 2011 he moved to New Zealand, where he worked as an Associate Professor of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington until his retirement in 2016. Since then he has been a tenacious cyber activist with a sharp critical sense that encourages us to question even the policies we consider more progressive. In this interview we explore the hidden pitfalls in drug reform, and critically consider the apparent “advanced” drug policies in New Zealand.

Q. How was your childhood?

I was born and raised in the Anfield area of Liverpool, a poor working class area. My experience of deprivation, poverty and classism shaped my whole outlook on life. My father was an Irish immigrant who came to the UK in the 1950s, a time when employers and landlords would publicly insist: “No Blacks, No Irish Need Apply”, so I became aware of discrimination at an early age. In the 50s & 1960s my father was a very active socialist and an influential man within the Liverpool Trade Union movement. Sadly, he died aged 46 years old of a heart attack, leaving my Liverpool born mum on her own with five children. I was the second eldest and had just turned 12 years old. We were already poor because my Irish father struggled to secure regular employment and decent wages in England, so his death left my mother with serious emotional, practical and financial challenges trying to hold the large family together. The fight for survival, the deprivation, the daily struggle, the stigma. the dependence upon free school milk, free meals and free school clothing undoubtedly shaped my life and drove a desire to become a social worker and make a difference.

Q. I once heard you comment that you had never taken drugs.

Of course, I have taken psychoactive drugs (caffeine, alcohol and tobacco) but strange as it may seem, I have never taken prohibited drugs. I think it was partly because in my teens after my father died I became a committed Christian adopting a lifestyle from what I could see mirrored his socialist values, I also wanted to become a social worker and I knew that if I got arrested for illegal drugs someone from my background was never going to get a chance.

For various reasons linked to the way I’m wired, my home circumstances, my unsettled emotional state and attending a rough school with 1,200 boys, taught only by male teachers, I was never happy at school, I failed to thrive educationally and failed most of my qualification. After repeatedly resitting numerous exams, some for the third time, I quit school in 1974 with six o-levels (GCSE’s) and at the end of that summer started work as clerical assistant with Liverpool Social Services having just turned 17years old. The local authority employer generously encouraged staff to engage in fully paid day release study, so after five years I’d gained an ONC in Public Administration at a local College of Commerce and a Certificate in Public Administration at Liverpool University. I then left Social Services administration to join the Merseyside Probation Service and later managed to secure a place at the University of Liverpool as a Home Office sponsored student to become a qualified social worker/prohibition officer.

I loved the Diploma in Social Work course, loved learning and once qualified I became a probation officer in Bootle, situated just north of Liverpool. It was the 1980s, a difficult time in the UK as it was being hit by mass de-industrialisation, unemployment and Thatcherite ‘trickle-down economics’, which deliberately punished the working class and savagely removed welfare safety nets. Liverpool with so much industrial history, depending on labour intensive industries was hit particularly hard with the closure of Shipyards, car factories, Bibby’s, Dunlop, Tate & Lyle, Meccano and many more.

Unemployment rates skyrocketed in Liverpool, people in their 50s who had worked all their life often in the same factory suddenly lost their jobs, their teenage children who had up to this point largely expected to follow in the employment footsteps of their parents were suddenly confronted with the idea of never finding employment. It was during these desperately bleak times when the discarded working class who had become surplus to capitalist requirement that many turned to heroin. The drug flooded into the poor areas of major cities in deindustrialised areas of England. The area where I worked as a probation officer became known as ‘Smack City’.

Prior to this heroin ‘epidemic’, illicit drugs were almost exclusively used to enhance social experiences, music, gigs, events and social gatherings. But in the 1980s, heroin and benzodiazepine use became normalized as a working-class activity. Working class youth used drugs not to enhance life but to block out life to achieve a state of oblivion. Depressants and pain killers helped avoid the stark and shocking realities of Thatcher's Britain, where almost overnight the established routine, security and stability of working class life seemed to disappear. Mass unemployment and the removal of hope and security changed everything . That’s when heroin really hit the big cities and the poor.

Although retired, Julian Buchanan continues his work for drug policy reform from his home.

Q. And what did you think about drug use back then?
At the time, I was a probation officer trying to help, trying to the right thing. I worked with the same type of poor people I grew up with. I could empathized with their situation, but I had no experience of drugs and so I adopted the dominant discourse and received wisdom that drugs were dangerous. I believed that drugs were killing the clients I has on probation, and I felt I had a responsibility to save them. In my first year I was desperately trying to convince young people to stop using heroin. I would write Pre-Sentence Reports for judges and magistrates, I would speak in Court explaining that my client wanted to stop using drugs and needed help. The Court would often grant them a chance of being on probation to me instead of being sent to prison. I’d take them to a detox centre or to a residential rehabilitation unit. But after only a few weeks (sometimes days) they would abscond and be back in Bootle again. It didn’t take me too long to realize that this approach was not working and that I was part of the problem not the solution.

Part two explores the move away from abstinence to risk reduction and the creation of one of the largest multiagency drug teams in the UK — (continued here)

Follow him: @julianbuchanan / https://julianbuchanan.wordpress.com