Sam Shirley-Beavan

Also I couldn't be more glad at the demonstration that threatening a Manchester suburb with the threat of drug decriminalisation is a fucking stupid political strategy for Labour.

Many families will know people who have had their lives destroyed by criminalisation.

So what?

(1) Interpersonal violence is an important drug-related harm that should be addressed by harm reduction programmes

(2) Interpersonal violence is an inevitable consequence of the War on Drugs: Harm reduction should aim to end that war and pursue peace.

Finally, alongside being displaced, other intersecting identities also exposed people to greater violence. This was true of women, migrants, racialised people and older people.

💣 ARMED GROUPS: Several people I spoke to had been forced to leave their homes by armed groups because they used drugs. They arrived in Bogotá without a social network other than the one provided by drug markets. That made them even more vulnerable to the all the other sources of violence.

🤝 PEERS: The structural conditions of scarcity, poverty and criminalisation make interactions between peers on the street fraught with danger. Small disputes (e.g. literally over a broken match) can escalate quickly to serious violence.

🦹‍♂️ CRIMINAL GROUPS: When one group ‘controls’ a drug market, they violently enforce their own rules. When there is competition, navigating the drug market becomes delicate and dangerous, as groups use violence against customers prevent rivals from operating.

🚓 POLICE: Despite Colombia’s decriminalisation of personal drug use, people who smoke basuco and live on the street still face police violence. The risk of violent encounters with police pushes them into more hidden spaces, where they are more vulnerable to…

The violence was perpetrated against them by police (and so-called “vigilantes”), armed and criminal groups, as well as by peers in the community itself.

Among people I spoke to, interpersonal violence was often the very first thing they mentioned when I asked about harms related to using basuco.

Excited to share the first published paper from my PhD project - an ethnographic project studying drug-related harm among people who smoke cocaine (basuco) in Bogotá, Colombia. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mfcN3PEro...

Restore Britain will, without apology or fear, deport the third world orcs who break into our country, rape young women and then expect the British to tolerate their presence. There is finally a political party that will defend our home, our people, our shires. Restore Britain.

The UK parliament now has an MP who is openly racist and far right. This is, for the current era, new ground, and it will be interesting to see how - if at all – other MPs respond.

His MO has always been “The real problem with [Bad Thing] is the reaction to [Bad Thing]”. The effect is to shut down criticism and defend the status quo.

Drugs, Civil Rights and the Alternative Society: A History of Release Principal Supervisor: Professor Toby Seddon (UCL) Co-Supervisor: Professor Alex Mold (LSHTM) Project Description Background Described as the oldest independent drugs charity in the world, Release w…

New PhD studentship opportunity! Research and write the history of Release, supervised by me and @alexmold.bsky.social! bloomsbury.ac.uk/drugs-civil-...

The question, though, is whether the harms become even greater for those that do 'evade' a ban, and how that changes the equation. Drug policy is one area where the evidence suggests the harms for those people (i.e. people who use illicit drugs) are vastly increased by prohibition.

If the issue we are facing now is polarisation then the solution is to be found in between fascism and anti-fascism, racism and anti-fascism, authoritarianism and democracy

Maybe then that's not the clever, reasonable argument some think it is...

Let's all just take a breath and remember that AI assistants are Dunning-Kruger Clippy.

On #WorldAIDSDay, remember that people are still catching HIV from sharing injecting equipment. And this can be prevented. #HarmReduction

British Politics' Midlife Crisis Why British Parties Can't Make Peace with Their Actual Voters

On the morning of Keir Starmer's conference speech here's a new post on an odd psychopathology in British politics - our main parties don't like the people who vote for them - the dreaded Professional Managerial Class. And so they are acting out like a divorced dad seeking cooler voters. 1/n

Thousands of opioid deaths missed off official figures The error - affecting England and Wales - raises concerns about the impact on the government's approach to drug deaths.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

An estimated 13,000 opioid-related deaths have been left out of official drug deaths from 2013-2022 - 50% higher than previously known.

This means what was already dire numbers were actually worse than expected. But would things have been different with this info?

Call from Palestinian Scholars to boycott the European Society of Criminology #EuroCrim2025
Link below

UK Home Office tells parents their children should return to Brazil alone While Ana Luiza Cabral Gouveia and Hugo Barbosa can remain, letter says sons, 11 and eight, must go back to Brazil

Abolish the Home Office.

Exactly this. Let’s not give the drug war yet another tool to mask the real problem.

More information on the L&SERWFL Trophy final between Clapton CFC Women's First Team and Dulwich Hamlet Reserves at Maidstone United today 🇵🇸✊

www.claptoncfc.co.uk/2025/05/25/c...

A nail biter! I’m sure you’ll be back on top next season 🏆

Also sceptical of this supposed 60% reduction in reoffending - surely the people who "volunteer" are those most motivated to reduce these behaviours anyway? Plus, is there not a risk that this drives people to find arousal in ever more extreme ways?

Shabana Mahmood considers chemical castration for serious sex offenders Justice secretary expected to back radical sentencing reforms, including use of libido-suppressing drugs in England and Wales

I'm not an expert in this by any stretch, but I am uncomfortable with 'do this or stay in prison' being presented as "voluntary".
www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Nice one, congratulations!

🔎 Special Issue Alert 🔍

This Special Issue seeks to provide ways in which we can understand drug-related violence. Submission Deadline is September, 15th, 2025.

Link: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

#InternationalDrugPolicy #DrugRelatedViolence

Guardian headlines about Starmer promising significant fall in immigration

As I argue in the article linked below, "concerns about immigration" are created in a top down manner and focusing on this only serves to legitimise and normalise the far right

Starmer is not trying to counter Reform, he's normalising far right politics

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Very excited to share our new paper in @ijdrugpolicy.bsky.social 🎉

In this paper we look at experiences of people who use drugs in public and semi public drug consumption environments and the need for OPCs in England.