I was trying to think of a title or pull out quote for this section but ended up with several in mind and no clear idea what the length or scope of this particular chunk of story will end up being. I guess I’m just gonna start writing and if there ends up being a best quote I’ll pull it out and stick it at the top when I’m done. I guess I’ll start with the needle exchange.
It wasn’t until we lived in the Red House that I even thought of looking for one. Everything that was self destructive experimentation at El Rancho became a lifestyle at the Red House. So I had already shot up on my second or third time trying heroin, I can’t remember who exactly I got to show me how, but I figured that I was probably about to do it a lot. And I figured if I was going to be doing it a lot I might as well be doing it with clean needles.
I haven’t really talked or thought about why we started smashing up El Rancho or being so casual and careless about using socially stigmatized hard drugs but I think a huge factor was the way the police had treated us during Jamie’s overdose. We were used to getting in trouble for having illegal shows, trespassing, drinking in public, loitering, driving without the proper documents or a hundred other things. But in every one of my previous police interactions it felt like the under-text was “you’re a basically good kid but you did a stupid thing or got caught up or I just felt like fucking with you”. This was the first time, for me at least, that I felt the police looking at and treating me like I was less than fucking garbage.
I don’t know, maybe other people in the crew were used to that or had grown up with that but for me it felt like “fuck it, they already think I’m the worst piece of shit imaginable, it doesn’t make any difference whatever else I decide to do from here on out.”
Anyway I found an early website or list of outreach locations for the Chicago Recovery Alliance and went out and made contact with the silver box truck. I met Dan Bigg right away and connected with him on the very first visit. Dan was a giant in the field of harm reduction, he lost a friend to an opiate overdose in the early ‘90s and made it a personal crusade to discover a way that it could have been prevented. Naloxone was only used by hospitals and paramedics until Dan started finding ways to get his hands on the substance and put it directly into the hands of drug users in 1996.
There is no way to overstate Dan’s importance in the distribution and current prevalence of this life saving drug. He was the Dallas Buyer’s Club of making sure your friends don’t die. If you or a loved one have ever been brought back from the brink of death using naloxone, even if it was done by a police officer, I can say with 100% certainty that Dan Bigg played an instrumental role in ensuring that the drug would be there to save you.
With CRA he found overseas suppliers for the substance and carried duffel bags full of the stuff to harm reduction conventions to distribute to anybody who would take it. When Chicago authorities said that nobody could legally carry the drug without a prescription CRA hired their own doctor to write a prescription for anybody interested in carrying it. Mostly Dan was a teacher and role model, I will never forget what he said to me when I mentioned having a week of clean time:
“Don’t say that, if you did happen to be using right now that wouldn’t mean you’d be dirty.”
Dan died of an overdose in 2018. The street drugs that killed him combined heroin with methadone, a benzodiazepine and two different fentanyl analogues. While his work continues to save countless lives the side effects of prohibition might soon mean that not even naloxone will be able to reverse overdoses in many cases. Now that it is illegal for Chinese chemical manufacturers to sell any type of fentanyl even more dangerous veterinary tranquilizers like xylazine are popping up in street drugs.
When I first met Dan in 2001 he had been looking for ways to reach the younger generation of mostly middle class and suburban intravenous drug users. He asked me to help set up a focus group of other young users so I just got everybody I lived with and a few other friends to show up to it. We met at a diner called Sully’s and got dropped back off at the Red House with some naloxone kits, a box of clean syringes and a twenty dollar participation compensation for every attendant. There were a couple attendants who hadn’t actually used intravenous drugs before the focus group but everyone ended up trying it afterwards, at least once.
It seemed relatively safe and like it wouldn’t instantly destroy your life or get you addicted – I don’t disagree with either of those conclusions or see the deconstruction of negative stigma as a bad thing. I’ve lost more friends than I can count to opiate, mostly heroin, overdoses but I don’t think they are bad drugs. Pure heroin is actually the most benign of the recreational “hard” drugs when it comes to it’s effect on the tissues and organs of the body. The medical complications come from bad hygiene practices when it is used intravenously or from overdoses that are 100% reversible.
I see Prohibition and Stigma as the actual killers. Nobody can distribute the more benign opiates legally so only adulterated versions of the most dangerous forms are readily available. If a high functioning user has a job, family or community those people would view and treat them differently if they knew they used. So they keep it secret and nobody can save them in the event that they overdose. This is especially true if somebody is supposed to be in “recovery” and “relapses”. They don’t want to bum everybody out by admitting they are using again so they use in secret and bum everybody out even more by dying.
I’m pretty sure I was the first person that we ended up having to actually use the naloxone on. A bunch of people were sitting in Kiki’s room, talking and smoking. Nearly everyone was high but we hadn’t necessarily gotten high at the same time or from the same source. Jamie had actually caught the entire thing on video and it used to be online with my first and last name attached to it but I made him take it down because of my public school teaching career. My friends are all talking when they realize that I don’t appear to be moving or breathing. Somebody hits me with naloxone and Justin Two makes an urgent entreaty as I return to consciousness:
“Ossian! Do you have anymore of that dope?”
It would happen several more times while we lived at the Red House. I’ve heard stories about people waking up angry, attacking the paramedics, that sort of thing but I’ve never seen it firsthand. I almost wonder if that’s just an urban legend thing or a form of mass hysteria like the cops who would “faint” after touching what they believed to be fentanyl. I do remember waking up with an intense urge to engage in a certain physical activity but it wasn’t violence. I told everyone that me and Robyn needed privacy to “talk about what just happened”.
CRA needed somebody in my age bracket to serve on it’s Board of Directors so Dan asked me and I joined. We met once a month to discuss the outreach locations and hours and other programs. It was mostly made up of older cats from the South and West Chicago Housing Project’s. There was a Puerto Rican guy named Jimmy who only had one hand and looked like he was either a burn victim or had really messed his skin up with an infection from injecting.
Jimmy actually sold heroin out of his Humboldt Park apartment, it was dark brown and about halfway between tar and powder in texture, not like anything I ever saw before or after. On my first visit they let me shoot up in their bathroom and his wife took off her nylons when I asked if they had a belt or tourniquet I could use. After that he always made me wait until I got home. His wife always told me that her cousin had been asking if I was married but I never looked into it. I should have met her at least, I like talking to people.
Dan and Karen Bigg lived in a nice apartment by North Avenue with a bunch of dried opium poppies in a vase on a console table the moment you opened the front door. I don’t think I ever actually saw further into the place than the hallway with the console table. I talked to Dan a few years later in 2007 when I was writing a piece about CRA in a community newspaper called The Skeleton.
It was about how the City of Chicago uses a method called “epidemiology” to determine HIV prevention funding. It means they base the funding on the number of new infections. CRA had successfully cut the number of new HIV infections in half so their HIV prevention budget got cut in half as well. With programs unfunded the new infection rate went back up again.
The article was called No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. I don’t have any copies of The Skeleton but I bet somebody does. I think there was another newspaper that came out after it called The Land Line.
When I went back to San Diego in late 2001 Andy Hyde took over my position as the youth representative of CRA’s board.
Dan’s death affected me somewhat differently than those of my many friends who have died the same way. I always feel frustrated because I know how preventable and reversible it is. It never bothers me that the people in question had decided to get high, I just always wish they had managed to do it around somebody who could keep an eye on them and reverse the overdose. I know it doesn’t always work like that, that you can fall asleep right next to a person and only realize that anything’s wrong when they don’t wake up.
When I heard that Dan had died it made me feel like I was holding a sword made out of fire. I haven’t done very much for harm reduction personally besides sharing information, talking to people who are isolated by their drug use or administering naloxone whenever I’m around somebody that overdoses. But it feels like my cause, I feel like a warrior in a conflict that is entirely legal and cultural in nature.
Dan was my commander, my idol and my friend. I don’t know if there is a secular version of sainthood but I think he should be canonized. Dan Bigg – the patron Saint of naloxone.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 