There was a speakout from 7-7:30 wherein the public could address the city council if you were able to call before hand to be put on the speaker list. A number of people spoke on needle exchange (there were other issues on the council's agenda as well), most of who were in favor of NEX, except one woman who was very confused around the issue and attempted to obfuscate her confusion by turning to God for her moral argument against injection drug use and the injector. That American flu seems to be hegemonic these days.

As the council debated around other issues on the agenda, we waited for those debates to end so we could get onto the injection question. The tactic of putting us at the end is always used to present the issue when most people have went home and the media have all gone to bed. This way, when the actual vote comes to the floor there is the least amount of people in the room.

Finally, at around 9:20, the president (Sarno) called on the next item which was the NEX proposal. After Bud introduced the proposal, he called on Helen Caulton (the head of Springfield's DPH) to argue the Public Health's position on the proposal. Although she spoke in monotone, unmotivated utterances, she did argue the harm reduction perspective in a very pragmatic, albeit apolitical, way. The unfortunate part, however, is that in her argument, which Bud also mimicked in his presentation, she used the trope of the "heterosexual, non-drug using, HIV infected woman" as the most devastating casualty of the HIV pandemic. Although this is an obvious tragedy, this type of argument always reproduces the cultural stigma surrounding the injection drug user by claiming that it's all right for drug users to die from HIV because they brought it on themselves by their very own practices. The latter population, however, are the real victims, the innocent victims of injection drug use. This strategy, although convincing to people who embrace the stigmatized depiction of injectors, only works if the drug user is erased as deserving services. In short, it is not enough to argue for saving drug users' lives (because no one really gives a fuck anyway), but we need to inhabit the discourse of the innocent victim - thus resorting to stigma - to break through the reactionary morality of our opponents. That depiction often works but definitely at a cost to the drug user.

Anyway, after Helen spoke, Bud delivered a long narrative on the viability of needle exchange. We prepped him well over these last months, and even though he inhabited Helen's innocent victim discourse, he did deliver quite a rigorous and pragmatic argument for the program. I was quite impressed.

Proceedingly, the four council members - Foley, Tosado, Walsh and Williams - who we knew where in our favor spoke first. They all gave there own reasoning why they supported the program. Then, out of the five council members against NEX (Kelley, Mazza-Moriarty, Puppolo, Rooke and Sarno), three (Mazza-Moriarty, Puppolo and Rooke) spoke on why they opposed the program. They all articulated their reasons within the same framework, but in various and yet mutually insidious ways. The gist of their arguments was that they did not have the proposal for how the program would actually run. The wanted to know what type of mobile van, what neighborhoods and times of operation, what type of services on the van, etc. This was of course given to them numerous time, once by the springfield users'council (us), once by Tim Purrington (Northampton Needle Exchange - Northampton, MA) and once by Bud Williams (the city councilor we have been working with) himself.

What ended up happening was that Puppolo made a motion to put the issue to committee. Bud second that and then the motion to put the issue to committee passed. OK, so we were pissed because we knew that Bud had the documents and failed to give them to the council. Thus, after the meeting we went into the council's chambers and spoke with Bud. He said first, "Calm Down." He then stated that he purposefully did not attach the aformentioned document because he claimed the city council would have irrationally torn apart the document and squashed its realization if he had. His point was that since now it would be debated in committee, those councilors who hinted, albeit in a false and misleading manner, that they might support a program if it was detailed out might be swayed to our side. Regardless of Bud's claim that they would have killed the proposal anyway or irrespective of Bud's actual intent, I believe if we are organized and have a United Front, we can hold those councilors accountable to their need for detail (after all, drug users are experts in the art of detail) through organizing and actions.

That said, if the vote ends up failing we are planning to administer a series of direct actions to hit the problem at its material core: the at- large city council and its undemocratic institutions. We are thinking public syringe spectacles with some bodybags and maybe some good old-school, state-sponsored, limp-bodied arrest scenes.

Well, that's it. I think Carl Schmitt's dictum on the undemocratic nature of liberal democracy is definitely evidenced in the workings of Springfield, Massachusett's electoral politics. Although, his answer to the problem of liberalism is pretty scary and similarly undemocratic in its application. At the end of the day, Marx was correct in the manifesto.

Thanks for listening.

in solidarity....

Nit Folgn - Springfield Users' Council