Dani

Whitechapel, London, UK

Dani is a drug user who works in harm reduction and peer led-community welfare, in nightlife settings, community groups and services, and with their friends and loved ones. Their approach stems from a deep-rooted love of abolitionist care principles, as practiced for decades by radical harm reductionists around the world, leading to practice with ACT UP London, the Love Tank CIC, and other communities. Dani co-founded a nightlife-based harm reduction collective in London, is a member of the RATS collective (Radical Acts to Survive), and is a long-term sex worker, mad, transexual, and autistic.

Selected quotes:

“It’s a tricky landscape in the UK, and everything is illegal that we want to do. Everything is getting more illegal, and the conversation is going broadly in the wrong direction. But despite that, and maybe even in response to that, there are the wonderful pockets of really meaningful harm reduction that are springing up and are inevitably being practiced by people who are on the fringes of society in different ways, who have potentially the lowest capacity to actually be the people to do that work, and who probably need to be the people who are receiving the care but inevitably who are the people who are doing the caring. That’s, I guess, the way it’s probably always been, certainly in modern history of harm reduction.”

“I feel so strongly about nightlife is because to my thinking, it’s the only setting that is accessible in the mainstream where it’s possible to experience different narratives and different outcomes around drug taking. And there’s really not many others places in our general day-to-day lives where it’s expected that you’ll be taking drugs. … [It’s one of the few places] you won’t be necessarily alienated or punished or shamed for drug use.”

“I feel very strongly and passionately about reminding people that the outcomes that they see in the mainstream media around having a terrible time, having your life destroyed, being punished, or having things removed from you are not the full picture—and in fact, that they don’t have to be the picture for anyone. This is core to the abolitionist approach of the work that I do.”

“Drug taking as trans is very important to me because my transness doesn’t really involve gender. I think gender is really boring, and I’m not that interested in gender. My transness is about different states of being—it’s like an opening of possibilities. If I can inhabit this gender or this expression, what else can I do? It even takes me into realms about how I connect with nature and animals and non-human people. I can’t bear the idea of just inhabiting one viewpoint to access reality. There’s so many ways to access other approaches to reality and experience that absolutely inform how I’m able to connect with people. Drug taking is that, it’s very that. It’s the trans experience, but also trans experiential. And sometimes it’s really, really fun. It’s okay to just have fun.”

FULL INTERVIEW (ENGLISH):