“The addicts [in Vancouver] started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movement of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: ‘Nothing about us, without us.’ Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing. They began, haltingly, to find a new language to talk about themselves as addicts. We have certain unalienable rights: to stay alive, to stay healthy, to be treated as people. You are taking those rights away from us. We will claim them back.”

“Since Henry Smith Williams was broken, anybody opposing the drug war had entered the debate in a defensive crouch. They had preemptively pleaded—no, no, we are not in favor of drug use, no, no, we are not bad people, no, no, we are not like those dirty junkies. VANDU [Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users] was different. For the first time, they were putting prohibitionists on the defensive. They were saying: You are the people waging a war. Here are the people you are killing. What are they dying for? Tell us.”

–Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Bloomsbury, 2015)