Against State Oppression: Feminist Solidarity, the Pandemic, and Drug Use in Poland.

The aim of my paper is to think about harm reduction and other programmes addressed to people who use drugs through the feminist notion of care and solidarity. While there is broad scholarship on experiences of women and non-binary people who use drugs, exploring to what extent existing programmes respond to their needs, I want to push current discussions happening at the intersection of feminist and drug research further. My goal is to answer the question of how using drugs (and activities emerging around) can produce feminist practices of solidarity and to what extent these practices might shape drug policies. Inspiration for this paper comes from my ethnographic study conducted among (criminalised) communities of people who use drugs who are clients of drop-in services in two Polish cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having experience of doing feminist and queer studies and activism in Poland for years, I was surprised how drug and feminist & queer fields are often conceptualised separately, both in terms of theory and policy. My studies however show that using feminist tools in analysing experiences of drug users and applying the notion of care produced by grassroots harm reduction programmes, especially in the realm of growing uncertainties due to the coronavirus outbreak, might be very useful in creating theories and practices that go beyond carceral, penal measures offered in some countries as a response to violence. At the outset, I want to present bottom-up care practices emerging during the pandemic among people who use drugs and analyse how solidarity and justice are understood and experienced within this community. Then, I will combine the findings of my ethnographic research with feminist theories by pointing out possible redefinitions of the concepts of care and solidarity. Going beyond the securitized practices present in the era of the pandemic, I want to show the importance of non-state, non-institutional, ephemeral and temporary solidarity responding to the needs and desires of substance users.