Cigarette butts are drug paraphernalia. Cigarette butts are a harm reduction tool. Cigarette butts are impossible to avoid. After the snow melts in winter, especially big messes of cigarette butts are revealed.
Unlike the overwhelmingly fewer number of needles or cookers or pipes that may show up after the first big melt, nobody says much of anything about the cigarette butts (the number of needles I see on the ground—and I go to a lot of places where people feel they can inject with the last chance of being interrupted or harmed for doing so—is negligible, not even worth mentioning really, compared to the number of cigarette butts I see). But these are the same kind of things. They are all harm-reducing drug paraphernalia that people use when self-medicating.
But some people may object to this. Needles are different—I could get poked and get HIV! I can’t get that from a cigarette butt (HIV is not transmitted by saliva, despite what some ding-dongs persist in thinking). True. But fears about contracting HIV from accidental needle poke injuries are massively over-exaggerated. In a study of hundreds or needle poke injuries that occurred in Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, not a single one resulted in HIV-transmission (even in healthcare environments where needles haven’t been left buried in the snow for weeks, the change of transmission from a needle stick injury is ~0.3%). HIV is really only a major risk for transmission when people share needles because there aren’t enough to go around. This is why, in London before the supervised consumption site came to town and a number of other programs started distributing sterilized gear, HIV and HCV rates were going up even though they were going down across the province. This is why, if we actually genuinely care about people not getting HIV from needles, the solution is to ensure more sterile needles are available and more safe spaces for injecting exist.
So, okay, the fear of harms caused needles is massively overrated (and it doesn’t help that we all probably were scared of needles when we were kids—although in those cases, too, it turns out our fears were wildly over-inflated). The same can’t be said about harms caused by secondhand smoke. These are well-studied, verified, and well-known. Cigarette smokers, myself included for many years, actively harm others with their drug of choice and means or consumption of choice, far more than people who inject their medications. Further, given the overwhelming absence of places for people to put their cigarette butts (which is also an issue for people looking to dispose of needles…), this also causes considerable environmental harm.
I don’t say this to vilify or disparage cigarette smokers. All of us harm others and the world in various ways. People who drive motor vehicles cause more harm than smokers. Ditto for people who eat factory-farmed meat or soy products grown by transnational corporations. None of us are innocent here. The point, rather, is to highlight the utter absurdity of how our communities are encouraged to respond to the little bit of needle-litter that they discover when the snow melts (or at other times of year). Go ahead and test this for yourself. Walk around your neighbourhood and count how many cigarette butts you see and how many needles you see. If you want to do more counting, walk to work and count how many motor vehicles pass you. You get the idea.
So why this degree of absurdity? Why is such a ridiculous response seen as so normal, appropriate, or even praiseworthy? Because we’re in the presence of oppression. The issue here is that needles, pipes, and cookers are related to people medicating their pain, or self-soothing their loneliness, or coping with their abandonment, with medications that have been criminalized (for them, but usually not for everyone). Cigarettes are much more available via non-criminalized channels.1 Furthermore, the fact that criminalization is less focused on specific substances (substances like fentanyl, Adderall, and hydromorphs that are all regulated and legal to acquire and use via certain channels), and more focused on specific groups of people—mostly forcibly impoverished colonized and racialized people who might also be existing outside the exchange systems established by racial capitalism (how dare they find a way to live that doesn’t require them to perform wage labour?!)—also highlights that this all pertains to oppression. Thus, what we take to be a sensible, commonsense approach to needle litter ends up being anything but that. As with other scares created to foster oppression (remember “Reefer Madness?”), we’re not really in the presence of something that will harm members of the general public. Instead, we are in the presence of those who actively harm the already-impoverished and we are encouraged to cheer on the oppressors and fear the oppressed.
- Although, NB, even when purchased via criminalized channels, the combined forces of the carceral state usually just yawn and look the other way. This happens all the time with rez smokes—it’s just not politically expedient, at this time, for the power that be to make a big deal about this. Although that may change in some Indigenous nations, like Akwesasne, as Canada and the US engage in new and more vigorous forms of border imperialism. ↩︎