Sione Crawford has worked in drug user activism and organising for nearly twenty years across Australia. He is proud to be a peer who leads the drug user organisation Harm Reduction Victoria and he has worked there for the past four years.

Australian drug policy creates contradictory and unsafe environments for people who use drugs and peer workforces with fundamentally mis-aligned approaches to drug policy. Law enforcement and abstinence approaches, rooted in stigma, discrimination and social control, receive 66% of drug policy funding. Peer-based harm reduction approaches are innovative, effective and responsive to community need but are limited in their capacity to advocate and support community participation in drug policy change through a combination of subsistence-level, service delivery funding models and overwhelming levels of community need.

Victoria is one of Australia's most progressive jurisdictions. A recent Mental Health Royal Commission recommended expansion of the peer workforce across the mental health, AOD and harm reduction sectors. As the Victorian Government invests in a lived and living experience harm reduction peer workforce comprised of people who use drugs, the contradictions inherent in a prohibitionist legal framework on one hand and a supportive health framework on the other, are becoming clear: impacting and implicating all of us.

Peer-workers are arrested in front-page splashes for being part of the community we are employed to engage with. It is not viable to embed a living experience peer workforce without safe workplaces that exist in a supporting social framework. Criminalisation and peer workforces cannot co-exist safely.

Criminalisation is deeply embedded culturally in this former penal colony; police pre-date the first Constitution and Parliament of Victoria. Parliamentary Inquiries explore the complexity of decriminalising drugs to little avail; the law is never really changed. The dominant system perpetuates, sitting in deep tension with the ethos of Health system reforms that are underway, as well as with the evidence-base in favour of decriminalisation and legal supply.

This paper will explore these problems and opportunities from the perspective of those most affected by prohibition - the community of people who use drugs.