Guerrilla Care: an interview with Peter Krykant

In a society built on discipline, simple kindness is a radical act.

[NOTE: This was originally written at the end of last year to be published as part of my work with Dosetest. This ended up falling through, but they were happy to let me retain ownership of the work (full credit to ‘em, they didn’t have to) and I’m now publishing it here. I think it’s still relevant, sadly, and I’ve made some tweaks to update it, but if it seems a little less topical than you’d expect this is why.]

While America’s overdose epidemic dominates the news, we can look to other nations to develop a fuller understanding of what leads to crises like these, and perhaps how they can be addressed. One such example is Scotland, which has sadly reclaimed its long-held title of the overdose capital of Europe with a meteoric rise in drug deaths in recent years. From 2013 to 2020, drug deaths have increased by 150% even without the widespread presence of fentanyl that’s seen in North America.

I recently [Oct 2021] had the good fortune to speak to Peter Krykant, a Scottish drug policy activist best known for setting up a guerrilla supervised-consumption site in Glasgow back in 2020. Operating outside the law from a van moving around the city centre, he ensured that the many injecting drug users in the area (most of them homeless) had a safe, clean place to dose with sterile equipment and a naloxone-equipped volunteer overseeing them. 

The police soon stepped in, following him and harassing him until things reached a head in October 2020: they attempted to force their way into the van while someone was dosing and charged him with obstruction when he prevented it. This proved to be a turning point, hardening already-widespread support of his programme and drawing further discussions in the Scottish Parliament. By the time of last May’s elections, after years of deadlock on the matter, multiple parties had committed to introducing official supervised consumption rooms. They have yet to open and even this rhetorical progress is fragile, but without Peter’s bold intervention, it would likely never have occurred at all.

Our conversation with Peter is wide-reaching, covering the situation around Scotland’s heroin crisis, his harm reduction work and his own relationship with drugs, so I decided to publish it in full rather than chop it to bits for the purpose of an article. First, we discussed how the situation in Scotland got to where it is.