The Chicago Recovery Alliance team is grieving the passing of Antonio Williams. For well more than half of his life, Antonio was a devoted CRA volunteer. He also was a long-standing member of our Board of Directors. We feel honored that he chose to spend so much of his time helping Chicagoans who use drugs and do sex work achieve Any Positive Change on the terms they set for themselves.
Since America’s founding, our relationship with dependence has been fraught at best, fatal at worst. “Independence!” we cry, charging forth across a country we stole, armed with devices we cannot live without. The terms within which we discuss addiction have been moralized, medicalized, and politicized in waves for the past century. (CRA Director Greg Scott quoted in article).
Yesterday, I spent some time manning one of the tables at the Students For Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) Conference in Rosemont! As always, I left knowing that somehow my presence there is to make a difference! I also left having learned just how meaningful this cause is to many people worldwide!
The Chicago Recovery Alliance is excited & proud to launch an exciting new initiative: The Alliance for Collaborative Drug Checking—Real Time (ACDC-RT)!
To our knowledge, this is one of the first real-time, triangulated spectrometer drug checking projects in the country. We are all thrilled for the possibilities! At the same time, the launch has been emotional for us. This is the final revolutionary brainchild of our founding director Dan Bigg, who doggedly worked toward the idea’s realization for the past several years.
Opioid overdose is a byproduct of institutionalized racial violence. In 2018, CRA launched an aggressive opioid overdose expansion initiative. It addresses institutional racism and structural violence by focusing on community care and resilience and preventing the trauma of avoidable overdose deaths.
No one in the history of the world has done more to prevent opioid overdose death than Dan Bigg. At CRA’s event on on International Overdose Awareness Day 2018, several attendees stopped by our “video voice booth” to share their remembrances of history’s greatest overdose warrior.
