RATS

RATS — ‘radical acts to survive’, is a drug user union resisting the violence and neglect of the ‘war on drugs’ and organising for harm reduction and collective liberation. RATS was set up in 2024 largely by queer and trans drug users, many with lived and living experience of sex work, in the spirit of ‘solidarity, not charity’.

We are harm reductionists — Our commitment to life moves us to support each other as we work toward a world where we all have what we need to live well and thrive.

We are not a ‘single-issue network’ — We are brought together by shared experiences of having our bodily autonomy and survival threatened by intersecting systems of oppression.

Our shared experiences shape our politics and practice, which is why rats are:

Anti-capitalist — Racial capitalism concentrates power and resources among the few, pushing the many into vulnerability and premature death. Our solidarity is with the dispossessed and the workers, including sex workers. 

Drug user and sex worker liberation are deeply connected. Our agency is denied and our experiences flattened into tropes of victimisation (in need of ‘rescue’) and vilification (deserving punishment). We are often forced into state interventions against our will.

It is the police who spearhead these interventions into our lives, often under the guise of ‘welfare checks’ or ‘stop & search’. We know that this police violence exists by design — which is why we reject and resist it.

Racial capitalism is also the driving force behind the accelerating climate crisis, which represents an existential threat to all lifeforms. Capitalism’s unending desire for profit has upheaved Indigenous livelihoods and sparked ongoing mass extinction — and the increasingly real possibility of climate collapse. Our commitment to life and liberation is inseparable from climate justice. There is no liberation on a dead planet. 

Abolitionist — We are committed to making institutions of surveillance, control and punishment non-existent. We are students of transformative justice, believing that by responding to violence in ways that invite collective care contributes to ending the very conditions that enabled it in the first place.

Public health systems are major drivers of harm against our communities. We are sceptical of the medical institution and medicalised approaches to the care of people who use drugs. For us, the path towards drug user liberation should not be guided by assimilation, but Mad liberation and disability justice. 

Anti-racist & anti-imperialist — The ‘war on drugs’ hasn’t failed. It succeeds at providing infrastructure to further racial control, propped up by the white supremacist ideology that Britain has been practicing globally for centuries. We seek to resist and uproot all practices, institutions and systems that serve racist oppression and push racialised people to premature death.

Because of this, our commitment to liberation is internationalist and anti-imperialist — against coloniality and all its manifestations globally.

Anti-patriarchal — we are surrounded by gender injustice. Patriarchy concentrates power and resources in detriment of the majority of gender identities — relying on systems of control that reproduce this gender hierarchy.

As queer and trans people, and women, many of our members experience this minoritisation and reject it. Instead, we treasure and build upon a legacy of resistance against cis-heteropatriarchal norms. 

Guided by Black feminism, we understand that race and class magnify and transform the experience of gender in uneven ways, exposing many to intensified policing, punishment and vulnerability to premature death.

Drug users and sex workers know all too well what it means to be denied bodily autonomy, which is why for us gender justice is inseparable from reproductive justice and the broader struggle for the freedom to own our bodies.