Protesters denounce police sweep that rounded up addicts

addiction recovery ebulletin police protest

Society Has the Disease –

September 28, 2019 – Linda Winn spends her days trying to save lives, using chest compressions, rescue breathing, and the overdose-reversing drug naloxone to care for people on the streets of Boston who struggle — as Winn long has — with drug addiction.

Other times, the 52-year-old vice president of the Boston Users Union hands out sterile syringes, she said, and collects needles discarded near Massachusetts Avenue and Albany Street, where a rally she had organized to demand respect for those seeking addiction services there was held on Saturday.

Cops aren’t all bad, Winn is quick to say, but on these streets at the edge of the South End and Roxbury, interactions with police are often tense. “They’re always telling us to go on the other side of Mass. Ave. They’re always pushing us around like cattle,” Winn said, her voice catching with emotion. “And they tell us, ‘Go in the shelters, where you belong.’ . . . We go in McDonald’s, and it’s like we’re poison. It hurts.”