Hello, my name is Dominique Anthony and I am a former sex worker and drug user. Now, I am an advocate for HIV, mental health, and domestic abuse. In 2005, I learned about a non-profit called HIPS and I met some beautiful people. They’re almost like family to me and I love these people so much. I remember I got infected with HIV and learned how to live better and learned about harm reduction. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do what you want. I’m still learning how to be a part of the community and how we can save lives with harm reduction. I would like to introduce the team that I work with at HIPS for the 7th and T Street project, a needle exchange and resource station.
The below interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Johnny Bailey
Tell me your story.
HIPS has been intertwined in my life forever. It’s always something that was present. Ten years ago, I was separated, I was living in squalor, unemployed, and trying to get stuff together. When I got out of rehab, I knew I wanted to work in addiction, but not in the “12 steps, you’re going to get sober way.” I went back to school for social work. I wanted an addiction treatment job, but harm reduction was closer to my views on addiction treatment than any rehab I interviewed with. At the time, HIPS was undergoing massive expansion, so we talked about how harm reduction and my theories could coexist.
The 7th and T project started two and a half years ago in my world. It started with me joining the 7th and T task force. Slowly, I saw headway being made on people. For me, this proves several theses: One: if this is successful, it proves that a very literal understanding of meeting people where they’re at is a good idea. It also proves that folks hired from the community is the ideal. It also proves the holistic viewpoint, because we are connected to everybody. We’re sitting here with needles, but I can get you into a clinic, or find housing.
How did you choose this team? Cause we got a good team.
I chose this team to represent different things, but everyone had passion and care. Also, I chose people who needed the chance I was given five years ago. Y’all are just fucking awesome, too.
How do you feel about harm reduction?
The difference between HIPS needle exchange and no HIPS needle exchange was huge. HIV and Hepatitis C plummeted in D.C. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, it’s back on the rise. Needle exchanges are great. They keep people safe. We are helping not just with clean-up and the one-for-one, we are keeping needles off the streets. There’s nobody yet who says no you should leave them on the ground.
How is the project going?
The project is kicking ass, we came into this with a major upset from day one where we had to pivot completely and change things, because we believed we had a sponsored indoor location to start a center but it turns out we didn’t. We forged this team while losing almost an entire team. For a moment I thought it was cursed, but every bit of the curse turned out to be for the best.
Phoenix Starr
Tell us your story.
My best friend was working on A Chosen Few, she told me about it and told me about HIPS. It resonated because I had experienced loss via overdose, and seeing family members and close friends using drugs. I myself have dealt with alcoholism and utilize cannabis for pain and anxiety. I’ve always been the type of person to see things for what they are. I was always able to see systematic things happening to people who look like me. I got involved with the Chosen Few because I wanted to be part of the solution.
I was super, super excited coming onto this project, number one to be working with HIPS superstar Johnny. Johnny is energy and light, like if he can’t pull someone in, that person is just dead inside.
How do you feel about how D.C. has been changing, like with gentrification?
It’s disheartening to see how D.C. has been changing. I’ve always viewed D.C. residents as prisoners of war, it’s an attack on the people. They’ve once again found an area where the land and the property are cheap so they run it down, buy it out, and complain about this area you chose to put in this situation. What made me fall in love with this project is there is a team of residents in the community who want this, who want us here. What they did not foresee was that we would have accomplices, someone who would stand in a drug-free zone with me, who ain’t scared.
How do you feel about the project?
It feels good, we are really turning numbers. I’m becoming a part of the community that I’m working for, and folks look forward to seeing me. Like HIPS is known, HIPS is D.C.
How do you feel about the new drug-free zones?
I can view things from different aspects of the table, however, it’s the disregard for our clients I don’t agree with. It’s the arrest for someone urinating in public, that is a human body function that must happen whether there is a bathroom for me to utilize or not. Why are they criminalizing someone, for relieving, that there’s liquid waste that needs to leave their body, and there’s nothing they can do about it? No one is choosing to sleep at a bus stop, it’s making poverty illegal to me.
What’s your view on harm reduction and sex work?
Prevention is proven. Some policymakers believe in harm reduction, but we could all do more. Sex work is work. Humans need to be protected. I treat people how I want to be treated.
Danny
Can you tell me some of your story?
I started getting high when I was young, it was a lot more innocuous substances. Then when I was 16 I started being like a hippie eating acid all the time and doing drugs in the rave scenes. By the time I went to school, I had already developed a heroin problem. Right after I flunked out of school, I went to my first program, and I’ve been in and out of programs in the last decade. I’ve had two periods of heroin addiction and two periods of fentanyl addiction, and I watched as the drug market became more synthetic. Herion was the scariest drug, and none of us knew what was in store for the chemicals in the market now.
I was able to get out of opiate addiction by pursuing music, and that became a replacement addiction for me. Only recently did I really come to grips with being an addict, and know that abstinence-based recovery is the best for me, but I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all recovery.
When my music career fizzled out, I fell back into using opiates. It was in April of last year, that I started using fentanyl. I was physically addicted within three days. I went through withdrawal and I didn’t realize what I was going through. I was not in a good emotional place, I started using it every day, and really quickly it became a matter of me just trying to get well, I stopped getting high and needed it to function. I didn’t really want to be completely sober until recently, I went to rehab on Valentine’s Day this year, it was really romantic.
How I got involved with HIPS, was in the music scene there is a presence of drugs. I don’t believe it’s my choice to stop people from getting high, so instead of creating a rule at my shows, I tried to make it as safe as possible. I would book Johnny to DJ my goth shows and that evolved into HIPS coming out to all my shows.
It is really difficult for me to look back at all the time I spent using it and not see it as a waste of time. Through the work I’m, doing now, I don’t feel like it’s a waste of time, I see how it’s an asset to helping other people.
Pep
So what’s your story?
My story’s basically the same as the rest of us, I’ll just skip to becoming a part of this. I look at everything through a spiritual lens. I was at NIH battling alcohol. After going through the shakes and depression, I called up NIH and told them I needed to come in. About my second week, I could see alright, it’s your time to change. They had people come from AA and SMART. I checked SMART out online and met Johnny. I called a couple of times, and he finally answered, I explained a little bit of my story and history, I used to have my own AA meeting and do a lot in the community. He said he could use a co-facilitator, and when he said that the universe had opened up. I said ok, this is it. Right then, I had the desire to quit drinking forever.
I went to the meeting and I was leaving and realized it was the same neighborhood I ran in and used to do all types of wild shit. I’m in the same neighborhood about to help the people I used to run with. I kept coming back. I’m not that person out there on the street, I’m gonna be out there to help, I was blown away. I didn’t know nothing about HIPS, but if Johnny said to go count rocks on the roof I’d be up there. I took the test to become a SMART facilitator, and studying for that and working on HIPS has really changed my life.
Then I got to 7th and T. It was super hard. I’m on the same corner with the same people, my mother and father was heroin addicts, and that’s where they copped, so it’s very spiritual. I can feel my parent’s spirit and presence, and like that I was transformed. I used to go up there with my mother and father to cop, and I remember when I was 4, I was sitting on my mother’s lap and a dude took out a pearl hammer 45 and stuck it to my head. The pain that I see in the people I work with, I saw in my parents, so it’s an instant bond.
I’m grateful to my God, always taking care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself. My father died of heroin, right there at Howard University Hospital, so I understand pain and grief and how you escape that with drugs. I know that look, but the crew because they allow me to be me. They allow me to be silly, in the midst of us working and doing this. I’m learning a lot still, I probably still have a lot to learn, I’m already seeing us do this in the future because the universe shows it to me.
Keith
Your turn, Keith.
I grew up in a weird family, it was abusive, restrictive, and away from the world. My sister died of a heroin overdose, but I didn’t know until five years later. I had a brother who died of a fentanyl overdose while I was in prison. He wasn’t a drug addict, he just got some coke one time that had some fentanyl in it, gone. My father died of Hepatitis, my mother is a 450 lb woman who didn’t feed her kids. I eventually was state-raised, and have been using since childhood. I actually started high school in Germany and alcohol was socially acceptable for teenagers there. I came to D.C., and I found out it is hard to get alcohol at 13, but it’s not hard to get drugs. I transitioned to anything to change the way I felt. Hopeless case, chronically homeless. I don’t know how many times in my life I’ve started over with nothing, like I bought plates, sheets. Sometimes I would get on a Greyhound, didn’t even know where I was going.
My brother used to always call me his junkie brother. Through my brother dying, I met my most current partner. I had three months left on my sentence, and she was my contact when my brother was on life support, at one point she was like “I’ll pull the plug, I’ll do it myself,” and we talked about it. We got together, she was sniffing dope, I asked how long, she said three months. I was like oh god, you got no idea where this shit’s going to take you. For a while, it was my purpose to help her, and she didn’t want no part in it.
I hit the streets, we were out there. That’s where we met Johnny, doing outreach for HIPS. I was out there living like an animal, but then the van pulls up to the encampment and everybody’s running towards the van, everybody loved to see HIPS. I went back to prison on violation for a year, she got clean, she got a job at HIPS, her voucher came through. I go home thinking no way I’m doing dope again. She picked me up, and she had a needle, and I didn’t even think about it, just grabbed it.
She passed away from a fentanyl overdose, nine months ago. That was what it took for me to get off dope. She was my safety net, I can’t even tell you how many times she Narcaned me. I never ocne thought there would be a time I would ever have to Narcan her, and I wasn’t there. I come home and she’s on the floor. I was supposed to speak at an overdose awareness event, it was like three days before the event. When I was ready to be clean, I knew where to go. I haven’t put a needle in my body since September, the last few years on it, I didn’t want to be doing it anyway.
HIPS hired me after she died, and I found that I’m good at it and enjoy it. I got off dope, I got a job, and I’m still homeless. I just got to a shelter this week, and I was outside through September. I went missing two or three times, like anywhere else I’dve been fired. This is a passion for me, I want nothing more than to see it grow.
Dominique
Now it’s time for my interview.
I am A Chosen Few member in 2015 and I was a former drug user and sex worker. I am also an HIV advocate for the DMV. When I was 25 years old, I caught HIV. My ex-fiance’s lover told me he had HIV and that I needed to go get tested. He saved my life. I was very angry, but not anymore because I accepted it and don’t do any pity parties anymore. I did this to myself.
I believe in decriminalization. You cannot get well in a cell. I couldn’t when I was locked up. My mental health was worse. I was having flashbacks, nightmares, waking up. I started having nervous breakdowns when i got pregnant with my son, and he’s now 22. My other son is 14, going to high school. My youngest son is 10.
I used to hang here on 7th and T and take the drug dealers’ money out of their pockets. I went to Cardozo and dated older men with money. I believe in harm reduction, it saved my life at a time when I didn’t want to have no life. This project is going to succeed. I am a writer/vendor for Street Sense. I am also improving my writing and getting a feeling of no just meet zone at all. I have been with them since 2017. I enjoy the newspaper and also like selling my newspaper as well. I am also a mental advocate for the DMV and my community. I have a story I need to tell. My mentor is El Drew, may he rest in peace. He told me to tell my story and keep telling it. Don’t look back at all.
If it wasn’t for Big El Drew, I wouldn’t talk to people or tell my story. I was far from talking about my HIV status.
Harm reduction means staying safe. I wish people were in harm reduction services because they help people who use drugs and sex workers.I wish I had a place where we could have a safe place, where people use their drugs in this place.
- NO Judgment Zone
- Be in a safe place
- Have a place that tests their drugs
- Teach about safe ways to inject drugs
- Teach them about test strips
- Teach about needle exchange
- Access more vendor machines
