Unity

Viev Schipper

Unity, 1e Weteringplantsoen 8, Amsterdam, 1017 SK, Netherlands

Phone no: +31 40 5702355 E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Unity is a peer project, a group of people - in this case ‘party people’ - who share the same lifestyle as the people we want to give drug information to. This way drug information will last longer. Ages vary from 17-43 years old, as similar lifestyle is more important than age. One of our core phrases is, "Think for yourself, care about others", which is what the name Unity refers to.

There has been a lot of bad publicity about parties and party people. Party people know what they like doing, and their attitude is: "Why not be proud of it?" What we wanted was to get some more unity, some more caring and some more pride in partying. We are not totally self-organised. We get state money from Hamburg, Manchester and Amsterdam and from the European Union. 3CP stands for ‘Three City Project’.

Our starting point is that drug consumers are responsible for their own bodies, minds and environments. We are not lecturing, we are not telling them things, but if they ask we can give them information. Also most of the peers have experiences with drugs or have an open mind to it so it is also an exchange of good and bad experiences. Our aim is to give out information. We do this through Jellinek brochures. Jellinek is the scientific organisation in Amsterdam facilitating our peer project. They have brochures on all kinds of drugs and we hand them out. We also make our own leaflets, mostly about the latest news. If there are some bad substances found in pills we distribute photocopied leaflets.

Since there is so much confusion about the long-term effects and long-term research on ecstasy, we also made a leaflet pointing out the three main ideas in the research world about the long-term effects of ecstasy. It says the long-term effects are not known but these are the points of views that are going around now. They are sometimes contradictory so we don’t choose between them but just point them out.

We want to empower people for safer drug use, safer drug consumption. We achieve this through peers, who are there to give their own life story of how they stopped using drugs. The peers in our group are all recreational drug consumers, or have interesting points of view of how they handled their parents or how they told their parents or how they consumed drugs while going to school or how they got into problems. So they can give their own personal experience to add to the information that we hand out so as to enable people to set norms in how often they should take drugs, how often they can take drugs without getting into trouble with work or school, and how much is a sufficient dosage for nice experiences without getting sick. Our main message is less is more and just say know, with a k that is.

We also give advice about getting pills tested. In Holland, this is possible in several of the big cities where there are organisations that test pills and powders and also sometimes send them to labs. This is sometimes free of charge and sometimes it is about 5 guilders, not much. They also test on location. The pills and powders police get from parties contain a lot of speed and not MDMA. So in my opinion it would be really good to go testing at parties again, to give this extra service. The testing we do is about 100% MDMA. It makes you wonder; if the dance floor gives about 80% speed in the pills that the police get and we have 100% in MDMA, there is something going wrong.

How do we reach the party people? We build a chill out with low lights, reflecting pillows, paintings and planets. We get a corner and build all this with pillows on the floor and a sign saying "drug info" so people know what we are doing there. All the peers are wearing t-shirts and they walk around or sit around in the chill out area and they are just available for people to talk to them. We do not go in grabbing people and saying, "do you want to know anything about drugs? Do you know how dangerous it is?" We wait until people ask us questions and, firstly, they usually go to sit down and read our information because it is a very low threshold. It is not scary. If they have questions you usually see them waiting and you go to them or wait until they ask you a question and sometimes you just talk about good experiences. Then at the end they come with questions about your bad experiences, how you do this or how you handle that. We also have DJs in our peer groups, so sometimes we have a complete chill out with our own DJs and sometimes we have a minimal chill out which is just a few peers and just a few decorations.

We would like to have a consultation hour in a smart shop. We are setting that up so that every Thursday, for example, we will be in a smart shop so that, even outside of parties, if people have questions or if they want to get some leaflets, they can come to us. The peer support theory is that our target group most readily believes the facts given by scientific experts. So we get the Jellinek brochures because it is a scientific organisation.

We also refer to the pill testing which is done at the Jellinek and then we add the experiences of the peers. That is how we try to set normal behaviour, by personal contact which is very important. You remember a personal story from another person, for much longer than just some scientific facts such as "If you take this too much or it you take this then this will happen", but if you have a personal story hanging on to it you remember it better. We also have consumer flyers which are different from the Jellinek flyers but they also contain practical consumer confirmation advice. We have an Internet website and we sometimes go to schools. Our peers go to schools presenting themselves as recreational drug consumers which is sometimes very confusing so we are not all completely at one on that front.