United States: Louise Vincent’s legacy and the future of drug user organising

Louise Vincent built the collective power of drug users. A year after her death, the movement she sparked struggles to pick up the pieces.

In her early years in the American drug user human rights movement, before harm reduction went mainstream, before she was profiled by The New York Times, before she got sick, the late activist Louise Vincent spent her days and nights anticipating “the call.”

At the time, it was still illegal in North Carolina to possess or distribute naloxone, the lifesaving medication that reverses an opioid overdose. She had a small supply smuggled to her from an activist in Chicago, though not enough to distribute widely. When someone overdosed in her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, people knew where to go. Strangers knocked on Vincent’s door or called her phone pleading for help. She left immediately after the overdose was reversed, before the ambulance or cops arrived. Sometimes dealers even called her, until Vincent taught them how to reverse an overdose themselves.

Vincent soon realized the drug supply was changing. More people were dying than ever before. The fentanyl crisis had begun.

“But we were seeing it in real time with real bodies and real life. This wasn’t graphs and maps,” Vincent told me when I interviewed her in 2024. “This was friends and lovers and people we loved.”