User:Krjmc

About: J Key Cards

For the purpose of spreading the J Key Cards concept and thereby the concept of harm reduction as widely as possible, The Danish Street Lawyers reserve the right to provide other harm reduction advocates, user organizations and other NGOs in your country, region or city the same privileged rights. If other organizations in your country, region or city may obtain the same privileged rights, The Danish Street Lawyers urge the organizations to co-operate in developing a locally adapted series of J Key Cards and to share any financial returns. The copyright of the cards stays with The Street Lawyers in Denmark.

Cardholders must ensure the direct involvement and final approval of cards from local drug users in the process of developing and adapting the J Key Cards. The final cards must express acceptance of people who use drugs, generate trust and credibility among users and must refrain from moralizing or condemning drug users. Absence of ‘finger wagging’ is crucial.

The Danish Street Lawyers strongly urge the cardholders to ensure to include local, national and international experts and specialists, public servants and other relevant players to support and assist the process of developing a locally adapted J Key Cards series in both professional and financial matters. When we started developing the concept in the late 1990s we succeeded to get doctors, health inspectors, treatment providers, police superintendents, public officials, professors of law, dentists and other professionals involved, and learned quickly that the work itself created a very much needed space for a new and far more constructive dialogue even with people who were skeptical about harm reduction. Asked questions do also tell a story about premises, needs, interests, wishes and priorities. Asked questions makes you want to respond. Asked questions can appeal to the responsible decision makers and public officials and make them take responsibility. During the process the following was said by a treatment provider: “After many years in this treatment-business I thought I really knew about drug users … Now I feel like I knew nothing”. A local health inspector said: “Finally I understand why so many are infected with hepatitis C”. And a police superintendent exclaimed: “Oh no, we don’t do that … do we? Oh no …”, when he had read the first question in the Legal Rights category, no. 89: “Can a cop search for drugs in my vagina or rectum?” About: J Key Cards The cardholder is privileged to sell the right to use the developed and produced cards to local and or national authorities in your country, region or city and/or to make profit from selling the cards otherwise in your country. When pricing the concept the crucial point must be that access for people who use drugs to the developed cards is or will become as wide as possible. To people who use drugs the cards must be freely available. Cardholders must assure that any surplus or profit from the development and implementation of the J Key Cards in your country goes to further promotion of harm reducing activities and services, including involving “street lawyers” in harm reduction outreach services and/or to organize people who use drugs.

In return The Danish Street Lawyers ask only to be informed, that you are now cardholder, or one of the cardholders, in your country, region or city, who you are and what you or your organization is aiming to do, so that we are informed that you are about to start to develop a locally adapted J Key Cards series. From here we will ask you to inform us regularly - for example every third month - on how you are doing, what steps you’ve been taking, your successes and failures etc. On the basis of this feedback The Danish Street Lawyers will try to assist you the best we can and we will later on be able to carry out an assessment of the experiences.

Please inform us regularly about the process by sending an e-mail to kontakt (at) gadejuristen. dk.

When a locally adapted series of J Key Cards is developed, we urge you to send us the texts in your language (questions and answers) in a word document so that the text can become available on this site. We also ask you, as a cardholder, to make sure, that The Danish Street Lawyers will receive samples of printed cards and/or other related materials.

We owe it to people who use drugs to walk humbly forward and to - in every step we take - show people who use drugs, people who suffers tremendously as victims of the ‘war on drugs’, our deepest respect, solidarity, care and love. We owe it to people who use drugs to involve them in all actions and services concerning them. Nothing about them without them!

In 2003 a series of Norwegian cards was developed, adapted to Norwegian conditions. Thanks to a wide range of people, among them Eliot Albers and Ole Lyngvaag is the total of 300 existing Danish card-texts now translated into English and available on this site (Download). Not all of these questions and answers can probably be of direct use in other countries, but might still be inspirational. If nothing else, they tell a story about Danish drug users, their questions, their premises, needs, interests, wishes and priorities.

In Denmark the cards are distributed by being added to the small bags of “works”, syringes and needles and other injecting equipment.