Refusal and Care

Why Non-Cooperation Requires Building Alternatives

On November 15, I participated on the closing plenary of the Reform Drug Policy Conference of the Drug Policy Alliance. The subject I addressed was non-cooperation, and the sections that follow correspond to questions I prepared to answer.

The following is an expanded presentation of my comments.

Clarifying Language

When I use the word “democracy” as in, “protect democracy,” I’m not referring to democracy as an ideal. Instead, I mean the kind of government that has meaningful checks and balances on executive power, and that guarantees, at least in theory, that the people have rights to free speech, free expression, and to protest. I believe that democracy understood in these terms provides us with the infrastructure and protections necessary to advocate for and build the kind of government that is grounded in equity and justice.

Put another way, checks and balances, even if unevenly applied, matter to us because, as the old saw goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Power We Hold

The first assumption underlying mass non-cooperation is that we have the power to defeat authoritarianism, full-stop. Consider the numbers:

If the administrative state moves to stop an authoritarian takeover, the global record shows us that we have about a 7-8% chance of success. If a mass, nonviolent civil resistance movement grounded in noncooperation joins the effort, the chances rise to just over 50%. And if organized labor joins the movement, the chances rise dramatically higher.

Why? Because their factories, supply chains, retail outlets, and fulfillment centers depend on our labor. Their stores and farms need our hands. Their restaurants and construction sites require our work. Their banks can’t function without our deposits.

This is the power of non-cooperation. But power without purpose is just chaos. And purpose without care is abandonment.

Why Authoritarians Attack Education First

Authoritarians always attack storytelling and education first. Always. Consider the way in which the American political right has built their base and won power. They went after Affirmative Action in higher education. They attacked feminist studies programs by referring to advocates and “Femi-nazis.” They labeled advocates for multicultural education “thought police.” And they defunded arts and humanities programs

Why? Because you can’t refuse to cooperate with an unjust system until you first refuse to believe the lies that justify that system.

When it comes to drug users and drug policy, the lies are everywhere:

• Drug users are criminals

• Addiction is a moral failure

• The war on drugs keeps us safe

• Addiction is a moral failure

But the war on drugs, waged relentlessly since the Nixon administration, has done something else entirely: It has justified the expansion of the carceral state that is now in the control of aspiring tyrants.

They rely on ignorance to demonize drug users in order to make them targets of repression. And they make them targets in order to build the repressive organs necessary to target anyone who doesn’t agree with them.

The Machinery of Mass Cooperation

Repressive drug policy doesn’t enforce itself. It relies on mass cooperation:

• Parents turning in their children

• Doctors refusing to dispense pain medication

• Landlords evicting drug users

• Employers drug testing and firing people

• Public acceptance of mass incarceration as normal

Each of these acts requires people to believe the propaganda. When we reject their lies, that’s non-cooperation. It’s refusal at the level of consciousness.

Unlearning is cognitive non-cooperation, and it can spread faster than policy change happens in legislatures.

Education isn’t separate from non-cooperation. It’s the foundation. Education creates the conditions where millions of acts of non-cooperation become possible and even inevitable.

The Cost of Resistance

Let’s be clear: No social movement that goes toe to toe with a violent autocrat is safe from harm.

We know this from history:

• Birmingham, 1963, where Bull Connor turned fire hoses and dogs on children, acts that were anticipated by organizers and activists who were baiting him to act violently in order to make the case that Jim Crow wasn’t just a system of segregation; it was a system of brutal repression

• Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, murdered in Mississippi during Freedom Summer

• Viola Liuzzo, shot to death on an Alabama highway after the Selma march

• Malcolm X, assassinated

• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated

• Medgar Evers, assassinated

The danger is real. The violence is real.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t care for people.

Resistance Requires Care

Non-cooperation without care is not resistance. It’s surrender.

If we can’t prefigure the beloved community we want in the actions we take now, how can we gain the experience necessary to govern when we win?

Here’s the most important part - the global experts on authoritarianism all seem to agree on this point: Refusing to cooperate with systems that harm people requires simultaneously building alternative systems that care for people.

This is integral to successful mass non-cooperation. Non-cooperation and care are two sides of the same coin.

What Non-Cooperation As Care Looks Like in Practice

Let me make this concrete with examples from the drug policy reform movement:

Syringe exchange programs are non-cooperation. They refuse to accept that people who use drugs should be punished with disease and death.

Safe consumption sites are non-cooperation. They literally refuse to let the drug war’s body count continue.

Naloxone distribution is non-cooperation. It says: “We refuse to let people die while you debate whether they deserve to live.”

Mutual aid networks are non-cooperation. When someone loses housing because of a drug conviction, and the community houses them anyway, that’s refusing to participate in the system that says people deserve homelessness as punishment.

Refusing to call police during overdoses is non-cooperation. Communities develop their own emergency response - peer responders who won’t bring the state’s violence with them.

Do you see the pattern? Each of these acts of non-cooperation is paired with an act of care.

We refuse to cooperate with laws that criminalize lifesaving equipment, and so we distribute syringes.

We refuse to cooperate with policies that let people die of overdoses, and so we provide naloxone and safe spaces.

We refuse to cooperate with the stigma that says people who use drugs don’t deserve healthcare, and we build peer-based healthcare alternatives.

Prefigurative Non-Cooperation

This is what I call “prefigurative non-cooperation.” We refuse to participate in the old system while simultaneously building the new one.

We don’t wait for permission. We don’t wait for the law to change. We keep people alive NOW while we fight to change everything.

When you build alternatives that work better than the system you’re refusing, you demonstrate that the system was never necessary:

• Safe injection sites prove we never needed mass incarceration

• Harm reduction proves we never needed punishment

• Mutual aid proves we never needed the state’s cruelty

The Strategy of Care-Based Resistance

Non-cooperation isn’t about abandoning people to a broken system. It’s about building the care infrastructure that refuses to let the system kill them.

This is how we win:

Not by matching the state’s violence, but by building alternatives that render the state’s violence obsolete.

Not by waiting for permission, but by creating the world we need right now.

Not by choosing between resistance and care, but by understanding they are inseparable.

The power to refuse is the power to build. The courage to resist is the commitment to care. And the community we create in struggle becomes the foundation of the world we’re fighting for.

This is the work. This is the path. This is how we keep each other alive while we build the future.