Andy Beeler worked to save people with drug addictions and follow successful drug policy, which calls for science-based approaches instead of criminalization and incarceration.The overdose crisis has affected everyone and the Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition will continue on their mission without Andy.
I’ve seen so much shared about Andrew Beeler today, and so much about how honest and genuine and authentic he was. So I am going to tell you something honest: more treatment access, more MAT, more naloxone, more fentanyl test strips, more treatment, more sterile syringes are all good things. But they aren’t going to stop enough of us from dying and this is going to keep happening again and again and again and again. Andy was smart about his use and made marquis reagents at home to test his drugs and did test shots and there is naloxone in every room of the house and he called me if he was using alone. He didn’t want to be opiate dependent because its expensive and it sucks. He wanted to go back on methadone but he couldn’t because he was too afraid his PO would send him back to prison if he knew he had been using and had to start MAT again. He was terrified of his PO and traumatized by law enforcement and the jails and prisons and had a countdown to the day his parole was finished: 7/1/2020, when he hoped he could never encounter a cop ever again. He started using again because his health insurance expired and he had a shoulder injury that needed surgery and he was in constant pain from an anterior shoulder dislocation that would re-dislocate 2-5 times per day. He wanted a substance that was a known quantity / quality that was regulated and ensured to be safe, not some shitty fentanyl being sold as heroin and weird designer benzos (without a known purity to help him properly measure his doses) to help him get through the anxiety that kept him awake at night due to the overwhelming financial stress of owing the criminal justice system and the health care system money and constantly being broke and never not working and taking care of all of our people who keep dying too.
Andy died because we don’t provide people with health insurance as a guarantee, all the time, no interruptions. He died because no one will have a real conversation about why we keep incarcerating people for any kind of illicit substance use. Andy is dead because drugs that millions of people use everyday and have used for most of human history are currently believed to be so evil that we will never end prohibition and regulate all substances so that people don’t have to put unknown shit into their system to avoid getting sick and going about their lives. Andy and all of the people like him / us are going to keep dying. And next year 70,000 will die. And then more the next year. Because no one will admit that handing out safe supplies and getting more suboxone trained doctors and more EMS trained on narcan and putting more people in drug court is SO necessary but just not cutting it when things are this bad. (Not drug court. That is just pure trash and ain’t necessary for anything).
Andy was deeply intelligent. For someone who barely passed high school, Andy’s intellect was more than remarkable. Everyone who knew him knew that, but in his work, national experts in science and medicine and drug policy recognized it as well. On Wednesday, during a briefing of the full U.S. House of Representatives, a national drug policy expert spoke to Congress about the opioid crisis and about Andy’s impact and what it means to lose him. On Thursday, a former drug policy advisor to Obama called me. An internationally respected physician and researcher, he had been writing a grant to fund Andy to work with him and publish a study on poly substance use in the U.S. He said the only problem he had run into was that he needed 12 more Andys to help with the study, but in his 30 year career had only met one. In the last year of his life, Andy had built an innovative program (one of only a few in the country) to help IV drug users cure their hepatitis C. He was desperate to get naloxone into all of the jails in Iowa so that it would be given to people upon release. And he was working on a plan to start a buyers club for hepatitis C meds, where he had found factories in other countries to buy the medicines from for cheap and could bring them back into the US to dispense to other drug users, just like people did for HIV in the 90s. He would come and tell me his ideas and then he would smile at me and say “Okay my baby, now you find the money for it.”
Andy was gentle and kind and he was committed to helping others. But he didn’t do it because he felt badly for people or felt guilty or thought that was what he should do. He wasn’t out here to save anybody. He did it because he so fiercely believed in people’s right to survive, be free, and be healthy. Sometimes his belief in doing what was right could frustrate him deeply. He was so impatient for justice and he had no time for incremental small steps. He did the work he did because he was naturally nurturing, a care taker of others. Some people would say that Andy acted in solidarity with other people, but I think that really he just saw all of us drug users as an extension of himself, as bound together by common suffering under the oppression and trauma and power of police, parole, prisons, drug courts, halfway houses, and probation. When I began to tell the people that Andy worked with of his passing, the people whose lives he had saved, the clients who knew him as their friend and supporter of their health, they were… devastated. In addition to the people who had told me Andy saved their life, one woman told me that he had told her about his drug use when they met, and that that had made her feel deeply comfortable and put her at ease to share with him what she was going through. If he couldn’t make it, then none of us can.
Andy and I didn’t get to spend that much time together. We met last summer when I got a phone call from him out of the blue. I didn’t know who he was, but he told me that he couldn’t believe that someone was doing harm reduction work in Iowa. He said he had been waiting for this for 10 years. He asked me if I could get him access to a bunch of chemistry and physics journals he really needed to read and had some questions bout. Then we started talking to each other everyday. The first time that we met, we went out for a drink. As we sat down at the bar, I had this very clear thought that by agreeing to sit down together, we were quietly agreeing to the start of being together for as long as we could. And that was our plan. We ate a lot of dominos and drank a lot of soda, but we started to slowly try to get healthier together, not because either one of us really cared that much about weight loss or beauty or our own health, but because we thought maybe it would help guarantee an extra five, ten, twenty years together in our very old age. He wanted to be driving around the country on motorcycles when we were 90, reading books aloud to each other, listening to Johnny Cash, and camping in national parks with our telescope, doing a lot of psychedelics and a little bit of heroin here and there. Although maybe it feels sad to talk about in this context, Andy loved altering his consciousness, just to see what it was like to explore different parts of his brain and to play with the ability to change his psyche.
I loved him because he was curious, sometimes obsessively so. He was unapologetically genuine: one time we went to a store that sold rocks and minerals and he cried he was so overwhelmed with happiness. He was practical and no bullshit, and his sense of humor would catch you off guard – he was quietly funny. Andy and I loved each other because we shared such similar passions, but I mostly loved him because he was so calming and deeply grounding. Being a human being floating around in the world is terrifying and lonely, but Andy was the only person that I’ve ever met with whom I felt a sense of being at home, at rest, and at peace. This summer we planned to take a backpacking trip to Yellowstone national park. We had a lot of trips planned out for the next few years based on Andy’s interests: volcanoes, telescopes, interesting geological formations, and rocket launches. He also swore me to secrecy about this, but he wanted to go to a Katy Perry concert this year too. Next summer Andy’s parole was up. I want to talk to you about how much Andy had been destroyed by every small part of the drug treatment – criminal justice industrial complex, but I will save it and just tell you that when we talked about July 1, 2020, he was deeply relieved by the idea of getting off paper and finally being free. To celebrate, we planned to go to Mexico to elope, and then take a trip to Greece – not surprisingly, this was Andy’s idea because he wanted to see the archeological ruins of Ancient Greece. He really wanted to be a dad, and we were going to try to have a baby before I started my medical residency.
There is so much pain right now and so much of our experience as humans is to be in constant suffering. I am so lucky that he and I got to spend part of his time together, and that I got to know how it feels to be loved and to love some one so genuinely.
Today is one week since Andy died. I have been thinking about Dan a lot too and feeling a lot of shame because of how Andy died. I keep reading Maia’s article to help contextualize Andy’s death – that just because harm reductionists can die doesn’t mean that our work isn’t still essential. But the silence I have felt from some people in the community, namely those outside of harm reduction and medicine who I work with on issues related to public health makes me feel like people are completely willing to accept that if you use drugs you deserve to die, full stop. If you aren’t “in treatment” or “in recovery” for myriad reasons and you do harm reduction, then you got what was coming. It’s sad when people’s hatred of harm reduction becomes so deeply personal that a death like Andy’s doesn’t even warrant a facebook sad face.
For everyone who has reached out to me, brought food to my house, sent me shit, whatever, I appreciate it more than you can know. Iowa City people are good good good ones, and I am seriously the worlds luckiest motherfucker to belong to a pseudo-cult with all of you harm reduction weirdos.
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Elizabeth AnnMy husband was well liked by everyone who KNEW him, but the things I have had to read from strangers on the internet, especially in the earliest and most raw days, have sent me bordering between homicidal and suicidal.
It was Vicki who taught me that “some are sicker than others” and now I just shake my head at the ignorance, but still.. fuck them.
Yesterday was two weeks since Andy died, and there are three things that have been remarkably more painful than the base line devastation of him not being here: the funeral, the anticipation of receiving his ashes on Friday, and what I have heard regarding local PD using his phone records to surveil, entrap, and arrest a number of individuals who use substances in Eastern Iowa. In theory I think that these arrests are supposed to be a representation of justice for Andy and for those who loved him, but the invasion of our life, of his privacy, and the destruction of the lives of the people he came into contact with (and who did him a favor by sharing a temporary antidote to his suffering) is mostly just re-traumatizing to me and inhibiting my ability to heal. Each one of these arrests has nothing to do with decreasing OD deaths, they just destabilize people’s lives and create more traumatized people in our community.
This has been your daily reminder that the war on drugs doesn’t have anything to do with the drugs, its just a war on certain people deemed undesirable.
We talked to Andy and ordered a shirt from the Iowa Harm Reduction Coalition shortly before his passing and are deeply saddened by the loss of a selfless life saver.
RIP Andy Beeler…we just needed you on the other side is all.
Ziegenhorn said he knew so much about harm reduction and the criminal justice system, it would have taken years to train applicants to get to his level. He was hired in August.
She said his first day on the job, he was already helping clients who came into the Cedar Rapids office.
“He had this ridiculous body of knowledge he amassed from his experiences,” she said. “And, he would always tell you the truth.”
Dr. Dan Runde, clinical associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Iowa, said it’s going to be impossible to replace Beeler. Runde also serves as a board member of the coalition.
“He had a unique combination of intelligence, lived experience and his ability to connect with people,” he said. “Andy talked a lot about how much stigma there was in the criminal justice system and in medical care.”
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