- Where Harm is Structural, Care is Revolutionary - October 2, 2025
- Where Harm is Structural, Care is Revolutionary - October 2, 2025
Metzineres, by and for those who live at the margins
In the heart of El Raval, Barcelona, a radically compassionate and deeply community-driven initiative is flourishing: Metzineres – “Environments of shelter for womxn who take drugs surviving violences.” This cooperative project challenges the institutional logic of public health and social intervention, offering a model that addresses the structural context of violence and exclusion faced by women and gender expansive individuals grounded in harm reduction, intersectional feminism, and human rights.
Above all, the Metzineres model is an ethic of mutual care that recognizes the agency, pleasure, pain, and knowledge of every person who engages with it. It starts from the belief that each person is an expert in their own reality, allowing them to design their own solutions or alternatives to the challenges they face—whether related to housing, employment, health, family bonds, emotional needs, or others. Through its journey, those involved in Metzineres have come to understand that stigma and prohibition cause far more harm than substances themselves. As such, it distances itself from punitive, stigmatizing models that criminalize people who use drugs—especially women and gender-expansive individuals—to create a space of trust and transformation that transcends each person’s relationship with substance use.
From its inception, Metzineres has been a collective refuge where women and gender expansive individuals who live on the streets find respite.
Metzineres was born as a response to an unavoidable reality: women and gender expansive people are disproportionately impacted by prohibitionist policies, predatory capitalism, and patriarchy. From its inception, it has been a collective refuge where women and gender expansive individuals who live on the streets find respite. At Metzineres, treatments are not imposed; instead, collective care alternatives are offered, centered on each person’s desires, pace, and decisions, prioritizing autonomy and neighborhood bonds.
(English Subtitles Available) – On the occasion of the international campaign “Support, Don’t Punish” we made this video questioning the stigma and discrimination faced by womxn who use drugs, focusing on the networks of mutual support that we have developed thanks to the community work of Metzineres in our neighborhood, El Raval.
Punitive drug policies disproportionately impact women, especially those experiencing extreme poverty, homelessness, migration, racialization, sex for survival, or mental health issues. Globally, although women make up only about 7% of the prison population, their incarceration for drug offenses is significantly higher, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In Spain, women represent around 7% of the prison population, but in Catalonia, nearly 30% of incarcerated women are serving sentences for drug-related offenses, compared to 20% of men. In Latin America, the situation is even more dire: in countries like Costa Rica, Brazil, or Argentina, between 60% and 80% of incarcerated women are imprisoned for drug law violations, often occupying low-level, expendable roles in the drug market—such as transporting small amounts—as a result of survival economies or coercive relationships. This mass incarceration does not reflect drug trafficking leadership but rather acts as a tool of gender and class control, reproducing inequalities and perpetuating stigma.
Predatory capitalism also enacts structural violence against women by relegating them to the most precarious segments of the labor market, informal economies, and unpaid care work. According to UN Women, women represent 70% of the world population living in extreme poverty and are the majority among those migrating due to economic, climate-related, or violence-driven reasons. When intersected with racism, transphobia, and ableism, these dynamics push many women and gender-expansive people to the margins, limiting access to basic services, dignified housing, or legal protection. Economic inequality and the lack of social safety nets not only increase vulnerability to violence but also force many to resort to survival strategies such as drug use or selling, leading to stigmatization, exclusion, and punishment.
Economic inequality and the lack of social safety nets not only increase vulnerability to violence but also force many to resort to survival strategies such as drug use or selling, leading to stigmatization, exclusion, and punishment.
In this scenario, the so-called “war on drugs” has been the breeding ground for a global machinery of exclusion, death, and mass incarceration. Born from a discourse of order and morality, this war has served as a pretext for militarizing territories, expanding police control, and eroding civil rights, all with strong gender, racial, and class bias. Women and gender-expansive individuals find themselves trapped between the institutional violence of prohibition and the structural violence of state neglect, exposed to persecution, police abuse, loss of custody of their children, and incarceration for actions that, in other social contexts, would not be criminalized. Far from reducing drug-related harms, prohibitionism intensifies them, especially for those historically excluded from spaces of citizenship and care. This is why Metzineres affirms that dismantling the war on drugs is also a feminist, anti-capitalist, and social justice task.
Metzineres has developed a unique approach that merges harm reduction with an intersectional feminist perspective, recognizing that the experiences of women and gender expansive individuals who use drugs are shaped by multiple forms of oppression, such as gender, class, racism, or migration. This approach materializes in the creation of safe, restful spaces where well-being, consent, calm, and the right to exist without constant surveillance, expulsion, or criminalization are prioritized. Additionally, holistic support is provided, covering legal, health, emotional, and cultural dimensions, enabling each person to access their rights and meet their needs without impositions or paternalism, with radical respect for their timing and desires. Through artistic, educational, and self-care activities, collective empowerment is fostered, along with the revalorization of knowledge and practices historically rendered invisible or disdained, encouraging processes of subjective and political reconstruction. All of this is tied to ongoing political advocacy work aimed at transforming the structures that perpetuate exclusion, amplifying the voices of people who use drugs as active agents of change, with concrete proposals and social legitimacy to redefine public policies from the realities they and their communities live.
This approach is built on horizontality, cooperativism, decoloniality, transfeminism, and the rejection of pathologization. It is about weaving networks of affection and resistance, where care is not a service but a collective practice. At a time when the therapeutic and spiritual use of psychedelic substances is gaining legitimacy, it is urgent to look toward those historically excluded from these narratives and spaces. The unequal access to people-centered drug policy development and to safe contexts for substance use has left out many women, trans people, migrants, individuals with psychiatric diagnoses, and those living on the streets.
Metzineres calls on the psychedelic community to broaden its ethical framework: it is not enough to decriminalize or “integrate” the use of entheogens without addressing the structural violence that affects bodies historically and systematically excluded and precarized.
Metzineres calls on the psychedelic community to broaden its ethical framework: it is not enough to decriminalize or “integrate” the use of entheogens without addressing the structural violence that affects bodies historically and systematically excluded and precarized. A truly transformative drug policy must first and foremost be a policy of care and social justice.
Metzineres is a non-profit social initiative cooperative that has been sustained thanks to the strength of its members, community networks, and occasional support. However, economic sustainability remains a critical challenge. For this model to keep growing and reach more people, we need financial support, solidarity alliances, and committed visibility.
We invite those who share our vision—whether from activism, research, art, the psychedelic world, or the human rights field—to collaborate in building these spaces of resistance. Because in a world that continues to marginalize those living at the intersection of multiple violences, a radical shift is necessary: to bring the margins to the center, transform public policy from the ground up, and care without conditions.
To support Metzineres is to bet on a future where care, autonomy, and justice are woven into every decision.
Art by Fernanda Cervantes.
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