Establishing Joint Productions in 1989 with artist Peter Ketley, I co-created and wrote the critically acclaimed independent comic, Downside, which ran for seven issues and was then published as a graphic novel in the USA. Set five minutes into the future and focused on a community under siege, with characters and politics rooted in a recognisable world, it generated wide-ranging media interest (BBC TV, City Limits, NME, Radio 5, the comics press). As a result of this favourable coverage we were invited by Kim Sweet at the Chisenhale Arts Education & Gallery in East London to conceive, develop and deliver what became the Voices From The Other Side comic art workshops for young people. The success of this project led to a series of high profile follow-ups, including the Crossing The Borders collaboration with colleges in Berlin and Liverpool (which featured in the TES), and with the Strip Search comics' exhibitions.
Hearing about our community-based projects and their success, Gill Bradbury from the Tower Hamlets Community Drug Team (then an Association for the Prevention of Addiction project), approached Joint Productions about collaborating with local youth groups to produce harm minimisation orientated drug information, using the comic format to reach the intended readership. During the preliminary outreach work, the young people made it clear that they rejected communication they thought was fear-based, authoritarian or not addressed to them as equals. Published (ahead of its time) in 1993, Just Say Know was the result of that research. Co-scripted with Geoff Chapman, stunningly illustrated by Peter Ketley and adopting an approach that neither patronised its audience nor sensationalised the subject matter, it described a 13-year-old boy's journey, led by a mysterious woman called Sophia ('wisdom'), through the social history of drugs and their effects. Despite receiving positive advance reviews in Druglink magazine and the comic press, being short-listed for a 1994 Comic Creators Guild Award and being approached by independent production company Double Exposure, who wanted to use the material as the basis of a Channel 4 schools programme, the Just Say Know drug information comic was subsequently 'withdrawn' (for reasons never made entirely clear) from wider distribution. During the intervening years it has continued to garner critical acclaim (see comics industry web-zine Sequential Tart) from those who have managed to get hold of the extremely limited copies in circulation.
It was an approach to the subject of drugs and drug use, however, that helped lay the foundations for what was to later develop (with the invaluable support of Theresa Sullivan at Action4Change) into the Just Say Know Drug & Alcohol Awareness Training, which since 2002 has provided workshops, courses and consultation to a wide variety of service providers across East Sussex. Informed by an appreciation of the role and importance of altered states of consciousness in all human societies throughout history, Just Say Know offers a meaningful framework with which to actually understand drugs and drug taking behaviours, rather than simply condemning them. In seeking to step outside the current mad and bad, weak and wicked, any-use-as-abuse orthodoxy of prohibition (with its roots in cultural imperialism, historical revisionism, religious intolerance, racism and class bias, not in health, safety or science), the training explores different approaches and alternative perspectives, which the cross-cultural evidence confirms as a more practically useful way of communicating to, understanding and working with people who use drugs.