Tobacco harm reduction is a concept never discussed in prison, despite the toll smoking takes on inmates’ health and the lack of safer alternatives behind bars. But for those exiting the prison system, they find a new freedom in the plethora of safer nicotine options, including vaping, which offer a path to better health and control over their finances and well-being.
Featuring:
DR. CHRISTY PEREZ
Journalist, Theologian (aka C. Dreams)
Contributing Writer, Filter
@UnCagedCritique
filtermag.org
Transcription:
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Brent Stafford: Hi, I'm Brent Stafford and welcome to another edition of RegWatch on GFN.tv. For those who've endured the hardships of prison healthcare, entering a world where public health policies restrict access to essential nicotine products can feel like a new form of control. Post incarceration, the pressures and stress of reintegrating into society are immense. For many, opting to vape nicotine instead of smoking is a critical choice for harm reduction and personal responsibility. However, the challenge lies in navigating an increasingly anti-nicotine and anti-vaping world. Joining us today to discuss the challenges people face reentering society post-incarceration is Dr. Christy Perez, a theologian, award-winning writer, and contributor at Filter, where her recent article titled, Everyone I Know on Parole is Vaping, was published this past August and created quite a stir. Dr. Perez, thanks for coming on the show.
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Christy Perez: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Brent. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to our discussion.
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Brent Stafford: Well, I have to say I found your article fascinating and your candor moving. Let's begin with a bit of your background. You have a doctorate. Tell us about that.
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Christy Perez: Yes, I do. I have a doctorate in theological and historical studies, which I earned from Amherst Theological Seminary, which is a small private seminary out of Madison Heights, Virginia. And I earned my doctorate, my master's and my undergraduate degree while incarcerated within the Georgia prison system.
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Brent Stafford: That's amazing. So let's start there briefly. Could you share what you're comfortable with about the circumstances around your incarceration?
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Christy Perez: Sure, absolutely. It's something that I write about and I speak about pretty openly. Basically, I had a very rough childhood, which is becoming a less common event in the United States, unfortunately. And I was the victim of a lot of sexual and physical and mental abuse, circumstantially. And this resulted in me being involved in the street lifestyle and prostitution at a very young age, like 13, 14. and pretty much living on my own. And so by the time I was 19, I had moved to Georgia from my home state of Maryland. I was living here for like two years. And as a lot of young queer people do who are ostracized, I was living and had for almost a decade at that point with other individuals like me, young, outcast, queer people. And so I was involved in prostitution sex work with a girlfriend of mine who was also a transsexual woman, which I am. And she turned out to be 17 years old and I was 19 years old when I got busted. And so basically the state kind of just super vilified me and treated me like Guido, the killer pimp, you know? And yes, so there's a lot of ways that you can end up both as a felon and having to live as a person on the registry.
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Brent Stafford: Now, where were you incarcerated?
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Christy Perez: Oh, man. I was incarcerated within the Georgia State Men's Prison System, the Georgia Department of Corrections. I was at many facilities, but I finished my sentence at Central State Prison. And the reason why I was at many facilities is because I was considered a problem prisoner and not because I was violent or anything like that. It's because I filed lawsuits and I represented myself and I won. And the one thing that people in power do not like is they do not like somebody that has both the I guess perspicacity, but also kind of like the balls to do it. I don't know if I can say that, pun intended there. But yeah, so I was litigating to improve prison conditions in general, but also particularly the prison conditions that affected transsexual and LGBT incarcerated folks.
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Brent Stafford: So let me ask you, when you became a writer, why filter?
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Christy Perez: Well, I think that relationships are incredibly important. And I think that when you are in the position that I was in, I was in a very vulnerable position, incarcerated, and I was looking for something to channel both my umbrage with the system as it was. um, into, and also a way to express myself. But as a third thing, I was looking for a way to generate income so that I could provide for myself a smoother re-entry because I had no family network, no resources, nothing available to me. And I would be coming out of the Through my advocacy work, I became acquainted with Castalia Medrano and Will Godfrey. Big shout out to both of them. They are the deputy editor and editor of FilterMag. And Castalia and I cultivated a friendship, and she put the time into teaching me, who had no journalism background. teaching me the ins and outs of working as a freelance journalist, how to pitch and how to take rejection and know that it's not personal, which it definitely seems that way at first. And, you know, so there was a lot of mentorship there, but also filter actually really cares. The stories that a lot of publications, in my opinion, they're telling the stories because that's how they generate the revenue. But Filter has chosen its niche, and it's mostly harm reduction. But inside of that harm reduction space, they acknowledge the need for conversation around carceral issues, around policing issues, and around human rights and bodily autonomy. And I was able to find everything that I needed, that entire panoply, in that publication. And they will forever be my first literary love.
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Brent Stafford: Christy, let's dive into some of the particulars around smoking in the prison system. It is fascinating for somebody who doesn't know what goes on inside. So is smoking banned in the facilities that you were in?
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Christy Perez: Yes, as you are, I'm sure, more than aware that it's actually illegal to smoke in any government facility. And the GDC, of course, considers the facilities government facilities, but they have other security based facilities. interest for not wanting smoking there. Number one, it does create a health environment. Primarily, the major issue is that there was litigation about 20 to 30 years ago. I'm not exactly sure. There was litigation brought by a class of incarcerated people who basically were saying like secondhand smoke was affecting them. And so Georgia, along with many other states, had removed access to tobacco. So it is against the policies. It's against what they call their standard operating procedure, SOP, and it can result in a slew of disciplinary actions.
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Brent Stafford: So that being said, was there, is there a lot of smoking, though, still inside prison?
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Christy Perez: Oh, absolutely. There's a super abundance of it. The reality is that anything, and you know this, you have that political, that political philosophical background. Whenever there is pressure by the powers that be to make something inaccessible or to regulate it, the people always find a way to push back. And the fact that tobacco is so highly economized and incentivized in that carceral sphere, that confined environment, actually creates the demand for it even more. And when there is a demand, there will be a supply.
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Brent Stafford: So how do people get their tobacco then in the system?
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Christy Perez: Well, there's actually several different mannerisms of doing it. The first is, of course, through social engineering. You create relationships with officials, staff, personnel who are there to make sure you don't get it, but they bring it in. And the secondary way is during COVID, due to the absence of staffing and the super abundance of inmates, the overpopulation of the inmate population, people got more clever. And so drones is one way. Having a friend who is very ballsy just run right on up to the security fence and throw it over, wrapped up in a package is another way. People go out to medical trips and they have contacts meet them in the bathroom at the medical facility or they go to another prison that already has a large supply of tobacco and they smuggle it through various means.
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Brent Stafford: That I don't think we need to get into.
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Christy Perez: I'm afraid not.
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Brent Stafford: So how do people pay for it then?
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Christy Perez: So that is very interesting. You know, there is, it's important to understand people have a lot of misconceptions about prison. Prison is a subaltern, which is a word that philosophers, sociologists, people that study society and relational dynamics use to explain environments that very closely mirror mainframe or macrocosm society. Okay. And so what you have there is you have an economy and in that economy, of course, there's a black market because there's always one inside of an economy. People buy tobacco in various ways. They buy it in varying quantities as well. So one of the most common ways for people that are less resourced, they have less money, is they use soups or pickles or sausage, food goods that they purchase from the commissary. And almost everybody in prison has a hustle, whether it's the shoe cleaning guy, the guy that shines boots, the guy that polishes your floor so they sparkle for the warden's inspection. Everybody has a hustle. And so it's not that hard to come up with four or five soups and an individual cigarette about this big. I don't know if you can see that really well about that big and not very thick at all. Very, very thin will cost you about five suits. And so the reason you're putting them, why are they getting this tobacco and that they're paying for all this money? And then they're just going to trade that tobacco pursuits. Well, the reason why is that they turn around and they sell those soups along with other food for cash apps, PayPal, Dell, any type of real world monetization. And that's how they actually generate a real revenue.
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Brent Stafford: Let me ask you, did you smoke while you were incarcerated?
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Christy Perez: I did for many years. I quit smoking. I believe it was March 16th of 2021 for personal reasons, because I knew that my time in that environment was coming to an end. And I really wanted to start getting healthy. I had gained some weight. So I want to start exercising and I could, I could barely breathe walking from the bed to the, cause you know, I was gaining so much weight, which now I'm, I'm nice and slim, but you know, so that was my primary motivation, but also I was just getting more tight with my money and I didn't want to be putting my money in tobacco. And the reality is, is that there was just a lot of drama at that time around tobacco because there was a drought of supplies at that time. So I did quit, and now I smoke again, but I vape.
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Brent Stafford: Right, right. And that's what we're definitely going to get to. Just before we do, I'd like to ask you, were there harms from smoking that are unique to the prison system?
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Christy Perez: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because the tobacco that you're receiving most of the time is of the lowest quality. And the reality is you don't really necessarily know well what has happened to that tobacco along its transit to you because there are both good people and bad people in prison, believe it or not. So you don't know if somebody's tampered with your tobacco. You don't know what they've put on it. You don't know what they've sprayed it with. You don't know what they've laced it with. But more importantly is that the access to good quality rolling papers is slim. I won't say non-existent, but it's slim. So a lot of people are smoking their tobacco and literal book paper, or God forbid, Bible paper or encyclopedia paper, or really whatever type of like that, that almost like a tissue paper that you sometimes see wrapped around industrial rolls of tissue, toilet tissue. So anything to basically envelope or house the tobacco in in order to consume it. So that of course it creates, and there's no studies on that. So we don't have even really any good medical data to suggest, you know, what this would mean, but we're intellectual beings. So we know that that's not adding a good addition to their systems.
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Brent Stafford: On the inside, so to speak, was there anything like tobacco harm reduction? Was that ever talked about? Were vaping products available?
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Christy Perez: No, the reality is that I didn't even really become cognizant of tobacco harm reduction until probably 2022. And it was because I worked as a journalist and advocate from inside of the incarcerated environment in a space of harm reduction. That's how I became aware of it almost secondhand. So a lot of those people know, they're not aware of that. That concept of harm reduction is actually almost, it doesn't exist there. It's an unknown factor. So the reality is that people there have so many pro-exes, comorbidities of different things. So when you take people in environments that are high in starch and salt diets, you know, they're having high blood pressure, they're having cardiovascular disease, there's not much exercise, which adds to a whole bunch of different types of health issues. And then you're also talking about an environment where the water is high in lead, the air is not well ventilated, sicknesses are confined to small tight quarters. So any type of degree of really any type of consumption of product is just an increased factor for health risk.
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Brent Stafford: In your filter article, the title, you know, everybody that you know that's on parole is vaping. There's almost a sense of surprise. Were you surprised when you got out and saw so many people vaping?
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Christy Perez: I was because I had not seen a vape in prison. You know, I had seen one or two THC vapes in prison and they were like hot commodity items. I I didn't realize just how ubiquitous vaping was. And then I would go to the parole office, or I would go to the sheriff's department to do my registration paperwork, or I would go to the group classes or whatever, and just everybody's vaping. And of course, when you are, I did a lot of time in prison. So I know a lot of people in the prison system and I built a reputation there from the inside. And people constantly tell me like, What you did, we've never seen anybody do. And so I get in contact with people all the time that are coming out the system and then I check in with them and they're vaping. And it's like everybody that I know that has come into contact with the U.S. criminal legal system and the incarcerated system is vaping. And I think there are three really good reasons why. And what are those? Well, that's simple for you. Really, honestly, Brent, the number one thing is every single person that comes out of prison, I promise you the number one thing that they're worried about is money, which I think to the average American is probably not going to come as a shocker. But the difference that the average American forgets is that they've already entrenched themselves. That doesn't mean they don't have their own struggle, but this person is coming out. not with a clean slate, not with the promise that society says, like you serve your time, it's behind you, boom. No, that follows you forever. Okay. So they're getting out. They're not having the best employment opportunities. I am well-educated. I speak two languages fluently and I work three jobs. Okay. So, you know, so they get out and of course the stress gets to them. So the money, it's much more affordable. If you are a, you know, a really proliferate smoker, you'll smoke a pack, two packs a day, easy. Um, that adds up, you know, the average pack is between seven and $9. So you're looking at 16 or 14 to $18 a day, seven days a week. That's a lot of money. Okay. Whereas depending on your intake with vaping, your single vape that you buy for between 18 and $25 can last you up to eight. Well, for me, mine lasts between eight and 12 days. I don't know how everybody else vapes, but I, you see me on this camera, I've been steady hitting it, you know? So, um, There is, of course, the economic factor for it is much more, you get more bang for your buck. And then secondarily is that nicotine does have the demonstrated background or history of addressing stress. It really does. Anybody that says it doesn't, they've never tried it, okay? When you're living under a lot of stress and you're not able to even, you're not trusted by the system to even exercise your own judgment to have a beer or to have a glass of wine, right? This allows you to feel a bit more free. It allows you to cope with that stress. It's what you reach for automatically after you've had a good meal or even you just had a good day. You're finally sitting on the couch. You're exhausted. You put on some Netflix and you hit your vape a little bit. So there is definitely a psychological and even kind of like behavioral regulation component to vaping, in my opinion. And then the third thing is the socialization factor. That is one thing that almost every cigarette smoker will tell you that there is a socialization to it. Well, the same thing with vaping and almost kind of non-self-identifying community has sprung up around vaping. And there's events and there's expos at the vape shops. You can go in there. Every time I go to the vape shop, I run into somebody that I know. And it's like, hi, how are you, girl? Oh, I'm doing good. How have you been? What flavor are you getting? I'm getting the watermelon pop. Well, girl, you know what I'm getting. I'm getting what I always get, the sour apple bee pop, you know? So there is definitely that. And when you're talking about individuals who have had between a year or 15, 20 years of their life snatched away from them, I'm a very sociable person, but I can tell you something that a lot of people don't talk about. As an adult who has been gone since I was 19 years old, I making friends is hard. It's hard for me to really like let people in because I'm worried about judgment and things like that. But also, you know, almost all of my friends that I have from back in the day, they're all family people. Now they have kids and stuff like that, which adds its own complications. So most people that I now have good friendships with, I met them through one way or another, something related with they've been, and that's the truth.
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Brent Stafford: While you're in Georgia, I'm not certain what some of the laws that are being passed there are, but I definitely know if you're in Kentucky, all of the vape shops are closing because of the new state laws. So, I mean, how does it make you feel to be relying on nicotine vapes for harm reduction, for friendship, for ease on finances, to know that public health state lawmakers, anti-vaping groups and stuff are positioning to take your access away?
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Christy Perez: So the first thing I have to say to that is this. Attacks on autonomy have been going on for a long time. And I want to be clear that the attack on vaping, this kind of legislative and social pushback against vaping, it is not its own distinct separate thing. There is a concentrated effort to assail our sense of autonomy, our sense of individuality, and the ability to execute decisions as self-executives. And that's happening with women's reproductive rights. It's happening with the kind of anti-gay rhetoric. It's happening definitely with the anti-trans rhetoric. all of these different things, they are part of a concentrated effort and people need to, and I feel like people choose to be blind. They really need to understand the interconnectivity of these issues because they are. The reality is, is that For me, it's a little bit bothersome. Here in Georgia, we don't see, our legislator at this time has not given the oppression of being like extremely anti-vaping. Now there was several years ago and kind of the same thing with the smoking, like no smoking in like public spaces, public forums, et cetera, that has been extended, that prohibition has been extended to vaping. And I understand some people's point of view on it, something about being a former cigarette smoker, I now cannot abide a cigarette around me. So I understand for somebody who is a non-smoker, you know, a non-vapor, I can understand their personal sentiment. However, I still think that it really, we need to re-concentrate these conversations around autonomy because that is what it comes down to. And I think that a lot of times, definitely people in my situation are overlooked. And of course we will be because we're not factored in. But the reality is a lot of the same things that I just said aren't specific or aren't exclusive only to incarcerated people. I feel like if you were to take a poll of the vaping community, people that vape, I feel like you would find many of the same positions or sentiments being reiterated in their own particular way. So I feel like Kentucky, that sucks. I really hate that for Kentuckians. But I think that It's really important that those individuals understand that this is an autonomy discussion and not so much a public health discussion the way that it's been tried. They've attempted to portray it.
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Brent Stafford: Could it also be partly intertwined with this is that the powers to be the man, so to speak, they. They've got a problem with individual pleasure. An individual in control of their own pleasure, stealing their own moments away of pleasure without sanction by the government. Could that be a part of it?
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Christy Perez: But all you just said is you just said autonomy. That is what autonomy is. It's the ability for us to pursue our own epicurean delight you know are whatever it is that gives life bliss for a moment because life is it's guaranteed to be full of several things taxes and drama it's always going to be there so you have to snatch the moments of gratification where you can and when we're talking about the man the government the corporations the secret cabal whoever it is you know because there's so many different opinions about it i think they're all right but um when we're talking about that when we're talking about that regulation that's what that is that regulation is a desire to um to to quit you of your ability to assess your own moments of gratification your own moments of bliss whatever is going to just give your light a little bit of light you know like your life a little bit of light i put it backwards But so definitely, I think that's 100% accurate. And the government has a long shown, the man has a long shown track record of wanting to be involved in the minutiae of the individual's lives down to what happens in their bedroom, what type of clothes they can wear, what type of presentation they can have, who they can love, what they can do with their bodily parts, what they can put in their body. And we also have a love affair here in America with prohibition regulations. Our government, our legislative history is one robustly romanced with the regulation, the prohibition of people's rights and pleasures. So it's not a new thing at all.