Meghan Fitzgerald has worked as a lawyer with lived experience advocating for PWUD for close to two decades. Whilst her casework traverses many human rights issues and frameworks, the impact of the war on drugs on the human rights to life and equitable health care recurrent themes rooted in LE.

Meghan Fitzgerald directed the legal intervention on harm reduction principles into coronial proceedings investigating the passing of Veronica Nelson, in circumstances of death determined to be ‘complications of withdrawal from chronic opiate use and Wilkie Syndrome in the setting of malnutrition’. Meghan has lived experience of IDU and carried relationships with family/ community members connected to Veronica. To avoid conflicts, the intervention involved a special interest application based on the 23-year history of the Drug Outreach Lawyer team, and focussed on interrogation of bail compliance in the context of health/ social conditions including dependence and homelessness; adequacy of drug treatment in custodial settings; stigma and discrimination in provision of services and care towards PWUD; the criminalisation of the health condition of drug dependence; and premature loss of life connected to the condition of drug dependence. Lived experience was critical to the approach adopted in the proceeding (participatory, consultative, centring of lived experience, directly confronting the experiences of PWUD), and was underpinned by close collaboration with peer peak body Harm Reduction Victoria in policy objectives and social support, and consultation with Aboriginal elders with relevant lived experience. Some critical outcomes included recognition that stigma (structural and interpersonal) was a causative factor in Veronica’s passing, that discrimination against PWUD who meet the criterion of the DSM V breaches equal opportunity laws, that stigma and discrimination operate in an intersectional and compounding manner impacting Aboriginal women, framed and understood through the lens of intergenerational impacts of colonisation and associated violence and harm. The most significant impact of the proceeding was to ‘normalise’ drug dependence as a condition deserving of care and professional treatment, and to destigmatise Veronica in her passing as a woman deserving of respect, compassion, worth, and appropriate professional care. Central to the success of the intervention was experts with LE.