Louise Vincent, a remarkable advocate and former heroin addict, passed away on August 31st at her home in Greensboro, N.C., at the age of 49. Her life was a testament to resilience, having survived numerous overdoses, the amputation of a leg, and even the tragic loss of her daughter to opioids. Despite these immense challenges, she rose to become a leading voice in the harm reduction movement, tirelessly promoting access to critical services like needle exchanges and naloxone, alongside initiatives that helped drug users identify dangerous ingredients in their substances.
Her mother, Sarah Beale, confirmed her passing, noting that Ms. Vincent had been battling a blood disorder and chronic health issues stemming from past injections of fentanyl contaminated with Xylazine, a potent horse tranquilizer.
The daughter of an English professor and a teacher, Ms. Vincent earned a master’s degree in public health in 2013, even as she grappled with her own addiction. In the same year, she co-founded the North Carolina Survivors Union, one of the nation’s pioneering organizations designed to offer crucial support and ‘safety rails’ for individuals battling substance use.
“Our society often pushes a single, rigid narrative about recovery that simply doesn’t work for everyone,” she once shared in Scalawag, an online magazine focusing on marginalized communities in the South. She criticized the ‘all or nothing’ approach to sobriety, highlighting the lack of understanding for those in the nuanced ‘middle ground’ between active addiction and complete abstinence.
Ms. Vincent’s resolve was fueled by a deep frustration with the rehabilitation community’s harsh judgment towards individuals who experienced relapses.
She vividly recounted a common, disheartening interaction, telling The Greensboro News & Record in 2021: ‘Imagine saying, ‘Hi, my name is Louise, and I can’t stop using drugs, so I need your program.’ Only to be told, ‘Oh, you’ll be kicked out because you can’t stop using drugs?’ It’s ironic, because that’s precisely why I sought help.’
Without a supportive environment, these individuals are left vulnerable to severe health risks, including hepatitis and H.I.V. from shared needles, compounded by an increasingly unpredictable drug supply often contaminated with lethal additives.
In a 2021 article for Filter, an online magazine advocating for safer drug practices, Ms. Vincent emphasized the stark reality of modern drug use. She quoted a friend, saying, ‘This isn’t your mama’s heroin!’ She criticized healthcare providers for failing to recognize that they were no longer dealing primarily with heroin, but rather with highly potent and unpredictable substances like fentanyl, tranquilizers, and unknown cutting agents.
The North Carolina Survivors Union, run from its modest community storefront in Greensboro, offers crucial drug testing kits, empowering users to understand what’s in their substances. A powerful sign on its wall declares, ‘We stand for loving drug users just the way they are’ — a direct challenge to conventional drug policies that often prioritize abstinence, incarceration, and rigid restrictions on vital treatments like methadone for opioid addiction.
“Louise was kind of the embodiment of the spirit of harm reduction,” Maia Szalavitz, the author of “Undoing Drugs” (2021) and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, said in an interview. “The idea is that we need to care about people who use drugs, whether they use drugs or not.”
In 2021, the Biden administration announced several initiatives supported by the harm reduction movement, including funding the purchase of test strips to identify fentanyl impurities. Critics argued that this approach was like buying whiskey for alcoholics; supporters said drug users deserved to maintain their dignity while battling addiction.
“So often, the problem facing all harm reduction programs is that people are so angry with those who use drugs, they want to try to punish them into abstinence,” John Oliver said in 2002 during a lengthy segment discussing harm reduction on his HBO show, “Last Week Tonight.” “But that is not how any of this works.”
He then played a clip of a television interview with Ms. Vincent.
“What we do is everything wrong to help a person,” she said. “We disconnect them from community. And then we disconnect them from their freedom. And when people finally have nothing left, then they will use until they die.”
Louise Mae Beale was born on March 15, 1976, in Greensboro. Her father, Walter Henry Beale III, was an English professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her mother taught in high schools and community colleges.
Louise was a precocious child.
At age 6, she was ordering pizzas for delivery. When she was 11, her parents made her stay home from Sunday school one day because she wasn’t ready to leave on time. She wanted to hang out with her friends, so she took a cab.
By seventh grade, she was drinking alcohol. One day, some older students offered her LSD and cocaine.
“I was a good kid,” she told The News & Record in 2013. “Thoughtful. Kind. But it was like going from Barbies to crack. I stepped off the ledge and fell face first into chaos.”
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, she self-medicated with hard drugs in increasing amounts. One overdose followed another. Her frequent hospital stays made her feel worthless.
“When they have security searches and room sitters, leave us in pain and withdrawal and refuse to allow any guests for us, we leave against medical advice,” she wrote in Filter. “We are treated as if we did this to ourselves and deserve our condition.”
Ms. Vincent entered Greensboro College in her mid-20s and graduated in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She was still using drugs off and on.
In 2007, she enrolled in the graduate program in public health at U.N.C. Greensboro and worked on a needle-exchange program. In 2013, she was struck by a car while crossing a street in a hit-and-run incident. Her ankle was crushed, and her leg had to be amputated. Later that year, she earned her master’s degree.
While attending a conference in Colorado, she met the founders of the Urban Survivors Union, an organization that promotes harm reduction strategies.
“When I first heard about harm reduction, I had an internal battle in my own heart because I grew up in the South and I was conditioned with all the same junk,” she told Scalawag. “It was a real battle. Am I doing the right thing? Is giving syringes to people … is this OK?”
In starting what became the North Carolina Survivors Union, Ms. Vincent initially worked underground. Users would call her on her cellphone and she would meet up with them to provide syringes, naloxone and sometimes CPR. She was still struggling herself.
“I didn’t start doing harm reduction because I wanted to save the world,” Ms. Vincent told NPR in 2023. “I wanted to save myself.”
In 2016, Ms. Vincent’s 19-year-old daughter, Selena Vincent, died in a rehab center from an overdose. Ms. Vincent had trained her to use naloxone, but the facility didn’t stock it.
“The maddening truth about what happened to Selena is that it was avoidable,” Ms. Vincent said.
She thought about getting high as a way of coping, but her dealer refused to sell to her.
“I’m glad that I’m OK right now,” she said. “But I know that it’s only this work. It’s only feeling like I’m a part of something that matters.”
Ms. Vincent was in a relationship for many years with Selena’s father, Carl Vincent. They were married shortly before he died from cancer in 1998.
In addition to her mother, Ms. Vincent is survived by another daughter, Summer Benton; a sister, Stella Beale; and her partner, Don Jackson, a human-rights activist who manages the North Carolina Survivors Union’s syringe program. Her father died in 2021.
Ms. Vincent was a co-author of numerous academic papers, collaborating with public health researchers like Nabarun Dasgupta of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“She was flat-out brilliant,” Professor Dasgupta said in an interview. “She identified problems in the system and could frame injustices in truly amazing ways.”
She was also adamant that public health researchers should work with people like her.
“Given the rising rates of drug-involved morbidity and mortality, it is high time to include people who use drugs in public health efforts,” she wrote in a 2021 article in the journal Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy on which she collaborated with Professor Dasgupta and others. “Our lives depend on it.”