Caty Simon

Caty Simon has spent more than 20 years in the low-income rights, psychiatric survivors’ rights, sex workers’ rights, and drug users union movements. She is a leadership team member of and a sex worker liaison for National Survivors Union (NSU), the United States national drug users union. Caty is also a founding co-organiser and Development Director of Whose Corner Is It Anyway, a Western MA harm reduction, mutual aid, and organising group by and for low-income, street, and survival sex workers who use opioids and/or stimulants and/or experience housing insecurity. She is Narrative Development Director at NC Survivors Union, the flagship affiliate group of NSU, leading Narcofeminism Storyshare, a project reducing stigma and disrupting stereotypes against people who use drugs through collaborative autobiographical story development and stakeholder training.
Caty is first author of a commentary in the International Journal of Drug Policy on union members’ experiences as drug user organisers doing community-driven research (CDR) and an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, “The methadone manifesto: treatment experiences and policy recommendations from methadone patient activists.” She has extensive experience as a research and intervention consultant representing people with living experience of drug use and drug treatment, and has worked with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration; American Institutes for Research, UMass Chan Medical School; the University of Kentucky; the University of Colorado; and many other entities. Currently, Caty is a research assistant at the Yale University Department of Internal Medicine. In 2023, she received the Alfred E. Lindesmith Award for Achievement in the Field of Scholarship at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference.