Action Medic Groups

The enduring scenes from the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization include photo after photo of police using clubs, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and tear gas against anyone who was on the street. Protesters, shoppers, businesspeople, students, children, all were targets. In the middle of this chaos, many victims found a measure of relief from the action medics, or street medics, who set up improvised treatment centers to help wash tear gas and pepper spray from people's eyes and to see that seriously injured people were moved on to hospital emergency rooms.

According to http://Action-Medical.Net, action medics are the all-volunteer “street first aiders” who provide preventative education, emergency first aid, and aftercare to demonstrators working to resist oppression. Alternatively referred to as action medics or street medics, these groups have traditionally maintained an active interest in the safety, health, and well-being of people who are participating in protests. Action medics are politically oriented and anti-authoritarian.

Numerous action medic groups in the United States grew during the 1960s civil rights movement. The Medical Committee for Human Rights started volunteering medical care in Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer. These medics tended to wounded protesters, set up emergency clinics, wrote orientation manuals, and also suffered from police and Ku Klux Klan attacks. Action medic groups continued their activities into the late 1960s protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam, as well as during the American Indian Movement's l973 action at Wounded Knee.

It was action medics from these groups, including the Colorado StreetMedics, who were called on to help protesters prepare for the 1999 action against the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle, Washington. Many action medic groups subsequently evolved from the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington. Among the groups are the Black Cross Health Collective in Portland, Oregon, Medical Activists of New York, Boston Area Liberation Medics, Bay Area Radical Health Collective, Star of Resistance Medics New York City, Cascadia Health Educators, the D.C. Action Medical Network, and On the Ground.

Most action medic groups maintain their own websites with information and training about upcoming protests, preparing for protests, and caring for people during and after protests. The Black Cross Health Collective, formed by health care workers who participated in the Seattle protests, have been among the first to conduct trials to find effective treatments for pepper spray and tear gas. With a policy of being forewarned equals being forearmed, the Black Cross Health Collective writes that they are making the material available so that people might be as safe as possible during street action.

Action medics are often independent people, and making generalizations about them is risky. Nevertheless, many of the action medic groups have grown from radical roots, combining direct action with anarchist organizing principles. http://Infoshop.org is one anarchist website that lists the Black Cross Health Collective and the D.C. Action Medical Network as favorite links.

Action medic trainings incorporate the principles of anarchist organizing, including a lack of hierarchy, with decision making by consensus. The trainers often introduce themselves by their first names only and make a conscious decision to avoid mentioning any titles or education they have. Although the trainers include medical doctors, nurses, and aides, they also include people without medical training who have shown they can maintain calm in difficult protest circumstances.

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