I’ve been sitting with the news that Filter is closing, trying to understand why it feels like such a personal loss.
I was never part of the organisation. I watched its work from a distance, as a reader. Yet somewhere along the way, Filter became part of my own story.
When I entered the tobacco harm reduction debate, I didn’t lack opinions. I had lived experience, questions and a growing sense that many of the people making decisions simply didn’t understand the lives their policies affected. What I lacked was confidence. I didn’t know whether someone like me had the right language, credentials or standing to write publicly about any of it.
Filter quietly answered that question.
Its writers were informed without becoming detached. They were prepared to confront powerful institutions, but they never lost sight of the people living with the consequences. They wrote about nicotine and other drugs without reducing those who use them to diagnoses, data points or cautionary tales.
Reading their work made something click for me: lived experience wasn’t an obstacle to serious writing. It was a form of knowledge.
So I began to write.
At first, it was simply a way to organise my thoughts. Then it became a way to push back against claims that didn’t match reality. Eventually, writing became part of who I am, a means of defending the consumer perspective and insisting that the people most affected by policy should have a voice in shaping it.
I don’t know whether anyone at Filter realised how far their influence travelled. They may never know how many hesitant writers found courage in those pages, or how many readers felt recognised rather than judged.
I was one of them.
Today, I feel grateful, but I also feel the emptiness left when something rare and important disappears. The publication is ending, yet what it gave me remains: the belief that difficult questions should be asked, that human experience belongs alongside evidence, and that my own voice might be worth hearing.
Filter helped turn a reader into a writer.
I’ll carry that with me.