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| Image: Pixabay, johnhain |
Letter to a friend today as we talked about how to get our heads around what has to come next in the toxic drug crisis:
I have been thinking so very long and hard about the toxic drug crisis lately, and have come to that point where the conclusion I've arrived at is challenging yet necessary. I hit that in my Peers Victoria years when I realized that the real way to support sex workers was to end stigma, and the only way you could end stigma was to normalize the activity.
So here we are on this one, and we all know the most obvious strategy with the quickest results: make sure everybody gets a safe supply of the drug they use. Normalize drug use. It's a strange one because in SO many ways and overwhelmingly, drug use is normalized. But this ridiculous "street drug" business - the drugs we don't want people to have, for no particular reason other than because we said so - is seen as an aberrant use.
In fact, as the demographics of the people dying have shown us, the people who are dying are "every person," in a sense. (Not really, of course - they skew male, young and blue-collar, but you know what I mean.) Drugs are used commonly, as it turns out, including the drugs we don't want people to have. I guess it hurts to know that, after a gazillion years of useless prohibition, but here we are. And we have to wake up to that if we're ever going to get a grip on the crisis.
I mean, let's consider this hoo-hah over "diversion," as you noted in your message. So what happened there was that a few people on safe supply are alleged to have sold their prescription drugs in order to get money for the kind of drug they actually wanted. (This can happen because the drug that works best for a particular person is not necessarily provided through the safe-supply system.)
So here we are on this one, and we all know the most obvious strategy with the quickest results: make sure everybody gets a safe supply of the drug they use. Normalize drug use. It's a strange one because in SO many ways and overwhelmingly, drug use is normalized. But this ridiculous "street drug" business - the drugs we don't want people to have, for no particular reason other than because we said so - is seen as an aberrant use.
In fact, as the demographics of the people dying have shown us, the people who are dying are "every person," in a sense. (Not really, of course - they skew male, young and blue-collar, but you know what I mean.) Drugs are used commonly, as it turns out, including the drugs we don't want people to have. I guess it hurts to know that, after a gazillion years of useless prohibition, but here we are. And we have to wake up to that if we're ever going to get a grip on the crisis.
I mean, let's consider this hoo-hah over "diversion," as you noted in your message. So what happened there was that a few people on safe supply are alleged to have sold their prescription drugs in order to get money for the kind of drug they actually wanted. (This can happen because the drug that works best for a particular person is not necessarily provided through the safe-supply system.)
So in other words, safe drugs - at least in the sense of certified purity - entered the unsafe supply chain. How is that a bad thing when you've got 16,000 people dead and not even a whiff of a real plan up your sleeve?
Another revelation from my sex work days: You don't have to like the thing that is happening, you just have to want it to be safer, and less "in your face" for the community. I think we've been positioned to believe that safe supply means being pro-drug use, when it's actually just a pragmatic response to stop the dying. Other things absolutely have to come right after that, because really, we ALL need more understanding from a young age about drugs, and not from the police. But first, we need to get a handle on the drug supply.
Here's a thing to think about: Victoria has drug-checking through a really cool UVic initiative, and the government has (so far) been ok with checking small quantities of people's street supply. BUT they frown on checking the supply of an actual seller, because that could be interpreted as being helpful to drug "traffickers."
Another revelation from my sex work days: You don't have to like the thing that is happening, you just have to want it to be safer, and less "in your face" for the community. I think we've been positioned to believe that safe supply means being pro-drug use, when it's actually just a pragmatic response to stop the dying. Other things absolutely have to come right after that, because really, we ALL need more understanding from a young age about drugs, and not from the police. But first, we need to get a handle on the drug supply.
Here's a thing to think about: Victoria has drug-checking through a really cool UVic initiative, and the government has (so far) been ok with checking small quantities of people's street supply. BUT they frown on checking the supply of an actual seller, because that could be interpreted as being helpful to drug "traffickers."
In terms of stopping people from dying, a quickly effective strategy would be to expand drug-checking so that someone selling to 100 people, say, actually knows something about what is being sold. What about a big drug-checking initiative of suppliers' drugs, with immunity? Wouldn't that be a positive thing?
But you see the problem - first, you have to get over the fact that people buy drugs (and sex, going back to the sex work comparison). And that we all buy drugs, in fact, and count on them for all kinds of things we're deeply grateful for. And that this is exactly the same thing, except that the people who are dying are buying weird concoctions of unknown potency and dosage from some dude who's cooking them up in Kitimat, while the rest of us use drugs that have been deemed socially acceptable.
The crisis is a pretty obvious problem of potency, purity and dosage at the drug end of things. At the addiction end of things, it's more complicated, definitely, but there's very little about the current system that helps the person with addiction. So that needs to get sorted too.
But you see the problem - first, you have to get over the fact that people buy drugs (and sex, going back to the sex work comparison). And that we all buy drugs, in fact, and count on them for all kinds of things we're deeply grateful for. And that this is exactly the same thing, except that the people who are dying are buying weird concoctions of unknown potency and dosage from some dude who's cooking them up in Kitimat, while the rest of us use drugs that have been deemed socially acceptable.
The crisis is a pretty obvious problem of potency, purity and dosage at the drug end of things. At the addiction end of things, it's more complicated, definitely, but there's very little about the current system that helps the person with addiction. So that needs to get sorted too.
Interesting fact: 300,000 British Columbians with substance disorders, 623 publicly funded treatment beds, and 259 detox beds. Plus just the muckiest way through treatment that anyone could imagine, and horribly expensive with no known or followed-up-on outcomes. I don't have to tell you that.
Wow, I should use this as a blog post, lol. It does not take me much to get ranting these days. But the parallels with sex work are striking. People hate that people use drugs that we've declared illegal. But hey, tough shit, man. Nothing else we do matters if the drug supply isn't safe.
Wow, I should use this as a blog post, lol. It does not take me much to get ranting these days. But the parallels with sex work are striking. People hate that people use drugs that we've declared illegal. But hey, tough shit, man. Nothing else we do matters if the drug supply isn't safe.
6 comments:
testing of the drugs street dealers sell, given the number of deaths per year I'd vote to give it a try. Nothing else has worked all that well. People already know there is a chance they will die from these drugs, but it hasn't stopped anyone from taking them.
Of course it would be nice if the population/government arranged our society/health care so that people weren't in need of drug usage to get through their lives.
Providing assistance to people who are starting to use drugs to deal with life's issues. It would be so much easier and better to provide support at the beginning of things.
What governments have been doing isn't working because people are still dying at an unacceptable rate.
People tend to think of people dying of drugs are those they see on the streets but most would not know about those who have homes, jobs, etc. Its about time government gives that information more freely even if they have to pay the press to carry that information.
Once upon a time if you read an obit and it said, "died suddenly" it was frequently suicide. These days if you read that, it usually means an O.D.
Part of the problem of safe supply is the suppliers themselves, and all the shenanigans that arise from the drug trade being lucrative beyond imagination while, and please correct me if I'm misinformed, the actual product is generally cheap to produce and distribute. Would it not be a big step in reducing the crime associated with drug use by not only legalizing, but also by providing a cheap, safe and reliable source, along with all the appropriate warnings and follow-up care? And, mostly, quit manufacturing the poverty and stress that lures people into the need to escape.
Absolutely, Danneau - providing a cheap, safe and reliable source would be the way to go. That was what the Drug Users Liberation Front tried to do - basically just be a safe, friendly storefront of street drugs that had been pre-checked so that everyone knew what was in them and that the level of fentanyl or fentanyl analogs wasn't going to kill them. They had quite a beautiful project set up, all tied in with university researchers and drug-checking technology and even a sense of community for the buyers coming to their store front. But then the two young DULF founders got charged with trafficking, and that derailed everything. So yes to this plan, but it will need to be underground, and obviously it's high risk for whoever is involved in terms of potential criminal charges. Someone running an underground drug-checking program for illicit drugs, however, while still at risk of some kind of criminal charge until we change the damn laws, probably wouldn't be risking anything as heavy as trafficking. Obviously, none of it should have to be done underground, because what we're talking about here is taking action to save the daily deaths of 5-6 British Columbians. But here we are, stuck with oppressive federal laws and now, clearly with both a federal and provincial government who want to scrape and bow to the US because of the tariff threats. We can all see what a fine job the US has done with its own illicit drug problems (insert sarcasm emoji here). Opioid deaths in the US more than doubled from 50,000 in 2015 to 114,000 in 2023, and have been ever so slightly lower since then. Which is ANOTHER interesting development - even though people are still dying in Canada and the US at wild rates, there has been a slight tapering off in both countries. Good news, but what does it mean? If it were a normal problem - i.e. not shrouded in criminality and governed by whatever police and socially conservative forces dictate - we would study that, and perhaps find hope in the answer.
Oops, meant to post the CBC story on the DULF people getting charged this past summer. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/dulf-advocates-charged-1.7229040
Thanks as always for your thoughts, e.a.f. And YES, people have a totally wrong idea about who is dying, though that said, people without housing in BC are still 25 times more at risk of a toxic drug death than someone who is housed. The other big error in thinking we're making is to conflate (another word from the sex work learnings!) the toxic drug crisis with "addiction." But toxic drugs can kill you whether you are a first-time user or have been using four times a day for 10 years. The problem is the DRUGS, not the users.
Other oops because I can't seem to edit my first comment: DULF was not selling fentanyl, but drug-checking was part of its storefront operation. So when someone came in with their own drugs, DULF could check what was in them (same as the Substance operation that University of Victoria oversees here in Victoria. But beyond drug-checking, DULF was selling up to 14 grams per user per week of cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine, with the substances tested for safety before sale "at cost."
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