Stigma deepens. People suffer and die. Just another day in BC

A hundred years from now, our descendants will feel sick to their stomachs when they read about how we treated people who used drugs in ways we didn't approve of. It will be like the revelations of priest-pedophiles and residential schools were for my own generation – one of those things that an evolved person struggles to come to terms with.

”Our governments did that?” they will ask. “And the people just put up with it?” Yes, Grasshopper, because even though almost everyone used drugs in that era, governments could get elected by singling out and causing to suffer anyone no longer able to hide the signs of their drug use, most especially if they were poor and sick.

In any logical world, offering prescribed drugs as a substitute for toxic street drugs would be a good thing. Now that dying of an overdose is the No. 1 cause of death in BC for anyone ages 10 to 59, substituting non-toxic drugs is pretty much the best strategy we’ve got to stop the deaths.

But today’s announcement from government, which follows on the heels of a big media fuss about legal opioids being “diverted” into street sales, cuts the legs out from under BC’s own prescribed-alternatives program. The 4,000 people on the program will no longer be able to bring home their prescriptions like any normal person, they will now have to go to wherever the health professionals are, in whatever hours those professionals work, and take their prescribed drugs in front of them.

The news release is loaded with hot words like “predators” and “bad actors” to make a reader think we’re fighting evil with this bold move. But sweep away all the noise and what you’ve basically got is government intensifying the stigma around drug use and making life even harder for people who don’t need any more of a hard time.

The cynical move, so blatantly political, will almost certainly push many people back to the deadly street supply. Some will die. The rest will just have their complicated lives made even more complicated. I hope David Eby feels that weight on his soul forever, and may it be all the more crushing because he’s a man who actually knows he’s doing the wrong thing.

Picture what this edict would look like in your own life. You like to come home after work and have a couple glasses of wine. Nope – you want that wine, you’re going down to the drug store to drink it fast in front of the pharmacist, while whoever is in line waiting for their own prescriptions watches. “Oh, what a shame,” they’ll whisper.

You like a cannabis gummy just before bedtime? Get on those bunny slippers and head on down to the clinic to eat it in front of the nurse, if anyone’s even open that late. If they’re not, you’ll be eating it at 6 p.m., and tough luck if what you really need it for is bedtime.

And yeah, you’ll be doing that every night.

Got high blood pressure? Keep the car warm or a bus pass in your pocket for those twice-daily visits to take your drugs where a health professional can see you do it. Have a job with odd hours? Get ready to figure out a work plan that lets you get to the pharmacy however many times a day, every day.

Ah, but those are the “good” drugs, I can hear you saying. (Not really, because the only people who have read this far already think like me.)

Sure, but they’re the good drugs only because we say they are. There’s no actual science connected to which drugs are legal and which ones aren’t. Every “illicit” drug has its story in our country’s history, but none of it is about careful science establishing which drugs harm us the most and making those ones illegal.

Somehow, people have come to believe that the visible suffering we’re all witnessing in our communities is about drug use. They hate talking about drug use and are very sure it looks nothing like the six bottles of wine they drank over the week.

In fact, the sad state of our streets is about a social safety net left to crumble over the last 30 years and a housing crisis. Harmful drug use is a symptom, not the underlying problem. And the toxic drug crisis isn't even about harmful drug use, it's about unregulated drugs of unknown potency, egalitarian in their deadliness whether you're a first-time user, an injured construction worker, or an "addict."

No difference. People are going to read the government’s cruel news release about deepening the humiliation for people trying to get well, and they’re going to think that something decisive is happening to stop the misery. 

Not at all. Something decisive is happening to increase the misery. David Eby is tightening the screws. The prescribed-alternatives program offered the tiniest ray of hope that government was beginning to grasp that one of the more obvious solution to toxic drugs is to switch to drugs that aren’t toxic. The light has gone out at Hope Farm tonight.

“We are committed to saving lives and getting the people who are suffering from addiction the treatment they need,” says Health Minister Josie Osborne in the news release.

Oh, please. That line doesn’t stand up 21,000 deaths later, most of them under the watch of the current government. Why do we let them get away with it? Why is the media just so damn useless, recording the empty words of whoever saying whatever, as if they see no role for themselves in digging deeper to solve a problem that can never be solved this way?

David Eby and his government will be on the wrong side of history one day. Another generation will tear their MLA names off plaques and schools, and be baffled that people with such a mindset could have ever been left to run government and cause such harm.

But that’s little comfort to the people being shamed and harmed now. David Eby would rather see them take poison on the streets than risk losing a political base who he imagines admires him for his decisive stand. Shame on YOU, David Eby.

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