A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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 peopl...

    I've been back in a life with young children again for the last six weeks, helping out with three of our grandsons for a couple of months while their parents get up to various things. There’s much that is quite lovely about it, but being able or willing to do my usual amount of writing is not one of them.     This new life has helped me see that in fact, I had become quite used to having time alone for writing and reflecting. But when you’re living in a house with children, forget it.     At this moment, my 14-year-old grandson is madly playing some iPod game a mere metre away from me. The 11-year-old is steps away on the other side, charging his own iPod. Not more than 10 minutes ago, I had to stop everything to half-drag, half-carry the 5-year-old to the bathroom and then bed after he fell asleep on the couch watching “Free Birds.”     There are magical grandma moments in there, for sure. But for the purpose of getting writing don...