A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Some guy's comments on one of my Facebook posts this week really brought home this twisted thinking that people who use illicit drugs don't deserve support because it was their choice to use drugs in the first place. (The "made your bed now lie in it" school of thought.) I've learned that mostly when people say stuff like that, they're just shooting their mouth off, parroting the thing they've heard over and over again from childhood on. But how about we take a moment to dive into that thought - the idea that our social compact, as this guy put it, should not extend to carrying the burden for someone's "bad" choices. Let's call it the Your Fault Social Compact. It'll be modeled on that health insurance company in the States where the CEO ended up murdered because he symbolized ruthless and predatory capitalism destroying human lives. Or ICBC. Right now, our health care system says if you're sick, we'll care for you, even if th...

Pixabay:  Md Habibur Please do read this latest piece of mine in this morning's Times Colonist , where you can see the photos and a nicer layout, and appreciate the sheer remarkableness of the TC generously giving me all this space to talk about this big, big issue. But I'm finding the workarounds for Facebook's news article bans are getting blown up faster than new ones emerge, so posting this piece in full on my blog seems to be the only option for broader sharing. Here it is: A school on fire. A multi-vehicle pileup on the Malahat. A high-impact earthquake. First responders call these kinds of major disasters “mass casualty incidents” – MCIs.That’s the perfect term for 900-block Pandora, says a local B.C. Ambulance Service paramedic speaking on condition of anonymity. “Pandora is a slow-motion MCI,” he says. “We’re in a state of system failure, and it’s devastating to so many people. I don’t even see a light at the end of the tunnel, just a big black pit and people falli...

Premier David Eby doesn’t give a whit about my opinion. As it turns out, I feel the same way about his. But we are stuck with each other – him with his Premier-level access to the traditional media, me with a blog and social media. And I’ve got a few things to say. Anything said about a politician seems to get interpreted as a statement of political support for or against them. That’s not what this is. I don’t care for politics. So there’s no politics in what is bothering me about David Eby. And just to be transparent, I loathe the BC Conservatives. What is actually bothering me about David Eby is the great discomfort of seeing that a man who I once believed in can be acting this way. It’s quite a different level of betrayal than the usual political stuff. David Eby is a lawyer. His dad was a lawyer too, and his mom a teacher. He once headed up the BC Civil Liberties Association, and I interviewed him a number of times in those years. He was always a sharp thinker who I had a good opin...

My journalism career coincidentally tracks the rise in homelessness in BC, from the days before anyone even used the word, to modern times when virtually every community in the province is profoundly affected by it.  I wrote for the Victoria Times Colonist for more than 20 years, full-time for the first 15 years and then as a weekly columnist. Homelessness was an issue I came back to over and over again. I have been part of adding to the public record for all the years starting from when that word first described maybe 10 or 15 men with alcohol problems, to the current time, when hundreds of people with immensely complex health issues are stuck on our streets. I was no longer a journalist when I sat on the mayor-appointed committee that dove into the issues for the still completely relevant 2008 report Breaking The Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness , but by then was working in social services and   felt a real responsibility to help open people's eyes to the...

  What’s underway in Canada and the United States right now is the manufacturing of new classes of people who can be discriminated against legally. Both our countries have been here before, but I’d always thought I was in the generation that would end all of that awful business, not lay the groundwork for more. The latest target for discrimination and harassment in the US are people with first- and second-generation immigrant backgrounds from the ever-changing list that the government keeps of countries that it doesn’t like. In Canada, the target is people living homeless. I’m not going to suggest that anyone’s wearing balaclavas and shooting people dead yet on Victoria streets. But that’s not to say there aren’t some striking – and disturbing - comparisons between ICE raids in the US and what’s happening for people living on our streets. The principles are certainly the same: Identify a group of “undesirables” whose vanquishing can be politicized, and make life hell for them...

I went looking for the origins of that phrase "the deserving poor" today. It turns out to be a 426-year-old term dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which aimed to reduce the devastating impact of a famine by providing alms to the deserving poor and a hard stint in the workhouse for the undeserving. Modern anti-poverty policies would never word things like that, of course. But strip away the dressed-up language and that’s still what we’ve got. We’ve even lost the plot on “the deserving poor” at this point, with people now stranded out on our streets who actually would have been eligible for alms back in Elizabethan times. Back in 1601, the Poor Laws divided impoverished people into three categories for the purpose of deciding how much help they qualified for. “The vagrant” was undeserving and destined for the workhouse, where he would be punished daily doing work that was deliberately designed to be more unpleasant than even the worst of jobs outside the workhouse...

I wrote a letter to the editor to the Victoria Times Colonist that they ran Sept 27 as an opinion piece , which I then posted on Facebook, where it got major traction primarily among people who aren't my "followers."  I'm saying all of that because it has led me to conclude that those of us who think like this about the social crisis burning on all of our communities' streets need to be way more out there in public spheres with our thoughts. There is more support than we might think, and governments that only ever hear from the highly active lock-em-up types need to know that.  Let's take a leaf from the populist playbook and get loud at every opportunity. (Ideally by pointing out the reality rather than just shouting angrily at the "other side" that they're idiots, though I admit I came pretty close to doing that in this particular rant, didn't I?) I fear that some of us in this fight have concluded that it's hopeless to openly push back...

Anyone else like a radio opportunity that gives free range to say whatever you want to sound off about,  but then you listen to it and think good grief, couldn't I have been more eloquent and organized in my thinking? Ah, but then I wouldn't be me, right? Or that's what I like to tell myself.  Here I am, blathering on People First Radio this month about the street scene in Victoria. For some reason, I'm listening to it for the first time today, 10 days after it aired. I think that might relate to my reluctance to not want to hear myself talking in random, wandering, no-key-messages fashion. That's my dealio, but that's not to say that I love that I do it that way.  But all that said, thank you, Joe Pugh, for letting me sound off in my usual stream-of-conscious style, and for including some clips from the speaker series on the toxic drug crisis that I organized in partnership with Peers Victoria earlier this year.  On the upside, illicit drug deaths in BC fell t...

I hope the inquest recommendations that have come out of tragedy in a University of Victoria residence really do lead to major change. What happened to Sidney McIntyre-Starko is very sad, and there were some major stumbles on a number of fronts leading up to her death at 18 from toxic drugs. But if anyone is thinking that the terrible stigma that hangs over illicit drug use got eased by all the news coverage of this young woman’s death, just let that one go. If anything, the coverage deepened stigma. Right to the final stories, we have seen photos of beautiful Sidney in all her active, “normal” roles, been reminded that this was the first time she’d ever used drugs. She was a good person, we have been assured many times by those quoted in the stories. She died because of system failures, the stories emphasize, not because she was a drug user. And there it is. The stigma. The coverage is careful not to say out loud that Sidney was not like all the other drug users who are dying, b...

Nobody knows the challenges of getting out from under harmful substance use like someone who has actually done it. The third event in the Peers Victoria speaker series on the toxic drug crisis brought together a powerful panel of six past and present substance users to talk about their journeys with frankness, wisdom and so much insight. (I was the lead organizer of the series.) But while we've got a complete video of the event , it's a rare devotee of the subject who would watch the whole thing, clocking in at over two hours. So I made a "greatest hits" compilation, if you will - 40 minutes all in, with clips reordered and with a bit of categorization that helps bring more focus to the panelists' comments.  Here it is for your viewing pleasure . If you have people in your circle who are still saying stupid nonsense about substance users not wanting recovery sufficiently or being content to exist in a state of oblivion, please share it with them.  What kind of sys...

I generally stay out of the fray when it comes to commentary on politicking, so much of which is about as reliable as a snake-oil pitch. But having caught Pierre Poilievre’s promise of addiction treatment for 50,000 Canadians , paid out of the money that will be saved when safe-supply programs are cut, I just can’t let that blatantly misleading statement stand unchallenged. First, let’s start with safe supply. That’s the term used for when people are able to swap out their completely unregulated opioid-based street drugs for a prescription opioid from a health professional. It’s the most obvious immediate strategy to stop a toxic drug crisis that has killed 50,000+ Canadians – more than a quarter of them in BC - in the decade since the anesthetic fentanyl began dominating the street drug market. That Poilievre actually thinks there’s enough money in the country’s teeny-weeny safe-supply response to pay for a major expansion of treatment beds and the cost of putting people into th...

Thank you to long-time community organizer Ann Livingston for pointing me to this 17-year-old blog post that takes us back to 1950s Vancouver to remind us that there's nothing new about the strategies being talked about now to improve health care for people who use substances - or the political tactics used to block those efforts. The Community Chest and Council, the forerunner to the United Way, struck a Narcotics Committee in 1952 to examine the problem. The Committee recommended a comprehensive drug strategy that included rehab centres, educational campaigns, and stiffer penalties for traffickers. But what really stirred debate was its proposal for clinics that would provide maintenance-level doses of heroin to addicts. The drug clinic scheme was intended to “maintain a constant check on the number of addicts in any community. It would also protect the life of the addict and support him as a useful member of society. This existence would hasten his rehabilitation, or at least r...

This is a callout to people who know someone who has died in the toxic drug crisis in the last decade. I've got an idea. I'll need your help.  Nobody can look at the faces in this Moms Stop the Harm video of lost loved ones without questioning what's going on, with more than 17,000 people dead in BC since 2016 and us seemingly powerless to act. (We aren't, but I've already written about that , so more on that later.) That emotional connection is exactly what's needed to shake off this ennui around a four-alarm public health crisis. We seem to have parceled the toxic drug crisis into the part of our brains where we hold faint understanding of something that we don't think affects us. But it does affect us, in so many ways.  Normally I'm all about the stats and evidence, but as the fantastic panel on moral panic pointed out at the Feb. 26 event in Peers Victoria's speaker series, we've got stacks of evidence on this issue and quite a lot of stats...