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...

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...

John Horgan, David Eby and Justin Trudeau are responsible for the unnecessary deaths of 21,000 people in BC in the last eight years. John Rustad and Pierre Poilievre will continue the trend if given the chance. So there you go, a rare all-party agreement. If I were a conspiracy type, I’d be looking for drug cartel money dressed up as some fancy campaign for a fentanyl czar, because you couldn’t make life much better for a cartel than to be handling the issue of street drugs the way our political leaders do. A person could spend a long time trying to find anything that makes sense about how we are managing a drug supply grown toxic from a complete absence of regulatory oversight. Believe me, I have. But then I was on a dog walk today in the sunshine and my mind was clear, and I saw the obvious – that our governments are protectionists for the drug cartels. Oh, they do a good job of hiding it. They shake their fist at “evil predators,” and they definitely throw a ton of money at police ...

I'm fresh from MC'ing a great opening event today for Peers Victoria's speaker series on the toxic drug crisis, and wanting to share some facts on the crisis here that I gathered as part of my work helping to organize the series. It really is so critically important that we shake off this paralyzed shock state we seem to be in, and do something.  But first, watch this video of people lost to the toxic drug crisis. (Thank you to Moms Stop the Harm for the use of families' photos.) It takes 18 minutes to watch all 300 of the beautiful faces here pass by. If we made a video of everyone who has died in BC since a state of emergency was declared in 2016, it would take 16 hours to play.  And here's a good fact sheet/backgrounder for a hot-button issue like this one, where everybody's going off about this "fact" or that to the point that nobody knows what's actually going on. These are some well-sourced, categorized facts to bring clarity, gathered with c...

I was in Philadelphia visiting family last month when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on a Manhattan street in a carefully planned execution. The instant roar of approval that united an otherwise starkly divided America in the days and weeks that followed has been a notable reminder that people are feeling a little done these days. Like everyone who has written about Thompson’s murder, I want to stress that in no way do I condone street executions. I’m sorry that he got killed, and that a young man whose own path seemed quite promising felt compelled to take such drastic action. At the same time, I’m awed by the powerful rage that the shooting brought out in people, and the major conversations it is sparking. (I, too, burn with fury at what the CEO class has gotten away with, though I’d like to think I’d never settle it with a gun.) The killing lit a fire under the issue of health-care claim denials in a way that a thousand of the most heart-breaking tales of life s...

Woe is us if a “marriage of convenience” ever started to define other important matters in a person’s life beyond whether you get to become a Canadian. Immigration is a hot issue these days, as it’s mostly been since the birth of Canada. B ut this week’s story about an Afghan woman rejected for permanent residency after Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada deemed her eight-year marriage to be a front to help her get citizenship – well, that’s just a whole other fascinating issue to get thinking about. What exactly IS the definition of a loving marriage that government turns to in making decisions like this? What signs and tells in our daily relationships might be quietly signalling to government eyes whether there’s love or just mutual benefit underpinning our marriages? I have heard stories of marriages of convenience, of course, and of the level of subterfuge necessary when the people involved still expect to have completely independent lives apart from each other but ...

And just like that, institutionalization is back.  My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come.  “This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby  in a statement released yesterday  in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe." "We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said E...