A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

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...

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...