Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 7 - The Corpse Panel
58 Plays5 years ago
The overdose epidemic killed 2 people a day in Alberta last year. It's an emergency akin to a house on fire but instead of helping the people caught up in it Jason Kenney has frozen three planned safe consumption sites and brought in a new panel to review the "socio-economic impact" of these life-saving facilities. In this episode we examine the causes of the overdose crisis and the history of civil disobedience and direct action in harm reduction in Canada as well as the latest news from the front lines in Lethbridge.
Further reading
More than 4,300 overdoses reversed at Alberta supervised consumption sites since 2017: Report
Alberta Community Council on HIV: A Community-Based Report on Alberta's Supervised Consumption Services Effectiveness
The Canadian Association of People who Use Drugs, “This Tent Saves Lives: How to Open an Overdose Prevention Site.”
Crackdown Pod Moms Stop The Harm Lethbridge man arrested after drive-by paintball shooting outside supervised consumption site Travis Lupick: Fighting For SpaceRecommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Progress Report
00:00:08
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're here in Treaty 6 territory in our atmospherically lit basement recording studio.
Focus on Alberta's Overdose Epidemic
00:00:17
Speaker
Today we're talking about an issue that has touched so many people in Alberta. A real and actual health crisis. We're talking about the overdose epidemic. With us today to talk about this is our guest co-host, Patriot Schultz of Moms Stop the Harm. Patriot, welcome to the show.
00:00:32
Speaker
Thank you for inviting me in. It's great to be here with you today, chat with you, and I also really look forward to talking to my good friend Garth Mullins from Crackdown podcast later and to find out what's happening in Lethbridge when we talk to Stacey Burke. Yeah, Garth is fantastic and I'm excited to talk with Stacey as well. So Moms Stop the Harm is an organization, a network of Canadian families whose loved ones have either died from drugs or struggled with substance use.
00:00:59
Speaker
They call for an end to the war on drugs, the decriminalization of drugs, and for us to treat those who use drugs with compassion and respect.
Personal Story: Danny's Struggle and Impact of Drug Policies
00:01:07
Speaker
For the past year, every day, on my way to work, or picking my child up from daycare, I've walked past a supervised consumption site here in Edmonton.
00:01:16
Speaker
I walked past it with my two-year-old daughter and my dog most times. The folks who were going in and out of this facility or hanging out outside seemed to just be living their lives, going inside and outside of a building. Never once have I felt unsafe or welcome.
00:01:31
Speaker
The issue of supervised consumption sites has become a political wedge issue. Our premier, Jason Kenney, has decided to use it as a wedge issue and he's decided to talk about them in ways that, frankly, marginalize drug users.
00:01:50
Speaker
But he's also started this, this review panel and I use that, I put that in kind of scare quotes. Um, but it's, it's a scary time for this issue in Alberta. This, this stuff, the progress that we have made could be rolled back. But before we get into that, I do want to know your story and what's your connection to the overdose, the overdose epidemic and what's, what's mom stopped the harm.
00:02:09
Speaker
Well, I always start with my son Danny. Danny was struggling with substance use. Danny was self-medicating for severe social anxiety. That was his method of coping. And Danny tried for several years.
00:02:26
Speaker
in different ways to get off drugs. I don't know how many times he detoxed and detox on our couch only to relapse and start again. And eventually he got on pure diagonist treatment on methadone, which worked for him. But both he and we, we sort of thought methadone as
00:02:45
Speaker
just another drug, and I've since learned that stigmatize it, a legitimate treatment that is effective. And he didn't stay there long enough to be stable.
Formation and Growth of Moms Stop the Harm
00:02:55
Speaker
And he would relapse at times. And one of those times when he relapsed, actually the night before he had asked me to book an appointment with his psychologist again, and he seemed to have bought one more pill. We didn't find any other drugs in his apartment, but that one pill was fentanyl.
00:03:13
Speaker
And that was before fentanyl was in the news. I actually had to Google it after I heard the diagnosis or rather the toxicology report. So Danny stood no chance. He was expecting a street oxy or heroin, which he had been using
00:03:29
Speaker
And he died pretty much instantly of an overdose and we found him in his apartment. And after that happened, I looked at it. I thought, I'm a bad mom. And people told me he made bad choices. But I thought, no, there has to be more in it. And I did research and I read.
00:03:45
Speaker
I read Johan Hari's chasing a scream and I read research articles and I started to talk to people and I discovered that Danny wasn't to blame and I wasn't a bad mom and my husband isn't a bad dad. What's to blame is bad drug policy and a drug policy that the war on drugs and prohibition that our son was really a victim of the war on drugs. And I felt like I had to speak out about it, especially because health services, there weren't any warnings. There was no action, nothing from the government.
00:04:15
Speaker
So I went public with the media and through the first media article I met two other moms in the same situation where she lost kids to substance use related causes. Lorna Thomas here in Edmonton, she's a filmmaker. Her son died by suicide, substance use related.
00:04:35
Speaker
then also Leslie McBean from Pender Island, and she has close Edmonton connections. And for the first time, I understood, hey, these people know how I feel, but they also share my passion for wanting to change. And reform bombs stop the harm. So in 2015, we started working together. In 2016, there were three of us forming the organization. We just registered the domain name. We set up a Facebook group.
00:05:01
Speaker
My daughter helped us build a website and we thought, let's see what happens. And now we are over a thousand members, Canada-wide.
Advocacy and Support Division
00:05:09
Speaker
We have 250 members in Alberta alone and almost all these members, there are a few professionals who joined to support us, but I would say 99% of these members are people have been personally affected. Most have lost a loved one to substance use and many others have loved ones struggling and there are many who have experienced both.
00:05:31
Speaker
have lost a loved one and tried to keep somebody alive. And so what does mom stop the harm do? What are you up to?
00:05:39
Speaker
We kind of have two streams to our work. We set out to do advocacy, but we learned that you can get pretty beaten up, especially on social media and such with the comments people make, like if they tell you a kid deserves to die because they are stupid and things like that. So we realized we had to do self-care to do advocacy. So these are two streams. In the self-care part, we have closed groups.
00:06:01
Speaker
where we support one another, we do a lot of grief support. We have a close group for families who have a loved one who is still engaged in use and we don't practice tough love and you don't hear words like kick him out and you don't hear words like co-dependence. It's a harm reduction focus support group for families. And then in the advocacy end, we do what I do today. We talk to media.
00:06:29
Speaker
We talked to politicians. If they talk to us, I've tried to talk to the new Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. He hasn't quite honored my request to speak to him. We give presentations to students, to the public, to any club who will have us. And I've spoken at national and international conferences, as have many of my colleagues.
00:06:51
Speaker
So we try to rattle the cage, you know, get the word out because as I said earlier, the worst thing has already happened to us. We are not afraid to speak
Opioid Crisis Statistics and Policy Impact
00:07:02
Speaker
out.
00:07:03
Speaker
And the work that you do is extremely important, I think, in the context of the epidemic that we are facing, right? Like the scale of the emergency that is like currently unfolding in front of us is like deserves to be talking about.
00:07:21
Speaker
And I think it was like 789 people died in Alberta from opioid overdoses in 2018. We're seeing similar numbers, though they are down slightly in 2019. This is akin to a house being on fire or a bank being robbed. This is a societal emergency that we are in the throes of. And I also think it's worth talking about how we got here.
00:07:46
Speaker
And when we talk about the overdose epidemic, it wasn't the weather, you know, it didn't just show up. These were conscious policy and policing and political decisions that got us to the point where people are dying every day.
00:08:02
Speaker
And, you know, the way we got here was that like, you know, prior to 2014, um, prescriptions, strength opioids were widely available on the street. And because they were professionally made and because they were, you know, a dose that people could understand overdoses were relatively rare. I mean, they happened, people died. Um, but, but compared to where we are at now in 2019,
00:08:27
Speaker
It was not the same. And then there was a crackdown on opioid prescriptions, and that was not available. Those drugs simply weren't available to drug users anymore. And as a result, the free market filled the void.
00:08:43
Speaker
Things like fentanyl and analogs, similar drugs to fentanyl started showing up on the street, like the drugs that your son bought. And this is the part where the emergency starts. Essentially the drug supply for everyone who uses opioids in North America has become toxic. It's poison.
00:09:02
Speaker
You are at, because it's, it's manufactured in a basement somewhere with no regulation and with no mind for quality, the variation between the dose is extremely high and users are at tremendous risk. And Alberta has been one of the hardest hit by this crisis, right? And can you talk about the scale, this problem in Alberta?
00:09:26
Speaker
Well, both BC and Alberta are hardest hit for a couple of reasons. One, the illicit drug, a lot of the fentanyl comes from China, so it kind of comes via that route. But you know, I don't blame fentanyl and I don't blame the Chinese. What I blame is really drug policy. As you said, it's because of
Dangers of Toxic Drug Supply
00:09:48
Speaker
the crackdown and prohibition is that the drugs are getting more and more concentrated.
00:09:53
Speaker
But in Alberta, what we can't overlook is our resource industry and the number of workplace injuries we had. Our 2017 data of death rates shows us that over 50% of those who died worked in the trades.
00:10:09
Speaker
So a lot of the people in the trades, when they have injuries, they used to get massive prescriptions for opioids, for pain. Often, in many cases, the prescriptions are appropriate.
00:10:25
Speaker
get rid of opioid pain medication. It's a very, very good medication. But when it's overprescribed and prescribed to the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong lengths and the wrong strengths, then we run into trouble. And then when a doctor discovered that somebody has become dependent and is moving into addiction, where it's becoming problematic, then they kick their patient out. Their patient goes to the street.
00:10:48
Speaker
And when they can't buy these medications on the street anymore and they can't buy heroin even, they have no choice but to move to fentanyl. And now carfentanyl. We see a lot of carfentanyl, especially in the southern part of the province and the overdose rate, you know, the chance to overdose is just too great for the concentration. So this, Alberta and BC is one of the epicenters of this crisis. And who are the folks kind of most likely to be affected?
00:11:15
Speaker
There are people like you two sitting across the table from me and the young man we talked to. It's men between 25 and 40. 80% are men. And this is something nobody's really unpacked yet why this is the case. I don't think we have an 80-20 split in drug use.
Demographics of the Crisis
00:11:33
Speaker
There are probably more men using than women. We don't have exact numbers, but there is something about masculinity. There's something about the way we raise our boys, the way we treat men and view men that, you know, you got to be tough. You know, you can't ask for help when you have a problem that makes it harder for men to reach out and seek help. But also, I think men hide what they do because of the huge amount of stigma. It's hard to
00:12:00
Speaker
You see yourself as a failure and people shouldn't do that. It should be okay to reach out and say, hey, I'm having a really hard time. People who use drugs don't use them for fun. They use them problematically and that is something that needs to be said as well. Most of us use drugs in some form or another or substances.
00:12:22
Speaker
They come in different forms. And most people don't use problematically. When it becomes problematic or when it becomes what we call addiction, that is when people need help. And because of the stigma, especially the stigma or criminalization, like how are you going to go and say, oh, I need help for something, but it kind of happens to be illegal.
00:12:41
Speaker
So when we end the criminalization and move to legal regulation, we can really allow people to seek out, but we also need to unpack why it is so many men.
Role and Challenges of Supervised Consumption Sites
00:12:53
Speaker
Now, definitely. And I think some other key stats to get out are that indigenous folks are three times more likely to die of a drug overdose in Alberta, and that around 20% of the deaths from overdoses have been for people without homes.
00:13:08
Speaker
You know, before this crisis started, uh, people who use drugs and their friends and their allies in Vancouver had pioneered one of the safest and most effective drug policy interventions out there, right? The supervised consumption site, the supervised injection site, you've probably heard of insight.
00:13:24
Speaker
But what you probably haven't heard of is the story of kind of civil disobedience, direct action, and community organizing that preceded the creation of Insight. And really, this is the story of kind of change everywhere, right? Like you don't get what you don't ask for. And if people aren't actively agitating, organizing, and disrupting society to get what they want, they don't get it.
00:13:43
Speaker
And so to explore that, we have Garth Mullins to chat with us in a bit about the genesis of the supervised consumption site in Canada. Garth Mullins is the executive producer and host of Crackdown Pod. It is an extremely good podcast out there on the overdose epidemic and it's extremely good and you should listen to it. The audio that comes out of this is just amazing. But before we bring on Garth, I want to play a bit of tape from episode three of Crackdown Pod. The episode's called Unsanctioned.
00:14:15
Speaker
On April 7th, 2003, Vancouver Police launch a major crackdown on drug users. 44 new cops march onto the downtown east side. The Coalition for Harm Reduction holds an emergency meeting. Van Do, a housing action committee, a progressive law firm and other groups are there. Everyone is pissed about the crackdown. And so, that very night, they open a totally unsanctioned safe injection site.
00:14:40
Speaker
It's a back room located at 327 Carroll Street. There are two small tables, a registered nurse, and some volunteers who had been trained in CPR. 327 Carroll was open seven days a week, from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. People could come in and use the washroom, drink some coffee, and if you shot up there, you could get some water, a filter, and a spoon. But most importantly, you could get a clean needle.
00:15:05
Speaker
And that meant that they needed lots and lots of clean needles. You know, I mean, essentially, the people who were organizing it made very clear that they needed supplies. And I know that there was some very supportive and courageous healthcare providers who were
00:15:22
Speaker
bringing medical supplies to this site. So tell me about that. You were one of those people, right? I might have been. You stole medical supplies to bring to people.
00:15:36
Speaker
I have no comment. Can we say redistribute instead of steal? So Thomas, you liberated and redistributed clean new syringes for people to use? Liberation and redistribution is a concept I can live with. I'm not going to admit to stealing on this podcast. What was the moment?
00:16:00
Speaker
Do you remember like a night where you're just like, fuck it, I got to do this. And when you're leaving some office or someplace, you're just like, this box is coming with me. You're really asking for a lot of disclosure around this. Only what you're comfortable with. But look, to be honest, we're trying to give other people who are listening the courage to do the same sort of thing. There's a lot of doctors that listen to our podcast. I want them to break the fucking law. When the law is wrong, I want people to resist the law. Yeah.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's what people did. And I wouldn't encourage people to take those kinds of actions when it's needed. Garth Mullins, welcome to The Progress Report. Where is the Crackdown Pod taking you today? I'm in Glasgow, Scotland right now. There's an overdose crisis here that's kind of rivaling the one in British Columbia. So we're here to try and figure out what's going on. And what kind of, what episode are we looking at here? Is it a few months down the road? Is this a longer term project?
00:16:56
Speaker
This will be in October, probably episode 10.
Government Review and Political Backlash
00:16:59
Speaker
Oh man, okay. I'm excited for it. I really, I really do enjoy crackdown pod. And if you haven't listened to it, um, that bit of tape is, is, um, just a little, a little taste, but thanks so much for taking the time to chat. Um, you know, I think this is an important time and it's actually kind of an accidentally extremely timely podcast on this issue, given all the stuff that's happened in Alberta.
00:17:21
Speaker
You know, we've got this supervised consumption site review panel that was started by our shit heel premier here. You know, it's being led by the former chief of police. You know, we had, we just, just had the Alberta community council on HIV release a report on harm reduction, which essentially says that
00:17:37
Speaker
everything on the box is there when it comes to harm reduction. I don't know if you had a chance to see this or read about this, but it is a pretty incredible report as far as just how effective the harm reduction stuff that's been happening in Alberta is. But to go back to this panel for a second, you know,
00:17:56
Speaker
They've got a very clear mandate from Kenny to not consider the positive health effects of harm reduction, but instead focus on the kind of like socioeconomic cost, you know, essentially prioritizing the voices of homeowners and business owners. Essentially, this is just like a prelude to him either rolling back or just fucking shutting down these supervised consumption sites.
00:18:15
Speaker
For a person who uses drugs, even if they don't use the supervised consumption sites, what do supervised consumption sites mean to the people who use them? What do they stand for? And what happens to the community if they are taken away or rolled back? Well, if they are going to shut down supervised injection sites in Alberta, then they'll force the whole province to be an unsafe injection site, basically.
00:18:40
Speaker
I think there the panel should be just called the corpse panel because that's what it's gonna make. It's gonna make dead people if they succeed and generate a pretext to close these places. There's no question. I mean, there's thousands of overdose been reversed been reversed at them and
00:18:57
Speaker
That's what it means at the very beginning. That's what it means is that people can people can have a chance to live and you know another day and The fact that they're considering property values ahead of human life just shows you how far to the margin struck users are
00:19:13
Speaker
Hey Garz, I'm always wondering, you know, not just, you described exactly the fear I have that if we shut down these sites, more people will die. We've seen a report coming out of BC that shows that without harm reduction, the death rate would be 2.5 times higher than it is and it's just a carnage right now what we have. In Alberta, we have 1.5
00:19:35
Speaker
five people dying now, which is actually down from previous numbers by 24%. I think about these families and what it means for them and what it meant for us. It's just so heartbreaking to think that we know what would work and this government is thinking about taking away what would work.
00:19:53
Speaker
But I'm also wondering for you as a person who used drugs, a person living in long-term recovery, you're on methadone and such, what message does it send to you or a person who has your kind of experience when a government says, hey, we're going to review this, but we're not going to see how well it works. We're just going to look at the impact it has on the social and economic impact in the neighborhood. What message does that send to you?
00:20:21
Speaker
It says, we don't care if you die. That's the message it says to me. In fact, it says it would be convenient if you were to die, preferably further away from our front lawn. And the only thing I can think to say back is, you know, fuck you, Jason Kenney.
00:20:36
Speaker
If you don't care about us, then it's down to just civil disobedience, keeping these things open illegally, occupying your MPs or your MLA's offices or MAAs, whatever it is in Alberta, your local political officials, and forcing this to stay an
Political Exploitation and Public Sentiment
00:20:56
Speaker
issue. Do we think, both of us, as everyone in the room think, that this has the potential to blow back on Kenny? I mean, I think by and large, harm reduction
00:21:05
Speaker
is pretty standard mainstream policy at this point. And that the opioid or the overdose epidemic has touched kind of so many people and so many just like, you know, what I would call like normies that like, I think this does have the potential to like blow back on them. I think Kenny's trying to organize amongst the like the small business tyrants and the like people who are directly around these facilities.
00:21:29
Speaker
I don't know, show me a political leader that's paid a price for beating up on drug users. I don't know that there is any. And, you know, harm reduction has become institutionalized, but as that's happened, as it's become medicalized, drug user activism has been kind of sidelined. And this is what you need when someone's attacking you. You need militants, you need people in the street, people who will occupy offices, people who will go that extra measure and keep things open illegally.
00:21:54
Speaker
And that's kind of become anemic. And I don't know the state of it in Alberta, but I've seen how institutional arrangements in other places kind of exclude or they kind of put you into lower categories than leading these initiatives as a drug user.
00:22:10
Speaker
And so it's a really dangerous time. I think that Kenny and Ford are not, they're sharp, right? They know that there's a large, huge pool of people who hate drug users out there. And you've always known it as a drug user. You can just feel it in the air. They just haven't been very well organized. And these two guys are like, well, we'll organize that hate. We can make political capital off it.
00:22:34
Speaker
I've been worried about this for a long time, and I think they might do all right. I'm not with you there exactly. I don't expect there to be a blowback against them unless we really organize ourselves well in Alberta and really push back hard. But short of a concerted political organizing effort, I don't know that that would happen. Or at least any pushback would be easy for them to dissipate.
00:22:58
Speaker
you have talked about, you know, that organized hate, we see signs of that. We're going to be talking about talking with Stacey Bork a little later. She's the executive director of Arches Lethbridge. And you and I, we've chatted about Lethbridge and about the hate, the participants and the supervised consumption sides and the staff face. And recently somebody was hit with a paintball and police have finally taken
00:23:22
Speaker
take a note of that, whereas they have ignored many complaints prior. So I share your concern. We see that hatred already on the street and the problem is that the mainstream Albertan doesn't understand what the supervised consumption side is designed to do and what it's not designed to do. And I really have the feeling that everything that goes wrong anywhere
00:23:45
Speaker
stuff that is attributed to poverty and this extreme problem we have with housing that you guys have in Vancouver, crazy. But in Edmonton, we have a lot of homelessness too and we just haven't really addressed it. And we have all these issues and people expect a supervised consumption side to fix it all. And if it doesn't fix it all, then we blame it for everything that might not be going right in the neighborhood.
00:24:09
Speaker
So how do we organize against that? How do we actually educate people at the same time as standing up for what's right?
00:24:19
Speaker
Yeah, my partner, Elisa, who's also a producer on Crackdown, she likes to say, you know, blaming the safe injection site for not having solved all of the problems, all of the social problems in modern society is like being at a roadside accident and blaming the first responders like the paramedics for not having cured cancer. Like you're there to do triage, right? A safe injection site isn't the whole solution. This is what we need in the moment. Like we have solutions that go way beyond that.
00:24:49
Speaker
Um, and we find the problems to be rooted in prohibition and the drug war and the contaminated drug supply in homelessness and in all of the ways that we're, uh, you know, put in this little box where it was very hard to maneuver from. But I think pushing back against the people.
00:25:05
Speaker
is we just got to learn the lessons from civil rights organizing that's going on for generations. We have to bring people together who are really affected by this, work collectively on our messaging, do door-to-door campaigns, make people see us as human beings instead of as these media stereotypes. You have columnists in Alberta like Rick Bell and stuff who just say atrocious things about us. We get called scumbags and zombies and this sort of thing.
00:25:31
Speaker
You know you have papers whose editors believe that there's no point in keeping us alive in Alberta as as elsewhere in the country So it's really it's it's a tough situation But it's one that that people groups who've been seeking their rights have have faced down For a long time and if you I got into that Facebook group it was in Lethbridge that was organizing against the safe consumption site and I just I
00:25:56
Speaker
You know put comments and argued away and argued away and I didn't convince everybody and there were some people who were just Really really horrible to me there because I admitted I was a drug user But there were but I also split them a little bit so and there was a few people in there and so we also made it so that they couldn't just so easily all unite under one one banner we said oh
00:26:19
Speaker
you know, peeled off some of the people who think maybe there should be solutions and drug users should have something and and those people who are still scapegoating. So it's like, we got to organize ourselves and we got to disorganize our opposition. And and Petra, I think when the moms and other people
00:26:34
Speaker
kind of went there to support and to show some solidarity with the people who were using the safe consumption site. That really probably has an effect too of making people go, oh, you know, I could see myself amongst that group of moms, you know, maybe I've been worried about my kids' drug use before. And that probably pulls people up too a little.
00:26:53
Speaker
I think there are two threads there that I think we got to pick up and that is the like the organized that we have to get organized and that you know drug users and substance users kind of have to be leading the way on this and I am ignorant here in Alberta like I am ignorant of any
00:27:12
Speaker
kind of Van Do kind of ask group in Edmonton or Calgary or Lethbridge. And if there is one, like I'd love to connect with them and learn more about the work that they're doing. But are you aware of any growth or Petra?
00:27:26
Speaker
Well, I mean, my dear friend Chanel Tuan and my friend Karen Turner here in Edmonton, they come to mind. They are members of AWARE, Alberta Addicts who educate and advocate responsibly. They are kind of a local group of CAPUD, the Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs. They have a group organized here in Edmonton, and they also have an active group
00:27:51
Speaker
in Calgary. And on Friday, for example, they are involved in an event at the legislature for International Overdose Awareness Day. And they've been very active, very outspoken. Chanel is a powerful, powerful advocate and speaker. As a matter of fact, you should get her on your program. So there are people here, but the environment in Alberta is far more fearful. And a lot of these people also work in the field.
00:28:20
Speaker
and often they are afraid of blowback against their organizations. We've seen that, you know, how suddenly a position of a very active social worker with legal aid is eliminated because he was outspoken. So people are afraid and that's where our group Moms Stop the Harm comes in because we don't work for anyone, we don't get paid by anybody
00:28:44
Speaker
We are all volunteers. And the worst thing that could ever happen to us has already happened. Most of us have lost a child or somebody we love. So we are not afraid to speak out. And I'm not afraid of Jason Kenney. I'm not afraid of any of his ministers. And we will be speaking out and we will be out there protecting these services to whatever extent we can.
Beyond Consumption Sites: Wider Societal Issues
00:29:04
Speaker
Oh, this is why I love you guys, Petra. This is why I love the moms. You guys kick ass.
00:29:08
Speaker
Well, we love you too, you know that Garth. We haven't decided if you're an honorary mom or if we adopted you. I think we adopted you. Well, I'm honored either way. Well, yeah, thanks so much Petra. I mean, the other thread that I want to pick up too is that like,
00:29:24
Speaker
And you talked very eloquently about it, Garth, is what supervised consumption sites do and what they don't do. And what they do do is that they save lives. And what they don't do is they don't solve homelessness or poverty. To do that, we've got to smash capitalism. And so to people who are
00:29:49
Speaker
You know complaining about the fact that homelessness and poverty still exists despite the supervised consumption sites. You know get fucked it's not the supervised consumption fault that capitalism is bad.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think so, you know, and a lot of the working conditions, you know, I've worked resource sector jobs, I worked mining in the north before. And, you know, it's like you want to have a beer at the end of the day, a lot of the camps are dry, so people have to smuggle in like coke or something that moves through your system a little faster. So some of those rules really promote people to use harder drugs.
00:30:24
Speaker
And then you're not meant to be on any kind of opioid while you're working there and they piss test you, so you can't really be on methadone if you're trying to sort yourself out in a lot of places. And so that means guys working the oil patch are really in a tough position because those are really hard jobs. You're away from your family.
00:30:44
Speaker
You get kind of broken and disrupted connections to your community and maybe you get injured and so maybe you do get wired, you know, just trying to keep yourself on the straight and narrow and going to work and then you're out of the job. And so Alberta really celebrates or they say they celebrate resource workers. I think they actually celebrate resource bosses.
00:31:07
Speaker
But if we can humor them for a moment, say if you really want to support workers in the oil patch or resource workers, then you've got to realize that that's who drug users are. There's people who've worked industrial jobs. In BC, they did a little bit of a deep dive into the statistics on who dies.
00:31:28
Speaker
And of the year they looked at it, more than half of the people who died of a fatal overdose had gotten up and gone to work that morning. In Alberta, people are going to work. The work is hard. The work can be alienating. The work can be disruptive to your life, as lots of work is. And it seems like throwing people under the bus to not catch them when they need a little help.
00:31:52
Speaker
So I think the UCP government has to be, they have to put the lie to this. They really don't, they really don't, you know, Bernard the oil patch worker or whatever, or the roughneck or whatever. These are ideas, tropes for them to sell to the voters. They don't really care to support working class people and working class people who need any kind of support.
00:32:13
Speaker
conservative talking point, which is popular in Ontario and Alberta and probably amongst the sheer, the government hopefuls in the federal Tory, federal conservatives. And it's like, we don't want harm reduction, we want treatment because we want to prevent the harm, we want to end the harm.
00:32:28
Speaker
And so they're saying these things, it's one or the other, right? We want to close down harm reduction sites and we want to open up treatment. Well, it's bullshit because these people are the first to cut health funding. There's no great record of opening up a wraparound treatment services. And it's just a talking point and you hear the people in Lethbridge parroting this line perfectly.
00:32:49
Speaker
without any understanding of what goes into treatment what treatments effective how people can have a say and finally that if you're dead you never get there to treatment to begin with. So i just encourage your listeners not to be sucked in by this conservative talking point about about treatment you know it's gotta be both weed all the tools go on at the same
Political Engagement and Drug Policy Advocacy
00:33:09
Speaker
time.
00:33:09
Speaker
And I finally, I agree with you that the way the market, the market and the work and housing, the way that capitalism organizes our lives is so fucking alienating that it's driving people to seek a way to
00:33:26
Speaker
to anesthetize ourselves against that alienation, against that disrupted connection. I mean, right now I'm in the home of Adam Smith, you know, and mercantilism and market forces as the way to organize society. That was all thought of by Scottish people 300 years ago. And it's all those chickens have all come home to roost here in a huge crisis of alienation and overdoses and housing and all that. End of rant.
00:33:52
Speaker
Good rant, Garth. And I fully agree. A friend of Danny's actually, he was a bit of a pot smoker, a bit more than a bit. And when he got a job in the oil patch as a welder, the union rep said, hey, Lou, you look like a bit of a pot head. This is the union where we turn pot heads into meth heads and coke heads.
00:34:14
Speaker
which is exactly what happens because of the drug testing, because of the parishionist policies. We drive people to more dangerous drugs. That comment always stuck with me when Danny's friend shared that. But you raised another important point. You talked about federal politicians. Garth, we have a federal election coming up.
00:34:36
Speaker
How do we make the overdose crisis and prohibition and the war on drugs and all the problems that surround it? How do we make sure that that is an election issue and that we push forward and make sure that people are informed and that they elect candidates who support drug policy that is sensible and takes us in the right direction?
00:35:00
Speaker
Well, we have two sort of mainstreams of drug policy or approaches to drug policy in this country. And they kind of align with the center party, which is the liberals and the right wing party, which is the conservatives and the NDP have never formed government federally and aren't likely to this time. So those two main, the sort of center and the right perspectives are in the center. We don't really care if you die. And on the right,
00:35:24
Speaker
Well, you know, we're kind of, we're kind of happy if you die. And, uh, those two are not very palatable to me. You know, we, we saw Justin Trudeau came down to the downtown East side a couple of years ago and he told us, don't hold your breath for decriminalization. You know, he, he empathized with us and shed a few tears, but then when it came to what are you going to do about it? Nothing. You know, so, um,
00:35:44
Speaker
It's going to require, to make this an election issue, it's going to require something a little bit extra. Because in the mandate of the last federal government, 10,000 people, probably more than 10,000 people will have died between two elections.
00:35:59
Speaker
So you'd think, my God, this should be the number one election issue. Nothing is nothing has had any kind of a similar reach. You know, politicians talked more about SARS and stuff when it was happening. So in my mind, this means it's time to show up to those all candidates meetings and town halls and stuff and not show up politely, show up with banners that you can unfurl, show up with hard questions to candidates you know that are in the way.
00:36:26
Speaker
Show up to really push candidates that are talking a nice line, but you suspect might not actually be doing it and and be rude, you know heckle from the floor bring people in numbers and You know be disruptive if that's what's called for, you know, if none of the candidates are willing to represent that
00:36:47
Speaker
you know, find a way to use the floor of those meetings as your organizing space too. So we've done this before. I've done the, you know, speak quite stridently at a minister in front of 600 people and I've politely held a banner at the back of the room or I've waited in line in a microphone to ask a nicely phrased question. So I think we all have to take our cues from the local situation.
00:37:13
Speaker
But I remember, Patriot, when I was at your AGM of Mom Stop the Harm there, the slogan No More Mr. Nice Mom was being thrown around. And I think if there's any time for No More Mr. Nice Mom, it's probably October 21st or the election leading up to October 21st.
00:37:29
Speaker
You heard it here first, folks. Be disruptive. Civility is overrated. Thanks so much, Garth, for appearing on the show. We really do appreciate it. If you haven't listened to the Crackdown Pod yet, go download, go listen, go subscribe, go leave a review. It is one of the best pieces of media that
00:37:48
Speaker
is coming out right now and that you really should listen to. It comes out once a month, end of the month. Garth Mullins, thanks again. It is great to be on a podcast where people from the heart of Canada's little supposedly free market heartland are saying, pointing the finger at capitalism. So you're a beacon of hope for the rest of everybody. So thank you very much.
00:38:09
Speaker
Again, thanks so much to Garth Mullins, but the thing, ostensibly this is a media criticism podcast, and I've got the rarest, one of the rarest things, which is a good piece of mainstream Canadian media to talk to you today about this issue. It comes from Andre Picard, who's a health columnist with the Globe and Mail. This piece is tragically behind a paywall, but I think we definitely need to talk about it and read a bit about
Critique of Drug Regulations
00:38:37
Speaker
it today. Have you read this yet, Petra?
00:38:39
Speaker
I have, and I cried. I cried when I read it. I thought, thank you, thank you, thank you, Andre. So, Andre, I won't kind of read everything out, but I will just kind of give the prelude before we get to the bits that I think are really important. You know, he talks about, you know, the Jason Kenney appointed panel to review supervised consumption sites. You know, he makes the point that, you know, these things have been kind of studied quite often and that the results quite often show that they are good and save lives. But here's where it gets interesting.
00:39:10
Speaker
The context here is he's thinking about the pros and cons of supervised consumption sites. The reality is that there are already a lot of supervised consumption sites in Alberta and every province and territory. Places where clients can be served with their poison of choice, unadulterated, in relatively safe quantities, and not be judged or jailed. We call these places bars.
00:39:30
Speaker
What they really are are supervised alcohol consumption sites, a place people can consume a safe supply of a drug in social surroundings and where if they overdose, i.e. get too drunk, there are friends and bar staff around to help. Drinkers can be rambunctious and obnoxious, so in and around supervised alcohol consumption sites there are fights, sexual harassment, screaming and other disruptive noise making, detritus such as broken glass and vomit, occasional vandalism and even more serious offenses such as drunk driving, sexual assault, stabbings and shootings.
00:40:00
Speaker
In other words, there is sometimes crime and social disorder around supervised alcohol consumption sites. The neighbors, both commercial and residential, are not always thrilled. Yet there are 1,226 bars, lounges, and tap rooms in Alberta alone. So why is the panel focusing only on seven supervised drug consumption sites in the province where opioids rather than alcohol are used? And I just think that's a fucking brilliant frame, and one that I hadn't really considered until Andre had brought it up.
00:40:27
Speaker
It's one that I have thought about a lot. I give talks to students, and we said, any one of you use a stimulant this morning? And the eyes go wide, and I said, what? No coffee? No tea? We have to look at all substances. And the way they re-regulate them in this society,
00:40:46
Speaker
Alcohol is a terribly harmful substance. It causes a lot of social disorder, a lot of destruction to families, to health, yet it is legal and the regulation around it is very much focused on commerce and not on public health, whereas substances
00:41:05
Speaker
that are less harmful, like ecstasy, for example, causes less harm if it's pure and consumed in a safe kind of environment, in a safe way. That is not legal. So we really don't have our regulation built on science.
00:41:23
Speaker
And Picard makes the point that whether, when we classify drugs as legal or illegal is pretty arbitrary and based on like super racist things from a hundred years ago. But like Picard goes on to say, you know, bars are well established and effective means of harm reduction, but they're not perfect, of course. And a lot of people still die from alcohol related conditions, about 5,000 a year in Canada with roughly 600 of those being Alberta, roughly numbers that are really just under our opioid overdose epidemic stats.
00:41:52
Speaker
And by contrast, about 4,000 people died of overdoses in Canada last year, roughly 800 of them in Alberta. This is Picard kind of going over the thing I just said.
00:42:01
Speaker
Proportionally, Alberta is one of the provinces hit hardest by the opioid crisis. That's why the province needs more, not fewer, supervised consumption sites. People don't drink themselves to death in supervised alcohol consumption sites. They do that alone. The same is true of other drugs. There has never been a death in an Alberta supervised consumption facility, despite more than 4,300 overdoses. And that leads us into another bit of something that we have to talk about before we get to our chat with Stacy, and that is
00:42:29
Speaker
The report that just came out from the Alberta Community Council on HIV, the numbers coming from this are staggering. What are the big numbers that jump out at you? Well, for me, what jumps out is, of course, the number of overdose reversals.
00:42:44
Speaker
As you mentioned, that is very important. But what is also very important is the connections meet, the number of connections meet. My daughter works in a supervised consumption site in Victoria, and whenever I visit there and pick her up, I usually walk in. And if I were to describe a supervised consumption site in three words, I would say love, compassion, and care.
00:43:06
Speaker
You walk in there and the interaction between the staff and the people who come and use the site are respectful, they're positive, they're caring, they're supportive. And what these sites do? They allow people to connect.
00:43:21
Speaker
And it's hard, as we said earlier, so many people die alone, so many people don't reach out. It's hard for people to connect and the sites make the connections. And that is indicated in this report. Is it over 10,000 referrals made? Not all to treatment, of course, because people who use these sites have a whole host of other issues. Like, first of all, housing. If you are not stably housed,
00:43:43
Speaker
you can't follow a treatment regime which is very regimented. If you don't have housing to go to, going to a 28-day rehab will just mean that you relapse when you come out and you have greater risk because your tolerance is down. So the connections made and the support to people given and the relationships
00:44:04
Speaker
built that stand out. But what's also important, the report points to the community reviews that has happened. Kenny says, and his minister of mental health in Dixon say that there hasn't been any review for the community services. Well, that report highlights exactly the changes have been made, like needle debris is down, crime is neither up or down, but supervised consumption side, as long as we don't regulate substances and make them illegal.
00:44:33
Speaker
They won't they won't affect crime. But so this the I think it's just got to jump in for a second is that we will be putting the link to this report in our show notes and the numbers are staggering, right? Like a hundred percent reversal of more than forty three hundred overdoses. Not a single person has died in a supervised consumption site from an overdose from an overdose since
Lethbridge's Challenges and Community Support
00:44:53
Speaker
they opened.
00:44:53
Speaker
The numbers on referrals, more than 35,000 referrals to site clients is to access other healthcare services or other mental health services. More than 11,000 of those or more than 10,000 of those were for addiction and treatment referrals. So the services there, which I think is incredible. The amount of needle debris is down around Edmonton. Like the stats don't lie. I think more than 60%, which is pretty hilarious because Tristan Hopper, kind of notorious like shit heel who works for the national post as a columnist.
00:45:23
Speaker
famously complained about needles in his neighborhood and supervised consumption sites, but they've actually gone down. You know, does this report, again, why have the fucking review panel in the first place, right? Well, the review panel, you know, I have two great concerns about the review panel. Well, actually three. One, that exists in the first place. The other concern I have is the composition of the panel. There is not a single person who uses a supervised consumption site on that panel.
00:45:52
Speaker
Like what review do you have where you don't include the people who are most affected? There is nobody who works in one. There is no harm reduction specialist on that panel. And the panel is stacked with people. They call themselves the recovery movement, but they're really the abstinence movement because those folks don't own recovery. Recovery is owned by people who are in recovery, people like Garth.
00:46:13
Speaker
Garth owns recovery in the way in which he defines it and in which it works for him. And harm reduction works in many, many different ways. But these people, the panel is really stacked with those that have not either publicly or implicitly or explicitly not being supportive of supervised consumption service. That is one problem I have with it.
00:46:37
Speaker
The other problem we had discussed earlier, the panel doesn't look at the part that actually works. The effectiveness, the efficacy of the supervised consumption side is not part of the review. We only look at social and economic factors. So it's really a NIMBY panel.
00:46:59
Speaker
Anybody who says not in my backyard can go and make a presentation. And most of these people have no idea how the sides work, what their mandate is, what they're designed to do and what they can't fix.
00:47:15
Speaker
Lethbridge was recently home to a big win on the harm reduction front. A conservative city councilor, Blaine Higgin, led a campaign against the harm reduction site in town called Arches. This culminated in him introducing a motion to have Arches defunded and for it to stop handing out clean needles. Thankfully, that motion was ultimately defeated 6-3 in Lethbridge City Council Chambers. Thankfully.
00:47:37
Speaker
Stacey Bork is the executive director of Arches and we're very pleased to have her on the phone and on the Progress Report. Stacey, welcome. Thank you. Hi Stacey, it's so good to talk to you and I was so horrified about that incident with that paintball incident where your staff got hurt and two of the participants from the supervised consumption side were attacked there as well.
00:48:05
Speaker
I'm glad that police are finally taking your concerns seriously. You've had these concerns for long, and I'm very, very sorry that it took somebody getting hurt for you guys to be taken, that people take notice of the threat you're under in Lethbridge. Thanks, Petra. We appreciate all of your support through all of this. Yeah, it's been a really difficult last couple of weeks, but certainly that incident
00:48:37
Speaker
I just want to go back to the city council thing. So, so this was the city council, you know, debating this motion to have your organization defunded was the culmination of kind of like weeks and months of, of a campaign by the city councilor. Right. But, but ultimately it was defeated. Can you kind of walk me through the, you know, the feeling and then the protests and the counter protests outside, as well as the kind of the, the scene inside council and how it went?
00:48:57
Speaker
Um, by far was, um, the worst.
00:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, this battle's been going on for over a year now with this particular Councillor. There was a motion brought forward last summer to ban arches for needle distribution. That motion was voted down five to four in favour of arches continuing needle distribution, which was great. Things got really quiet after that. And about a few months ago, things started to spark up again, similarly around the same debate.
00:49:28
Speaker
this time though Because the supervised consumption service is open and it's been operating needle distribution has actually dropped 70% in our community and return rates have increased 83% and so the argument at this point that Needles were still as big of an issue as they were a year year and a half two years ago wasn't in fact true and so that motion was put forward and then
00:49:55
Speaker
In addition to that, now that the SCS is operating, there's a lot of misinformation and business accusations being thrown around about SCS in general. And specifically, obviously, about SCS in Lethbridge and the fact that it is causing more needles on the ground, more public drug consumption, you know, that people aren't getting well.
00:50:15
Speaker
that it's causing crime in our community, and we know that those things are not true. You know, the evidence says otherwise, the evidence that we have, the statistics that we have say otherwise, but unfortunately in some cases it falls on deaf ears.
00:50:32
Speaker
I would say probably a couple months ago a number of pages started being cropped up on social media as well that support these types of rhetoric and then Councillor Hagan put this new motion forward to have us defunded for SCS and then also again to have a stop distributing
00:50:54
Speaker
needles and of course there's two sides that feel very passionate about this and so rallies were organized, artists didn't organize either rally but they were organized by members of our community who feel very strongly one way or the other and it all came to a head last Monday at the city council meeting so both sides held rallies for and against
00:51:14
Speaker
uh supervised consumption services harm reduction needle distribution um and then the debate occurred for about an hour and a half two hours inside council chambers it was quite tense i know initially people were warned uh that if there was any more snickering or comments that they would clear the galley our story clear the um the area in council
00:51:37
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think it's incredibly encouraging that I mean, I don't know. I don't know much about Lethbridge City Council, but that it was able to be defeated six to three. And it sounds like the mayor of Lethbridge was behind you and was behind harm reduction as a concept. So that that's incredibly encouraging to see.
00:51:53
Speaker
I mean, I think the context here is also super important that Arches and that the supervised consumption site in Lethbridge is the busiest supervised consumption site in Canada, maybe North America. Like the study, the report that just came out, can you kind of walk us through like what your facility does and kind of how you're meeting the community, where they are and why, you know, for a city of a hundred thousand, this is such an especially serious issue.
00:52:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it feeds into how that motion came to be. A lot of people in our community think our church has just opened in Lethbridge a year and a half ago, but we've been in this community since 1986. We've been incorporated since 1988. Originally, our roots are in HIV AIDS. And so we started off many, many years ago in the face of the HIV crisis in our community, working with people who have been infected with or affected by
00:52:47
Speaker
HIV and over the years incorporated a number of different programs, you know, started working with people who are living with hepatitis C or at risk of hepatitis C doing needle distribution beginning in 2001. So we've actually been handing needles out for
00:53:04
Speaker
For quite a long time, much the community just wasn't aware that it was happening. And over the years when the opioid crisis became recognized by the government we implemented taking the lock zone. And we've grown now to offer 17 programs supervised consumption services is just one of those programs. We also have
00:53:21
Speaker
the virtual opioid dependency program here. So it's a virtual opioid agonist therapy program where we can start to restart people on suboxone or methadone. We have Indigenous recovery coaching program, justice services, HIV hep C supports. We have two housing programs, cultural supports on site.
00:53:41
Speaker
We have music therapy programs. We have 24-hour addictions counseling, mental health counseling. We have two nursing clinics on site, so they do STVVI testing and treatment, wound care, foot care, prenatal care, and support. So we have lots and lots of services here, and people often don't realize that, that SDS is one program that we integrated into the multitude of other programs we were already operating last February.
00:54:09
Speaker
I think I was listening to something from your music program while I was on hold. Is that true? Possibly. Yes. Awesome. Okay. So this is, you know, you don't just do supervised consumption sites. This arches does an incredible amount of work in the community, but when it comes to supervised consumption site, you're really leading the way on a couple of issues, right?
00:54:33
Speaker
Um, well, we are the first regulated facility, um, that offers supervised inhalation services, uh, and, uh, in, in the country. Uh, and in addition, uh, we are one of the busiest for sure. So we've seen between February 28th of this year and July 31st, uh, over 268,000 visits to our facility or uses. Um, we've seen 1,376 unique participants register for service. We see anywhere from.
00:55:02
Speaker
We've managed 430 to 450 of them a month on average. And we've managed 2,531 medical emergencies inside of our facility since opening. So we are extremely busy. Our average between January 2019 and now our average number of visits a day is about 663.
00:55:23
Speaker
So it's a steady flow all day, every day. But it's important work. And I think there's a multitude of issues. We're very close to the border. We have a high representation of people in our community who are living with intergenerational trauma. And we have very few services.
00:55:41
Speaker
that appropriate services to support people who are street involved or homeless or using substances. We have no permanent supportive housing that is an abstinence-based. We have no non-abstinence-based treatment. We have limited access to detox. So it's quite difficult when we're having to outsource those things and there's no housing options or few housing options for people that we serve.
00:56:08
Speaker
Stacey, I had a chance to come down and see the facility, meet some of the participants, meet the staff, and I was just amazed at the work you do. You know, when you walk in there, it's so busy, but it's calm, it's respectful, people's needs are being met. I met the young man who recorded music, and he was so excited about that, and I'm really pleased that he's getting an audience.
00:56:37
Speaker
And we have a local team down in Lethbridge, our Lethbridge moms, mothers and others are very outspoken in the support and have written letters, have come out to the rally in support and done many things. Sadly, we have some members who are not able to speak out because they also have face threat and harassment, which is awful.
Supporting Harm Reduction Initiatives
00:57:00
Speaker
But I'm wondering,
00:57:01
Speaker
What else can people do, like the listeners to this podcast or others, what can people do to support Archers, to support other SCS's in this province as they are undergoing this review that we talked about earlier in this episode?
00:57:18
Speaker
I think there's lots of things people can do. I mean, you know, showing up at the review sessions would be really important to ensure that the voices in those rooms are balanced and not just one-sided. You know, writing to your municipal government, your provincial government, letting them know that you are supportive and if appropriate sharing, you know, evidence related to
00:57:44
Speaker
to SCS and the benefits that you're seeing from your perspective in your community, writing letters to the editor for the local newspapers, because there's always groups of individuals who read those or access those, and providing a balanced approach, not engaging in
00:58:02
Speaker
um negative rhetoric or arguing on facebook or other social media platforms so they don't find it um you know helpful it doesn't necessarily get us anywhere but i think you know if you have evidence you have information um you know sharing it and appropriate platforms with people again to to let the community know that there is you know a balanced there is a balance in the community not everyone is opposed to supervised consumption services or harm reduction
00:58:28
Speaker
I think that there's lots of ways, even sitting at dinner tables with friends, you know, I know it's a common conversation, you know, when people go and get their hair done or their nails done, or they go out for drinks or dinner with friends or family, services or, you know, the talk of the town, I guess, so to speak, at this point, and using those opportunities to provide real information to people who are accessible and available to you in that moment, because I never, it never ceases to amaze me the,
00:58:58
Speaker
the rumors, I guess, the misinformation, the accusations that seem to crop up out of nowhere and circulate so quickly through all of our communities. So I think that that's often those face-to-face conversations are one of the most useful tools I think that we have at this point.
00:59:14
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for giving us that concrete list of things we can do, how we can support the work that you're doing and the work that other supervised consumption sites are doing. I think the work that you and your colleagues do is fucking heroic, and I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much for appearing on The Progress Report. Thank you for having me.
00:59:39
Speaker
Okay, so there you have it folks. The evidence is clear. Harm reduction is good. Supervised consumption sites save lives, and anyone who wants to stop them or is organizing against them is a fucking ghoul who literally wants people to die. These are healthcare facilities, and we don't organize against or rally against hospitals.
Conclusion and Contact Information
01:00:00
Speaker
You know, we don't organize and rally against bars.
01:00:03
Speaker
So the kind of panic around this is rooted in a kind of moral puritanism that is just not fucking helpful. So Jason Kinney's review of supervised consumption sites must be fought. We must organize against it every step of the way. The things that Garth and Stacy talked about are steps that we must take. And if you are interested in those, you know, please reach out to me. I'm at DuncanK at progressroberta.ca. You can find me on Twitter, on at Duncan Kinney.
01:00:31
Speaker
And I think we must kind of continue the fight. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We do have a section of the podcast called Sundries where the guest and myself do get to bring up something that we didn't get to talk about in the course of the show. And I know Petra has one that she wants to talk about. Petra, what is your sundry?
01:00:50
Speaker
Well, Garth touched on, Garth really taught me that harm reduction was fought for and first unsanctioned by users. When you come inside, sometimes you don't understand the history and I was really intrigued. I wanted to learn more about this and I came across a book.
01:01:06
Speaker
by a journalist from Vancouver, Travis Lupeck, he's with the Georgia Strait, great guy, and he wrote a book, Fighting for Space, and that documents the development of insight and other services by users, the history of the downtown east side rising up and
01:01:23
Speaker
fighting for harm reduction and starting these services. And he also finds some similar stories in other jurisdictions, including the US. So I really recommend fighting for space by Travis Lupeck to your readers if they want to learn more as to why do we have harm reduction and who are our early pioneers, so to say.
01:01:44
Speaker
Awesome. I will definitely put that in the shout outs. I am going to cheat a bit here and just reference or come back to a couple of things that we had mentioned prior, which is that Alberta Council on the ACCH report on harm reduction is just absolutely amazing. Take an opportunity to listen to that and please listen to Crackdown Pod. It is really, really good content.
01:02:05
Speaker
Um, you know, we're coming to the end of our show tonight, Petra, do you have something that you want to talk about? Is there a, so first off, is there a way that people can find you online? Is there a place that people can go to support mom, stop the harm, sign up for your newsletter, that kind of thing. And I know there's a specific event that you want to plug. So what's up.
01:02:20
Speaker
Well, we have our website momstoptheharm.com. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at momstoptheharm. We identify to people how they can support us in different ways. But coming up this week, August 31 is International Overdose Awareness Day. It's a time to remember, a time to act.
01:02:41
Speaker
There are 76 events across Canada and Mom Stop the Harm is involved in many of those. Locally here in Edmonton, we have two events. On Friday at noon at the steps of the legislature with street works, there will be speakers, there's Naloxone training and free Naloxone distribution, and on Saturday night,
01:03:03
Speaker
on the 31st in Victoria Park on River Valley Road from 6.30 onward official program at 7.45. We also will have speakers, we have activities, there'll be a food truck, there's music, and at 8.30 we'll have a candlelight vigil in the high-level bridge. The city of Edmonton has declared this International Overdose Awareness Day and the high-level bridge will be lit in purple to remember those that we mourn.
01:03:30
Speaker
Okay. Well, there you go. There is something for you to do immediately on Friday. So please go check that out. Finally, to wrap up, if you do like this show and you do want it to continue, you should definitely tell your friends about it. Um, that is kind of word of mouth is the best, most important way to spread the word.
01:03:47
Speaker
Uh, we also really appreciate it when people leave reviews. Uh, if you can just click five stars, that's great. If you want to leave a written review on apple podcast, it's even better. Uh, there are other pod catchers and pod platforms of choice. So please leave reviews and write nice things about us there as well. Uh, also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, a hate mail, please send them to me again. I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. My email is Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. I want to thank cosmic family communist or the theme. And I want to thank you for listening.
01:04:17
Speaker
Goodbye.