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The Alberta Model must be destroyed
1.4k Plays2 years ago
Euan Thompson of Each + Every joins Duncan Kinney to discuss the incredibly evil "Alberta Model" of addressing the drug poisoning crisis and why it must be destroyed.
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Transcript
Introduction & Upcoming Episode
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here, host of The Progress Report. And while we've got a great episode with Ewan Thompson coming up, I just want to talk about the Harbinger Media Network for just a minute.
Harbinger Media Network & Nickelback Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
It's a loose collection of lefty podcasts that we're a part of, and there's a lot of folks that produce really good stuff that I encourage you to listen to if you've got the time. A new pod on the network that I want to highlight is the latest from Aaron Giavenone at Sweater Weather. His latest does a deep dive in the history of one of the most commercially successful
00:00:25
Speaker
yet most critically reviled Canadian bands of all time, Hannah Alberta's own Nickelback. So yeah, it's really great. That kind of cultural criticism from a lefty perspective I think is really needed. And Aaron does a really good job. Also, you know, this pod is back. It's our first podcast of 2023.
Supporting The Progress Report
00:00:44
Speaker
You know, we are still producing content on the website, so please go to theprogressreport.ca as well as follow us on our social media feeds. And if you like the work that we do, you believe in our editorial vision, please consider becoming a monthly donor. There is a link in the show notes, or you can just go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons and put in your credit card, become a recurring monthly donor. We would really appreciate it.
00:01:03
Speaker
Jim is back from surgery now. I'm back in the studio producing podcasts. So yeah, if you've got the money, if you've got the extra in your bank account every month, just a little bit, five, 10, $15, whatever you can afford, Jim and I would really appreciate it. Now onto the show.
Interview with Ewan Thompson: Harm Reduction in Alberta
00:01:31
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report, I am your host Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Ms. Squishy with Skygun, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kasiskasaw, or the North Saskatchewan River.
00:01:45
Speaker
Joining us today is Ewan Thompson. He is the executive director of Each and Every, a national volunteer coalition of businesses from 12 sectors supporting harm reduction and policy solutions to the drug poisoning crisis and all around one of the like more smart and knowledgeable people you will find on the drug poisoning crisis in Alberta. So Ewan, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much, Duncan. Good to be here.
00:02:09
Speaker
So how are you doing? How are you feeling? Where are your vibes at currently? This is a vibe check opening. That's my opening banter there for you.
00:02:17
Speaker
Well, thanks. Um, yeah, it's good, good to check in with people these days. I think if you'd asked me a few days ago, it would have been just like very heavy existential dread. So I tried to make an adjustment. I went off of coffee for a few days. I'm on day three of my recovery using, uh, you know, using tea as my caffeine agonist therapy cat, as I like to call it. Um, so vibes are a little, little lighter now. I can feel some of the dread lifting and I'm starting to get back into a position where I'm like,
00:02:46
Speaker
you know, seeing, seeing what we can do instead of what we need to react to all the time. Sounds like you've adjusted your dose of preferred drugs. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I'm kind of, I'm on like a, like a very steady 50 milligrams a day right now. It's, it's nice to know these things. Like, you know, exactly what you're taking. So anyway, hats off to everybody out there that doesn't know what they're taking, but is, you know, struggling through managing, managing their dose without actually knowing what's in their substance.
00:03:13
Speaker
I know we joke, but caffeine is a drug. So I mean, everyone uses drugs. You're a drug user. I'm a drug user. We all love our drugs.
Drug Poisoning Crisis in Alberta
00:03:22
Speaker
So today we are going to spend some time talking about a subject that is, there's a reason why you might be going through an existential crisis because the drug poisoning crisis is still happening and it's still really bad.
00:03:36
Speaker
And while Marshall Smith and Mike Ellis like to trumpet, the Alberta model is some kind of amazing success story. The numbers are still, how do you say, horrific, right? Like, I assume you've looked at the numbers recently.
00:03:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we're still well above where we were when we went into the pandemic. You know, there's there's absolutely nothing to be celebrating right now. We're still seeing 100 deaths a month. And, you know, we look back in time, we
00:04:07
Speaker
We've come from a situation where people were raising the alarm bells when there were 10 or 20 people dying every month. We're now still five times above that. We hit 10 times above that or 20 times above that, not too long ago. And all we're really seeing right now is a mitigation of the drug supply toxicity that's really driving a national downturn in deaths.
00:04:31
Speaker
So I don't think there's anything to celebrate. I think we're just leaving ourselves really open to the next wave of toxicity, which is actually starting to hit us now with with xylazine entering the market.
Critique of Government Policies
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, this government really does like to compare itself and the numbers that are coming out currently. I want to say currently, they're like usually is a six month delay, but like to the absolute horrific highs of like winter 2021, where it's like 200 people a month we're dying. And but I did poke my head into the Alberta substance use surveillance system camp just before the pod.
00:05:01
Speaker
And we only have data up to August for 2022. And in those eight months, we have 976 deaths, or really we're talking about four drug poisoning deaths every day. In Alberta, we're on track for somewhere between 1400, 1500 drug poisoning deaths if those trends continue.
00:05:18
Speaker
And just for comparison's sake, COVID-19 killed just over 2,100 people in Alberta in 2022. So it's like, these are both still really bad. And it's still ongoing. You might characterize some of the COVID deaths as sort of non-preventable. The drug poisoning deaths are entirely preventable. When we were back at a time when we were losing a handful of people every month,
00:05:47
Speaker
It was largely like accidental overdoses from people who maybe had prescriptions or so on. These illegal drug market deaths were relatively rare because it was a pretty steady supply. People understood what they were getting most of the time. The heroin wasn't in the cocaine. The cocaine wasn't in the heroin.
00:06:07
Speaker
And we didn't have any fentanyl around back then. So we've really just like ramped up our, as we've ramped up our enforcement efforts and tried to get drugs out of society, the opposite has really held true and the drugs have just gotten far worse. So people are struggling way, way more today than they were 20 years ago. And the death numbers reflect that.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, we really are in drug war 12.0. Surely this time it will work. Because when you hear conservative politicians talk about their solutions, they do put up a face about harm reduction. They can't discount it entirely, even though that's what all of their policy actions do is undermine.
00:06:53
Speaker
actual harm reduction and then they talk about recovery a lot and then they you know pure poly have is still like and we have to stop the flow of drugs at the border from China and it's like bro like is this like the black handle is this 1910s are you are you fucking channeling Emily Murphy right now like
Rhetoric and Drug Policy Failures
00:07:12
Speaker
Are you fucking kidding me? We will never stop the flow of drugs from anywhere. One, and two, like that rhetoric is like, has consistently been used to demonize the other for more than a hundred years now.
00:07:25
Speaker
This is why people that don't understand the drug supply should never be touching drug policy. We're making fentanyl in Alberta. Does he know that? Does he know that we have super labs that are making the full supply of fentanyl in Alberta if we needed it? It's not hard to do that. I could bake fentanyl in my kitchen this afternoon if I wanted.
00:07:46
Speaker
you know, anybody with a basic amount of chemistry knowledge can do this stuff now. So it's, you know, this war, the war was lost ages ago. And really, I think what we need to understand is that the war was never meant to be won, the war serves its own purpose. And we can kind of get into that.
00:08:06
Speaker
Exactly. So the inciting incident for this podcast, the reason why I reached out to you and was like, Hey, you want to come on was just an absolutely God awful bit of stenography from one of my least favorite journalists in Alberta, Jen Gerson, who sat down with
Overdose Response App Criticism
00:08:21
Speaker
His name is Marshall Smith, the chief of staff to Daniel Smith, no relation, and to the architect of the Alberta model. But before we even get into that fucking atrocity of journalism, I want to talk about a story that came out earlier this week, because it does highlight a lovely bit of hypocrisy from our friends in the Alberta government.
00:08:40
Speaker
Headline here from the CBC, it's confidential. Alberta won't say if overdose response app is saving lives. And the first couple of paragraphs, I'll just read them out here. Nearly two years after the launch of an overdose prevention app, the Alberta government refuses to say whether the digital overdose response system is saving lives. A spokesperson for the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction would only say the app has been downloaded 3,700 times and has nearly 1100 yet registered users.
00:09:04
Speaker
But has it saved lives? The government won't say. Doors is a confidential and anonymous service, said Colin Acheson in an email to CBC. So Yoon, isn't it very interesting to see the government talk about the value of anonymity for substance users for their app that nobody uses and doesn't do shit, but then totally discount the value of anonymity for substance users who want to go to supervised consumption sites?
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah. I'm so glad, you know, I'm so glad Colin Acheson, you know, the press secretary for the minister of mental health and addictions is so on board with this app because it seems like nobody else is. And I think it needs all the support that he can give it right now. Um, like this is, this is an app that was pointless from day one. It does absolutely nothing that other apps that already existed didn't do, but it does serve a very important purpose for the province, which is to gather as much data on drug users as it possibly can.
00:09:56
Speaker
And all the more hilarious of that is in the story, there is a Made in Alberta solution that does the exact same thing, but better and in a more transparent fashion called NORS, the National Overdose Response System, which connects you with an actual person from the very get-go as opposed to the Alberta app, which is just like, if you don't press a button after a minute or five minutes or something,
00:10:18
Speaker
like 911 is called and just tracks to your phone. Like the objectively better app already existed, was created by a guy who works at the University of Alberta and the, and the Alberta government was like, nah, now we're going to do our own thing.
00:10:32
Speaker
Yeah. Part of it was an obvious patronage play for the developer that works in the oil fields, typically. I think that seems fairly obvious at this point. The app does nothing other than just serve the province's Alberta model a little bit more. And I think at the end of the day, it's to make them look like they're doing something when they're actually
00:10:56
Speaker
not doing anything, and this app has been downloaded by what, 3,000 people or something it's cited? A small number of people have downloaded it. They don't tell us how many active users there are, but I saw an app nerd actually pop up on Twitter in reply and say, hey, app nerd here. I know for a fact that if you have that many downloads, the chances are pretty good that you only have about a dozen or two users. So that's where we're at right now.
00:11:25
Speaker
Oh yeah, this, this app is hilariously like underused, like is not doing a single thing to like actually save lives. Like, you know, maybe if they were lucky, like one or two over the past couple of years that it's been functioning, but that would seem to be, you know, a very generous, generous assumption. And, and, uh, and you're right. It is just kind of to make them seem like something like it doesn't cost very much money. It's like less than $200,000 a year they give to this app developer.
00:11:51
Speaker
And, uh, in Bob's jungle, they get to point to it in their, in their press releases and in their press conferences. And it's part of their rhetoric and like, if it doesn't work, I mean, that doesn't matter to them, right? They're not, they're not here to make things work anyways.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty much a good way to underline most of the actions that are being taken. Yeah, and I think getting from that to the Alberta model, the doors plays a really important role within the Alberta model, as we'll call it. And I think maybe we'll get more into that after hearing about what went on in this interview.
00:12:23
Speaker
Well, yeah.
Marshall Smith's Influence on Policy
00:12:24
Speaker
So yeah, again, the inciting incident was this freaking Jen Gerson interview with Marshall Smith. And I think we I do want to read out some passages and like just marvel at the amount of like self delusion and just straight up evil present in this guy. Like this guy is a bad person who is doing bad things and is using the power available to him as a senior and highly placed government staffer to affect drug policy in a way that will continue to kill people in a way that like
00:12:53
Speaker
you just don't see in any other kind of epidemic. And as you said earlier, these are preventable deaths, right? Entirely preventable deaths. And we've got a cohort of people who are in extremely high levels of power in this government and other governments as well, but particularly this one where they
00:13:16
Speaker
They have it in their heads that we actually have a chance to get rid of drugs in society. But their definition of drug is very narrow and doesn't include all those other people like all of us, really, that use things like caffeine, that use things like alcohol. And the goal here, in my view with Marshall Smith, and this is a name that everybody should know in Alberta by now. He's the chief of staff to the premier.
00:13:41
Speaker
He's got a long history in the addiction treatment field. He's very well connected with addiction treatment practitioners, with companies and private organizations that do addiction treatment across Western Canada. And it seems pretty obvious that they're the ones kind of steering the ship on these policy measures. Right out of the get-go when the UCP took power, they
00:14:07
Speaker
They made very obvious overtures to the effect that they were going to dismantle harm reduction, that they didn't believe in it, that it was just leaving people in their misery of drug use. Again, totally narrowly defining what drug use actually is and just signaling from day one that their goal was going to be abstinence from all illegal drugs for all people
00:14:29
Speaker
under all circumstances. And so here's how we're going to do it. And it's now we're watching more and more of these building blocks of the system being put in place as the months go on. And I think it should be really obvious to Albertans by now what this was all about, which is
00:14:46
Speaker
patronage for the addiction treatment industry and really supervision and monitoring and control of populations of people who use drugs, many of which are racialized, many of which are indigenous and that
00:15:00
Speaker
It doesn't actually serve any purpose in terms of removing drugs from society. Yeah, and fuck it. We're going to keep teasing that Jen Gerson stuff because I think Marshall Smith as a figure and as a character in this broader narrative is important to examine just for a few minutes because he was a high flying BC liberal staffer and just for everyone who's not familiar with the politics of BC, BC liberals are like the conservatives of BC.
00:15:25
Speaker
He was a high-flying BC liberal staffer back in the early 2000s who found himself, like so many other folks, addicted to drugs. He eventually ended up on the street. He was arrested. He did a little bit of time in prison.
00:15:39
Speaker
And on his way kind of out of this spiral, he found himself at Baldy Hughes, which is a treatment facility near Prince George in Northern BC, kind of close to the Alberta border. And Baldy Hughes is actually a former military base full of like former, full of like poisons and toxins and just like leftover shit from the American military.
00:16:03
Speaker
But they thought it was a good place to start up a treatment facility for people who were trying to get off drugs. And he ended up going there. He ended up working there. And that's really his kind of ascent into the kind of management and executive levels of these, you know, recovery and treatment facilities of which he is so fond of promoting. And and so he's when he speaks about recovery, he speaks from a very personal first person perspective. He's like, when I was on the street,
00:16:32
Speaker
or when I was homeless is a very common rhetorical trick you will hear from Marshall Smith, right? And so with that in mind, he has constructed essentially this model of yeah, supervised consumption sites, harm reduction can get fucked.
00:16:52
Speaker
recovery over everything, we were gonna funnel a bunch of money into recovery, which again, is an incredibly ill-defined term, which means 17 different things to 17 different people. And even when you start getting into the foundations of what modern drug recovery is, it's really shifty and shady. I just listened to a true and on five-part podcast on SinAnon, which is really the foundation of
00:17:18
Speaker
from my understanding, the foundation of most like adolescent drug recovery, which was then kind of transposed up to adult drug recovery. And it was a fucking cult, you know, like, yeah.
00:17:31
Speaker
Yeah. This, I mean, the whole thing is, is about net widening for addiction treatment. And, and I think like what a lot of people miss here is, is that there's a bigger field at play here that I think a lot, like it's really important to understand what, what constitutes this, uh, this entire battle, which, you know, like we're, we're looking at a situation where the police, uh, are being scrutinized, like for everything right now, what, what are, what are we paying them to do? You know?
00:17:59
Speaker
And so they're looking around saying, well, you know, like we chase around the drug dealers, we chase around the gangs, we chase around like all these different people who are pretty much just all affiliated with the drug trade. So, okay, so it would be bad for us if we removed the drug trade and replace it with something legitimate, right? Like that's bad for policing. The union's not going to be happy with that. So they need to find ways to integrate themselves with different elements of
00:18:26
Speaker
of healthcare, of social services, and so on. So when you see these non-police crisis intervention teams going out on the streets, they're effectively working hand in hand with police now in Calgary. And it's still better than having police go and do that. I'm not criticizing that part. It's that the police are in there now monitoring
00:18:49
Speaker
Alongside the social services agencies but what i think what probably happened a while back you know in a way that nobody was really aware of at the time is that the police also saw this opportunity within addiction treatment to kind of like reinforce the carceral system that benefits them.
00:19:06
Speaker
and start to integrate themselves with addiction treatment and start to reframe a lot of our criminal system as really a way to get people into a health system that is still very much carceral in nature. So when I look at addiction treatment and I think about how we define recovery and how recovery is defined as abstinence by the state, by Alberta in particular,
00:19:33
Speaker
I it makes me kind of realize that like a lot of.
00:19:39
Speaker
of this discussion, this rhetoric that's being played out is about reframing the conversation in a way that benefits policing, ultimately, and shores up their jobs, shores up their funding. And there's so much more to it, but when we talk about these addiction treatment, these public safety task forces that are playing out in Edmonton Calgary, it's all kind of part and parcel with what I see as this broader field of police
00:20:08
Speaker
addiction treatment, starting to integrate themselves more closely in order to reinforce the carceral state. Yeah, you're absolutely correct. And Chief Dale McPhee here in Edmonton has been very clever, very forward thinking, you know, to kind of co-opt this language, to build these alliances.
00:20:28
Speaker
know, with Marshall Smith and with this with the recovery industry with the recovery capital conference, you know, which is a frequent visitor of like, yeah, this is this is a part of a broader strategy. But but let's get back to let's get to the to the Jen Gerson story, because I think there's a piece in here that I want to pull out. And it really is a piece of a piece of Marshall Smith kind of patting himself on the back so hard that you know, I'm worried about his shoulder. But
00:20:51
Speaker
Here's a brief package on the impeccable, brilliant data that they keep in Alberta. So Jen Gerson says, so do we have a sense of what the usage statistics are in Alberta versus other more liberal jurisdictions? Marshall Smith, well, you absolutely can. In fact, we're one of the only jurisdictions in Canada where you can actually do that because we keep track of this information.
00:21:09
Speaker
They don't do that in other jurisdictions. Alberta has one of the most sophisticated substance use data analytics systems anywhere in North America. We're the envy of North America. It's called the Alberta Substance Use Surveillance System and it's available to the public. I'll give you an important anecdote in a second, but we post our data, our raw data, online for everyone to see and we post it without comment.
00:21:26
Speaker
which is very funny, they don't. British Columbia is the alternative, puts out a news release and a couple of graphs every month and they use those opportunities to advance a narrative to tell people that they should be thinking about the data. We think that people who study these issues should be free of that type of influence and so we post the data without comment.
00:21:43
Speaker
Ewan, I know you've put together an open letter and you've actually thought about this quite a bit about what kind of data that actually does need to be made public when it comes to the drug poisoning crisis. What is that data? What do you want and why isn't the government giving it to us?
00:21:58
Speaker
Okay.
Data Transparency Issues
00:21:59
Speaker
Yeah. First of all, I just want to comment on a couple things like in that statement first, you know, BC actually puts out its data in a monthly timely manner that we can keep up with what's going on in the crisis. So, you know, you, you mentioned earlier, we don't have data past August right now. It is mid January and we don't have the September death data, October, November, December.
00:22:22
Speaker
That's ridiculous. BC's data is up to date within two months always. They never miss it. And yeah, maybe they put out data that shows like, okay, here's what we think from my professional opinion as the chief coroner. Here's what seems to be happening as a result of what we're seeing in these people that are coming in, these human bodies that are showing up at our door. We're measuring what sorts of drugs are in them. Alberta has a different system that
00:22:50
Speaker
really doesn't allow us to see as transparently that the drug poisoning crisis is a contamination crisis, is a regulation crisis. And just I think the timeliness is really important to hammer home. So that's not transparent, first of all. Second, the transparency of the actual addiction treatment services that are in Alberta. We put together this open letter.
00:23:16
Speaker
50 different data points that are not shared by the province that would really help us evaluate whether or not any of this effort, any of this money is actually going to useful places. So we don't know how the government defines a treatment space, for example. That's like number one on our list. We've got this whole open letters, you know.
00:23:38
Speaker
How many people are exiting addiction treatment into houselessness? How many people do not have a place to go after they leave? And what does that mean for whether they're going to relapse or not if they did actually achieve abstinence after going through this treatment program?
00:23:56
Speaker
What's the pipeline of personal health numbers here that are being collected at supervised consumption sites that are being collected at addiction treatment facilities? How are they collected and reported to AHS, for example?
00:24:10
Speaker
And most importantly, probably, what are the actual outcomes of these? How many people are dead in the weeks, months, or year after that they go through abstinence-based treatment? How many people are dying or experiencing overdoses inside of these facilities? We don't know any of this sort of data. And if we're going to evaluate and actually
00:24:32
Speaker
You know, maybe, maybe there are some big props due to the government for some of the efforts they've put in here. I'm like, I'll be first to say, I don't have anything against voluntary addiction treatment. If people want to access these services, I think that's really important for people to have it. These are, it's one more option, one more tool in the toolbox for everybody.
00:24:49
Speaker
that they should be able to access. But if we're not able to evaluate how these programs are running, for all we know, they're just having prayer circles in these every day and forcing people to read the Bible and memorize passages or something. We actually don't know.
00:25:07
Speaker
So that's important. We need to know that evidence-based practices are being used, that people aren't being excluded on the basis of race or religious belief, and that they're really being given every opportunity to pursue their own form of recovery however they define it.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think it is important to point out that yes, recovery is good. If people wanted to go to a recovery facility and detox and do 12-step or do the smart system or whatever it is that they feel would be helpful in order to stop them from having a substance use disorder.
00:25:48
Speaker
do it. But this government has talked a huge game about all the recovery treatment spaces that they're building, that they're in the process of building, that they will build, that already exist. And then the number 8,000 treatment beds has been bandied about quite frequently by this government, by Mike Ellis. Has this government built anywhere near 8,000 treatment beds in the three and a half years that they've been around? No, not even a fraction of that. But it's
00:26:18
Speaker
We don't know is the problem like they're not transparent about any of this I mean they're still saying like these recovery communities these therapeutic communities are still coming online
00:26:27
Speaker
There's this one in Red Deer that's about to open. That's the first one out of the five that they had said they were going to build. Even the stuff that they say they're putting all this effort and resources and public resources into is not really being done. It's just being announced and then re-announced and then re-re-announced.
00:26:49
Speaker
And so people that actually wanna access these services, I know people that have tried to get into them and they can't. So this is a situation where they really haven't achieved much and yet they're claiming,
00:27:07
Speaker
victory over this crisis that is still wiping out a huge number of our young people. You've got to emphasize that most of the people dying from this crisis are well under the age of 60. Most of them are between 20 and 40, and some of them are as young as 12 or 13. The level of the crisis is such that we should be treating it with emergency measures, put everything on the table, all the options that people
00:27:36
Speaker
need and that are asking for. And instead, we're just narrowing the scope more and more as time goes on and saying like, no, like your goal is abstinence. I don't care what you're, you know, we're going to tell you what your goal is. And it has to be abstinence. And if that's not it, then well, we're sorry, but we're not going to support you in any way.
00:27:55
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, in that Jen Gerson article, Smith claims that there are 1300 treatment beds in Alberta, which seems wildly high, especially when you say you go to let's, if you go to the VO PD page, like the virtual opioid dependency program page and the page they have on rehab.
00:28:11
Speaker
They only have 29 rehab spaces listed on that page. If you go to the Recovery Access Center, maybe you get up to like 40 or 50. But those aren't like treatment spaces for everyone. Some of those are for very specific groups. Some of them are for women. Some of them are indigenous people. Some of them are specifically for men.
00:28:27
Speaker
Like to treat them as like, it's not an undifferentiated mass. It's not like you don't just go to the emergency room. It's not like going to the emergency room where eventually you will get treatment. It's this variegated, custom bespoke system that like only, there are only a handful of operators in the space. And like, one thing that I'm interested in quantifying is how much of the treatment system in Alberta is 12-step and 12-step facilitation.
00:28:54
Speaker
Because there's lots of data to show that it only has a very minor positive effect on getting people to be abstinent from drugs.
00:29:04
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah, sure. Like the 10% of folks or whoever that actually, you know, that can get through 12 step and achieve abstinence and stuff, they become like evangelicals of it afterwards, which, you know, understandable. It worked for you. Like you want the rest of the world to know about it. They should try it, whatever. But like, it can't be the only option on the table. And the thing that I want to highlight here as well is that, like,
00:29:27
Speaker
Almost none of these facilities allow people to come in and continue using methadone and suboxone. You can search that. Like in Calgary, I think I found one or something. It's so people, like if they're, if their goal is to get off of fentanyl and then, and then go to like lifelong methadone use, first of all, they can't get into treatment to do that. Like you can't, you almost can't access treatment. That's going to, you know, permit you to continue a methadone program.
00:29:54
Speaker
And second of all, the government won't support you. So if you don't have access, if you don't have, sorry, like insurance coverage to cover your methadone, the government gives you four months and then it's up. Like the virtual opioid dependency program will only support you for the four months and then that's it. So again, they're defining your recovery in a way that excludes anybody that wants to say, stay on methadone.
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah. If you're not off methadone in four months, like fuck you, buddy, like pay for it. And then you're back to the fentanyl supply guaranteed. Like if somebody's coming off a mental methadone, like nine times out of 10, they're going to turn to, uh, back to the street supply. And that's going to put them at even higher risk than when they came off it in the first place. Yeah. Let's talk about safe supply for a minute, because, you know, it's used as a bit of a scare word by people like Smith and Polly Ev and Daniel Smith.
00:30:48
Speaker
And the rhetoric that's used against this is like, we're against safe supply because it's flooding the community with hard drugs or whatever. And this is the rhetoric they're using to kill the idea of safe supply before it even gets implemented at scale anywhere. Here's the passage, again, just uncritically repeated by Jen Gerson in her Q&A with Marshall Smith. Quote from Marshall Smith, the concern with safe supply and the problem with the literature that's being generated by the people who are running safe supply
00:31:14
Speaker
is that none of the things that they're measuring exam harms beyond the harms done to the addict that they're studying. The big problems with safe supply is the diversion of these drugs into the broader population. For example, if you live in a home where one person in that home has an opioid prescription, everybody in that house is five times more likely to develop a substance use disorder.
00:31:30
Speaker
And it's like, okay, sure, that sucks. But do you know what else sucks? When your fucking dad dies from drug poisoning. There's a reason why the primary thing that they're measuring is the harm done to the substance user. Because if that person dies, they don't get to fucking come back. That figure is so misleading because it kind of
00:31:52
Speaker
creates this correlation as causation sort of dynamic. Like, okay, so if somebody in your house uses opioids, then you're five times more likely to use opioids. Like it has no appreciation whatsoever for trauma and for these things that are actually linked to what we would consider addiction.
00:32:10
Speaker
these sorts of behaviors come from somewhere. It's not just- Just having the drug in your air spice makes you more likely to be addicted to it, right? Is the kind of underlying assumption there. It is the way that Marshall Smith and that cohort of people seem to approach this whole problem. I personally cannot be anywhere near a drug and therefore nobody else can.
00:32:29
Speaker
And I just think it's so sad that we're being towed along by this mentality that just does not really contextualize the crisis in a way that, like you just said, you know, what if your dad died of drug poisoning? That is a super traumatic event that you, you know, you're gonna, it's gonna take you the rest of your life to untangle that. And you may fall into substance use during that time while you're trying to get, you know, work it out. There may be other bad things that have happened to you in your life.
00:32:56
Speaker
like drugs provide some sort of relief from that. I think we need to appreciate that these drugs in many cases are pain medications that help people adjust to pain in their life.
Debunking Safe Supply Myths
00:33:08
Speaker
They shouldn't, physical pain or emotional pain.
00:33:12
Speaker
We don't need to differentiate these to that level. And a lot of people are self-medicating with them. So help the folks get off of them that want to get off of them, but people that are benefiting from them in different ways or whose biggest barrier to life is not the drug, but the circumstances around them should be helped with regulated supply. And that's really where the idea of safe supply comes from.
00:33:37
Speaker
And when it comes to safe supply, Marshall Smith really is following in the footsteps of her boss, Danielle Smith, of just like out and out telling straight up stupid, easily falsifiable lies. In this Jen Gerson article, quote, in my day, when I was on the street, a tab of morphine cost $20 for one tablet. Today on the streets of Vancouver, you can pick up a tab of morphine for $1. That's how much it is on the street. That's how much flooding of the market they've done. This is Marshall Smith intimating that the government is flooding the streets with $1 morphine. That is so dumb.
00:34:06
Speaker
That is just objectively not true. It's so stupid and easily fucking disprovable that it's like, how does Jed Gerson not interject and be like, oh yeah, $1 morphine. That seems wild. It's like, okay, yeah, $1 morphine. Thanks. In this fucking day and age with inflation being what it is, you think drug dealers are selling morphine for a dollar a tap?
00:34:27
Speaker
And Marshall, nobody's using morphine. Nobody uses morphine anymore. Fentanyl is the thing people are using and they're paying 10 bucks a point for it. That's what the drug supply is. And this idea that we flooded the market with some drug that absolutely fucking nobody is using is laughable. And it shows a complete disconnect from this guy and what's actually going on in the street, despite his history there.
00:34:54
Speaker
Ooh, that is a hilarious little excerpt from that Jen Gerson piece of just like, oh yeah, there's $1 tabs of morphine on this street in Vancouver. It's because of the government. Get the fuck out of here. So I think everything we've talked about here has been a relatively, well, relatively is maybe not the right word, but an explanation of what the Alberta model is, how it works.
Alberta's Treatment Approach Critique
00:35:14
Speaker
And so Ewan, I'll put this question to you.
00:35:17
Speaker
How do we destroy it and discredit it? How do we make sure that the Alberta model is something that's confined to the dustbins of history?
00:35:25
Speaker
Well, I think defining it properly is probably step one. People need to understand really what's at play on this field. Like the Alberta model really is a net widening tactic for addiction treatment, for private addiction treatment interests. So it's almost kind of a tip of the spear of healthcare privatization in a way. Everybody should kind of look at it that way because a lot of the experimentation that's being done within addiction treatment
00:35:50
Speaker
is going to apply to most types of healthcare. So look at it that way. It affects everybody in that very direct way.
00:35:57
Speaker
So like what is the Alberta model? You know, I look at it as you know this like anything that's gonna help widen the net for addiction treatment So getting personal health numbers at the supervised consumption sites getting people's information on this doors app, for example You know integrating the police with the with the health and social services so that when somebody shows up like in a jail cell at the police they're being held and
00:36:22
Speaker
or whatever, they've been arrested, that they now are offered addiction treatment. Okay, you're unhoused, you must be addicted. Here, have this access to our addiction treatment service, and then the government or the public pays for that person to go through an addiction treatment, which they may not have needed, and then released back into houselessness afterwards.
00:36:44
Speaker
Um, you know, removing services that don't widen the net or that actually like constrict the net for addiction treatments. So things like supervised consumption sites, things like, uh, prescribing of drugs for people who don't want to go through addiction treatment. And finally, yeah, like that addiction, uh, removing access to prescriptions.
00:37:01
Speaker
That's what's happening under the Narcotics Transition Services program right now. People across the province are being stripped of their access to hydromoraphone or Dilaudid, and they're being forced into these centralized facilities that will let them take their one tab of drug, put it under their tongue, make sure it's swallowed, and then go on their day for the next few hours until they need their next dose.
00:37:26
Speaker
You can do that for a few months and then you've got to be on methadone or suboxone and then a few months after that you've got to be off of everything. So that's what this is really about, forcing people into abstinence.
00:37:39
Speaker
And we got to back up and just look at the greater context. Why are we doing this type of advocacy? It's to stop drug poisoning deaths. And every drug poisoning death is attributed, really attributable to this type of thinking. It's like getting people into abstinence. It's just that Alberta is taking it to an extreme. This is a national problem, but Alberta seems to be taking this really hard line on it without sharing any data.
00:38:03
Speaker
I think it's more about, the Alberta model is more about talking about what you're doing than it is about actually helping people who use drugs. And, and so it's, it's very convenient for conservative politicians to pick it up because it's like, look, we get to talk about helping people. We get to talk about getting people into recovery. You have to do anything. No one's going to fucking audit us. No one's going to like actually check in and say, Oh yeah, did you actually build those 8,000 recovery spaces? Like,
00:38:27
Speaker
Can anyone actually get into recovery or a recovery space right now? What does recovery even fucking mean? It's funny, you do have this opportunity to, if you're going to spend a gajillion dollars, unlimited budget on treatment and recovery, you might actually be able to find recovery treatments that work more than the one point whatever percent that you get out of
00:38:51
Speaker
out of like 12 step, you know? But instead you're just shoveling money to like people who run a business essentially, whose job it is to fill beds.
00:39:01
Speaker
And, and like the potential for abuse is rife. Like when you talk about, you know, the troubled teen industry, when you talk about adolescents in, in these types of treatment centers, like the history there is really bad. And then when you, when you transpose it up to adults, like because the ultimate goal here seems to just be to lock up, unhoused people for doing drugs in public, like this is, you know, it's, it's like warehousing, unhoused people seems to be the kind of end game here, right?
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's incarceration by another name. It's important to close the loop and just look at who's really benefiting from this. I think you identified these businesses, these private organizations that are doing addiction treatment. I suspect at the end of the day, it will be beneficial to have more of these with more resources
00:39:50
Speaker
for some people so that they can access these services more easily. I'm not contesting that if people are looking for voluntary treatment, but it's an interesting thing. When you decriminalize drugs and when you give people other options, voluntary treatment is rarely the one they choose. Dave Lucas is a really good authority on this. He's worked in drug treatment courts for a long time and he did a really great podcast episode with Narcotica not too long ago. I think everybody should listen to that because he really goes into
00:40:20
Speaker
Okay, what happened in Portland? What happened in Oregon when they decriminalized? And what has happened with voluntary treatment since then? Most people just have kind of lost interest in it and they're doing other stuff now. So it kind of just goes to show you, again, this is kind of just correlation, but when people have other options and they're not being kind of like
00:40:38
Speaker
bullied into going into treatment and it's not being presented as the absolute only choice they get to make here or the only option on the table, then they will find other things to do and other ways to recovery and ways to define their own recovery.
00:40:55
Speaker
Yeah. And when I talk about how this is all just a setup for warehousing, unhoused people, like that might sound like a bit like hyperbole, but like chief Dale McPhee and David Eby and Daniel Smith and Marshall Smith all have involuntary treatment or let's just call it what it is forced treatment. Like that's, that's really what they want to fucking do. They are fucking straining against the leash to just start sending people to involuntary treatment. And like,
00:41:23
Speaker
It's probably not advantageous to do it right now because one, you're right up against an election cycle. People are going to get caught up in this kind of dragnet. You're going to get bad stories. But if Daniel Smith wins this next election, I have no doubt that we will start to see Alberta leading the way on involuntary treatment in Canada.
00:41:43
Speaker
And David Ebe, the leader of the BC NDP, the premier of BC, he floated this idea. He talked about it. He was like, maybe we should do. Sometimes people can't help themselves, et cetera, et cetera. And then everyone who was fucking around him told him, shut the fuck up. Yeah. And he backed off. And he backed off of it. And now he's like, oh, we're going to listen to the experts on it now. And every fucking expert who looks at this says, you don't do involuntary fucking treatment because we tried this 30 fucking years ago and it didn't work.
00:42:12
Speaker
Well, it killed a lot. It continues to kill people. People are put at higher risk. It's right for abuse. You're essentially incarcerating people with none of the even minor protection systems that you would have in a jail or prison context. It's absolutely horrific what we did to people 30 years ago with forced treatment, and they just want to fucking do it again.
00:42:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it rolled out in incarceration settings as a way that could duck the public eye. And not to give them any ideas, but I'm sure they've thought about this a million times already. It's too bad because we could be going in a totally different direction right now.
00:42:51
Speaker
We're always in this reactive stance, but if you look at what the feds have done, they actually opened that SCS and Drumheller to massive approval once even the guards were clapping along afterwards. We know that supervised consumption sites in a prison setting now will save lives and help people.
00:43:12
Speaker
um, you know, gain some level of stability and connection with the health care system if they need it and so on. So like we just, we have to start offering these alternatives and showing the data and showing the telling the stories and have, you know, having people tell their own stories so that everybody understands like another world is possible within this. We don't need to continue feeding into this precarity model where, you know, people at the bottom rungs of society are just continually oppressed and, and run through their washing machine of
00:43:41
Speaker
Like, is it incarceration? Is it addiction treatment? We don't know. Like, here, like, have, you know, have one month stay free and then you're back out into houselessness. We just, we got to get away from that and start offering, you know, alternative ideas, alternative vision for what this can be. Because yes, you're right. Alberta is absolutely accelerating towards this. They're not even hiding it anymore. Nicholas Milliken was very masked off in his description of where they're going with these public safety task forces in Alberta, in Edmonton and Calgary.
00:44:11
Speaker
Last month, it's not a secret anymore. They're going for involuntary forced addiction treatment for unhoused folks who they deem as having problematic addiction problems or mental health as the top issue in their life.
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah. Anyone who does drugs in public, you know, is a target, right? If you do drugs in public, Chief Dale McPhee essentially said it. Like, my goal is to fucking stop that. And it's like, you put the chief of police in charge of stopping public drug use, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? And so, you know, he talks a good game about public health. He talks a good game about integrating social services, but he is the chief of police. He is in charge of 1,900 police officers. What do fucking police do?
00:44:55
Speaker
Well, they have a vested interest in seeing all of this go forward and into not seeing a fair, equitable model of decriminalization move forward or safe supply for that matter. These are things that would absolutely reduce crime.
00:45:11
Speaker
The police force in Calgary recently told us that 90% of property crime is committed by about 100 active individuals, all of which or most of which have pretty significant drug habits. And so we know that if we just offered them some of their basic needs, make sure that they're housed, make sure they have access to safe supply, chances are that property crime is going to diminish significantly or disappear altogether for some of them.
00:45:37
Speaker
But that's not what they want. They want longer detention times. They want people to ramp up their storefront thick glass and CCTV cameras and stuff like that. They want people to be scared. They want people to be scared of people who are unhoused because it serves its own purpose in ensuring up police resources and nowadays ensuring up addiction treatment resources as well.
00:46:02
Speaker
Well, there you have it, people.
Call for Effective Solutions
00:46:04
Speaker
I think it's important to remember a better world as possible. You and did spend a bit of time there talking about how we can imagine a better world where we care for each other. It doesn't have to just be incarceration and police. The Alberta model, I think, is incredibly evil, must be discredited and destroyed. Anytime you hear people using the talking points that you hear coming out of the mouth of Chief Dale McPhee,
00:46:25
Speaker
or Marshall Smith, or Nicholas Milliken, or Mike Ellis, be very wary. It's not about the arguments, it's not about the proof. It is about talking to your friends and neighbors about how this problem actually gets solved, and it's never going to be about enforcement. It's never going to be about locking people up, but that's where it's all headed. Absolutely.
00:46:50
Speaker
So Euan,
Each and Every's Advocacy Work
00:46:51
Speaker
that's it for today. How can people follow along with the work that you do? If people wanted to sign that open letter, what's the best way to find it? Now is the time to plug your pluggables. Yeah, cool. Okay, so first of all, if you are a business operator or if you know people that get friends that run businesses or whatever, send them to each and every .org. They can sign up for free there.
00:47:11
Speaker
and just join us as a member, then we'll be doing advocacy kind of on your behalf to make this sort of world, bring it closer to reality, because we've got a lot of ideas, we've got a lot of support, and there's a lot of allies that we're trying to help support within this as well.
00:47:29
Speaker
If you are in Edmonton, which I'm sure a lot of the listeners are, you should come out to Metro Cinema on February 16th. There's going to be a few of us there, you know, talking after a film screening. We're going to show Love in the Time of Fentanyl. It's all based in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside at an overdose prevention site. So you can really get inside of one of these sites and understand what happens at them, how do people form connections, you know, how are lives saved within these facilities and so on.
00:47:57
Speaker
And that's being hosted by Michael Jans, I believe, along with a couple other organizations. So we'll be there if moms stop the harm.
00:48:04
Speaker
and some others. And if you are involved in any way with a community association or a business association, please, again, send them to us, send them to each and every dot org to the contact form just to get in touch. We want to talk to them. This is a crisis that's affecting every community and every, you know, every business district. And again, we've got better ways to deal with the problem than just moving people from one neighborhood to the next and then waiting for them to complete that cycle and show up again and, you know, still have the same problems.
00:48:35
Speaker
So we can help people, you know, better and help businesses be better towards other people as well, I think, in their neighborhoods. We don't, you know, everybody's seen the fire hose or whatever, the hosing down of people.
00:48:46
Speaker
in front of storefronts, that's kind of the exact opposite of the sort of thing we need to be doing and that businesses can really take to heart. So I think with that, I'll probably leave it. There's lots that people can do, but I think the first step is just get in touch with me if you're looking for ideas or try and connect us with businesses.
00:49:07
Speaker
All right. Thanks so much, Ewan. Thanks for coming on the pod and thanks for the work that you do with each and every and in your personal life.
Closing & Listener Support
00:49:13
Speaker
It's incredibly needed and it's important work. Folks, if you like this podcast, if you want to join the 500 or so other folks who help keep this little independent media project going,
00:49:23
Speaker
I'd be very grateful, as with Jim, who is just now coming back from his time off in his surgery. You can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and contribute a little monthly contribution. Recurring would be very much appreciated. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, I'm very easy to get ahold of. You can reach me by email at DuncanKatprogressalberta.ca and I spend far too much time on Twitter at Duncan Kinney or at Progress Alberta.
00:49:49
Speaker
Thank you to Jim Story for editing this podcast. Thank you to Cosmic Family Communist for our amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.