Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100 .5 FM in the Lower Mainland. In our episode today, I talk with Susan Boyd, author of the just published book, Heroin, on the history of heroin regulation in Canada.
Speaker: Flawed ideas about heroin and people who use the drug have shaped drug law and policy in Canada for decades. A new illustrated book by Susan Boyd traces the history of Canadian heroin regulation over two centuries. The book is informed by documentary evidence and the experience of people who use heroin, drug user unions,
Speaker: and harm reduction advocates. Susan Boyd is a scholar activist and distinguished professor at the University of Victoria. She has authored several articles and books on drug issues, including Busted, an Illustrated History of Drug Prohibition in Canada.
Speaker: Susan Boyd was also a member of the Federal Task Force on Cannabis Legalization and Regulation. And she joins me today to talk about her new book, Heroin and Illustrated History. Hello, Susan. Hi Jane, thanks so much for inviting me to speak at Co -op Radio.
Speaker: I'm really happy you could join us today. Your illustrated history of drug prohibition in Canada busted, came out several years ago. Why did you decide to write a second book focusing on the regulation of heroin specifically?
Speaker: When I was researching for Busted, I came across quite a bit of information about heroin specifically, but I wasn't able to put all of that in that illustrated book. But other events had happened that made me want to focus more closely in on heroin or diacetylmorphine.
Speaker: In 2011, I was at an event. It was actually sort of the birth of Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. And Dave Murray, who is a member of Van Do, was at that event. And he came up to me at the event and he said, Susan, I want you to come visit a group that I'm working with. We just started having meetings at Van Do. We were all research participants in the Naomi Heron assisted treatment trials in Vancouver.
Speaker: Naomi's clinical trial had begun in 2005, but when it was over, the research subjects or the patients that went through that clinical trial no longer received her an assisted treatment, even though it was found to be beneficial for them.
Speaker: So I met the group at Van Do and they asked me if I would work with them because they wanted to tell their own story about what it was like being a research subject in Naomi and what it was like having the trial end and having the choice of doing abstinence -based treatments
Speaker: or methadone, other treatments that had not worked for them. In fact, that was the criteria to get into the Naomi clinical trial was that conventional treatments didn't work for this group of people.
Speaker: So we spoke, and I decided I would do that. And I just saw it as a one -off project. OK, we'll figure out how we want to collect the voices of the members. We'll write a report, and that'll be it. We decided to do focus groups. While we were doing those focus groups, the next hernassisted treatment clinical trial emerged, and that was a solemn A, clinical trial.
Speaker: And so the group wanted to be able to talk to the researchers at Salome. They thought that they had good information to communicate to them. And the fact that they wanted a permanent herni -assisted treatment program to be set up, that at the end of the trial, they wouldn't be left high and dry again like they had with the Naomi clinical trial. So I started to work with that group. What we had thought would be one report.
Speaker: ended up being nine years of working with the group. Until my interest in heroin increased, as I watched this group advocate for their rights to receive heroin -assisted treatment, communicate what it was like for them on the clinical trials, how their lives had improved,
Speaker: and also to launch a charter challenge so that they could receive Herne assisted treatment in Canada. So it's an amazing experience to collaborate with them and to be invited to work with them on that project. And so through that I began to look even more closely at the subject of heroin. I was interested in why it was originally criminalized
Speaker: why we were in Canada just so opposed to any kind of substitution treatment for people who were using newly criminalized drugs. So that was my initial interest in it. But what became more complicated was the presence of fentanyl in the illegal drug supply and the rising preventable overdose deaths.
Speaker: And I felt like these events collided together. I couldn't understand why the federal government, the provinces and municipalities didn't change policy immediately to prevent the crisis from occurring and from the death rates to increase over the years. So those events brought me to look at heroin more closely and to write another book about those events.
Speaker: One of the things that comes through very strongly in the book that Canada has had a particularly punitive approach to heroin and one of the interesting stories that you tell in the book that at one point people from Canada were moving to the UK when the UK was providing people with legal heroin because the approach was just so different.
Speaker: Yes, that's an amazing part of our history and the UK's history as well. It was in the 1950s and early 1960s that over 90 Canadians went to the UK to receive legal prescribed heroin.
Speaker: And the main reason that they left was that they were so harshly criminalizing Canada. And they knew that our 1961 drug law was going to be passed that had very harsh punishments like life for trafficking heroin and seven years for possession of heroin. But there is nowhere for people to receive a legal substitution drug in Canada at that time.
Speaker: It was in 1961 that we allowed for some methadone maintenance, but it was mostly used for detox and then slowly we allowed it to be used for longer term methadone prescribing. But that was only available in Vancouver and Toronto and not in smaller areas or rural areas of Canada.
Speaker: And I think one of the people that had immigrated to the UK or went to the UK said that they went there so that they could have a normal life, a non -criminal life, so that they weren't profiled by the police every day. And that was the only way that they could realize being a full citizen in a nation instead of being seen as a dangerous criminal.
Speaker: Why has Canada remained so totally resistant to strategies that have worked in Europe for decades and Canadians have gone over there and studied them and come back and talked about them? Why do you think that is?
Speaker: You know, we're very resistant in Canada. I think we have this idea of the ideal citizen being a sober, responsible person, somebody with self -control. It's very much tied to our Christian theology about abstinence and sobriety.
Speaker: It really contrasts to have what we might call harm reduction services to our more punitive drug policy in Canada, which is punishment. And for years, law enforcement communicated this idea of the criminal addict that people who use criminalized drugs, specifically heroin,
Speaker: were criminals first and addicted to the drug, second. And so that even if you gave them a safe supply of drugs, they would still be criminals and a threat to Canadian society. And so for decades, this was communicated by politicians, law enforcement, the RCMP, the Narcotic Division. And it's really a large part of our understanding
Speaker: of criminalized drugs. It's this criminal addict myth. We don't use that term anymore, but it definitely exists. The fact that we could have such harsh drug laws and policies that also call drug use a disease or a disorder as we do today makes no sense. You can't have it both ways, but we've managed to do that in Canada for centuries.
Speaker: But really to the detriment of people who have been criminalized. And in the book, I try to explore how in the Indian Act, non -medical opiate use was also criminalized along with alcohol. And here we had this setting, the first setting for criminalizing drug use. It wasn't until 1908.
Speaker: that non -indigenous people were criminalized for non -medical use of opioids. So I find that interesting that the sort of racial injustice started off through the Indian Act and continued on in our drug policy because we know certainly that Indigenous, Black and poor people are profiled by the police more so than middle -class users. And that's even the same for cannabis use when it was illegal.
Speaker: So I think it's just a discourse that we've created in Canada. We saw ourselves as leaders of punitive drug policy, and we stayed with that. And the stereotypes and myths that were created to support that kind of punitive policy remain.
Speaker: You say you started because of Dave Murray who came out of the Naomi trial and then the Salome trial afterwards and these were exactly trialing the kinds of methods that work in Europe and yet they didn't continue even though they worked.
Speaker: It's really a tragedy. And what we can say in the coroner's office, I stated this quite clearly, that not one person who's in a substitution drug program has died from a drug overdose, and no one has died at the overdose prevention sites.
Speaker: or safer injection sites in Canada. So we know that these programs work. And the fact that we didn't roll out across Canada herni -assisted treatment and other substitution programs more forcefully really is a crime. And that we didn't look more forcefully or urgently at decriminalization of personal possession of drugs
Speaker: even though there's been a movement to do that for many, many years. But yeah, we've been very opposed to harm reduction in Canada, and you could say harm reduction in many ways is just trying to lower the harm of drug prohibition policies, the punitive policies that we have.
Speaker: There's so much in the book, and we've really just scratched the surface, but I don't want to let you go without asking you about the illustrations in the book, which are really remarkable. Were they hard to find? Well, they took me years to find. Some of them were quite easy because I had been at events or knew about events, and so I could email a person who helped organize that and say, do you still have a poster of that event?
Speaker: Other images, you know, it was like weeks before I could find the image that represented the event. And what I did for those images is I created a timeline of events. Then I looked through archives and other means to find an image that reflected that event.
Speaker: So I have to say there are many generous artists and people who made posters who sent me those images and others through the newspaper. Did a lot of digging around in the National Archives, Provincial Archives, City Archives. But what I wanted to do with the images was not only draw people in to the book through the images, but to provide an alternative to the enduring myths and tropes about heroin, about people who use drugs.
Speaker: I saw the images as an alternative reading of events in Canada. And so for me, they're just as important as the text that accompanied them. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Susan.
Speaker: Thank you so much. And if I could just add, the book reflects the resistance that's occurred in Canada as well. And I think this is so important that for decades, Canadians have come together, people who use drugs themselves and their allies to change policy. And they've been saving lives.
Speaker: and not being recognized for the hard work that they're doing. And I hope through the book that people will read about and see the incredible efforts and organizations and programs and projects that they've set up to save people's lives in Canada. That certainly came through very strongly to me when I was reading the book. It's a real testament to all that activism and hard work. Thanks so much. Thank you.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Susan Boyd, author of Heroin, an Illustrated History, designed by David Lester. Susan Boyd is a scholar, activist, and distinguished professor at the University of Victoria. The book will be published by Fernwood in the middle of May. The Red Eye podcast is produced at the studios of Vancouver Co -op Radio. You can support us by supporting Co -op Radio.
Speaker: go to coopradio .org and click on the donate button. Independent media relies on the support of people like you.
