#safe supply

Interesting how the term "poisoning" (in place of "overdose") is advocated in two VERY different politically-loaded ways, by two different factions toward opposite goals.

One faction uses the term "poisoning" to mark how overdoses are (systemically, indirectly) the result of prohibition. Because of prohibition, people cannot know the dosage or contents of what they're putting in their bodies, and the substances are maximally unregulated. According to this view, legalization or some kind of regulated safe supply is the solution.

The other faction uses the term "poisoning" to mark how overdoses are (individually, somewhat directly) the result of individual substance dealers and traffickers, who adulterate the substances and sell it in erratic doses with ever-changing contents. According to this view, the solution is even more prohibition and enforcement to crack down on dealers/traffickers.

The pro-legalization viewpoint is overwhelmingly the more correct one, as I have continually argued. The more systemic approach is more explanatory as a theory, and vastly more promising as a viable real-world solution. We can much more efficiently (let alone ethically) target the incentives to change how substances are provided and used-- not whether substances are provided and used.

But in terms of political philosophy of language, it's an interesting contrast between two VASTLY different rationales for insisting on the "poisoning, not overdose" terminology. The exact same change from Word-A to Word-B, for polar opposite rationales.

Language matters-- but so does context. It supports what I've been saying for years, which is that replacing one term with another "because it has better political implications" depends immensely on the context of who is advocating the new language and why. It further debunks the notion that certain changes to our language are intrinsically oppressive or intrinsically liberatory.

More than 400 safe supply supporters gathered in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside Friday to protest the recent arrests of the founders of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), which had been distributing a safe supply of illegal drugs in an effort to prevent overdose deaths.  Vancouver police raided the group's office and other addresses last week and arrested Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum, saying the organization had publicly admitted trafficking illegal drugs. The group's website says it provided 43 active participants up to 14 grams of substances that had been tested for safety — including cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine — each week, distributing a total of three kilograms of drugs "at cost." "The climate to harm reduction and safe supply has been getting increasingly hostile over the years," said drug user activist and podcaster Garth Mullins on Friday as he walked with protesters down Hastings Street behind a banner calling for action on the toxic drug crisis. Some protesters carried a cardboard coffin to represent the more than 13,000 people who have died of toxic drug poisonings since B.C. declared a public health emergency in 2016. 

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Things like cigarettes are so villainized and taxed so high. Menthol cigarettes are even ILLEGAL. While in British Columbia narcotics are FREE and packaged nicely with warning labels for the homeless!

This Christmas a man sent all 87 B.C. MLAs magic mushrooms and politicians had the nerve to be angry. The same politicians who are mad about being gifted drugs are the same ones who allow organizations to freely dispense them!

We are living in clown world 🤡 so called “safe supply” will only lead to death and ruined lives.

Naloxone (generic) or Narcan (brand) is a fast-acting drug that temporarily reverses the effects of an overdose, restoring breathing and providing time for life saving intervention. Naloxone is used to respond to only opioid-related overdoses such as Fentanyl, Heroin, Morphine, and Codeine. Naloxone administered to someone not having an overdose has no effect and is completely harmless. It generally comes in two forms, a nasal spray and an injectable. If you can, have a naloxone kit in your home, car, bag, or workplace.

In Canada you can get naloxone at almost any pharmacy for free (or free with a prescription) provided you have a health card. The pharmacist will give you a short demonstration on how to administer naloxone as well. Multiple harm reduction agencies exist across Canada and also supply naloxone as well as other free supplies such as needles, alcohol swabs, pipes, and sometimes testing kits to verify the purity of a drug. If your province does not have free naloxone at pharmacies, majority of needle exchange and harm reduction services will have it for free.

Alberta

Grande Prairie & Fort McMurray: Northreach Society

Hinton: Options HIV West Yellowhead

Edmonton: Streetworks

Red Deer: Turning Point Society

Calgary: Safeworks Harm Reduction Program

Calgary & Medicine Hat: HIV Community Link

British Columbia

I would list them all but there’s more than 1000 harm reduction programs in the province. This handy map can help you locate the one nearest to you.

Manitoba

Street Connections provides a list of naloxone and needle exchange programs.

The Manitoba Harm Reduction Network

New Brunswick

Fredericton, Miramichi and Bathurst: AIDS New Brunswick|SIDA Noveau-Brunswick

Saint John: Avenue B Harm Reduction

Moncton: Ensemble

Newfoundland and Labrador

St. John’s: AIDS Community of Newfoundland and Labrador (ACNL)

St. John’s: St. John’s Women’s Centre

Nova Scotia

Halifax: Mainline Needle Exchange

Truro: Northern Healthy Connections Society

Cape Breton: Ally Centre of Cape Breton

Ontario

The Ontario Harm Reduction Network has a list of harm reduction programs.

Prince Edward Island

Charlottetown: PEERS Alliance

Charlottetown, Montague, Souris, Summerside, O’Leary & Albertson: Needle Exchange Programs

Quebec

Montreal: Cactus Montreal

Montreal: L’Association Québécoise pour la promotion de la santé des personnes utilisatrices de drogues (AQPSUD)

Saskatchewan

Saskatoon: Prairie Harm Reduction

Multiple harm reduction programs can be found across Saskatchewan here

Yukon

Whitehorse: Blood Ties Four Directions Centre

If you are a person who uses drugs, consider yourself as much, you may have harm reduction resources available to you. In all likelihood, what you do have available is inadequate at best, and more can always be pushed for. 

In British Columbia, programs including distribution of injectable hydromorphone are being piloted, but even this is not enough to stop the sharp rise in overdoses the province has gone through. 

Meanwhile, in the US, some officials seem to be all but wishing death on people who use drugs when they talk about the available resources, and that’s when they aren’t in fact openly wishing death for people who use drugs.

We heard about the epidemic of abuse of prescription painkillers, and the opiate crisis that followed. Have we ever talked about the way post-9/11 American culture and the Capitalist Death-Drive’s eventual fruition in the Great Recession pushed so many to use drugs, sell them, survive on them? How, now, chronic pain patients are forced to choose between what meager resources a doctor can give them, and managing their pain with potentially tainted drug supplies plagued by instability, inadequacy, how you can’t even rely on street fentanyl to be a good source of fentanyl let alone on your heroin to be fentanyl-free?

When we see deaths from overdose, we are told to blame many people. Dealers who may also use drugs. Dealers selling for money to survive on. All of this obscures and obfuscates that for so many, the problem is lack of a safe supply. the problem is that you can use drugs that may kill you, or face withdrawal that will make you wish you were dead anyway. Sell potentially cut drugs, or not be able to feed yourself, get enough of a hit to stay alive for your next one.

Jokes were made about Liquor Stores being declared “essential businesses” at the beginning of COVID-19 lockdowns, but given the seriousness of alcohol withdrawals, it would almost be like closing a pharmacy. When dispensaries remained open, it was a dual recognition of cannabis as a medical resource and as a viable recreational substance, much like alcohol. Psychedelic and empatheogen-aided therapy is gaining a great deal of traction, and it is for good reason, at that given its effecitveness.

We need SAFE SUPPLY because drug use is not abnormal, unnatural, is not a moral crisis in the sense most seem to think of it as. the crisis is not that drug use is widespread, the crisis is that so many are content letting people who use drugs die to satisfy their own moral precepts. the crisis lies in making it so that casual drug use is made into something impossible, something far more dangerous than it has ever needed to be. it lies in making it so that the remedy to the availability of prescription painkillers and their popularity is to make it so that they may as well be impossible to get.