Safeguards are Racist + Imperial
Safeguards are Racist + Imperial
all we need to do is make hard drugs completely legal to fix the addiction + overdose problem!
Buckle up because today I’m gonna tell you all about a report on Safe Drug Supply written by Bonnie Henry’s team of Wokeist malignant narcissists. First of all, after reading this report I designate Bonnie Henry an extremist, one who must be removed from office before she causes the death of more people. Dr. Henry has a delusion or a difficulty with truth-telling — prohibition did not cause the current crisis with hard drugs in British Columbia. Hard drugs were always toxic and they remain so — they’re poison to the human brain and body.
“In publishing this report, my intention is to provide a clear and truthful description of the reality of this crisis, of which the main driver is a prohibitionist approach to drugs that has produced a highly toxic unregulated drug supply.” — Bonnie Henry
When you read this report you get a window into the level of delusion operating at the highest levels of public health policy in this country. Let’s be clear and let me state at the beginning what caused the current drug use and overdose crisis. Failure. Social and public health policy failure. Specifically, failure to implement the prevention and treatment pillars of the four pillar approach caused the current crisis. Specifically, failure to develop an evidence-based, patient-centred, resilience-focussed, sobriety-focussed approach to ending compulsive drug use.
There is no other debilitating compulsive behaviour for which we deliberately extend the patient’s exposure to harm, and do not offer any form of mitigating or relief therapy, as a form of treatment. For instance, we do not just give patients with compulsive hand washing milder hand soap. This does not deter the behaviour, it enables it. The source of discomfort of a compulsion is that it controls the individual and forces her to do behaviours that inflict pain in order to feel good or to not feel sh1tty. It feels like slavery. Yes, addiction feels like a form of enslavement.
After the blatant misrepresentation of fact in the introductory letter, I encountered the very odd author page, in which 16 report authors listed their racial credentials, all but one of them listing settler, the remaining one being the fully indigenous author who apparently didn’t need the humiliating label settler attached to her author racial profile. Why do I need to know the racial credentials of people who authored a report advocating for decriminalisation of hard drugs to decolonise drug use and save lives?
I envision a future in which people who use drugs are not at the mercy of an unregulated supply and system that puts their lives at significant risk. This requires an urgent shift toward enabling sufficient access to alternatives to meaningfully reduce drug poisonings and deaths. This courageous, innovative, and compassionate action is needed to address the proximal cause of this emergency: the unregulated drug supply. — Bonnie Henry
This concluding paragraph of the report succinctly summarises the tone and message of the report — legal safeguards that disincentivise harmful hard drug use put drug addicts at risk. It’s not the drug addicted person’s inability to exercise self control that puts the person at risk, no it’s the system, it’s the whole world that does not want that kind of behaviour in our society and therefore stigmatises and disincentivises it. Basically the report is 54 pages of it’s white supremacy and racism and stigma, society is so mean to not let drug addled people do what they want without taking responsibility for their own well being.
Study the systems map (from page 15 of report) for understanding why people use drugs alone for several minutes and think about what it shows you and what that tells you about the addiction experience and those facing it. What do you see? I see weak and dogmatic reasoning in this map. I see a misrepresentation of the systems at play in the individual addiction experience. I see little in the way of helping those who struggle with drug use and addiction find relief. I see a paradigm and vision that exists to placate the authors, not to provide relief to the ones suffering on the ground. I see inconsistency between the results that this map gives me1 and the statistics provided on page 13 that tell me “overall, men age 30-59, Indigenous people, particularly Indigenous women, people living in poverty and with housing instability or homelessness, and people with mental health disorders or poor mental health were the most negatively affected groups in the unregulated drug emergency between 2017 and 2021.”
What does it mean to understand why people use drugs? Looking at that systems map, does a person sitting in their home alone use drugs because of some colonial history from hundreds of years ago? Or do they use drugs because it’s their comfort animal, they are poor and inadequately housed, live in social isolation, had a work place injury and face culturally inadequate mitigation measures and supports? Do public services gaps serve as a main reason for drug use? What do some of these reasons mean, in terms of systemic impingement on a person’s decision to take drugs, practically speaking?
On page 16, the report blames the unregulated drug supply … [as] … the primary driver of the [overdose] emergency. No valid and reliable evidence give for the reckless and irresponsible claim that drug regulation, what decriminalisationists call prohibition, caused the drug overdose crisis. Because of history, Bonnie Henry and her team think it’s racist to impose drug regulation, which they refer to as prohibition in Canada … based on a history of racism, white supremacy, paternalism, colonialism, classism, and human rights violations. To be fair, I think that’s lazy reasoning to invoke the racism of early 1900 drug laws in present day, as though racism still drives the jurisprudence underlying the prohibition of hard and harmful drugs. I also think these abstractions of causes don’t bring policy development analysts any closer to a practical solution for people struggling under the enormous weight of compulsive drug use aka addiction.
I fail to see how this narrative helps anyone struggling with compulsive drug use. Also the intersecting factors they mention? That’s sh1tty health policy response to COVID that cut off social supports for the poor and homeless and marginalised. That’s the COVID benefit that the federal government gave to everyone initially, which naturally drove up the demand for hard drugs and also the overdose deaths. During the COVID pandemic, overdoses took more lives than did COVID. More than anything, this report provides an anti-racist decolonial analysis of the public health system responsible for delivering care to the poor, socially isolated, homeless, unstably housed, addicted and otherwise vulnerable. As such it serves the needs of those who crafted it and not the population group the report discusses.
The helplessness mentality driving this report fascinates me. It’s 54 pages of Franz Fanon dogma masquerading as a public health policy report. There’s several pages of newspeak in a glossary at the end. The entire thing could have been summarized thusly: “we need unfettered access to drugs, drug regulation laws are racist and safeguards are white supremacist and paternalistic, we want unfettered access to safe hard drugs now, drug regulation and safeguard laws are dangerous and killing people.” At no time did the authors suggest that building resilience—learning self soothing techniques and skills, learning emotional regulation and learning about ones cues and triggers and cravings and compulsions—could help provide the most effective and enduring relief to users. Why? Stigma, what does that mean and how does this feed any drug users compulsion to take drugs?
I’m curious, do those individuals who struggle with compulsive drug, who live under the weight of less than optimal choices they have made, of high risk behaviour they engaged in impulsively in an effort to attain relief — do these individuals have to do anything other than continue their drug seeking lifestyle?
What is the end game, overall, of this drug policy?
Some problems have more connections than others and can be viewed as root causes, states the report on page 14, meaning systems map identifies as root causes the pink circles. According to the report, through conversations with more than 100 people who use drugs (like heroin, cocaine, meth) and people in support provider roles, we found connections between parts of this complex problem, revealing root causes.
This level of insanity can only be understood as purposeful destruction. Evil.