“Our son Ryan, 26, and the vast majority of the 42,000 who have lost lives to the toxic supply of drugs, would be alive today if their substance was legalized, regulated and controlled, like we do for alcohol users.”
At some time we have to shed the misguided Nixon era belief that drugs are a legal problem, and not a public health problem. The war on drugs has produced nothing but losers on every single front. Addicts don’t get the help they need. An underground market thrives like crazy at the cost of human lives. Tax payers pay out hundreds of billions over the years in tracking, enforcement, and incarceration, all yielding zero net gains. people are going to prison for life on a 3-strikes violation because they got caught with a dime bag of dope. The entire thing is an absolute clusterfuck and waste of money.
A safe supply means fuck all without other extended care programs. Even these drugs when “clean” come with risks of overdose and significant risk of addiction impacting many other aspects of life. I’m all for a safe supply, if it comes with programs to help people get off them and reintegrate into society if their addiction has impacted their employment, education and housing.
My understanding (which may be faulty) is that opioids, specifically, rarely cause overdose deaths if the supply is safe. Granted, “rarely” is not “never”, and having the other programs does help addicts put their lives back together and kick the drugs for good, but a safe supply would keep a lot of people alive while we try to fund and ramp up those other programs.
A safe supply has a significant lower risk of overdose though. There is absolutely no consistency with potency even with the same dealer/suppliers. You either get a product that has been cut with inert additives to inflate the product supply or you have product that has been spiked with more potent analogs to achieve the same effect. None of this is done with any level of safety to ensure a completely homogeneous mixture meaning within the same batch the potency can vary. Without any consistency in potency users do not know how much they are actually administrating even if that dose appears like one they have previously safely done.
This is a harm reduction technique and is in no way intended to replace other programs but simple reduce the amount of injury and death that is occurring as it’s hard to reintegrate an addict into Society if they are dead.
Then you have to deal with the NIMBY crowd not wanting those services anywhere close to their precious houses and little angels.
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safe supply prevents death in the next 7 days, which is an immediate problem
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programmes to handle the next phases of recovery would be neat, but the father-knows-best bunch keep killing those programmes because they “encourage abuse” or “those people don’t deserve handouts” or whatnot.
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People use/abuse drugs for many reasons, a frequent reason being childhood trauma. The war on drugs has always been a war on the people and an instrument of oppression. Legalize it!
What’s the source for the 42000 claim?
