Addictions
Harm-reduction activists could find common ground with critics if they kept an open mind
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By Rahim Mohamed
The recovery-oriented PROSPER Symposium was protested by harm reduction activists.
A star-studded symposium on recovery-oriented drug policy went off without a hitch in Vancouver on Thursday, despite efforts by several prominent harm-reduction activists to sabotage the event.
Harm-reduction activists oppose the enforcement of criminal laws prohibiting public drug use and the prioritization of treatment and recovery-oriented policies.
Yet, if these activists had attended the symposium rather than undermining it, they likely would have found they agreed with many of the speakers’ points.
The PROSPER symposium — which stands for Policy Roundtable on Substance Prevention, Education, and Recovery — was moved to a new venue after organizers caught wind of credible threats to the event’s security. Audio recordings leaked before the symposium depicted activists brainstorming ways to disrupt the proceedings, including by dyeing fountains red, shouting down speakers and honking horns.
The last-minute venue change didn’t stop a handful of protestors affiliated with the group Moms Stop the Harm from picketing the event. Some held photographs of lost loved ones. Others commented to on-location news crews at various points throughout the day.
Fortunately, the event’s logistical challenges didn’t dissuade three high-profile elected officials — Official Opposition leader and leader of BC United Kevin Falcon, BC Conservative Party leader John Rustad and Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West — from attending the conference.
Even though PROSPER was a success, one can’t help but lament the missed opportunity for the event’s organizers and detractors to come together to find common ground on sensible drug policy.
Speaker after speaker reaffirmed the importance of the 4 Pillars approach to combating drug addiction and dependence. This approach says harm reduction plays an important role in drug policy, but also recognizes the importance of three other pillars: treatment, prevention and enforcement.
No speakers denied the importance of harm reduction; they only said they would like to see a more balanced approach that is recovery-oriented and sees harm reduction as one tool among many.
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One presenter, Dr. Launette Rieb of the University of British Columbia, shared findings from her research on the efficacy of supervised opioid agonist therapy, which involves using medications such as Suboxone to help patients taper their opioid use.
While some harm-reduction activists have been critical of providers of this therapy, many others advocate for its use and want to expand access to it. Why boycott a presentation about this treatment option?
Dr. Pouya Azar, a psychiatrist with Vancouver Coastal Health, had audience members watch snippets from recorded interviews he conducted with opioid-addicted patients. One of the interview subjects told Azar that his mom also used, and noted that taking drugs was one of the few activities they still did together.
These clips underscored the significance of environmental and psychosocial factors in facilitating lasting recovery. This is an idea that harm-reduction activists, at least in theory, also recognize.
The conference placed a strong emphasis on Indigenous perspectives on addiction and recovery. Indigenous leaders shared stories of how addiction had impacted their families and communities.
Harm-reduction activists often emphasize the importance of ensuring Indigenous perspectives are incorporated in treatment approaches. It seems unlikely they would have been offended by these presentations.
“I think many harm-reduction activists are well-intended, hardworking and want the right thing,” said former senior White House drug policy advisor Kevin Sabet and one of the conference’s organizers.
“But they’ve also been led astray by a much smaller group of people who want to dress up radical ideas with sympathetic faces,” he said. “It is in that small band’s group of interest to distort the truth and spread lies about what we are about.”
Sabet and fellow conference organizers have promised to meet with some of the protesters, including parents who lost their children to overdose, at a later point to find areas of agreement.
In the spirit of protecting open discussion, PROSPER also admitted several individuals who work for organizations that were implicated in the leaked audio recordings.
In his closing keynote, Stanford psychology professor Dr. Keith Humphreys expressed cautious optimism about the future of drug policy. He noted that some of the US’ most drug-addled jurisdictions, such as San Francisco and Portland, have recently taken meaningful steps toward sensible drug policies, including ramping up law enforcement in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of drug users.
“I think reality is our friend,” Humphreys said. The past few years have shown that “people who live in an ideological world can recover,” he added, referring to hardline ideological approaches to drug use and other urban issues that have become less popular in recent years.
It’s a shame that some of the people who may have benefited most from Humphreys’ message weren’t in attendance to hear what he had to say. By protesting initiatives like PROSPER, rather than engaging in good-faith dialogue with those who hold different views, these activists are hurting their own cause.
It’s too bad that they’re too blinded by their own ideology to see this.
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Dr. Andrea Sereda addresses Moms Stop the Harm online.
From LifeSiteNews
Dr. Andrea Sereda, an advocate for the safe supply program, had previously denied that kids could get access to the opioids.
A “safe supply” drug advocate has admitted that children probably use drugs diverted from government programs.
During an annual general meeting of Moms Stop the Harm (MSTH), an advocacy group that champions radical harm-reduction policies, Dr. Andrea Sereda, a prominent Canadian advocate for the “safe supply” drug program, revealed that kids are likely using diverted opioids.
“I’m not going to stand up here and say that some kids, some adolescents, are not accessing diverted safe supply and using diverted safe supply,” she declared during the June 1 meeting.
“Kids experiment with everything, and we need to be honest to ourselves that kids probably experiment with diverted safer supply as well,” Sereda continued.
“Safe supply” is a euphemism for government-provided drugs given to addicts under the assumption that a more controlled batch of narcotics reduces the risk of overdose. Critics of the policy argue that giving addicts drugs only enables their behavior, puts the public at risk, disincentivizes recovery from addiction and has not reduced – and sometimes has even increased – overdose deaths when implemented.
Sereda even gave the phenomenon of children using diverted “safe supply drugs” a positive spin, claiming that one parent told her these drugs kept her child alive “longer” than expected.
“I met a parent about a year ago who had lost their child to a fentanyl overdose,” she said. “This parent approached me, and they told me that their child had been using safe supply given them to them by a friend.”
“I thought this parent was going to be angry with me, but that parent told me that that diverted safe supply had kept their child (…) alive longer than the otherwise [they] would have been,” she continued.
Sereda has been a strong advocate for the program and founded Canada’s first safer supply program in 2016 at the London InterCommunity Health Centre (LIHC) in London, Ontario.
Previously, when speaking to Parliament or publicly addressing Canadians, Sereda has denied the possibility of children consuming “safe supply” drugs.
In May 2023, she told the London Free Press that, “Not a single physician critic of safer supply has been able to provide us with an example of medications being sold to children. This seems to be the boogeyman of safer supply. It is silly.”
Similarly, Sereda told the House of Commons health committee in February that there is no evidence that children are taking the “safe supply” drugs.
“Do you agree that it’s possible that diverted opioids are ending up in the hands of people they aren’t prescribed to, or even children? Yes or no?” asked Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Todd Doherty.
”We have no evidence that they (safer supply hydromorphone tablets) are ending up in the hands of children,” Sereda responded.
Later, Conservative MP Laila Goodridge asked the same question, and Sereda answered, “They’re not being sold to kids.”
However, it may be that Sereda tells a different story when she believes she is not being recorded, as her remarks to the meeting seem to suggest.
During the meeting, she congratulated the Drug User Liberation Front’s distribution of “unadulterated crystal meth and cocaine.”
“If physicians could prescribe that, and this is where I’m afraid there’s a mole like on that other Zoom call earlier this week, right? But if physicians could prescribe crystal meth and cocaine, I think we would actually start to get somewhere,” she said, apparently referring to a National Post article, which published secret audio recordings from activists planning to disrupt a recovery-oriented addiction conference in Vancouver.
It is unclear why Sereda would not know the meeting was being recorded; that it would be captured and downloaded to YouTube was made clear in the opening remarks.
Notably, Sereda’s admission comes after the program was deemed such a disaster in British Columbia that the province asked Trudeau recriminalize drugs in public spaces. Nearly two weeks later, the Trudeau government announced it would “immediately” end the province’s drug program.
Beginning in early 2023, Trudeau’s federal policy in effect decriminalized hard drugs on a trial-run basis in British Columbia.
Under the policy, the federal government allowed people within the province to possess up to 2.5 grams of hard drugs without criminal penalty. Selling drugs remained a crime.
Since its implementation, the province’s drug policy has been widely criticized, especially after it was found that the province broke three different drug-related overdose records in the first month the new law was in effect.
The effects of decriminalizing hard drugs in various parts of Canada have been exposed in Aaron Gunn’s recent documentary, Canada is Dying, and in the U.K. Telegraph journalist Steven Edginton’s mini-documentary, Canada’s Woke Nightmare: A Warning to the West.
Gunn says he documents the “general societal chaos and explosion of drug use in every major Canadian city.”
“Overdose deaths are up 1,000 percent in the last 10 years,” he said in his film, adding that “(e)very day in Vancouver four people are randomly attacked.”
Addictions
Trudeau gov’t earmarks over $27 million for ‘safe supply’ drug program linked to overdoses and violence
From LifeSiteNews
The taxpayer money will help fund 22 drug distribution projects in British Columbia and Ontario.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is planning to spend over $27 million on “safe supply” drug programs this year.
This week, Health Canada revealed that the Trudeau government has budgeted over $27 million in funding for “safe supply” drug programs that have been linked to increased violence and overdose deaths across Canada, according to information obtained by Rebel News.
“With regard to planned funding by the government related to ‘safe’ or ‘safer’ supply programs: How much does the government plan on spending on such programs, broken down by department, agency, and initiative in the current fiscal year and in each of the next five fiscal years?” Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Tako Van Popta had questioned in April.
“Safe supply” is the term used to refer to government-prescribed drugs given to addicts under the assumption that a more controlled batch of narcotics reduces the risk of overdose. Critics of the policy argue that giving addicts drugs only enables their behavior, puts the public at risk, disincentivizes recovery from addiction and has not reduced — and sometimes even increased — overdose deaths when implemented.
Three months later, on June 17, the House of Commons revealed that the Trudeau government plans to spend an excess of $27 million to fund 22 drug distribution projects in British Columbia and Ontario.
The two largest recipients of federal funding are in Ontario, with Toronto’s South Riverdale Community Health Centre receiving $2.7 million and Kitchener’s K-W Working Centre for the Unemployed receiving $2.1 million.
In British Columbia, the largest recipient is the AVI Health and Community Services Society SAFER North Island in Campbell River at $2.02 million.
The Trudeau government’s funding for increased drug use comes after the program proved such a disaster in British Columbia that the province recently requested Trudeau recriminalize drugs in public spaces. Nearly two weeks later, the Trudeau government announced it would “immediately” end the province’s drug program.
Beginning in early 2023, Trudeau’s federal policy, in effect, decriminalized hard drugs on a trial-run basis in British Columbia.
Under the policy, the federal government began allowing people within the province to possess up to 2.5 grams of hard drugs without criminal penalty, but selling drugs remained a crime.
Since being implemented, the province’s drug policy has been widely criticized, especially after it was found that the province broke three different drug-related overdose records in the first month the new law was in effect.
The effects of decriminalizing hard drugs in various parts of Canada have been exposed in Aaron Gunn’s recent documentary, Canada is Dying, and in U.K. Telegraph journalist Steven Edginton’s mini-documentary, Canada’s Woke Nightmare: A Warning to the West.
Gunn says he documents the “general societal chaos and explosion of drug use in every major Canadian city.”
“Overdose deaths are up 1,000 percent in the last 10 years,” he said in his film, adding that “(e)very day in Vancouver four people are randomly attacked.”
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Canadian doctor admits gov’t-funded ‘safe supply’ drugs are likely diverted to children
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