Gregory Sword fights back tears during his testimony at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health meeting ‘Opioid Epidemic and Toxic Drug Crisis in Canada’ on Sept. 24. (Screenshot/House of Commons)

By Alexandra Keeler

In a House committee meeting Tuesday, grieving father Gregory Sword provided a poignant account of the problems with safer supply

In a poignant testimony that laid bare the devastating toll of Canada’s opioid crisis, Gregory Sword, father of a 14-year-old overdose victim, urged the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health to confront the failures of safer supply programs.

Despite the emotional weight of his story, neither Liberal nor NDP committee members asked Sword any questions during the 2.5-hour session, choosing instead to engage with the expert witnesses.

“I had to sit there and watch my daughter commit suicide for a year without being able to help her,” Sword said during the committee’s Sept. 24 meeting.

His daughter, Kamilah, died from an overdose in August 2022. Sword is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the B.C. and federal governments for alleged negligence related to safer supply programs.

Since November, the House of Commons committee has been studying Canada’s opioid epidemic. The committee has been focused on the effectiveness of current harm reduction strategies, including controversial safer supply programs.

Proponents argue safer supply offers a regulated, pharmaceutical-grade alternative to toxic street drugs, which can prevent overdoses and connect individuals with addiction to treatment. Critics say such programs fail to address the root causes of addiction and potentially increase drug use and diversion.

The meeting underscored the ongoing tension between supporters and critics of these programs.

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‘One click’

In his testimony, Sword discussed how easy access to safe supply drugs — such as Dilaudid, or “dillies” — contributed to his daughter’s addiction and eventual death.

“The ease that she was able to get safe supply was just one click on Snapchat, and she would be able to get any drugs she wanted within five minutes,” he said.

Sword, who travelled from his home in Port Coquitlam, B.C., at his own expense to attend the meeting, shared the challenges he faced watching his daughter cycle between overdoses and hospitalizations for two years.

He expressed frustration with mental health professionals who quickly discharged Kamilah, and with drug counselors who insisted it was not possible to intervene because Kamilah was not explicitly asking for help.

He explained that the lack of action following his daughter’s death put her friends at risk. Several have overdosed multiple times since Kamilah’s death. He is also frustrated by the lack of funding for treatment, pointing out that one friend had to wait more than a month to secure a rehab bed after seeking help.

“Even after [Kamilah] died, [drug dealers] were still messaging her cellphone,” said Sword, in response to a question from Laila Goodridge, the Conservative MP who invited Sword to attend the meeting. “My friend had access to her Snapchat account, and they were still asking if she’d need any dillies.”

Other witnesses also emphasized the negative impact recent drug policies have had on youth.

Dr. Patricia Conrod, a clinical psychologist from Université de Montréal, highlighted the need for evidence-based prevention programs. She noted that safer supply initiatives have increased youth access to potent opioids, and stressed the importance of providing services such as therapy and counselling alongside harm reduction.

Conrod also pointed to social media as a youth drug-use enabler.

“Using social media impacts your cognitive development and makes a young person more disinhibited and impulsive, and it contributes to ADHD symptoms,” she said. “We know that all three of those behavioural profiles and symptoms place a person at much higher risk for early onset substance misuse.”

Dr. Patricia Conrod fields questions virtually during the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health meeting ‘Opioid Epidemic and Toxic Drug Crisis in Canada’ on Sept. 24. (Screenshot/House of Commons)

Dr. Martyn Judson, an addiction specialist from London, Ont., criticized safe supply clinics for inadequate oversight, leading to opioid diversion. “The perpetuation of a supply of opioids is … perpetuating the addiction. It’s not doing anything to change the lifestyle of the individual.”

He condemned excessive doses and lack of witnessed dosing as “unconscionable” and “tantamount to negligence.”

After the session, Sword expressed his frustration about the lack of questions from Liberal and NDP committee members.

“I have no problems with the experts talking, but ask me some questions, and I probably could give you a better answer than the experts on how that really affects parents and their kids,” he said.

“I hope this opens up their eyes to realize that there needs to be accountability for their decisions,” said Sword.

“They can’t just be like, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this and it doesn’t affect us’ because there’s no face. Now they can put my daughter’s face to their decisions.”

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This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

More than 20 state attorneys general are banding together to warn the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that it could face legal action if it continues to promote surgical and chemical “transitioning” of gender-confused minors, Idaho’s top law enforcement official Raul Labrador announced Tuesday.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, the AAP sides firmly with LGBT activists on how to approach children suffering from gender dysphoria, endorsing the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical transformation of developing bodies, going so far as to accuse states that deny minors so-called “gender-affirming care” of “state-sanctioned medical neglect and emotional abuse.”

AAP’s position is based on “evidence free standards,” the Idaho Attorney General’s Office contends, the “most concerning” of which is its claim that the “use of puberty blockers on children is safe and reversible. This assertion is not grounded in evidence and therefore may run afoul of consumer protection laws in most states.”

“When used to suppress hormones below normal ranges during or before puberty, puberty blockers: (1) may interfere with neurocognitive development; (2) compromise bone density and may negatively affect metabolic health and weight; and (3) block normal pubertal experience and experimentation,” reads the coalition’s letter to outgoing AAP president Benjamin Hoffman and his incoming successor Susan Kressley. “And when puberty blocker use is followed directly by cross-sex hormone use, which is often the case, infertility and sterility is a known consequence, at least for those who began puberty blockers in early puberty.”

“Telling parents and children that puberty blockers are ‘reversible’ at the very least conveys assurance that no permanent harm or change will occur. But that claim cannot be made in the face of the unstudied and ‘novel’ use of puberty blockers” for gender dysphoria, it continues. “It is even less defensible now that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and its standards of care—the AAP’s apparent cornerstone source—have been exposed as unreliable and influenced by improper pressures,” referring to revelations earlier this year that Biden administration officials pressured WPATH to remove age limits.

The attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia, as well as the Arizona Legislature, went on to threaten legal consequences for AAP if it does not reverse course.

“Idaho law, for example, prohibits ‘[e]ngaging in any act or practice that is otherwise misleading, false, or deceptive to the consumer,’” the letter says. “Most other states likewise prohibit making statements to consumers that are false, misleading, or deceptive. Each of us takes our responsibility to protect consumers in our states very seriously.”

The AAP has until October 18 to answer a series of information requests about its decision-making process on the subject.

“It is shameful the most basic tenet of medicine – do no harm – has been abandoned by professional associations when politically pressured,” Labrador said. “These organizations are sacrificing the health and well-being of children with medically unproven [procedures] that leave a wake of permanent damage […] Parents should be able to trust that a doctor’s medical guidance isn’t just the latest talking point from a dangerous and discredited activist agenda.”

A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

Studies find that more than 80% of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”

“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”