Much has been said and established about the most recent revival of drug panic in British Columbia as provincial and federal elections loom. Some politicians seem to have even made it their entire identity.
Below is a quick breakdown of five favourite terms the theatre troupe is weaponizing during a public health emergency, which continues to kill six people per day in BC:
- Treatment & recovery
Treatment and recovery can vary incredibly widely and are not regulatory terms – without defining what either is, someone could be referring to private drug treatment sites, opioid agonist therapies, safe supply prescriptions, recovery houses, and/or involuntary detention and the list goes on. Even between these options, there are wide chasms of quality of care, rates of success (if any), autonomy and/or increases in chances of dying. The BC government does not track deaths at drug treatment treatment sites, and Moms Stop the Harm have requested a full investigation into the private treatment industry based on compiled harms their group has anecdotally heard about (full request here); and the Death Review Panel requested similar previously. "Treatment" can be many things, but the word alone does not specify a certain type. - Diversion (i.e., sharing)
Research shows that the sharing and selling of prescribed – the only route to any regulated, predictable supply in BC – substances has had a positive impact for those trying to avoid or reduce use of the unregulated, poisoned supply.
Use of diverted pharmaceutical opioids associated with reduced risk of fentanyl exposure in Vancouver in Drug & Alcohol Dependence
People need them or else they're going to take fentanyl and die in Social Science & Medicine
The impact of an unsanctioned compassion club on non-fatal overdose in International Journal of Drug Policy
Sharing or re-selling prescriptions is often a form of mutual aid or basic reciprocity between people or groups. As waitlists for physicians and primary access grow, this will likely continue to be one of the only ways some people can gain access to regulated substances – unless BC follows the recommendation of its own 2023 Death Review Panel to create and scale up non-prescriber access to substances to "urgently reduce the number of people dying." People share many different types of medicine, drugs, substances and always have. - Organized crime
While politicians and some addiction medicine physicians have tried to make it sound like there is a big, coordinated criminal network behind re-distribution of prescription hydromorphone, organized crime is generally defined by the RCMP and other international bodies as any criminal activity involving three or more people, and colloquially can probably mean anything. Since drug use and possession can be a crime on its own, the stretch to 'organized crime' is nondescript. It tends to be those participating in sharing with their community or selling for subsistence that are targeted. - Addiction
The label of "substance abuse," which had already replaced addiction as it was potentially too "pejorative," was removed from even the (widely criticized) DSM-5 more than 10 years ago. Both terms lacked clinical/diagnostic validity. The newer "substance use disorder" (SUD) relies just as much on social and interpersonal 'symptoms' as it does medical ones. Politicians have put energy into conflating the toxic drug supply emergency with addiction, even though less than half of the people who have died in BC would meet criteria for a SUD if they could access healthcare, and up until 2018, only 35% of people who died from drug toxicity in BC had such a diagnosis according to official government statistics. The crisis is that the supply is contaminated and needs to be undercut and regulated.
Elaine Hyshka outlined the crux of this recently in the St. Albert Gazette: “Addiction is kind of a colloquial term that we use to describe when people have problems with drugs and alcohol, but substance use disorder is the formal clinical term." - Drug user
The conflation of addiction and the toxic drug supply crisis by some politicians, media and researchers has also worked to reduce the parameters of what a "drug user" is. In reality, the BC Coroner estimates (conservatively, in my opinion) that 5% of the adult population accesses BC's illicit drug market across the spectrum of occasionally to regularly. This doesn't include people who rely only on regulated drugs and alcohol. Drug users are a diverse group of people – and we are all at risk of overdose, death and cruel and unnecessary carceral punishment under current drug laws.