A Safe Drug Supply for Safer Communities

Perhaps the most frustrating part of advocating for a safer drug supply is to come up with arguments that can reach people not directly impacted by the tainted street drug supply. Of course if they’d lost a loved one like the brave folks at Moms Stop The Harm, that would be very easy, and they don’t need much persuasion indeed to start advocating for it themselves. But everyone else? It’s difficult to convince them that it could happen to them or someone they love. And then let’s put it bluntly: without loss of generality, people don’t care about other people’s losses.

So unless our advocacy target is to wait until mothers who’ve lost a child to drug overdoses become a leading demographic group, we need to come up with alternative arguments. What do people in general care about? Safer communities. They may not be overly concerned about dying of a fentanyl overdose, but they evidently seem concerned about getting randomly stabbed in broad daylight while walking down Main Street in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, and by increased street gang violence related to the drug trade.

Endemic random violence has often been dismissed as a mental health problem, or a repeat offender problem. Let’s call it what it is: a massive drug poisoning problem. Egregious drug additives are well known to induce altered mental states leading to violence, such as paranoia and psychosis, so there should be little room for debate on this issue. In fact, this is hardly a new line of argument; the lead-crime hypothesis, for example, has long been accepted by political circles and indeed led to drastic policy changes.

A common culprit is bath salts, which is known to trigger excited delirium, and which empirical evidence has linked to waves of random stabbings here in downtown Victoria. Another is THC, which is known to induce hallucinations and paranoia at very large doses; I’ve personally witnessed someone being brought back from an overdose caused by drugs tainted with THC (in addition to fentanyl, of course) only to spring up on his feet and repeatedly punch his buddy first thing after waking up. Furthermore, psychedelics such as psilocybin have become more prevalent as of late, making the behaviour of drug users completely erratic.

And then there’s street gang violence over control of the drug trade, and innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire. As long as there’s money to be made selling illicit drugs, there will be people willing to kill to control the trade, and they don’t care about collateral damage. The only pragmatic remedy to this perpetual and failed war on drugs is to circumvent it with a safe drug supply. The alternative of course is to keep our heads low watching out for stray bullets in necrotising neighbourhoods.

So, don’t you think it’s an easier sell now, to promote solving our drug overdose poisoning problem at the source, thereby solving both random and organised criminality spillovers at the same time? That’s killing three birds with one stone. All it takes is a controlled drug supply that doesn’t kill drug users or unleash the zombie apocalypse onto everyone else. As a bonus, we could even afford to defund the police and spend the resources on helping needy people instead of brutal repression, and that would clean up our streets as well. Personal and community interests may not sound as noble as appealing to compassion, but to put an end to this perpetual and senseless hecatomb I’m willing to use the arguments that do reach people over those that don’t.