Guest Column: Government propaganda machine targets vulnerable populations

By Medicine Hat News Opinion on January 27, 2020.

There is no doubt that the UCP government has taken issue with supervised consumption services, and more broadly, harm reduction. As far back as March of 2018, Jason Kenney has been quoted claiming that supervised consumption services ‘help addicts inject poison’ seemingly unwilling to learn from over-a-decade of evidence, and the recommendations of public health experts. In true UCP non-comital fashion, Kenney and his two-headed ministerial monster, Jason Luan and Tyler Shandro, have never once said they would cancel these sites-instead we are seeing an increasingly common trend, death-by-panel.

One of the first official acts made by our new government was to pause funding to pending sites; easy targets that have yet to establish themselves. Communities like Calgary East and Medicine Hat continue to manage overdose without a supervised consumption service, and given the current tone of our government, may never get access to these life-saving services. Next came the introduction of the SCS review panel; a group tasked with reviewing the perceived socio-economic impacts of consumption sites, but also asked to ignore the known merits of harm reduction. That’s right, perform a review of the sites, but don’t look at the positive impacts – the rationale was that the panel already knew the merits, so why beat a dead horse?

In the following months, we started to see the propaganda machine in full force – UCP shills like Rick Bell wrote horrific and rhetoric-laden articles referring to clients of these sites as zombies and criminals; an angle meant to elicit fear-based reactions amongst a base that already opposed these sites on the premise of ideology, not evidence. This is not a government that likes or trusts evidence; in fact, the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Jason Luan went as far as questioning the validity of the evidence by suggesting Big Pharma funded the research to promote their agenda. This was no one-off experience, as Luan later suggested on Twitter that naloxone distribution only encouraged overdose. Let that sink in for a moment.

In Alberta, we have begun to see a decrease in opioid-related overdose deaths; the existing supervised consumption services in this province responded to 625 overdoses in a three-month time frame this year alone. To downplay the positive impact of these sites is akin to burying your head in the sand-instead of giving credit where credit is due, the government attributes the 20% decrease in overdose deaths to a deprescribing initiative that hinders physicians from providing access to prescription opioids. In reality, deprescribing and forced tapering has been known to push people to the illicit drug market. You know, that one contaminated with highly toxic fentanyl.

The fate of supervised consumption services remains unknown, says Kenney. The arbitrary and slanted SCS review panel has submitted their recommendations to the government, but no decisions have been announced. These recommendations have not been made public, and given this government’s commitment to “transparency,” you might not want to hold your breath. For those of us who can read between the lines, the future of these sites is looking more and more dire. When your premier is publicly slamming these services, joining forces with conservative troll and Post-media writer Rick Bell, and the minister responsible for this portfolio spends time tweeting rumours and rhetoric, then the path becomes much clearer.

Considering this government’s ability to spin away from the truth, don’t expect anything ceremonious in the death of supervised consumption services. Instead, expect this government to lean on recommendations from a biased panel, while simultaneously shielding their data from the public eye. Expect delays in action until March 31, a convenient time to kill a program as many will have their funding expire shortly thereafter. Expect the usual suspects to be lauding the government’s decision, framing it as a move to protect residents and businesses from the harms of harm reduction; if anything, expect zero accountability for the fallout to come. Make no mistake, these sites save lives, and any cessation or limitation in current services, will result in more preventable deaths.

In a province that continues to see an average of two Albertans die every day at the hands of opioid poisoning, we are on a precipice. We can continue to innovate our approaches while supporting what is working, or we can regress to our pre-crisis strategies. Rest assured, there are lives at stake; while they may not be a part of your immediate social circle, they are somebody’s child. In very short order, we will see which lives hold value to this government, and which are expendable in the name of guillotine-style budget cuts.

Corey Ranger is a harm reduction advocate and former Hatter.

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