Flood: The Overdose Epidemic in Canada (Full Documentary)

because of funding cuts for salvation army they've now closed the salvation army men's shelter in sudbury that was 35 people the ots was 35 people there was a company here that owned two or three apartment buildings and they filled them up with whoever they could put in it as long as they could show somebody oh it's all full full occupancy they sold them and now the companies that bottom are emptying them out and they're doing it kind of you know a little sneaky they're like there's nowhere to go pay your rent so if you don't pay it you're going to be evicted so the one building they're emptying out 111 people there's nowhere to sleep there's no affordable apartments in this town so we know this year there's going to be camps set up in the bush last year we counted i think 27 camps that's going to seem like a real cakewalk compared to what we're going to face this year this year it's going to be hundreds hundreds of people living in the bush and when i say hundreds of people it's not just you know older guys or or all guys for that matter living in the bush it's i walked in there and seen 15 year olds young girls sleeping on cardboard in the bush and i tried to explain this yesterday to a group at a symposium like some of these people they're like i don't want to hear the scary stuff i don't want to hear about the drugs anymore i said you know what you don't understand what fear is until you're a 15 year old girl and you're sleeping on cardboard tonight in the bush that's scary um the new stuff we're finding now with speed it's um it's really sparkly and the kids think it's cool really cool what it is is the guys making it are crushing tube lights and to find powder and adding it to the speed so they're sparkling but we're getting kids coming into places like the clinic with bleeding noses bleeding throats because their speed has glass in it i get crazy questions like you know don't these guys care their clients are gonna die and stuff they're dealers it's money it's like the people evicting you out of your house it's money um we have a fight here to get an overdose present uh prevention site and it's a struggle and we're honestly thinking if we can get it within the next two years yay how many bodies are we gonna line up before we get it so far this year we went one week seven for seven yeah one a night now when are you gonna start calling it a crisis when is somebody gonna step up and say okay something has to change because we're a small city you know i mean big city in the north 160 000 but small by the time we get the report back of what they really died from nobody cares and one of the girls who died that night actually listed as a heart failure she was 23. 23 years old you don't die from a heart failure i mean i look at our premier and i thought when he came in wow he's gonna there's gonna be a lot more funding he cut the heck out of it and i'm like man your brother like you know how did you not see this how did you not see that but the problem is we get these people in there and this guy is just business we're going to balance everything i think the balance would be if you got somebody in there it was half social worker half businessman said we got to keep things going we got to keep people safe we got to give them what they need but let's do it fiscally responsible which isn't going to happen right it's gonna be a chop chop chop all the way that's just a picture you'll see last friday i had somebody text me that hey there's uh there's a guy in the park memorial park which is a beautiful park we'll go by that on the way back and so you know we're really worried he's gonna walk into traffic he's so high and yeah he was so i got on the phone i sent my outreach team over there our team showed up they called me back said yeah he's high as heck like he's right out of his mind but he's sitting on a bench talking to us right so he's not a problem right now an officer showed up she questioned him for a little bit took everything out of his pockets called the uh called the ambulance called the fire truck took him off to the hospital and we're like okay you didn't have to do that and we wish you didn't but then we um she takes out a bag and it's a blue crystal and she hands it over to two other officers and write as loud as she can she goes take this back to the office but whatever you do don't breathe it don't breathe it we could have played hacky sack with that blue crystal literally we could have played hockey segment until you grind it up cook it in a cooker and shoot it in the arm it's nothing i'm gonna run back i'll you guys wait here i'll be right back what's that you know what buddy i'll just empty the container okay well there's some in here too but that's what i picked up in the last day no okay i'll leave them over there no you don't care okay it's a documentary we had the ambulance here three times last night you hear that hit the ambulance here three times last night for ods that's what he's picked up in the last couple days i won't sugarcoat it canadian lives are being taken at an alarming rate due to fatal overdoses i mean why else would they call it an epidemic well then how come there is in a blinding bright spotlight as hot as the surface of the sun being shined on this issue province to province city to city these are more than just some statistics these are people and their stories are unique these are people's lives these are the grassroots initiatives from across the country the overdose epidemic does not discriminate from major cities to small towns this issue has taken lives ruined families and has flooded our communities [Music] in the flood i was raised by addicts my mother she was an alcoholic the most hardened alcoholic that you you could probably find she tried everything that she could to quit she went to inpatient treatment programs she brought me to aa when she didn't have child care for me she was also a psychiatric nurse so she was um very trauma-informed very loving she knew all the things to say to hide her addiction from me as best as she could my father like was an adulterer and left her that was just too much for her to handle so she completed suicide and that really started me on like a mental health a negative mental health trajectory after uh after she completed suicide i was i was homeless for a while and then my grandparents came and they got me and they brought me back up here to canada to live and to complete high school but i was never given any sort of counseling so as soon as i discovered discovered drugs i i absolutely fell in love with them it filled a void in me that i didn't ever think could be filled and i always say i never met a drug that i didn't like i was doing a lot of nude modeling at the time which brought me into sex work i was using using sex to pay for my addiction my husband and i at the time we were just partying all the time on mdma and then eventually the i wanted the party to stop and my husband at the time he he didn't he didn't want the party to stop so it ended with a huge mental health breakdown and we had to we had to split and i was left with a big hole in my life again like what what what do i do now uh that i'm not using drugs every day i met a group of people with overdose prevention ottawa and they were running an unsanctioned site for for people that were currently in addiction in active addiction um so i just started volunteering there and i started showing up and it might sound ridiculous but being surrounded by people who are actively openly using drugs kept me off of drugs i'm [ __ ] sick of my friends dying and i wish more people would stand up for us since 2016 more than 12 800 canadians lost their lives due to fatal overdoses in 2016 3023 [Music] in 2017 4120 in 2018 4588 between january and march of 2019 1082 lives taken at the hands of an increasingly scary overdose epidemic roger was just about a year a year and a bit old when we went to the big island sun sea palm trees he grew up there the island couch is very easy going you know you go to high school they don't care if you're going if you don't go it's a very lazy fair kind of lifestyle so i'll bring them both back to toronto and get roger back into school and it was two years later that roger came here in 2010 and i would say within such a short period of time a couple of months roger found drugs i was like if you're staying in this home with me you can't take drugs you know say no to drugs that was before i am where i am today to know that addiction is it is a disease it's not something you can just say no to because your mum tells you to roger passed away on june the 13th in may just a month before he called me all excited mom i'm coming over i'm coming over i said oh good and i was out and he said come i'm here i'm here so well i'm almost home and i got home and he said close your eyes close your eyes so i went into the bedroom and closed my eyes and heard all this noise and him and his stranded came and when i came back in this rug was on the floor and he said um it was for mother's day i brought this out because i cherish it so much it says mum thank you so much for being there for me through all my ups and downs i would not still be here if it wasn't for you i hope you like your gift and smile every day when you see it i love you roger and that's that's the carpet and we sat in that car but we you know just i've got pictures of us sitting on the carpet laughing he hit a big heart and he and who would think from that day like weeks later that he would not be with us i will say that the most kind person i spoke to throughout the whole in in the system was the coroner i called the coroner's office left a message and this lovely dr gupta called me back he's so lovely he was a doctor that found roger he could tell me where he found him and how he looked and where he was and he said i didn't i want you to know that he was just sleeping he wouldn't have gone with him he just put his head down and had gone to sleep there was a needle beside him and there was a little bag he was all by himself it was found in the corner of jarvis and came right across the street from moss park but the supervised consumptions i didn't open for a couple more weeks supervised consumption services provide a clean and sterile environment and equipment for people who use drugs in doing so these services prevent fatal overdoses and the spread of disease with overdose deaths on the rise in canada supervised consumption services exist in both an unsanctioned and sanctioned capacity sanctioned services receive exemption from section 56 of the controlled drugs and substances act a federal law that prohibits activities related to controlled substances unsanctioned services are conducted by grassroots movements made up of health care workers activists and people who use drugs taking it upon themselves to offer these services intense in their communities that see frequent overdose deaths so it's almost two years ago that we just decided to set up tents in the park and we showed up here in moss park and we brought you know our tents and our supplies harm reduction supplies naloxone um and we were immediately sort of surrounded by police in this standoff it wasn't a media play we were there to save lives and you know people sleep in this park people live in this park people overdose in this park and there were no services and so we were allowed to stay the police superintendent said it was up to his discretion and he said in what i think is a historic statement that the crisis supersedes the law and he allowed us to stay and so we stayed for 11 months we didn't have supervised injection in toronto before we open so we didn't really have a workforce with this experience certainly we had a lot of people who had vast harm reduction expertise and then in terms of like responding to overdose we really needed to rely on the the community because the people who use substances have been resuscitating their friends in their community for forever and so we deferred to their expertise and and i'm saying that as a nurse who you know resuscitated people in critical care i think the most tangible examples we have of harm reduction are things like seat belts you know we can't prevent car accidents but at least we can be a little bit safer maybe a little more controversial example is condoms but it really is just about reducing the harms and it's the same with harm reduction i think harm reduction as a concept is kind of agnostic about drug use it's like um it's not that drug use is bad or a good thing drug use is a thing that people will continue to do they have done for for years and years and years and centuries and i think harm reduction just says we're going to meet you where you're at in your drug use and try to reduce the harms associated with with substance use by providing sterile harm reduction supplies so that you're not putting yourself at greater risk each time you use we began a process that i helped to lead to get three sites opened here originally before fentanyl was a name that anybody knew it was a difficult conversation to have with people at that time but nevertheless we were making some progress when the epidemic started people's attitudes began to change the sheer human toll of it meant that this wasn't any longer an issue about whether what your personal feelings about drug use might be this was a public health emergency the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetimes harm reduction is not only about preventing overdoses but also reversing overdoses when they happen naloxone is a drug that temporarily stops overdoses by blocking the effects of opioids on the brain markhasi produces two different kinds of naloxone kits and these are the ones that we provide training on to all of our clients and there's a reason why we train on both kinds of kids almost everyone knows about the nasal spray version but the injectable version is also highly effective it's as effective and according to some evidence perhaps requires fewer extra doses to reverse an opioid overdose so this is why we um train on both kinds the first thing we want to establish is really are they responsive like are they truly in a crisis so you're going to approach them and you'll try and stimulate them so shout shake rub their sternum with your knuckles right and and see if they respond if they're not responsive to that then we really want to know are they suffering from an opioid overdose and there are certain hallmark signs and symptoms that we train people to look for so in this case we're dealing with the injectable form so i'm quickly going to show you how that works so you want to put on your nitrile gloves you're going to take one of these safety syringes just peel it open there is a cap on here and in one smooth motion you kind of just remove that cap from the tip you take the tip of the needle and if you're a bit shaky or nervous you can brace one hand against the other to make things more steady then you insert the needle tip there push it all the way in flip it over there are two main sites that i train where we're going to do the injection we're injecting into a muscle not into a vein so the deltoid muscle or the thigh muscle these are the two main targets so replacement kits are also available in ontario for ontario residents at no charge otherwise you can contact us at marchese healthcare or go to get naloxone.ca and there's more information there about how to get replacement kits social exclusion is a theoretical concept a lens through which people look at reality and not reality itself from psas we grew up with to what we've been shown in the media everyone alive today grew up surrounded by deep stigmatization towards people who use drugs from health inequality to discriminatory policies socially excluding those whose reality we don't understand is common practice in our society but the consequences for people who use drugs have proven to be catastrophic and addressing the situation is dire for my husband and i we're both retired lawyers you know i was a beaver cub and girl guide leader for years i'm on the board of mad canada you know i'm what most people would look at as an upstanding member of society and this happened in our family uh you know to one of my children and you know it's not it's not due to his badness or our badness as parents or anything like that so um when you get out and people see wow this happened to that family this could happen in our family that's what breaks down the stigma even health care workers think that you know people are choosing to use drugs people like the goal of doing this work is to make people get off drugs to push abstinence so there's a lot of misconceptions around even what this overdose crisis is like people still call it an opioid crisis and all that um and so i think yeah that's very much feeding into the stigma and it's something that we've all internalized and it very much affects the way that we're able to deliver services so it's very prominent here as in the rest of the country any public service brings change and sometimes stresses to the neighborhood my role then becomes working with the community to figure out how to manage any of those conflicts that might arise as neighborhoods change conflicts emerge and a key part of that i think is getting people past the question about if this should happen to how it should happen so yeah nimbyism like not in my backyard people don't want to believe that these issues are happening in their neighborhoods and when they are faced with the fact that they are happening in their neighborhoods they turn a blind eye to it and a lot of the conversations that i have with people are not these people don't deserve health care or these people deserve a safe space to use they just don't want to see it here unless it's happened to them directly it's like oh well these people have a choice people people can quit using drugs if they want to um you know if it's not somebody's brother father mother you know somebody that like directly affects them then it's they don't tend to care very recently i read in i think it was ctv about a woman who was uh got a petition together in a letter to send to mr ford to say that they don't want um a safe consumption and treatment facility in their area because it's bad for business and there's this dichotomizing now with that of what's bad for business and what's good for business death is not about business death is something else becoming brain injured isn't about business having endocarditis is not about business having a compartment syndrome and massive abscesses and hiv and hep c and being beaten up on the street that's not about business so i think it's a very powerful framing this continual talking about what's good for business this is about marginalization impoverishment um it's about a whole bunch of other stuff that happens when this focus stays over here narrow focus on business property values in the downtown core are a super big issue you know people they they move to ottawa the capital of canada and then they get a condo in the downtown core and it's worth a million dollars and then they scream they scream at me in the street when they see us they see us using drugs that that we're an eyesore and that we're we're a zoo and we deserve to die and my rebuttal to them is that you've come to the capital city of our country and you're in the downtown core what do you expect you know addiction and mental illness represents over 10 percent of the burden of disease in canada yet it receives about six and a half percent of the health care budget people say it's discriminate that's stigma it's actually discrimination i mean stigma is just a nice word for discrimination i think health care is great and accessible to people who fit the model of care right so i think a lot of people who use drugs or kind of people who who struggle with with health inequities often get a label of behavioral problems and most of it is actually just related to the way that we expect them to interact with the system so i think when we turn around and kind of look at the system from their perspective we can start to do things differently so that they can achieve care just like us despite the fact that health is a provincial matter the fact that we criminalize drugs in this country comes from our federal drug laws and if we criminalize drugs in this country we're inherently criminalizing people who use drugs so the portuguese model is there's actually two things we want to talk about the portuguese model so the first is one that everybody knows about which is that that back in around 2000 they had a huge problem with heroin like something like one percent of their population was struggling with an addiction to heroin so everybody was affected and they realized they had to take drastic measures and they decided the best thing they could do was to decriminalize possession of drugs for personal use and take the money that would have gone to prosecuting those people and put it into treatment and they have had tremendous success they have low overdose rates they did not see a jump in uh you know addiction in youth or anything like that so there's no question that the portuguese model is a model that i think needs to be replicated everywhere i'm not buying the canadian government's line that canada is different than portugal our people are dying people most affected by fatal overdoses are those between the ages of 30 to 39 years old well there are two things first i really want to be clear that we have regularly people dying every month every day i've been losing my patients who are very young people more and more over the last 10 years we had the first case of an epidemic of overdoses in 2014 in montreal that last you know between may and june 2014 that was the beginning of our situation of overdoses and then it was the first time in quebec that we had kind of a case like that and we start in epidemiology study to understand what was going on and to be able to describe the situation but not only that but we start the plan of prevention from montreal because we find out that we needed to go forward with all you know intervention including naloxone and others you know to respond to this case so in june 2017 we opened two fixed sites and one mobile that one mobile was the first one in north america so it's it's a van that is open during the night and that go east to west in the city in some spots where drug users are in during the night but people can call and say look i need to see you and then if it's possible they go to that person to you know answer their their their needs so it was created like this in montreal because we don't have a concentration like downtown east side in vancouver for example so our population of injectors are a bit more spread around montreal so we really had we needed to go in many places where people were in november 2017 we opened the third six fixed sites so in montreal we have three fixed sites in one mobile and at the beginning when we started um giving out needles and syringes people were saying well if you do do that people will start injecting and they will inject more that was never proven we have all the data saying that no it's like someone who's diabetic if you have you're treating or giving services for people who are diabetic you're going to teach them about diabetes to have a nurse to help them to teach them about how to inject insulin you are going to have a broad spectrum of medication that you can give them and if they fail this medication they can have access to insulin so to me the vision for the supervision of injection is the same is that anywhere you have injectors in quebec or in canada or in the world you should have access to supervised injection according to the canadian association for people who use drugs safe supply refers to a legal and regulated supply of drugs with mind and or body altering properties that traditionally have been accessible only through the illicit drug market due to the toxicity of the unregulated drug supply many front-line workers activists and people who use drugs have called upon policy makers to implement a safe supply in canada safe supply is giving drugs or medication of pharmaceutical quality to people and that use drugs not only in treatment but people on you know that we come in arm reduction organizations in the way to try them not to go on the black market because the black market is a problem right so it's people who think they are taking hydromorphone or airline and it's contaminated with fentanyl in its analog or very potent drugs that their body cannot handle so if we were able to give to people safe supply of drugs that they would know what they're taking these people would not overdose it would lower health inequalities or inequalities and people would be less going to through the justice system they wouldn't have to hide they would wouldn't be seen as bad people doing illegal things so that would rapidly go into a lot of the issues but that's very difficult political commitment but i think we we stride so many things up to now and we see that we cannot get over with the epidemic so i think we need to start to have this conversation and government support for harm reduction varies around the country places like manitoba rely on more grassroots initiatives to deliver sterile harm reduction supplies to people who use drugs project safe audience is a harm reduction initiative that targets high risk behaviors in the rave or after hours music community we started this about two years ago because we noticed there was a significant lack of harm reduction in information that targets the rave community and i was noticing a lot of my community were getting themselves into a lot of situations that could have been prevented with harm reduction practices so we go to a lot of these raves and underground events and warehouse parties to give out condoms lube earplugs safer snorting supplies and we also do on-site drug checking as well as psychedelic crisis intervention for people who may have taken a bit too much to psychedelics and we're feeling a little anxious about the situation they're in some of the boundaries we originally faced was trying to get some of the clubs to take us up on our offer a lot of them felt that by providing harm reduction services at these events they're promoting substance use and we also noticed very similar with a lot of the raves they didn't want us they didn't want us there because they thought they would become affiliated with substance use but what they learned over time is regardless if we are there or not there is going to be substance use at this party so it's safer for them to allow us to work with their population because honestly it's it's not safe not to have these harm reduction services there people take risks and they need a sort of a safety net to help catch them another couple boundaries as well where people just very weirded out about what we were doing so when we first came into the community people were wondering like like i don't want to give you up my drugs i don't want to i want to say that we are using substances so just getting the community to accept us as a resource took a little while so now after about two and a half years of running this program the community has fully accepted us and we can operate at pretty much every single after hours in the city as well as a lot of the rave venues and many of the festivals are now taking us up a lot of the time some of the bigger organizations are a little concerned by us just because they don't want to acknowledge the substance use at their events so they'd rather just turn a blind eye to all this and we're trying to change that a little bit to help protect our population so in manitoba we have a bit of a conservative province so that means harm reduction has been a bit slow on the uptake the population itself very much feels that we shouldn't be supporting people who use substances that they should just be getting addiction streaming when it comes to the sort of the four pillars of drug policy so that's addiction harm reduction policy and prevention manitoba seems to sit with the prevention addiction and enforcement side and they haven't really acknowledged this harm reduction side so a lot of the times when i bring up this idea of harm reduction a lot of these organizations were uh would essentially would ignore this because they don't want to acknowledge that people can use substances safely they they believe that if anyone's using substances that should be stopped and everyone should stop using these substances completely but what time and time again has shown is that that's an impossible goal stopping people from using substances is not something that we're going to be able to do so that's where harm reduction comes in and that's um and that's what i'm trying to do with my organization british columbia remains the most affected by the ongoing overdose epidemic however bc is also the most proactive province in canada when it comes to addressing the crisis since 2016 british columbia has seen over 4 300 overdose deaths a study led by the bc center for disease control estimates that overdose deaths would be 2.5 times higher without access to and rapid scale up of harm reduction and treatment strategies but for those on the front lines this still is not enough british colombia certainly is the leader across canada in terms of progress in terms of rolling out harm reduction in all its forms um in the sub in the lower mainland especially victoria is getting better we need we need more treatment we need more acknowledgement of mental health issues more acknowledgement and treatment and funds going into mental health so that people don't feel the need to start mitigating their pain with drugs in the first place you know victoria is one of the highest impacted townships in the province for overdose deaths in the current overdose crisis and so we're relatively small urban centered compared to somewhere like vancouver but we have a sort of comparable overdose rate there's all kinds of really progressive things on the table they're all harm reduction however people are dying at four plus a day in bc still especially out of the communities out of the larger communities up in the rural areas up north up island here up vancouver island there's struggles in the community with safe with safer supervised consumption sites for any any harm reduction measures there's a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance really around what it is when this was occurring and it seemed like nobody was really paying attention it's always a bit of an uphill battle to bring it to the forefront to grasp the attention to catch the attention of the powers that be uh and to say that this needs to stop right so when this had first occurred people were doing it on their own in the community by the way people sort of set up their own little tent actually in a back alley to try to help and save lives i was a heroin user for over a decade i've been on methadone now for over a decade and uh yeah it's it sucked um i've lost more than 50 friends i myself have have overdosed and and well i'm here so that's good you know but uh it's it's been very difficult and that's as a drug user as an activist um we've had a real difficulty punching through to the government and getting some real change to happen this is my second overdose crisis so for me my knowledge of harm reduction started the last one which was in the 90s and really strong heroin was dropping someone around here every day and people were starting to organize to do something about it mostly as drug users we experience the drug war and and all the criminalization as individuals isolated by ourselves and so a few people started to call for meetings in a park and even i was incredulous like we are unorganizable we're so [ __ ] up right now but we came together people started putting their ideas down and one of the things that people realized was we we need somewhere where people can uh give help a safe injection site in the late 1990s there was a strong call to action by drug users in the city growing in vancouver to offer a safe injection site similar to the services offered in parts of europe in order to address a growing hiv epidemic in 2003 insight was given federal exemption and became the first sanctioned supervised consumption site in north america supervised consumption services are heavily stigmatized in many of the communities in which they reside according to health canada since insight opened in 2003 the federal government has provided exemption to 39 sites across the country however a discriminatory drug policy and backlash from communities remains an area of concern for activists and people who use drugs [Music] i mean the main stigma against drug users is in the law you're a criminal it's illegal so the law is the main way how society decides what behavior is okay who's kind of within the tent of civilization and who's an outcast and so the law says that people like me are are you know the others they're outside and that makes a huge difference to people because when you're criminalized when something you do is illegal it means you've got to be on the down low about it means you're kind of underground so we're often afraid to access health services people use quickly they use a loan they use in in sort of risky circumstances uh sometimes they smash it all at once because they don't have time to try a little first and see if it's okay because you know maybe there's police around so yeah criminalization is that's where the stigma comes from the evidence shows us that with supervised consumption sites crime actually goes down a lot of communities think crime's going to go up because these people come into their community well it's absolutely not true it doesn't bear out in the statistics people meeting people where they're at having the supervised consumption sites in areas where people congregate anyway is the thing to do the nimbyism is is really significant i think the overdose crisis and the fact that our government actually has named it a public health emergency and used the public health emergency has made it harder for people who who disagree to be able to voice an opinion it's pretty hard for people to express their hatred in the face of so many deaths but the hatred is still there i had people actually say things to me at that time as a minister say things to me like what do we care why don't we just put them all in a cage and dump them to the bottom of the ocean i mean people actually said things like that to me and i i just felt like oh my god you're kidding right but some people do feel that way you know others said just put them on an island let them self-destruct like you know and i just thought like we're talking about humans here we're you know it's each other and we we're connected with each other as the human race there's the stigma on illegal drugs and the people who use them make it really hard for for the public and politicians to understand why we would you know soften our approach um or or you know you're it's like in the harm reduction movement you know you're seen as enabling people's drug use which is a crock you're not enabling a drug use you're enabling healthcare safety around them you're enabling engagement you're enabling a lot of good things the drug use is happening anyways and so it's the same thing with uh moving towards regulation you know people like oh uh one one person said to me earlier today uh well what about you you open the floodgates of regulation and more people will become addicted and i said the flood gates are open these drugs are available in 24 7 in any community in canada the transnational highly organized criminal networks ensure a retail product at the street level in every place in the country first off dead people don't detox and imagine if that person is your child is your son or your daughter what would you do what would you do to try to save that life would it not be better to save that life and so that they have a chance for detox right or even if they don't have a chance to manage their addiction and still live a successful life isn't that what we want that we want our children to be safe that we want them to be successful don't we want to give them every opportunity to achieve that because of stigma people use and die alone people hide their use from people they love like danny was in recovery and he had relapsed and he hid that from us had we known that he had relapsed um we could have been there for him we could have helped him we could have could have found him in time you know that that is one thing that i always have to have to live with that you know the way we conducted ourselves as well creates stigma even treatment is stigmatized you know people talk about being clean and sober you know what's the opposite of clean it's dirty you know our kids they weren't dirty stigma does not just exist amongst citizens drug possession and consumption remain a criminal offense enforced by the canadian federal government with an increasingly scary death toll the overdose epidemic is undeniably the worst health crisis canada has seen in a long time because of this there is a growing push for a more sensible drug policy that would require involving people who use drugs in the creation of these policies okay drug policy in canada is it's it's a it's a policy framework that was designed in the early 1900s and it's been in place for uh since then it's originally based on a very punitive approach to people who use drugs in 1929 the sentence for possession or trafficking they didn't differentiate was seven years in prison a thousand dollar fine which was a lot of money in 1929 and whipping was at the discretion of the judge in the 90s there was a harm reduction movement 80s and 90s a harm reduction movement which sort of pushed the limits of the drug policy towards supervised consumption services and sort of a harm reduction area expanded we've really in the last few years come to realize we and i by that i mean everybody who's in the in the file if you will of of harm reduction and policy change how critical it is to have people with lived experience that is people who use drugs people who are in recovery families who are struggling at the table when policy discussions are made i mean if there's anything good to come out of this disaster one of the things is that the governments have understood very clearly that involving people with lived experience and not in a token way but in a major way funding their groups federal governments funding the canadian association of people who use drugs the bc government is funding a network of drug user organizations in british columbia that if you look at if you look at the response in british columbia much of the response is run by peers run by people who use drugs in the overdose prevention services that's who's that's who's on the front line we've got to be there or else whatever they discuss they're going to have all these negative outcomes maybe even unintentional ones that they didn't think of we got to be there to watch that stuff so we see policies get made around here all the time we're not there so we're not able to effectively say that you know policies like you can't communicate or talk help each other in a safe injection site uh policies like they switched the methadone formulation a few years ago here they thought oh it won't make a difference it's made a huge difference you know half of us on methadone are dope sick every day now uh so yeah if you don't put us at the table you're you're gonna get it wrong it's really helpful for people who don't know a lot about this stuff too and to hear the stories of people with lived experience you know they're not all criminals they're not all crazy they're just people trying to get through life like you or i and they have good days and bad days and sometimes they use get more messed up with their substance use and sometimes they don't but but they're the subject of the criminalization policy it's on their shoulders on their heads every day and the worst part of it is now that's where their access is so they have to go out and buy drugs from a dealer they may know or they may not know if the cops have picked up their dealer they have to find another dealer they have no idea whether their supplies any good or not and they live in this it's this barbaric world of of uh risk um that we don't seem to be able to move away from we'll have health authorities or people policy makers saying you know nothing about us without his sort of like spouting these tech things but then still criminalizing the person and then saying but then we want you on radio talking about drugs when we're then we're going to criminalize you the exact same day exact same moment um so there's just there's so many contradictions in including a pure voice or lived experience voice that i think needs to really be grappled with and as people doing working the movement and activism like you know it's really hard work to do that and to be to do it in a way that is safe for everybody and not just safe but that we all benefit from it and now we're in an area in an era where the there are so many overdose deaths in the country that we we see that as a sign that this is the absolute utter catastrophic failure of our drug policy and now is the time to radically transform it into something that actually works is based on principles of public health human rights and decriminalizes people who use drugs and moves towards a legal regulated market and drugs if this were any other policy framework it would have been evaluated years ago it would have been modernized it would have been refreshed and it's resulted in this catastrophic epidemic of deaths it doesn't work as a matter of fact it's it's more harmful than drugs so our drug policy the state of our drug policy in canada is that our drug policy is killing thousands of people and it's more harm than good conservative governments have historically disproved of harm reduction in canada for years the federal government under stephen harper attempted to have insight shut down then federal minister of health tony clements was brought to the bc supreme court where insight was given the go-ahead to keep operating the conservatives immediately appealed the court's decision and the appeal was dismissed in 2010 the federal government applied to the supreme court of canada where it was unanimously ruled that the health minister's efforts to have insight shut down were against the canadian charter of rights and freedoms however with conservative governments forming in provinces around the country many fear that in the 2019 federal election canadians will vote conservative jeopardizing the future of harm reduction in canada i mean we're preparing for the worst which is a conservative-led government we've struggled really hard for the progress we've made with the federal government they at least are aware they at least are working on anti-stigma they at least are are rolling out funds sanctioning supervised consumption sites they're inching forward and we've been fighting this well we've been fighting this for three years um and four years really and and other people for decades uh so to if we lose that it's it's unimaginable but you know it could happen and so we're preparing for that fight to scale back up to where we are now if such if some of the bad things happen it's how i think there's a lot of questions on how do we go from arguing for services because i think there was a long time and here in victoria for 12 years we fought to try to get a safe consumption site and when you get those 11 booths it's pretty disheartening to see that that was 12 years of activism after we were successful in getting the first supervised injection facility insight into play we you know the federal government did try to change all of that under the harper administration and in fact we could not get our authority renewed actually our exemption renewed under the harper government so the community actually had to take the government to court uh in the portland hotel society along with users you know in the community actually took that on and so now uh we've caught the attention of uh some government representatives so there's some effort being made but with that being said though the federal government still refuse to declare a national health emergency i mean i don't know what is it going to take for the federal government to declare national health emergency how many more people would have to die before that happens and the signal to me is that somehow the value of the lives of people who die from an overdose is less than that of any other health crisis and that to me is just plain wrong when you break open that ampoule of narcan you're doing an intervention which is in the last few heartbeats of somebody's life and we need to do things that are way upstream that give people the kind of lives that aren't going to put them in danger of a fatal overdose to begin with and so putting safe injection sites there is important taking them away is irresponsible and and ludicrous and now in this third year of this disastrous epidemic uh that's sweeping canada the overdose crisis are the overdose poisoning crisis um there are now you're seeing calls like the vancouver coastal health report released today that's calling for the creation of a legal regulated market so people can get access to a safe supply of substances the problem is that drug supply is poisonous and we've got to deal with that right at the source so we've got to find a way to get a safe supply of drugs to people or we're going to keep seeing the dying so bc is harm reduction and that's great the deaths would be a lot higher here without the harm reduction methods but if we're going to bring it down if we're going to stop seeing you know someone die in bc four times a day [Music] we've got to go further and so that's the lesson for the rest of canada don't don't go incrementally down the road to a partial implementation of harm reduction bust right through to the safe supply because otherwise you're going to have years and years of people in your province dying and you're going to stack up the corpses and dither while you're doing it it's just really sad that the governments are so uh blinded by ideology that they would pull a life-saving service from a community especially a community really wants one why have we regulated most substances most consumer products are regulated including drugs pharmaceutical products alcohol tobacco and now cannabis why are we not regulating the other drugs we regulate thousands of pharmaceutical products very dangerous ones uh powerful ones that people use every day we regulate them there's a way of accessing them why don't we regulate these other drugs that are killing so many people and trying to minimize the illegal market as much as possible in 2015 the new democratic party was elected in alberta harm reduction methods were ramped up in the province including seven supervised consumption sites in four years however in 2019 the united conservative party under jason kenney formed government leaving the future of harm reduction in alberta uncertain the current situation in alberta is frustrating and it's a little bit scary for those of us in the field we've had recent funding pauses and things are really up in the air right now in the last four years since i was an active user the climate has really changed here for the better like harm reduction came to town in full force the current situation in alberta is still as bad as it is in in bc we we have death rate about almost two people a day dying in alberta our numbers in the last report went down a little which is encouraging because over the last three years we've ramped up a lot of harm reduction measures we have since had an election and we have a new government and they have paused the supervised consumption sites that were already approved and we're ready to open and the other ones are under review well with the ndp being in of course it was like the first time we had a more liberal government in a long time so yeah things started to change really drastically in a good way in 2018 the progressive conservative party of ontario under doug ford was elected shortly after a series of cuts to services such as education the environment and health ensued doug ford also stopped funding several supervised consumption services in the province after speaking to homeowners claiming there are four sites within a kilometer and they don't want them down there in alberta the government under jason kenney has put similar services under review and put a pause on other applicants that are ready to operate [Music] with the conservative government now um people are emboldened to to um you know come to city hall meetings and speak out about their property values um like i said like write petitions because they don't want community services in their neighborhood that they just moved into that those those community services have been there for 20 30 years you know you don't uh check with all the neighbors to make sure that everybody's okay with the fire trucks going past at 2 am you know like are we really um angering people is this inconvenient for you uh because it's an emergency and you just like do what you gotta do and send the fire trucks through or the ambulance through and it should be treated the same way we should just we need these services on an emergent basis and so to expect that everybody's going to be happy when we start to do something different is never going to be really realistic but the expectations are far too high uh and and inappropriate they're the wrong expectations to say you know we're going to weigh out community needs the same as we're going to weigh out people dying it's just not the right analysis seems to be a very tough love approach here you go to treatment and you do what they tell you to do and you clean your life up and it doesn't always work like that yeah the stigma here is is that people are thieves um and that they don't care about themselves in the community and that's wrong they do some examples of stigma in medicine hat um i've heard let them all use the same needles and die they aren't worthy of our tax dollars to help let's use the old arena in the flood zone of the city for the supervised consumption site and next time it floods problem solved perhaps my personal favorite referring to people who use drugs as scab [ __ ] the war on drugs became infamous south of the border in the united states in 1971 when former president richard nixon declared it so as the years progressed the war on drugs raged on with rhetoric being just say no and choose wisely canada looking to our neighbors took similar actions yet the human toll has only increased in early 2019 the life expectancy stopped rising for the first time in four decades as a direct result of overdose deaths has absolutely proven that this war on drugs is not effective it is not working really for anybody involved it's not working from an enforcement from a harm reduction from a treatment addiction kind of standpoint it just it doesn't work so i think that we are at a point where we have to try something different does that look like a safe supply maybe but i think what it does look like is a really a strong in-depth assessment of what is working and there are models around the world that we can look to for guidance and you know just to keep on doing what we're doing because that's what we've always done is not an excuse to to do things differently i've seen what it's like on the front line and on the ground but i've also seen how challenging it can be from an academic perspective or from a policy perspective to be able to continue to move forward to get resources while still not offending people that impact either your employment or other programs lives are at stake and people are dying right now in in medicine hat in in east calgary in those communities where we don't have consumption sites at the moment but i could have them ready to go if they weren't blocked by our government as far as the overdose crisis i mean i think i've lost 40 some people that i've known that were close to me and it's it's exhausting right but we have to keep going so that these numbers don't just keep going up part of what i think harm reduction is is about treating people as humans and meeting them where they're at and allowing them to feel like a human being for whatever interaction i may have with them so that really is my job is to make them feel like they are just as loved and just as worthy as anybody else myself as a harm reduction worker i've not had anybody say anything to me but i know the narrative is that we're enabling people we're enabling people to live essentially traditionally addictions recovery has been thought of as abstaining from all substances however this method of recovery does not work for most harm reduction meets people where they are at in their use and reduces the harms affiliated with it keeping people alive so if and when they are ready to take the next step into recovery someone is there to help and that does not always mean abstinence so i was a iv opiate user for about 10 years during that time i i knew harm reduction was important and i tried to be the person that was looking out for myself and looking out for my friends by accessing clean supplies and information about overdose and what to do if there is one so i really tried to be the peer worker from the beginning my parents split up when i was about 16 and me and my mom moved away to another city and that didn't go very well about six months after that i moved to bank i went to vancouver because my brother and dad were there thinking that i could like live with them but it didn't go as planned i couldn't live with my dad um so i became homeless and got into math for about six months and then i got pimped i got um arrested like very a lot of things happened within about six months i got released out of prison like jetted back here and that's why i had a warrant in bc for so long me and the guy had a kid together we were together for a few years everything was all good and then we split up and then um within like a month after that happened i went from zero to 100 i was like staying up for like two weeks at a time like smoking endless amounts cracks sex work um you know extreme crime then i went got in a high speed chase went to jail for like almost two years got out tried for about a year in treatment you know go back out and kind of that same pattern for on and off for about two three years and then my dad died that was when i found heroin when i was really young i was like went through a lot of early childhood trauma i was sexually abused between the ages of five and six and i had a mother who was mentally ill and a father that was an alcoholic so when i was 13 and i did that first hit it was like i was finally okay i ran with that for so many years the heroine was like that times five thousand heron was amazing like i'm not even i don't i love drugs like they worked very well for me like my dad died i was in extreme pain and heroin was like a warm they call it a warm hug from god or whatever and it seriously was like i felt like relaxed finally you know i've been to more funerals in my life than i've been to weddings and i'm 29 i think i've been to two weddings and i know i've had 27 people in my life personally that i know that have passed away due to addictions or the lifestyle um in 2015 my girlfriend brittany she overdosed on fentanyl in her mother's basement and you would think that would be enough to get me to quit using but i left there and all i wanted to do was get high and i had a total disregard for my own life and i think i was using to die like that was the intent at that time in my life it was just originally it was like a solution like i felt at peace but at that point in time i just just gave up you know you know i used to get high in the bathrooms over here all the time send these benches and um and use fentanyl meth and i come to these same places and i will find someone i'll take them off for lunch and i'll talk to them a little bit about my journey and what brought me to where i am today i know originally i thought recovery was abstinence and i'm learning more and more each day that recovery is connection like this is what harm reduction has done it's empowered me so much it's given me this like demanding of my health care and basic human rights to be taken care of i didn't even i never i never i never used to feel this way i used to cower and think that i was a piece of [ __ ] the the overdose does not discriminate about who you are it doesn't matter who you are where you come from right you could still overdose and some of the people who were overdosing were in fact users for the first time to shift the dial in the opinion of the average canadian so to speak we have to make sure that they really understand that this is a problem that affects all of us in canada and we can turn our back on it and say it won't happen to me because it could and also we can't turn our back and say these people don't matter because they they take drugs people matter you know everybody matters what everyday canadians could do is is talk to your families talk to your friends because we are you we are drug users are everyday canadians we're in your workplace we're in your community or in your church or your mosque we're in your family so we are you um and so understanding that is a big move they can make you could just smile at that person who's living with homelessness and addiction you just smile at them say hello treat them like a human being in that moment maybe that's the smile that helps them elevate their day just a little bit just a little bit better i know for me the hardest thing was feeling like it was me versus them it was the street and using community versus the world and that's why i didn't mind if i stole from people or if i was morally making negative decisions that impacted communities i didn't care at the time because it was i was so segregated from the whole entire world at least that's how it felt for me at that time true harm reduction is to accept people where they are at and not limit their access to anything in that moment at that time i am not my job is not to put hoops up for people to jump through my job is to help them where they're at and so and to help assist them in jumping through the hoops that we insist on continuing to put in front of people or huge high brick walls in front of people um so that they can't access care unless they're willing to do something nothing else is like that in our supposed democracy what we need is politicians and people in power that are willing to stick their necks out and and to take the right action and so not people that are you know not in put like ministers anymore people that are independent now but people that are in positions of power right now like the federal health minister to say yeah people that are people are dying in this country and we need a safe supply of drugs and so the grassroots communities and the activists we can continue doing all our work but ultimately we need solidarity from like the wider general public and to make sure that politicians know this will affect them in the next election so they need to get behind it so the one of the things that i'm always asking is who's in charge and i still ask who is in charge here right um i'd like to know because it's not anybody that's that's the answer to the question and it needs to be somebody so it should be the federal government outside of legalization um and regulation of all drugs and kind of an end to prohibition i think that our wider health care systems need to examine ways to include all people in health care we need to just be able to say you know what as a community we're opening a site they should automatically just give us exemption right then and there until one of these sites is actually open um because it's really it shouldn't be our job as community members to open these sites but we're just doing it because it's our community that we're losing you know if there's one thing our sons would have wanted they would have wanted to live we know that so it's you keep people alive but you go way beyond it you keep them healthier you keep them connected you give people hope and and if and when they're ready to make a change you're there and you can help them but if people don't want to make a change that is okay too you know we have to make sure that people have the access to the best possible health if they're using drugs or not that's why we need access to safe supply write your member of parliament let them know how you feel how important it is to save lives how we could in fact do it push them to action because from where i come from in vancouver east things get done when the people demand it everyone should be calling on their politicians to to do something safe which is just designing a new process designing a new model they don't have to come down on the side of anything but just let's get on with the change i won't sugarcoat it canadian lives are being taken at an alarming rate due to fatal overdoses has the war on drugs proven itself to be a catastrophic failure or has it just revealed itself to be a war on trauma decades of social exclusion criminalization and health inequality has pushed people who use drugs to the fringes of society province to province leaders tout things like just say no choose wisely and not in my backyard from major cities to small towns this epidemic has taken lives ruined families and has flooded our communities

Channel: First Gear Productions

Views: 371,902

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Id: zdNxcRutMmc

Length: 71min 45sec (4305 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020