In September 2019, the Government of Alberta established a Supervised Consumption Sites Review Committee. The government gave the committee a mandate to study the socio-economic impact of supervised consumption sites in the communities where they were located. The government specifically prevented them from simultaneously reviewing the health care impacts of the sites.
I don’t understand how opponents of the supervised consumption site can say there wasn’t enough consultation prior to the it opening.
The Lethbridge Herald is on a roll this month with all the roasts and letters they’re publishing from people opposed to the local supervised consumption site. I already addressed this week’s roasts, but I thought I’d take a stab at some of the letters.
I wrote my response to the first letter and the second letter earlier this week. Below is my response to the third, which you can read here.
The Lethbridge Herald is on a roll this month with all the roasts and letters they’re publishing from people opposed to the local supervised consumption site. I already addressed this week’s roasts, but I thought I’d take a stab at some of the letters.
I wrote my response to the first letter yesterday. Below is my response to the second, which you can read here.
The Lethbridge Herald is on a roll this month with all the roasts and letters they’re publishing from people opposed to the local supervised consumption site. I already addressed this week’s roasts, but I thought I’d take a stab at some of the letters.
Here’s the first, which you can read here.
I don’t normally do much with the roasts and toasts in the Lethbridge Herald, but there were several today that criticized the local supervised consumption site, so I thought I’d address some of the points they raised.
Last week, Dr. Em Pijl, a researcher at the University of Lethbridge, presented to City Council “Urban Social Issues Study”, a study into the impacts the Lethbridge Supervised Consumption Site has had on the local neighbourhood.
Yesterday, someone wrote a letter to the editor of the Lethbridge Herald. This person is dealing with drug addiction and was providing some insight from that perspective on the benefits of the supervised consumption site, as well as addressing some myths.
Naturally, the online version of the letter received negative feedback, many with the same, tired myths and rhetoric. I thought I’d address some of them here.
I keep seeing people holding up Portugal as the preeminent example of how to respond to the drug crisis. In the last two decades, drug usage among youth has dropped, their STI rate has dropped, their drug-related death rate has dropped, and their treatment rate has gone up.
Those results are certainly better than Canada’s, so it makes sense that Canadians would want to mirror that.
Except, Portugal’s approach doesn’t go far enough.
Drug crime is an issue in Lethbridge.
Dealers sell their drugs in the city. People steal from business, homes, and cars as a way to raise money to buy drugs.
But the only solution we’ve tried is enforcement. It’s not working.
It’s been nearly 50 years since Richard Nixon coined the phrase “war on drugs”. But this so-called war hasn’t really solved anything.
I mean, sure, our prisons are filled with people convicted of drug-related offences. But drug usage is still happening. Drug dealing is still happening. And property and violent crime related to the drug trade is still happening.
We need real solutions that address the underlying causes of drug crime: supply and poverty. Here are 5:
By decriminalizing all drugs and creating a pharmacare programme that would see distribution of those drugs through pharmacies at no cost to the consumer, we’d virtually eliminate drug dealers and improve the quality of the drugs (thereby reducing health risks for the users).
By redirecting enforcement funding (since drugs would no longer be illegal), we could improve prevention and treatment programmes to discourage addiction from even becoming an issue and properly addressing it when it does.
By implementing programmes that reduce or even eliminate poverty, people will no longer have an incentive to commit crime as a way to get money.
Unfortunately, most politicians don’t want to do this because it’s political suicide, and the general public opposes it because it sounds like money.