Slurs and Insults - Keeping the BC Drug Crisis Festering

Insults Don't Work

Slurs and Insults - Keeping the BC Drug Crisis Festering

So many of us are trapped on a merry-go-round of anger, frustration, and sadness when it comes to the drug crisis in British Columbia. People in the general public see someone openly using in public or catch glimpses of the fallout like petty crime or discarded needles, and ask, what’s going on? Raw emotions flare up. It's understandable to be fed up with the situation. If you love someone with mental health or substance disorders, the whole mess is even more concerning. Then there are those families who have lost someone to this crisis ----- words fail to even imagine their feelings.

But Here's The Hard Truth: Many of us are concentrating solely on those surface-level feelings. That results in being driven by the symptoms, missing the gaping wound that's causing this epidemic to fester in the first place. Lashing out at the highly visible "person with substance disorders" or calling for harsher crackdowns might make us feel a temporary cathartic release, but it does precious little to staunch the actual bloodletting.

Them or Us Doesn't Work: The people we're tempted to dehumanize when we use terms like "junkies" are human beings - often deeply loved by family and friends who've been powerless to stop their freefall into addiction's abyss. They're our community members suffering from the brain disorder of substance use and mental health challenges through no moral failure of their own.

In an ideal society, we'd never treat them as criminals or parasites, but as folks deserving of evidence-based care (proven science) and compassion to facilitate their recovery. Not opinions.

With the recent decriminalization of personal possession in BC, drug use has simply been destigmatized so that it can be the health issue it is, best tackled through health treatment and harm reduction approaches. Finally, we were on the right track! That's all gone up in smoke with the BC Government's announcement on April 26th to recriminalize using substances in public.

We get it. Many people want to make certain places off-limits because we haven't yet come to terms with our previous biases around substance use. It took more than forty years after the repeal of prohibition for people to accept that you could openly drink a beer at a hockey game. We're working through people smoking cannabis in public and it will take time for people to accept other substance use in public. Change is hard for all of us. However, what we have to ask is what is best for preventing overdose deaths? How do we protect people with substance disorders and at the same time satisfy the general public's perceptions?

It's NOT a Free Ride To Do Anything: That's not to absolve anyone from accountability for harmful or criminal behaviour. Those things have to be dealt with appropriately. But we'll never make meaningful progress by going scorched earth on people suffering from health problems or referring to them using stigmatizing terms. We also can’t continue thinking that banishing people who use drugs from the rest of our community like modern-day lepers is a workable solution.

The Real Problem: Structural factors like childhood trauma, mental illness, abject poverty, homelessness, and inadequate access to treatment are the open wounds fueling this seemingly unstoppable catastrophe. As long as we prioritize temporary band-aid solutions over stitching up those deep lacerations, we'll stay stuck on this cycle of outrage and despair.

The damning language we use, like the “J” word, is more than just an insensitive slur - it's a symptom attaching itself to the crisis, making the wound fester more painfully. Those words deepen the self-made quarantine between "us" and "them." They give people the subconscious permission to disregard a person's humanity because we've reduced them to merely their mental health or addiction.

It's A Vicious Paradox: the harsher we stigmatize people who use drugs, the harder it becomes for them to access the supports that could facilitate their actual recovery and reintegration into society. We'd never overtly declare that diabetes or people with heart disease from smoking are morally depraved pariahs, yet we routinely condemn those with the no-less-clinical brain disorder of addiction or mental illness to be subhuman.

Enabling or Injustice: Our communities needn't ignore genuine public safety concerns nor turn a blind eye to criminal behaviour. But there's a civilized middle ground between anything goes and perpetuating injustices that kick human beings while they're down.

By trading demoralizing slurs and insults for respectful language, robustly funding evidence-based care instead of archaic punishment models, and meeting every addict as a human being worthy of a path out of suffering, British Columbia can begin salving its own oozing wound. It'll be an arduous process - but continuing to prioritize anger over compassion has already shown its ineffectiveness.

And dare we say, those inflammatory social media posts aren’t helping one bit. As cathartic as it might feel, they just create more damage and polarize our community. If you really want to change the mess, you have to tell our Provincial Government to stop dicking around, stop piecemealing their actions and step up to timely recovery access and fix the social determinants that are the root causes.

There is No Them, Only We: We're all riding this merry-go-round together, no matter how badly we'd prefer to hop off or push others off, that isn't going to work. The only way to disembark is by harnessing our empathy, not our outrage, as fuel for solutions. The first step is acknowledging that what we define as "the J word" or better yet, (people with substance disorders) are simply the human manifestations of treatable health issues our society has failed to prioritize.

Want to make a real difference today? Resist that whining post on social media and instead write a quick email to your MLA - Don't focus on the symptoms. Instead, tell them to fix the root problems of the toxic drug crisis. That is - Access to timely recovery, and solutions to social determinants, like housing. Demand that they find the middle ground that doesn't force people with substance disorders back into alleyways, behind dumpsters so that we're protecting the sensitivity of the public. All that does is cause more toxic drug deaths. Let's find a model that allows people to know they don't have to be afraid of being identified with their health challenges and satisfies concerns around public use. We could be that smart and empathetic if we try. ... we really could!

To help you out, you can find their email contact information here: https://www.leg.bc.ca/content-committees/Pages/MLA-Contact-Information.aspx