To the Editor,
Re: Frontline workers reflect on toll of toxic drug crisis, AV News, March 20, 2024
I want to express my great admiration for the front line workers mentioned in that article as well as all of their colleagues involved in that important work of assisting, supporting and saving the lives of the most vulnerable, vilified, stigmatized citizens in our community.
While I was attending law school at UBC in the early 2000s, I was also a community activist in my Eastside neighbourhood trying to protect street-involved women who were disappearing at the hands of a serial killer.
I saw first hand the horrific, harmful consequences that compassionless stigmatization of unhoused, street-involved people causes those already suffering from trauma, mental illness and the sickness of addiction. At that time, there was a rapidly increasing epidemic of HIV/AIDS and Vancouver had the highest rate of infection in North America. The city was also experiencing a crisis of drug overdose deaths.
So, I wrote two lengthy legal essays for my law courses arguing that the B.C. government had a legal obligation to establish safe drug consumption clinics to protect drug users in the midst of an officially declared public health emergency. Those legal arguments were used in the fight by community activists to establish InSite, North America’s first legal, supervised drug consumption clinic. It is the work I’m most proud of because since InSite was set up in 2003, it has saved the lives of tens of thousands of people who would’ve otherwise died of an overdose.
Today, here in Port Alberni, and across B.C., I see the same kinds of misinformed criticisms of overdose prevention sites and other harm reduction programs that stigmatize our most vulnerable citizens. Such criticisms are largely based on willful ignorance, disinformation and propaganda that politicizes a public health issue. It should surprise no one that Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, is one of the leading disseminators of such disinformation. He served in Stephen Harper’s government when it unsuccessfully attempted to shut down InSite, and it prevented similar supervised clinics from being established across Canada.
To people opposed to harm reduction programs such as Port Alberni’s overdose prevention site, I say: educate yourself on the facts instead of simply parroting the propaganda of Poilievre and other Conservatives of his ilk. To all those working the front lines of this public health emergency, I say: thank you for your humanitarian dedication. Those you serve deserve our compassion, not bigoted hatefulness.
Perry Bulwer,
Port Alberni