There are many reasons British Columbia is continuing to see record levels of drug addiction and overdoses in our province, from poorly secured and inspected ports of entry to a lack of recovery and detox beds to the provision of addictive drugs for free to citizens as young as twelve years of age to tying the hands of law enforcement through our failed decriminalization experiment. One of the reasons we keep making bad decisions is the way radical activist propagandists have distorted our language about this issue, inhibiting our ability to accurately describe the problems we face.
Activist academics and civil servants are masters of Orwellian language games, constantly changing terminology on the grounds that plain language offends or “stigmatizes” a group of people. But let’s stop there for a moment. What is stigma? Stigma is social disapproval. But apparently, it is wrong to stigmatize being a drug addict. So, our education and healthcare systems want our kids to know that being addicted to drugs is no better or worse than not being addicted to drugs, that communities of people that are based around smoking crack are just as good as communities based around fly fishing or ballroom dancing.
Any recovered addict and most current addicts will tell you this is nonsense, that standing bent-double in the street in urine-soaked garments in semi-conscious state from fentanyl is less good other activities, like playing backgammon or doing a crossword puzzle; perhaps it is even bad. Of course, there should be social disapproval associated with drug addiction. How could there not be in a healthy society in which people, especially, children, need to be educated about the dangers of certain life paths?
Next, we come to the term “toxic drug crisis” which is entwined with the term “safe supply.” Both of these terms distort our thinking about this crisis and lead to bad policies, bad decisions and bad outcomes. Here our activist academics and managers in the caring professions have borrowed a type of rhetorical sleight of hand from another industry.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, there really was a reason use the term “clean coal.” Impurities in coal and byproducts from burning it produced acid rain, a major environmental problem in the Great Lakes, East Coast and Europe. So, new technologies were developed; new laws were passed; and new kinds of smokestacks were created that cleaned sulphur, nitrogen and other acidic impurities from emissions. Today, the Great Lakes continue to recover, with growing populations of marine life. Clean coal was a success!
But in the twenty-first century, the term “clean coal” was resurrected for a much less salutary purpose. It has been suggested that “clean coal” can help to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with the Greenhouse Effect i.e. global warming. This is most irresponsible. The whole point of cleaning impurities from coal-fired emissions is that the only emission, after cleaning, is carbon dioxide. The great technological achievement of clean coal is to remove impurities so that global warming gases are emitted at a greater density, ideally 100%.
The terms “toxic drug crisis” and “safe supply” employ the same illogic. No one overdoses because of impurities in their heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, etc. They overdose from the active ingredient. Getting impurities out of these drugs does not reduce their addictiveness or deadliness. In fact, delivering a purer, less adulterated drug makes it more addictive, more dangerous, more deadly.
But by framing the problem with our street drugs as their lack of purity rather than their active ingredient, an undue and wholly inappropriate legitimacy is conferred on the idea that helping addicts get purer drugs will reduce addiction and overdoses. There is no “toxic drug crisis,” there is a simple “drug crisis.” The problem is the drugs not the adulterants they are cut with. And the idea that drugs can be made safe by being made purer is ludicrous when we remember that it is the drugs themselves that are the problem. People overdose on heroin and cocaine not the talcum powder, baking powder or crushed aspirin used to adulterate and stretch those drugs. And nobody becomes talc addict as a result. While the adulterants can cause serious long-term health problems, they cannot produce ODs.
And then there is a problem not just with the “safe” in “safe supply,” but the “supply” too. As any first year economics student knows, there is something known as the Law of Supply and Demand. It is a simple set of laws on which all economics is based. Foundational to it is this simple truth: all other things being equal, if you increase the supply of something in a market and do nothing else, the following will happen: prices, across the board, will fall and the total amount of the good that people consume will increase.
Safe supply drugs don’t push other opiates out of the market. They cause their vendors to lower their prices due to increased competition. And that means drug users can afford more drugs. If they are already taking “safe supply” drugs, they can supplement them with more affordable illicit drugs. Even if they are not, prices for the drugs they buy will fall, not just due to diversion and resale but because drugs, overall, are cheaper and more plentiful. The overall supply of drugs, is not getting safer, just bigger and more diverse.
And a province with minimum drink pricing legislation in force at liquor stores and bars, with punitive cigarette pricing, already knows that keeping drug prices up is a proven and vitally important public health tool.
We need to get back to proven tools with successful track records to get this crisis under control and to do that, we need to drop our misleading, propagandistic language and have a real conversation in which we speak bluntly and honestly. We owe the victims of this crisis nothing less.
