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George Skinner's avatar

Every time opioids have become more accessible, it's been accompanied by an addiction crisis. Opium in China, morphine in the 19th century, Bayer heroin in the early 20th century, oxycontin in the late 20th/early 21st century. Diversion of "safe supply" drugs exacerbating existing addiction problems and expanding the number of addicts is depressingly predictable.

It often seems like activists concerned with drug addiction miss the fact that the drug use *is* the problem. The homelessness, disease transmission, overdoses, social dysfunction, and crime all follow from the drug use. The fact that we talk about drug use instead drug *abuse* suggests another way we've lost the plot here: these are pharmacological substances with positive and negative effects. When used for pain management, particularly temporarily, the benefits outweigh the negatives. Using them for recreation or getting high is abusing them. When these drugs don't kill their users quickly with overdoses, any experienced medical professional can tell you stories about all the other nasty consequences that manifest with chronic use. Preventing overdoses with things like safe supply is at best a means of buying time to get people into recovery. If you can't get them into recovery, you're just prolonging the time it takes for drug abuse to kill them.

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Allan Stratton's avatar

Thanks for all your work on this file, Adam. The gaslighting around safer supply is similar to the gaslighting around puberty blockers. Ideological capture makes evidence based decision making next to impossible. Aside from confirmation bias, too many people have invested too much personal credibility to walk back unfounded beliefs. (See also the general unwillingness of politicians and media to correct false claims of mass graves, and of prosecutors to own up to wrongful convictions.)

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