For someone who recently re-tweeted a reprehensible column that demonized and vilified drug addicts as zombies and criminals, Alberta’s premier has a lot of gall to talk a big game about needing to destigmatize mental health.
In a pre-prepared, sanitized press statement to attempt to portray a shred of decency and humanity, Jason Kenney said, “Few things in life are as universally relatable as mental illness — one in five of us will face it at some point — and yet few things are harder to talk about. Shame begets stigma, and stigma begets silence. So this quiet crisis continues, claiming lives and devastating families.”
But this is coming from the same man who denigrates and condemns “NDP drug sites,” in a derisive reference to safe consumption facilities that have irrefutably proven to be a successful part of a harm reduction strategy that saves lives.
Surely the premier is aware that mental illness is a primary factor that drives addiction in the first place. Although not always, substance abuse issues typically stem from a person’s desperate desire to escape trauma. Whether experiences of abuse or neglect endured as a child, or perhaps even a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, there are any number of devastating life events that lead some people to seek out a way to escape, or at least numb, the pain. It’s been said trauma is the true gateway to drug abuse.
Safe consumption sites are just one part of the equation to reduce harm and confront the opioid crisis head-on.
Is the approach perfect?
No, of course not.
Concerns about crime in the neighbourhoods that are home to such facilities cannot be downplayed or ignored.
But defunding, or even worse, closing down the sites, is not the solution either.
Drug addiction and the spinoff societal ills associated with it are not just going to magically disappear in the absence of safe consumption sites.
Instead, the problem would simply be exacerbated, spread out and swept back under the rug into back alleys, where vulnerable people who most need help would suffer in silence without the help they need.
Just like we cannot ignore the bad that comes with safe consumption sites, we cannot overlook the good either. These facilities, staffed by people who are the living embodiment of empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings, are credited with saving the lives of thousands of Albertans — sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, friends.
And through having access to this kind of resource, addicts are much more likely to embark on a path to recovery. Without that avenue available to them, addicts are far more prone to further succumbing to isolation as well as despair, and all too often, inevitably death.
“With your help,” claims the premier from atop his pretentious soapbox, “we can change the conversation. We can end the stigma. We can contribute to a culture where every person in our province knows they never have to be ashamed or suffer in silence.”
Maybe the premier can put his money where his mouth is and cease his efforts to stigmatize safe consumptions sites as incubators of criminal miscreants that society should sweep away and forget about.
Simon Ducatel is the editor of the Sundre Round Up.
