Thread by @kwardvancouver

Thanks for the call @bctoday appreciate the time to talk about the @BCCSU report on "Strategies to Strengthen the Recovery System in BC." An overall review is long overdue, given the situation - #overdose #bcpoli #harmreduction

https://twitter.com/kwardvancouver/status/1019669585413300225

and there is much to be encouraged by in the report. Dr. Wood states clearly that recovery is a process, by definition long-term, so more is needed beyond harm reduction and acute care. bccsu.ca/news-release/n…

This is the bit that troubles me. I read the report closely and remember seeing a very early version of it well over a year ago. It's about "Therapeutic Communities":

"Corrections-based," means prison, in this case a secure environment that you get taken to unwillingly, to be clear. This may be of benefit to

so that is what i object to, because that's me and my neighbours #DTES

pulling people out, unwillingly, from their homes and whatever lives we are leading, however disordered, into a "correction-based therapeutic community" for wraparound care says - no matter how well-intentioned the individuals involved are - that

problematic, illicit substance users shouldn't be part of society. that people visibly, publicly suffering, will not be tolerated, and through a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand suggests that this be a policy consideration: "Therapeutic Communities"

https://twitter.com/CitizenYan/status/1019401493068173313

And this is precisely the problem. Deciding, through #WarOnDrugs il-logic, that some people can be helped, and get choices and some extra guidance and the dignity of making choices among many possible futures - while those of us visibily suffering, self-medicating in public

must needs be cordoned off, removed from the category of human, for our safety & everyone else's too. End the epidemic. Isolate the infecteds. We'll kill each other eventually, crisis solved. Maybe there will be An Offical Apology in a generation or 2, a new park. A Memorial Park

After all, that's precisely why over 4000 people died as a result of using illicit substances in 2017, in canada. Unfathomable loss, universes lost.
So if that, given the scale of this disaster, is what is offered to policy makers as

of course I reject it. Rather treat me as human, understand that my choices and hopes, as I stammer to articulate, may be unusual and unlike your own, but no less real, at least not less real than I am.

Substance use isn't itself the problem - for an individual, it's the solution to the problem... but a potentially lethal solution at this place & time. It has become so as the result of a century of criminalization.

Respect, dignified choices about work, education, counselling, medication, the opening-up of possible futures - as a human in human society. I am you, because this is about all of us really, you want to #StopThisCrysis?

Homes, decent incomes, friends, for all of us and everyone too. If the starting point is #harmreduction - we seriously! must "expand our concept of harm" (@johannhari101 @tlupick)

because this is why we die
and we must stop harming each other like this

oh forgot to unroll @threadreaderapp