1. Safe Supply Saves Lives: a look beyond the deadly war on drugs
December 12, 2022
Over 108,000 people died in the US last year from a drug overdose. British Columbia’s coroner data puts the sheer scale of the North American illicit drug overdose crisis into perspective: beginning around 2015, illicit drug deaths began towering over every other unnatural cause of death, including motor […]
2. Criminal Justice System Doubles Down on the War on Drugs
December 12, 2022
US States have predictably responded to worsening drug supply with the same “tough on crime” drug war approach as decades past. Colorado’s Democrat-majority legislature passed HB22-1326 this spring, setting the felony line for simple possession of fentanyl […]
3. The Under-Prescribing Crisis Tormenting Chronic Pain Patients
December 12, 2022
For many chronic pain patients, the result of a singular regulatory focus on reducing prescribing has been tragic. Amanda Votta has had rheumatoid arthritis for over 30 years, and the debilitating pain of bone grinding is only […]
4. Defining Substance Use Disorder and Addiction Remission
Twelve Step Programs reverberate the line from AA’s 1975 Living Sober handbook that addiction “is an incurable, progressive, fatal disease” treated only by ongoing spiritual transformation and abstaining from all mind-altering substances (except caffeine and nicotine). In […]
5. What is Drug Treatment? Science-Resistant Industry and Courts vs. Best Clinical Practices
December 16, 2022
Having ostensibly moved away from mass incarceration for simple use, politicians laud “addiction treatment” as the silver-bullet solution for chronic pain patients, unsheltered homelessness, and the overdose crisis alike, but they don’t typically define what methods of […]
6. Heroin-Assisted Treatment, Harm Reduction, and the History of Safe Supply
December 24, 2022
An apt comparison to a safe supply of substances is legal alcohol and its own history of prohibition. Since 1933, people with alcohol use disorder have had access to a regulated and labeled supply so that they know the exact dose they’re consuming. They won’t die from the possibility of random amounts of methanol ending up in their product, […]
7. Reducing Harm is the Right’s New Culture War Target
January 11, 2023
Harm reduction programs have become a target of right-wing “culture war” attacks that paint “big city liberals” as enabling drug use. In West Coast cities, residents and local politicians often see the overdose crisis as intertwined and exclusive to the housing crisis. Local media coverage paints that picture in pieces like “Seattle is Dying,” using poverty porn to call for mass incarceration of unsheltered people. […]