Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Bumface
I think it's a cop out to say "we're different, that won't work here".
In Alberta, a First Nations person is 18% more likely to die from a Fentanyl overdose. While that's awful, and it's own problem to be solved, we're talking 6.5% of the population facing a disproportionate part of the problem.
In absolute numbers, if the policy only works for European whities for some arbitrary reason, we'd still be stopping a massive amount of loss of life, and the many many knock-on effects.
Why not try and find out if it works here instead of dithering on about how we need to somehow be innovators in the world of ending overdose deaths?
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I am not saying it won't work, I am saying it's results will be different, in the same way drug policy applied to Vancouver will have different results in Kerrisdale or Kits than it does on the DTES, what drives people to drugs and keeps them using is pain, a history of abuse and neglect, lack of opportunity and (ironically) social acceptance amongst your peer group.
If you have grown up in a native community with a history of generational abuse and poverty and drug and alcohol abuse, residential schools etc your level of pain and your utter lack of opportunity is ten twenty times that of middle class white folks in Portugal or Switzerland or Vancouver, it has nothing to with race, I can create just as effed up a group of white folks given a 100 to 200 years of abuse and oppression, the closest we have to that in my experience would be the poorer areas of Scotland and Ireland where they have grim levels of addiction and overdose