Charlotte Munro and her mom smiled for a selfie high above the frothy water of Niagara Falls. Amidst a difficult year where Munro endured both opioid withdrawal and a near-deadly infection, the weekend trip should have been a respite. But the getaway quickly turned sour because she was forced to forgo packing one essential item—her medication.

In 2014, after years of opioid use that began with a prescription for a fentanyl patch from her doctor for leg pain caused by necrosis, Munro decided to try methadone, one of the most effective medications in treating opioid addiction. It works by activating the same opioid receptors in the brain as drugs like heroin and fentanyl, except it’s slow-acting. This means that it can prevent withdrawal and reduce drug cravings. However, methadone itself is an opioid and subject to strict regulations in Canada and abroad.

These regulations limit access to take-home doses, forcing many patients to visit a pharmacy or clinic weekly or even daily to be observed while they take their medication. Patients are evaluated for signs of intoxication before they take their dose, watched while they take it, then their mouths are checked to confirm it’s been consumed. The purpose of these restrictions is to ensure methadone is used as prescribed, but the ensuing limitations on movement have caused some to refer to the drug as “liquid handcuffs.”

Daily observed doses shouldn’t render a patient completely tethered to their home pharmacy. Ralf Gerlach co-founded a harm-reduction organization in Münster, Germany just over 30 years ago and found his clients unsure if they could travel after starting methadone treatment. In response he wrote Methadone: Worldwide Travel Guide. He maintains that people should have access to this care wherever they go. “Denying freedom to travel is counterproductive to the goals of treatment,” Gerlach insists. “If doctors feel their patients are not stable enough for take-home dosing, courtesy dosing should be arranged at the place they travel to.” In practice though, courtesy dosing can wreck a two-day vacation to a nearby city.

Munro wasn’t prescribed any take-home doses for her trip, so she and her mom took a detour to a pharmacy near the Falls. Even though her doctor had called ahead and she had her ID and previous dose receipts, Munro’s methadone, which usually came in the form of a small, fruit-flavoured drink, hadn’t been prepared. She had to wait for the pharmacy to empty before being seen to. “I wasn’t given a fair turn in line like most people would get if you’re just going to the pharmacy to pick up a script,” she says. “I felt like a second-class citizen.” In her eight months of taking methadone, that was the only trip Munro attempted to make.

“A change of scenery and feeling like you’re part of society is healthy, it’s needed,” she says. Research shows exposure to new environments—in other words, travel—can boost our happiness. But for those who take methadone, this kind of happiness may not be available.

Tens of thousands of people across the country take methadone to treat opioid addiction. Treatment duration can range from less than a year to decades. While Canada struggles to address an opioid crisis that has killed more than 30, 000 people since 2016, aggravated by a drug supply poisoned with fentanyl and, more recently, benzodiazepines that render naloxone ineffective, methadone treatment for opioid addiction has proven critical—cutting a person’s chance of dying in half.

Although strict restrictions on take-home doses are slowly easing, they continue to impose barriers which may lead to people experiencing interruptions in treatment or discontinuing it altogether. They also limit freedom of movement for those who do take it. The drug is treated differently than many other life-saving medications; retrieving a dose from the pharmacy or methadone clinic is burdensome and can be deeply stigmatizing. What’s more is that research proves that lessening these restrictions is better for patients.

*

The first methadone treatment program in the world was founded in Vancouver in 1959. Residents of the Kitsilano neighbourhood originally set to house the clinic protested its opening and succeeded on the grounds that it would devalue their homes. At the time, two distinct conceptions of addiction treatment were clashing in B.C. Where the criminal model saw addiction as a moral shortcoming and pushed for indefinite compulsory treatment with a goal of abstinence, the medical model vied for voluntary treatment over punishment. The latter’s proponents suggested giving people addicted to heroin controlled levels of the same drug to help stabilize their lives, but this approach was ultimately rejected.

Amidst the discord Dr. Robert Halliday began treating patients for short-term opioid withdrawal with methadone. The drug had been synthesized by German scientists only 20 years prior and its efficacy for treating opioid addiction was mostly unknown at the time. Initially patients were given 12 days of methadone treatment to taper off the illicit opioid they were addicted to, but a few years later the clinic implemented what Halliday called “prolonged withdrawal”—allowing patients to take methadone for as long as they needed.

Both approaches had positive effects, however prolonged withdrawal saw more results, particularly for older patients who had been using drugs longer. Halliday cautioned against using abstinence to measure methadone’s efficacy. In a 1967 study that featured interviews with more than 150 of the clinic’s patients, he wrote that it’s “illogical to equate abstinence with a cure,” and compared methadone treatment for opioid addiction to insulin therapy for diabetes.

Instead, Halliday used factors such as relationships with family, work, a patient’s psychological wellbeing, and whether they developed healthy coping mechanisms to determine the success of methadone treatment.

At the turn of the millennium, professor Benedikt Fischer, a drug policy researcher, published a 40 year history of turbulent methadone policies in Canada. The success of Vancouver’s small-scale methadone treatment program prompted the practice to be widely accepted and 23 methadone programs opened across the country. In the early 1970s the government’s LeDain Commission published a series of reports on the non-medical use of drugs, including opioids, in Canada. It concluded that methadone was an effective treatment for opioid addiction and recommended a heroin substitution program when methadone was not adequate.

At the same time as the LeDain Commission, a special committee was struck to investigate methadone programs after a significant increase in the import of methadone into the country prompted concerns. It found that methadone was responsible for several overdose deaths and the widespread availability of the drug was brought about by private doctors without the knowledge to properly prescribe it. The committee thus recommended methadone guidelines that said it should only be prescribed to those with at least one year of opioid dependence, frequent urine screening for illicit drugs should occur with treatment, written prescriptions for methadone should be prohibited, patients must take the drug under supervision, doctors need authorization from the federal health authority to prescribe it, and any violation of the guidelines would be a criminal offence.

As a result, the number of patients taking methadone in Canada decreased from about 1,700 to about 1,100 in just three years. Over the years restrictions on people addicted to opioids continued—B.C.’s Heroin Treatment Act proposed compulsory treatment of up to three years for opioid addiction. While this was struck down in the province’s Supreme Court, policies restricting access to methadone persisted over the following decades.

In 1995, the federal government abruptly transferred oversight of methadone programs to the provinces. Since then, rules and regulations for methadone treatment, now one of several medications used to treat opioid addiction known under the umbrella term opioid agonist therapy, have developed differently in every province, with services in B.C. and Ontario expanding the most.

However, consistent throughout the country is the concept of contingency management, where people can earn take-home doses through meeting program requirements such as daily attendance at the pharmacy or clinic to receive an observed dose and frequent urine testing to check for prescribed and non-prescribed drugs.

“I was on methadone and suboxone for 18 years. And in that 18 years, I never once earned a take home dose,” says Toronto- based Andrew McLeod.

The restrictions on methadone and suboxone, a similar medication used in opioid agonist therapy, isolated McLeod. Being forced to make daily pharmacy visits means “you’re not engaging in society; instead, you’re kind of observing it,” McLeod says.

His rigid daily appointment made finding work difficult, with one employer never calling back after hearing he would be gone for half the day to visit the methadone clinic. It also affected his ability to spend time with loved ones. For nearly two decades, if McLeod wanted to be with his family at the cottage in Kingston, Ontario, away from his pharmacy, he had to secure heroin or fentanyl or else risk withdrawal, which he describes as excruciating. “It’s probably one of the worst feelings in the world. The withdrawal is what often takes people back.”

“Take the worst flu you’ve ever had,” he says, “then multiply that by 25 or 50. I’ve seen people violently sick.” At that point, McLeod explains, if he could not make it to the clinic in time or there was an error faxing his prescription, he had to find an alternative opioid. “I cannot live in that sickness.”

“One of the most dangerous situations is when someone decides for whatever reason, they want to abruptly stop their opioid agonist therapy,” says Dr. Vincent Lam, an emergency and addictions physician in Toronto. “Sometimes this can happen just because they’re frustrated with the limitations of the program.”

In the agony of withdrawal, patients are more likely to access another source of opioids, and with a lower opioid tolerance, this can be deadly.

*

Alongside take-home doses for people who want them, activists in B.C. and across Canada are fighting for safer supply, meaning access to prescribed medication in lieu of potentially toxic illegal drugs.

In B.C., small pilot programs providing hydromorphone to those who use illegal drugs and are at risk of overdosing were established in 2020. However, the province continues to suffer the consequences of toxic supply with 2,300 people dead due to poisoned drugs in 2022. This year, B.C.’s government decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs, though activists and researchers warn that without an accessible safer supply, this is not enough.

After starting his career as an emergency room physician, Lam yearned for more continuity of care. He began working in addictions medicine and was surprised at the positive impact even a couple of weeks of opioid agonist therapy had on a patient’s wellbeing. Lam explains that addictions medicine has historically been the subject of additional oversight and scrutiny compared to other specialties, and says it’s a field which, in many ways, is stigmatized within the medical community.

Lam recently spearheaded the drafting of new methadone take-home dosing guidelines to make the program more accessible, replacing the former contingency method. These new guidelines are meant to help advise physicians in taking a more patient-centred approach. Instead of sweeping, generalized criteria for take-home doses, doctors are encouraged to look at factors such as whether someone can safely store their medication, a person’s overall stability, and their amount of time on methadone. Abstinence from non- prescribed drugs is no longer required to access take-home doses, although it may affect how many are permitted.

Changes to the guidelines were in part brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce the risk of an outbreak, take-home dose allowances were increased for those who already had them and provided to people who were formerly only permitted observed doses. Researchers found that as a result, in Ontario the risks of treatment discontinuation and opioid-related overdoses were lowered.

A lingering point of concern for those critical of loosening methadone treatment rules is the potential for diversion. That is, methadone being acquired or used by someone it’s not prescribed to. While diversion does occur and improperly stored doses pose a public health risk, studies have shown that the main motivation for diversion is to provide safer drugs for others during an overdose crisis.“People have done it for me. I’ve done it for people who are dope sick. I’ve given them some of my methadone before to help them along so that they don’t have to do something else,” says Garth Mullins. Mullins is a board member of the B.C. Association of People on Opioid Maintenance and host of “Crackdown,” a podcast about drugs run by drug users.

Mullins first encountered harm reduction when he was 19, sleeping in a San Francisco park and using black tar heroin. At the time, syringes were difficult to find in the U.S., needle exchanges were illegal, and HIV was spreading among people who injected drugs. Mullins remembers using bleach in an attempt to sterilize needles and a match striker to sharpen them when they dulled. Then a group came by with buckets and new syringes. “It was a guerilla needle exchange. It was an act of civil disobedience in public health. It touched me and left a mark,” Mullins says.

While he has been taking methadone for more than 20 years and travelled abroad to Portugal with take-home doses during that time, Mullins understands why someone wouldn’t continue treatment. “A lot of people have just had enough. They don’t want any more people monitoring their lives, and want to get back a little bit of that dignity and self-determination…A methadone clinic seems like this weird hybrid between a place of healthcare and a place of punishment,” he says.

Alongside restricted travel, limited or no carries means someone fleeing disaster can’t access a supply of emergency medication. With wildfires burning more of the country every year and floods increasing in frequency and severity, this issue is growing more pressing.

The same restrictions that prevent people taking methadone from traveling are exacerbated for people in need of treatment living in remote regions. While opioid addiction is still prominent in rural areas, geographical barriers mean daily pharmacy access for some is impossible, like for Charlotte Munro, who was often forced to forgo treatment when her town’s pharmacy was closed on Sundays. If she wanted her medicine, she’d have to take a 45-minute cab ride to Stratford. Harsh regulations meant Munro’s access to methadone was precarious, putting her at risk of entering withdrawal. Her doctor was aware she was missing doses on Sundays, but that didn’t change her predicament.

*

Almost a decade since Munro waited for a pharmacy to empty in Niagara Falls, the evidence of medical stigma sits in a box in her hallway. A few months after the weekend trip she became severely ill with endocarditis, an infection of the inner lining of the heart. Munro was turned away from three hospitals in one week. “They weren’t doing the tests, they were just thinking I was trying to get drugs,” she explains. She feels that her methadone prescription sparked bias.

The Friday of that week Munro fell into a coma and was rushed to Stratford General Hospital. She remained unconscious for two weeks and spent months recovering.

Now an activist and full-time student in Indigenous Social Work at Laurentian University, Munro requested her medical records from that period. She intends to go through the large box to understand why she was treated so poorly and present her findings, but hasn’t felt emotionally ready to relive the experience.

Even last year, however, Munro was traumatized by her treatment at the hospital while giving birth to her son. Munro wasn’t given adequate support with breastfeeding, her concerns were dismissed, and her chart noted that she had consumed alcohol during the pregnancy, which she says is untrue. “I’ve been so successful in my recovery… and then I go in there and none of that matters. It’s just what they see on paper. It was probably a flagged file,” she says. “I feel like it robbed me of certain things that I should have been enjoying with my son,” Munro recounts. “I was basically being looked at like an unfit parent.”

Both Munro and Andrew McLeod are co-authors on the new set of methadone take-home dosing guidelines, offering their perspectives for a more human- centred approach. McLeod is now a social service worker and addictions counsellor.

“Addiction, it’s got a lot of pieces to it. It’s not just as simple as changing carries and everything will get better,” McLeod says. Three-and-a-half years ago, he tapered off of methadone by slowly decreasing his dosage. The process was physically arduous as he endured some withdrawal, but he’s experienced new freedom. “Instead of having to make my way to this pharmacy, I could get up in the morning and I could go to work, or I could go to school. I was able to go visit my mom and my kids. I was able to go to college,” says Mcleod. Last summer, he went to B.C. for his first vacation in over 20 years, which he says is sad.

Alongside changes to how methadone is prescribed, McLeod believes that housing, access to education, jobs, especially for those with criminal convictions, and support to help families affected by addiction are all equally as important. Without housing, family, and employment opportunities, McLeod believes many will look at methadone treatment and think “what’s the point?”

However, the truth about the treatment of opioid addiction in Canada has been clear for more than 60 years. Abstinence- based, compulsory, and punitive programs are often ineffective. Yet echoes of these regressive policies remain and fester in strict contingency management, lack of patient-centred care, and a continued resistance to implementing harm-reduction from officials at all levels of government.

*

Accessible opioid agonist therapy is a matter of life and death. While new person-centred and evidence-based methadone take-home guidelines and the decriminalization of small amounts of drug possession in B.C. are steps forward, the restrictions to travel Charlotte Munro faced nine years ago are still a reality to many across the country. The stakes could not be higher. An average of 20 people per day died of opioid-related overdoses in 2022. Safer supply programs that would provide people with unpoisoned drugs are difficult to access and although smoking is now involved in most overdose deaths in B.C., inhaled drugs are only permitted in a handful of safe consumption sites across the country. Ensuring freedom of movement for those who take methadone as well as improving access to this life-saving drug is critical.

An ocean away from Munro and McLeod, Gerlach still monitors drug policy in North America. Set to retire from his organization this year, Gerlach plans to continue updating the guide, now called Substitution: World Travel Guide, to include other opioid agonist therapy medications like suboxone. Poring over almost 200 sets of national import regulations and securing contact details of doctors and clinics is tedious work, but 26 years after the guide’s first publication, and in spite of limited funding, it’s helped thousands of people travel internationally. For Gerlach, it isn’t a question of whether someone taking methadone or other opioid agonist therapy medications should travel, but of how. “Travelling,” he says, “is a human right.”

Image courtesy of Dopamine Montréal.

A pride flag flaps defiantly in the wind above a welcoming front porch. A basket of free naloxone kits hangs on the front door. On the wall upstairs, a poster reads “Activities to avoid dying sad/to make you happy” and lists acupuncture, bowling, and picnics.

This is the home of Dopamine Montréal. Just like its namesake, Dopamine uptakes and releases a rush of essential resources to those who use illicit drugs. But the organization operates under the spectre of the law: Clients, many of whom are low-income or houseless, struggle to access employment, housing, and security as long as drug use is criminalized.

Montreal is considered a progressive urban centre, located in a province with relatively strong social services like universal daycare and subsidized college programs. When it comes to tackling the overdose crisis, though, the city is in traction. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, 541 people died from an opioid-related drug overdose in Quebec in 2022, an increase of nearly 20 percent from the year before. Emergency interventions in the city of Montreal were reportedly four times as frequent in 2022 as they were before the pandemic. These numbers paint an incomplete picture, however. CACTUS Montréal, another harm reduction organization that serves the Gay Village, recorded a 350 percent increase in overdose deaths in the city from 2019 to 2022—about one per day. According to their numbers, as of this January, the rate has jumped to two per day.

Harm reduction groups such as Dopamine and CACTUS are filling the gaps in community care. Established in 1994 amid the HIV/AIDS crisis, Dopamine serves the Hochelaga- Maisonneuve neighbourhood through a day centre located in a converted home and a supervised injection site (SIS) a few streets over that operates from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. After what CACTUS says was a decade-long bureaucratic process involving loads of paperwork and city approval, the SIS opened in 2017 alongside CACTUS Montréal’s.

Dopamine was founded on three core values: humanism, accessibility, and solidarity. The words reinforce that Dopamine is part of a political struggle against the conditions that create poverty and lead to people being incarcerated for drug-related crimes.

Executive director Martin Pagé knows how the cycle works; he’s seen it firsthand through his personal experience and through Dopamine’s staff, several of whom used or continue to use their services. “We are par et pour,” he says, both by and for the community. Criminalizing drugs pushes the market underground, where products are cut with riskier substances, such as often-deadly fentanyl or carfentanil, at variable concentrations. Once someone’s drug use is made legible through a criminal record, barriers to housing and employment get even taller. “It’s the exact opposite of what they should be doing,” Pagé says. Without safe, controlled injection sites that provide sterile tools, the risk of contracting HIV or Hepatitis C grows significantly.

At Dopamine, academic experience and lived experience are both valued and essential to fostering trust with clients. Intervention coordinator Yanick Paradis has worked at Dopamine for 18 years, with 12 years of street work experience. Many staff and casual employees are users themselves, Paradis explains. “We involve the people who visit the organization at different levels,” he says. “We will compensate people for their work, no matter what kind, whether it’s lawn mowing or a service offer…Ideally, our group is led by the community.”

As the organization has a history rooted in the AIDS epidemic, an integral part of their community mandate is to make health services accessible. Dopamine runs a drop-in medical clinic every Tuesday for their regular clients. Though it’s not a totally effective alternative to Quebec’s crumbling health-care infrastructure, the clinic focuses on preventive care and follow-ups for those who face barriers to access. “We reflected on how we could bring community health closer, and have health care that gives people positive experiences,” Pagé explains.

Pagé says the pandemic exacerbated every problem the community group sees. Clients are in increasingly precarious housing situations; the social safety net is eroding and organizations like theirs represent the last threads. And sex workers, immigrants, and trans people all find themselves at the intersection of socioeconomic instability and government negligence.

As paramedics administered naloxone a record high of 291 times in the city in 2022, according to Radio-Canada, drug testing has become one of the most crucial services Dopamine and CACTUS have to offer. Data gathered by CACTUS reports that Montreal’s Gay Village is at the epicentre of the overdose crisis in Quebec. But municipal and provincial governments are not treating it that way, though there’s precedent to do better. British Columbia was granted a federal exemption to decriminalize possession of illicit substances weighing less than 2.5 grams in January of this year, while the city of Toronto began the process of applying for the same exemption in 2021. Long-progressive Edmonton, often subject to Alberta’s conservative political lean despite its ability to operate separately, tabled a motion to decriminalize drugs within the city. Over 100 harm reduction groups across the country support the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition’s proposal to make all drugs legal for personal use nationwide— but fierce opposition from some premiers, municipal governments and lobbyist groups makes it unlikely to move forward.

In the summer of 2022, Mayor Valérie Plante told the CBC that she supported the idea of decriminalization in Montreal. Her administration has yet to apply for the same exemption.

The municipal government’s vague response illustrates just how easy it is to shirk responsibility for a manufactured crisis. “We are actually in a worse situation than we were [in] the HIV pandemic,” says Jean-François Mary, CACTUS’s executive director. “Because actually, in those days, there was a real partnership between public health and community organizations.” In the 1990s, a Quebec coalition representing 31 community organizations gave presentations to a federal committee to advocate for increased funding and support. Now, Mary says that public health officials are detached from the reality of intervention on the ground, hindering their approach to resource allocation.

“They talk, we die,” is the slogan CACTUS and Dopamine jointly rallied behind at a protest in early April. They are pushing for decriminalization, increased funding from Quebec’s public health division, and a non-prohibitive approach to the overdose crisis. “And Valérie Plante is talking,” says Mary. “But what are they doing? What have they done?”

CACTUS provided the municipal government with the paperwork to apply for the exemption, according to Mary. In an email to This, the city’s media relations office referred to a non-partisan motion adopted by city councillors in 2021, asserting that they were in favour of decriminalizing simple possession and calling on the city to apply for the exemption. But they did not confirm that an application was in the works. They did say the “[police] will continue to apply the law.”

People working on the ground know that prohibition won’t help those already pushed to the margins. “An important saying in harm reduction is if you can’t help, then at least try to do no harm,” Pagé says. Whether Montreal’s policymakers will heed this duty of care remains to be seen.

Our (totally made up, unofficial) Legalization Week continues today with Katie Addleman’s exploration of the drug trade, and the catastrophic effect prohibition has had on law enforcement, gang violence, addicts’ health, and community safety:

Ounce for ounce, marijuana is worth more than gold, and heroin more than uranium. Yet it’s only as a direct result of international policy that drugs are so valuable; if they weren’t illegal, they’d be worthless. Prohibition floats the drug trade by raising potential profits to astronomical levels, and the drug trade in turn floats the gangs who control it. “Because of … their illegality and associated criminal sanctions,” writes Chettleburgh, “those willing to trade in them—drug cartels, organized crime syndicates, so-called narco-terrorist groups and street gangs—can demand high prices and derive great profits.”

“You’re talking about a profession where people accept a risk of being murdered, execution-style, as an occupational hazard,” said Bratzer. “How is a mandatory minimum sentence going to deter a person who already accepts the risk of being shot and having their body dumped in a car?”

Read the article in full here. And be sure to vote in our poll on drug policy above, too.

Tomorrow: Rosemary Counter on raw milk.

Shortly after Vancouver was named the host of the 2010 Olympics, Naomi Klein was seething about injustice again. “The Vancouver-Whistler Olympic bid presented the province of British Columbia as a model of harmonious, sustainable living, a place where everyone gets along,” she wrote in 2003. After 9-11, the city had sold itself to the International Olympic Committee as the “Safety and Security Candidate…a place where nothing ever happens.” It was a false image, and Klein feared that the darker realities of life in B.C. would remain unexposed to the international community. She needn’t have worried. Six years later, just as the world was turning an eye on Vancouver in advance of the coming Olympic carnival, the city was full of guns. The murder rate between January and March was unprecedented: 47 shootings, 19 of them fatal—twice as many as five years previous. The U.K.’s Sunday Times ran an article calling Vancouver “Murder City.” Vancouver police chief Jim Chu summed up the situation for a panicking public: “There is a gang war, and it’s brutal.”

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its 2009 World Drug Report in late June, naming the west coast of Canada as a hub of the international drug trade and B.C.’s organized crime groups as largely responsible. By this time, the violence had died down and not much attention was paid to connecting this new information about B.C.’s pivotal role in world drug traffic and the war that Chu had identified three months earlier. The link between gang warfare, the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, and the fact of those drugs’ very illegality was, meanwhile, barely mentioned at all.

After years of attacking the symptoms of the (increasingly ludicrously named) “war on drugs,” it’s time to stop and consider what would actually end the murders, gang wars, smuggling, petty arrests, and drug-related deaths that afflict us. The answer is to attack the root of the problem: prohibition itself.

In October 2007, six men were found dead in an apartment in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Surrey. The 48 investigators charged with solving the crime appealed to the public and the victims’ families, asking for any information that could lead to arrests. It was obvious to everyone that four of these six murders weren’t random. The two remaining victims had been caught in the crossfire and killed accidentally. These were executions. Vancouver had long supported a substantial criminal economy, but the case of the Surrey Six marked the beginning of a precipitous rise in gang-related violence. In the months that followed, the headlines of local papers became increasingly macabre; by the time I arrived in Vancouver at the end of 2008, I felt I’d landed in Gotham City: Three Slayings Within 24 Hours, the papers screamed; Man Gunned Down in East Vancouver; Grieving Mom Begs for Public’s Help; Four Fatal Shootings Lead Cops to Expect More. At the beginning of 2009, one year before the Olympics would make Vancouver the focus of every news outlet in the world, people were being shot on a nearly daily basis.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded with the hardline approach typical of conservative politics: more convictions, longer sentences. The proposed legislation called for more of the same, its coup de grâce being a mandate that all gang-related killings be called first-degree murder and carry minimum jail terms of 25 years. Harper announced his proposal in Vancouver at the end of February, affecting a “we’ll take care of it” demeanour that aimed to calm the public and the international media, who were now swarming on the story of Gangland Vancouver. There was nothing to worry about, he said. The escalating violence shouldn’t concern those planning to attend the 2010 Olympic Games. (They’d install 15,000 police officers, working morning to night!) Later that day, Cory Stephen Konkin, 30, was shot in his car in Maple Ridge. He was followed by four more murder victims in the five days that followed.

“They have to appear to be doing something,” says Jerry Paradis of the Harper government’s fledgling recourse. “They can’t just admit they are at a loss on how to deal with the issue.” Paradis, who served as a judge on the Provincial Court of British Columbia between 1975 and 2003, has become an outspoken critic of governments’ law and order policies, and particularly their proven ineffectiveness in preventing gang violence. He points to the various “task forces” that have been created and re-created over the years as examples of this failure—when one proves ineffectual, it is replaced by another that looks remarkably similar: the Integrated Gang Task Force, implemented in 2004, was followed in 2007 by the Violence Suppression Team. The violence not having been suppressed, Premier Gordon Campbell is now allocating funds to identical squads in Kelowna and Prince George, to be developed over the next three years at a cost of $23 million per year.

Paradis points to the failed anti-gang measures of the United States, which bear a strong resemblance to those our own government would adopt. “The federal and many state penal systems that adopted mandatory minimums are withdrawing from that approach,” he says. “In California, devotion to quick-fix measures like three-strikes laws and widespread minimums have nearly bankrupted the government, while having no perceptible effect on crime.”

Why do we continually fall back on tactics that don’t work? Aside from the share of votes garnered through “tough on crime” posturing, gangs are exceedingly problematic to combat. “Their airtight culture, their shifting alliances, and, most important, the fear they spread make gangs exceedingly difficult to successfully investigate and prosecute,” says Paradis. “Surveillance, infiltration, and intelligence seem to be the keys—and those can be extremely delicate and costly.” No government in the world has the resources necessary to quash gang activity through these conventional means. Policy makers need to put on their creative thinking caps, and then ready themselves for a revolution. The solution to the problem— legalization—is nothing if not divisive.

The concentration of violence was unprecedented in Vancouver. But gang violence is nothing new; gangs are volatile entities, their hierarchies often disrupted by death or imprisonment, their members sensitive to power fluctuations occurring in like organizations all over the globe. When a cartel boss flaps his wings in Mexico City, a typhoon of violence can erupt in Surrey, B.C. According to a study on organized crime in British Columbia prepared by the RCMP’s Criminal Analysis Section in 2005, as of that year there were 108 street gangs operating in B.C. Today’s estimates place the number higher, at 160. And it will continue to rise; there’s money enough to support hundreds of these organizations. It’s not hard to turn a dime when you’re invested in the world’s most lucrative market.

Michael C. Chettleburgh, a criminal policy consultant in Ottawa and Canada’s foremost authority on street gangs, posits that gang life offers various attractions—camaraderie, protection, a shared sense of identity, power—but that the opportunity to make vast amounts of money is undoubtedly its primary allure. “The desire for money and the desire to make money quickly, by whatever means possible, are the combined drivers of street-gang activity,” he writes. Street gangs derive their income from myriad illegal activities, but selling drugs is far and away their greatest profit source. (Studies conducted by the RCMP, CSIS, and the Fraser Institute, among others, consistently produce findings to this effect.) Though the worth of any black market is impossible to calculate exactly, the UN puts the yearly value of the worldwide drug trade at somewhere between US$150 and US$400 billion. That’s one-eighth of the world’s international trade, according to UN studies. Only the textile industry yields similar gains.

“This kind of gang violence is always very cyclical,” Const. David Bratzer told me in the measured, helpful tone of a schoolteacher, when I reached him at his home in Victoria and asked for his take on the current crisis. “It’s related to control of the black market for drugs. A lot of times, when you see this kind of violence, it’s because something has been destabilized: a leader’s been arrested or shot, and now his subordinates or other groups are fighting to control that black market and all those tax-free profits.” Whether violence is up or down at a given moment is inconsequential; it will continue to rise and abate in endless waves as long as there are gangs, and there will be gangs as long as organized crime is profitable.

Still, in the early months of 2009, politicians and police were compelled to offer more pointed explanations for the latest explosion. Most spoke broadly of internal power struggles or disruptions to the drug supply, while some, like RCMP Supt. Pat Fogarty, placed the blame squarely on the ongoing Mexican drug war. None of this reasoning is invalid, but it skirts the larger truth: people were dying, and killing, for money. Or, more accurately, enough money to buy a country.

Ounce for ounce, marijuana is worth more than gold, and heroin more than uranium. Yet it’s only as a direct result of international policy that drugs are so valuable; if they weren’t illegal, they’d be worthless. Prohibition floats the drug trade by raising potential profits to astronomical levels, and the drug trade in turn floats the gangs who control it. “Because of … their illegality and associated criminal sanctions,” writes Chettleburgh, “those willing to trade in them—drug cartels, organized crime syndicates, so-called narco-terrorist groups and street gangs—can demand high prices and derive great profits.”

Great profits is an understatement. Everything in the drug trade is profit. Manufacturers, who buy from farmers, incur virtually no overhead. They’re buying plants—weeds, in fact— that will grow nearly anywhere. From the point of production to the point of purchase, the value of their product can increase by as much as 17,000 percent. By contrast, the markup on retail goods is generally closer to 100 percent. This is what Canada, and all other governments who support prohibition policy, fail to grasp: drug dealing is a profession, and its potential earnings guarantee an endless supply of hopeful employees. Harsher criminal penalties haven’t stopped it, and won’t stop it, because the number of dealers will never diminish. Locking up one doesn’t remove one from the street; it creates a job opening that hundreds of people are waiting to fill. In his wildest imaginings, Stephen Harper could not envision an effective deterrent to this fact.

“You’re talking about a profession where people accept a risk of being murdered, execution-style, as an occupational hazard,” said Bratzer. “How is a mandatory minimum sentence going to deter a person who already accepts the risk of being shot and having their body dumped in a car?”

In British Columbia, the marijuana trade alone accounts for five percent of the GDP, placing it alongside forestry and mining in economic significance. It employs 250,000 people and is worth $7 billion annually. Police have busted thousands of grow-ops in eradication campaigns over the past 10 years, finding particular success with the Electric Fire Safety Initiative, a four-year-old project that partners B.C. Hydro with the fire department and the RCMP to track down growops through notable spikes in private electricity usage. Yet the industry continues to thrive. The number of plants in B.C. is actually proliferating; the RCMP estimates there are currently 20,000 province-wide. The webpage of the City of Richmond, B.C., includes helpful hints for landlords wishing to prevent their properties from becoming marijuana farms.

The Criminal Intelligence Service of British Columbia confirms “marijuana cultivation is the most pervasive and lucrative organized crime activity” in the province, but goes on to remind us that local methamphetamine production is nothing to pooh-pooh; it’s making a strong push to the top, “expanding at a rate similar to the early growth of the marijuana industry.” It’s little wonder that the province can support so many gangs.

And while, in Chettleburgh’s words, Canadians demonstrate a “robust interest” in consuming illicit drugs (a 2004 study by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse leaves little room for interpretation), it must be noted that 90 to 95 percent of the illegal drugs produced in Canada are eventually sold in external markets. This is not unique to Canada, but representative of the trade. The drug market is borderless, and links every crime ring in the world to every other: grow-ops in Canada are guarded by American guns, which are sold to Canadians to finance purchases of cocaine, which is sold to Mexicans by Colombian manufacturers, and then ferried across the border by American importers, who trade it with Canadians for B.C.-grown marijuana, who sell it for guns to protect their growops, ad infinitum. Variations on the model are unlimited; supply lines and products traded change along with profit margins, power structures, and government patrol barriers. What remains constant is a competitive economic system, controlled by people under immense pressure and concerned only with profit potential. Violence is the natural by-product of such a system—in Vancouver, in Phoenix, in Ciudad Juarez. It is a global problem.

Jack Cole is the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an international organization comprised of police chiefs and officers, former mayors and governors, criminal justice policy experts, MPs, retired senators and judges, and the former attorney general of Colombia, among others. Its mandate is to legitimize a fringe position on drug policy: legalize. Legalize everything.

“I’d say this is about business as usual,” Cole said of the violence raging from Mexico to Canada. We had finally gotten the chance to speak; Cole travels endlessly for LEAP, within the U.S. and internationally, presenting to professional, civic, religious, and governing bodies, including the UN, on the proven dangers of prohibition and the necessity of ending it. He estimates that he has given his speech, “End Prohibition Now,” more than 800 times. The International Harm Reduction Association selected it as one of the world’s finest documents on policing and harm reduction. Our conversation had been preceded by numerous emails. The last one, genial as always, concluded, “Attached are some of the things that would not exist if we had legalized regulation of drugs.” I opened the attachment. It was an article from a recent issue of the London Telegraph. “Henchman of Mexican Drug Lord Dissolved 300 Bodies in Acid,” read the headline. I didn’t read any further. Cole’s position was clear enough.

When we spoke the next day I was surprised by his tone: warm, patient, patently American. It made his pro-legalization talk all the more intriguing. “It was worse than this at given times in the past,” he said. “In Colombia, for instance. Most people weren’t following it, but when you look at the number of people murdered in Colombia back in late ‘80s and early ’90s … I mean, the drug cartels actually attacked the federal courthouse, and for several days held hostages there. They killed a whole bunch of judges.” For all of the apocalyptic talk at the beginning of the year, gang violence was not, internationally, the worst it had been—just the closest to home. “The fact of the matter is, that all this would end, it would all be over within a day, if we legalized and regulated these drugs,” Cole said.

Not everyone agrees. Darryl Plecas, a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Fraser Valley and the RCMP Research Chair in Crime Reduction, argues widely for continued prohibition and prosecution of producers and traffickers. “Things are changing, thanks very much, without a change in policy on prohibition,” he told me when I reached him on the ferry from Vancouver Island to the mainland. “Cocaine, crystal meth—we wiped that problem off the planet. It’s vanished. There were all kinds of people using meth, then there was an all-out assault [by government and law enforcement agencies]. What it takes is clever education.” The UN World Drug Report naming Canada as one of the largest exporters of crystal meth had not yet been released at the time of our conversation.

Plecas, who has twice participated in the prestigious Oxford Round Table, an annual forum on public policy at Oxford University, also takes a moral stance against legalization, arguing the harmful effects of drugs on users and their communities. “Do we want to facilitate, condone that?” he asks. When I put forward the standard argument that marijuana has proven less harmful than alcohol, he responds that there is “mounting medical evidence of the harms of marijuana use. Nobody’s getting schizophrenia from drinking. You can backtrack from alcoholism. You’re not returning from schizophrenia.”

This, in effect, is the centre of the prohibitionists’ argument. Drugs are not just dangerous, but demonic; if they weren’t, it would be very hard to justify their illegality. “People have, to some extent, been hoodwinked by the misinformation put out there by the prohibitionists,” says Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist who has been studying the unintended consequences of prohibition for 15 years. “This is the claim that drug use is very, very horribly bad for you, the implication that it’s always and necessarily bad for you, as opposed to the more accurate view that, like alcohol, dose makes a difference and lots of people can use in moderation and use responsibly,” he says. “They don’t seem to want to think about the fact that some people misuse alcohol and do stupid things, but millions of people don’t misuse alcohol and use it in moderation. And they assume that somehow drugs would be different, that we would only get the extreme cases. But the evidence doesn’t suggest that. I don’t know why more people don’t recognize that.”

So while Plecas says prohibitionists “should get their moral compass out,” Miron, Cole, and a growing number of politicians, economists, criminologists and police officers (particularly in the wake of President Obama’s election to the White House, as the new administration is seen as more amenable to logic) are putting forward the idea that legalization represents the most ethical solution to the drug problem. It is founded on a singular fact, irrefutable in the face of a century of gathered evidence: prohibition has made everything worse. From crime to corruption to instances of overdose, prohibition has left us less safe, sicker, and poorer than before, and all at tremendous expense. Governments everywhere have essentially spent billions ramping up social ills. It is one of the hideous ironies of our age.

As drugs and their use predate prohibition, the social implications of the policy can be easily traced. The first instance of anti-drug legislation in Canada was the Anti-Opium Act, passed in 1908. British Columbia was then roughly 20 percent Chinese. One year earlier, an anti-Asian riot had torn through Vancouver, and the practice of placing head taxes on Chinese immigrants, first instituted in 1884, was at its peak. The Anti-Opium Act was plainly born of racist sentiment masquerading as a public safety initiative, as drug use in general was hardly stigmatized during this period. Throughout the Victorian era, one could dabble in cocaine, morphine, and heroin, whether instructed to do so by a doctor or no (physicians regularly prescribed all three), without wandering outside the border of mainstream practice.

In his book Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity, and Illicit Drugs in Canada, author Kyle Grayson writes that “public disapproval of opium arose not from the effects of the drug itself, but rather from its association with a group perceived as biologically and culturally inferior.” Opium was identified with Chinese immigrants and labourers, and, worse than that, with the corruption of white women at the hands of Chinese opium merchants. While other drugs were an acceptable good time, opium was foreign, un-Christian, and threatening. “It is important to remember that the publicly stated rationale for the Opium Act, the legislation that made further acts possible, did not have to do with the potentially harmful effects of opium. Rather, it was based on reports of the narcotic’s ‘dire influence’—specifically, on reports that young white women had been found in an opium den.”

By 1911, as Canadians were first starting to carve out a cultural identity, drug use of all kinds had begun to be seen as “improper,” not “Canadian,” and a symptom of moral deterioration. This new conception, spearheaded by culturally conservative journalists and politicians, led to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act, a broader version of its predecessor, which included a clause permitting for the later addition of other drugs. In 1923, marijuana made the list. No reason was given. The trend continued, and the production, sale, and consumption of opium, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana were all eventually entirely criminalized, with other narcotics similarly banned as they appeared. The result? Just over 100 years after the misinformed creation of Canada’s first drug law, production is up, usage is up, crime is up, prices and ill-gotten profits are up. Prohibition has had none of its intended effects, and has instead served its targets. There is a kind of poetic justice here: we’ve seen that prohibition was based on a bogus theory, and as befits all ill-founded practices, it failed demonstrably.

The solution is to end it. We’ve lost much to fear campaigns (“Drugs kill!”) and plain delusion (“We can achieve a drug-free world!”), but the population can be re-educated. The majority of the Canadian public already supports legalized marijuana, but a 2009 Angus Reid Strategies poll indicates that only eight percent favour legalization of hard drugs. We are uneasy with the idea of the government supplying the public with drugs; there are too many attendant moral questions. But legalization, though not ideal, remains what the Economist calls the “least bad policy.” The trouble will be getting the public to vocally support it, and finding politicians willing to stand for it. “There has to be some fundamental change in people’s attitudes toward drugs,” says Miron. “It’s not obvious where that change will come from, unless a mainstream politician or a mainstream figure, a respected figure, stands up and says, ‘This policy’s idiotic.’”

Nowhere is the sale and production of drugs a legal activity. Prohibition remains a fact of life in every country in the world, but the decriminalization policies of some places— most notably Switzerland, Portugal, and the Netherlands—are so comprehensive as to give us an idea of what life in a drug-law-free zone might look like. The Swiss have been treating heroin as a health problem since 1994. There were 23 clinics in the country where addicts could go up to three times a day to inject government-supplied heroin in 2007. The drug is provided on a sliding monetary scale. If an addict can pay for it, he or she does; if not, it’s free. The crime rate went down by 60 percent. Portugal shocked the international community and its own citizens when it decriminalized the possession of all drugs in 2001, becoming the first country in Europe to do so. A report published earlier this year by the Cato Institute, a U.S.-based think tank, concluded that the policy change had led to lowered instances of drug trafficking, sexually transmitted diseases, and overdose deaths, and an increase in the number of adults registered in addiction treatment programs. In the Netherlands, where soft drugs have been all but legal since 1976, the per capita usage of marijuana and hash is half what it is the U.S. Studies also suggest that the Netherlands per capita usage of hard drugs and homicide rates are one-quarter less than those of the U.S.

While we don’t have examples of successful legalization to look to, most policy makers, researchers, consultants, and activists envision it as combination of governmental drug production and distribution and harm-reduction initiatives. The government would manufacture the products, standardizing them for purity; supply them to the public in government-operated stores like the LCBO or B.C. Liquor. and use the profits from taxation to treat and ease addiction through rehabilitation programs and safe-injection sites. “There are lots of different ways it could be implemented,” says Miron. “It could be implemented by medicalizing it, meaning change the rules so that medical provision was not much supervised, so doctors could prescribe relatively freely, in which case just as many people can go and get Prozac; if they go to a psychiatrist and act as though they need it, people will be able to go to doctors and say, ‘My back hurts,’ or ‘I have anxiety,’ and be able to get prescriptions for morphine or methadone or marijuana or whatever. But it would still be open to the views of the enforcers about whether or not to allow wide-scale medical distribution. I think the better model is alcohol—sold by private companies, advertised, subject to age restrictions and some taxes, but just a legal commodity like anything else. There’s no reason it has to be treated any differently than Starbucks or Budweiser.”

Whatever the model we choose, drugs cannot continue to be treated as they are. We’ve avoided it as long as possible, but it’s time to look the ethical maze in the mouth and navigate our way through it, because to continue to pretend that we can extricate ourselves from this war through the traditional crime-and-punishment avenues of the Canadian justice system is to continue to line the pockets of those who would slay us in Surrey, if only by accident.

Regardless of other circumstances, a helmet helps protect the only head you've got. Photo courtesy Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

Intrawest, the resort company that runs the ski runs at Whistler Blackcomb and 10 other ski hills, announced yesterday that it is strongly encouraging skiers and snowboarders to wear helmets on its courses, and instituting mandatory helmet rules for all children and young-adult participants in its skiing and boarding classes. The move comes six months after British actress Natasha Richardson died of head injuries sustained at Mont Tremblant in Quebec. This is a good idea, and people should heed the advice.

Helmet-wearing (for all kinds of activities) is inexplicably controversial for some people, and I don’t get it. When I was a kid, we had a family friend die of a head injury sustained on a bike; it was around the time that I got my first two-wheeler, and my parents told me I had to wear a helmet. This was before anyone else around my school was wearing one, and I felt like a total dork. But I also felt, even as a kid, that it was better than the alternative. I still feel that way.

You only get one head. It’s worth protecting. Plus, the helmets don’t all look as dorky as they used to.

(And here’s “Protect ya neck” by those advocates of head safety everywhere, the Wu-Tang Clan. Sensitive people: beware explicit lyrics!)

When the news came out yesterday that the largest-ever HIV-AIDS vaccine drug study had concluded with modestly positive results, there was certainly reason to be glad. There was not, of course, any reason to call the damn thing a “miracle vaccine,” as the Dallas Fort-Worth NBC affiliate did. The actual announcement from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which had conducted the study in Thailand, made no such claims, saying only that the experimental vaccine had a “modest preventative effect”:

In an encouraging development, an investigational vaccine regimen has been shown to be well-tolerated and to have a modest effect in preventing HIV infection in a clinical trial involving more than 16,000 adult participants in Thailand. Following a final analysis of the trial data … the prime-boost investigational vaccine regimen was safe and 31 percent effective in preventing HIV infection.

“These new findings represent an important step forward in HIV vaccine research,” says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases … “For the first time, an investigational HIV vaccine has demonstrated some ability to prevent HIV infection among vaccinated individuals. Additional research is needed to better understand how this vaccine regimen reduced the risk of HIV infection, but certainly this is an encouraging advance for the HIV vaccine field.

There’s a lot of qualifying language in there: “encouraging development,” “modest effect,” “important step forward,” “some ability,” “additional research is needed,” “encouraging advance,” and of course, that not-exactly-miraculous number, “31 percent effective.” The AIDS Committee of Toronto posted a cautionary tweet late yesterday afternoon, pointing to a somewhat less breathless article that quoted some other AIDS vaccine researchers:

“Wow. Wow,” said AIDS vaccine researcher Ronald Desrosiers, head of the New England Primate Research Center in Southborough, Massachusetts. “Looking at the numbers, it’s underwhelming to me. […] Dennis Burton, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, had a similar reaction. “It’s very early days,” said Burton. “People should be enormously cautious now.”

So without proclaiming “Cancer Cured!” let’s just say that this is good news, and research will continue, and while we’re waiting for better news, we still have to improve HIV-AIDS education and prevention.

Documentaries about drug use and life on the street can easily become depressing cautionary tales. The NFB’s website Playing It Safe avoids this type of tired cliche by offering at-risk youth a chance to make their own films. The project paired at-risk youth and peer filmmakers from Vancouver and Edmonton. As Vancouver prepares for the 2010 Olympic Games, these aren’t the  kinds of stories the city wants to the world to hear.

Being at once the filmmaker and the subject of the documentary, the people in these films tell honest, thoughtful stories. They talk about the different paths that led them to the streets, and speak openly about both the positive and negative aspects of their lifestyles. Some want to keep using drugs and living on the street, others are going to school and working with other at-risk youth.

Many of the films don’t offer a happy ending, and can’t try to sum-up difficult issues in a simple package. The goal isn’t to scare at-risk youth straight, but to reflect their lives and remind them that they’re not invisible.

There are currently eight films on the site, and more are posted each week.

Augustus Hill had it easy. At least he had a wheelchair inside Oz. Real disabled inmates aren't so lucky. Image courtesy Home Box Office

If, as a disabled person, you think you’re still getting the shaft out in the real world, then you better thank the Lord you didn’t land in prison. Though twenty-five-to-life can be utterly soul-destroying for anyone, no one has it worse than the disabled inmates around the world.  For them, even basic human rights are hard to come by.

In 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] of Southern California and the Disability Rights Legal Center commissioned a study that found deplorable conditions in LA County jails.  The study found that disabled inmates struggle every day to overcome physical barriers to toilets, shower stalls and visitor areas, according to the LA Times. The study also revealed that cells for disabled inmates had broken plumbing, lacked natural light and had only limited access to recreational areas. LA’s disabled prison population is also limited in job and educational training, since those sections of the prison are often located in inaccessible areas. That wasn’t the worst of it. Disabled inmates, in sworn declarations, said they had their wheelchairs and crutches confiscated because guards failed to classify the prisoners as being truly disabled, thinking the devices were weapons As a result, inmates were forced to crawl around in their cells. The LA Times also interviewed a paraplegic man who asked to use the washroom while being booked on petty theft charges. The guards told him he would have to hold it because the washroom wasn’t accessible. The man eventually lost control of his bowels and was forced to sit in his own feces for six hours. The study prompted the ACLU and the Disability Rights Center to file a class action lawsuit against the LA County Sheriff’s Office for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. As of right now, both organizations are still waiting for their day in court–a year later.

But abuse of disabled inmates is not limited to Los Angeles.  In  May 2009, The Independent reported that a disabled inmate, held at HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wright in the U.K., couldn’t clean himself for a year because staff outright refused to carry him to the shower, while another inmate couldn’t have a shower for six months because the three staff members who were “trained” to push his wheelchair were unavailable. The director of the Prison Reform Trust has called on the Ministry of Justice to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act and the director general of the National Offender Management Service acknowledged that the prison had “fallen below standard.” The general manager hopes a new management team and a redesign of the prison will help rectify the situation.

Canada is hardly immune. Though Canadian prisons are supposed to provide a basic level of medical care, 52%  of its institutional healthcare facilities failed to be accredited in 2006 because they didn’t meet basic standards. Failing to pass out all required medication at regular dosage times and failing to check insulin levels, were only some of the named offences.

Inmate abuse at such systemic and international levels is especially heinous given that many of the world’s prisons hold a disproportionate number of disabled inmates. In Canada, estimates put the number of prisoners with intellectual disabilities at almost 10% and those with learning disabilities at more than 55%.  I couldn’t find estimates for prisoners with physical disabilities. In the U.S., 40% of all people with serious mental illness are in jails and prisons, which translates to 10-30% of all inmates in the overall prison population, depending on the prison.

Essentially, this is re-institutionalization.  Prison guards are taking the place of  the attendant care staff that are often unavailable.  Also, assistive devices are often confiscated as weapons when disabled people are arrested and it can take a court injunction before inmates who rightfully need them get them back. The prison system in North America is already so overburdened and under-funded, regular inmates are sometimes housed in gymnasiums instead of cells and staff are grossly outnumbered.  If there aren’t enough resources for able-bodied inmates, it’s difficult to anticipate that anyone will give disabled inmates due care.

Still, someone has to wake up and put this pattern of double-punishment to an end. While able-bodied inmates are punished for their crimes and have to acclimatize themselves to the gangs and violence, disabled inmates are punished for their crimes and for being disabled. If prisoners are treated as the lowest class in society, then disabled inmates must be society’s pond scum.   It’s scary to think that in the 21st century,  a disabled inmate probably has a better chance dying as a victim of a neglectful judicial system, than an able-bodied inmate does from a shank to the chest.

It doesn’t look like it. The US-based drug-policy group Join Together, a project of the Boston University School of Public Health, dug into the headlines a bit further and found less of a problem than had initially been suggested. They noted: “Flavored meth is somewhat akin to the Loch Ness Monster: everyone has heard of it, but firsthand sightings are hard to track down and verify.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency told Join Together they in fact had no confirmed seizures of “flavoured” methamphetamine. One drug expert told the agency that pink-coloured meth was a real possibility, but this was because of the dye that one precursor ingredient sometimes contains rather than any nefarious intentions.
The agency also talked to a former meth cook, who suggested the idea of “flavouring” meth—which is usually snorted, smoked or injected rather than eaten—made little sense and would be likely to hard to integrate into the manufacturing process of the drug.
The initial news story pitted evil drug dealers against vulnerable children. The reality, as usual, is more complex. To read the detailed investigation, go here.
PHOTO CREDIT: EROWID.ORG