Drugs, Death and Responsibility

I have been thinking a lot about drugs (illegal) the past few days..... not that I am planning on taking anything any time soon but rather I have been thinking about how the conversation about them has changed. With the rise in awareness of how addictive opioids are ( or at least an increased media awareness of how newsworthy it is) plus the ever increasing number of people who are over-dosing on fentanyl, it feels as if the responsibility  (or blame) for the addiction has perhaps shifted.

Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in the late 1970s developed a convincing argument  (that was ignored by almost everyone) that heroin use had far more to do with social conditions then the addictive attributes of the drug. In the last decade or two Dr Gabor Maté of Vancouver had argued that a child's early environment, specifically how abusive it was, has a direct impact on why an individual becomes addicted. Neither of these two positions, backed by scientific data have ever received much public or political support. We have continued to outlaw and blame the users while ignoring the social causes for the addictions.

However within the past few months - if one only reads main stream media, the fault for the increase in opioid use and the alarming number of people who have died from a fentanyl over-dose is the fault of the doctors  for over prescribing a drug and the lack of treatment programs to help people with the addiction. I am sure that some doctors (perhaps most) have on occasion been careless about monitoring how their patients are using the pain medications. It is conceivable that there are numerous doctors who are either unaware that opioids can be highly addictive or who just don't care. But it is not conceivable that the majority of doctors are so incompetent. Similarly for patients talking such medications, they and their families would need to have their heads in the sands for extended periods of time to not be aware of the dangers of pain medications. Clearly doctors and pharmacists have some responsibilities for monitoring their patients medication, but the patients also have some responsibility to be aware of the dangers. However, I suspect that the vast majority of opioid users are people who have come to their addictions through some other process than their doctor over prescribing a specific medication. We ignore (as we have for the past forty or so years) the social causes of addiction at our society's peril.

The one main difference between opioids such as oxycontin and fentanyl as compared to more traditional street drugs such as heroin is that it appears to be far more addictive, far faster. Opioids are cheaper to manufacture, easier to smuggle, and dosages are far more inconsistent and therefore potentially more potent and dangerous.  This has resulted in the drug being more easily available to the "recreational" drug user who uses drugs less frequently and therefore his or her system is less able to cope with inconsistent or hidden dosages. Again, it is difficult to believe that these individuals are not aware at some level of the increased dangers of taking manufactured chemicals into their bodies. However, young adults have a strong sense of invincibility, of believing that something bad could not ever happen to them.  We might need to look at other methods of having  a dialogue with young people. Clearly the threat of punishment or death is not effective.

Traditional treatment programs dealing with addictions are in part based on changing lifestyles that have been warped by decades of addiction supportive behaviours. Those strategies may not be effective in dealing with addictions that happen so quickly and so powerfully. But I am not too sure if blaming the government for the lack of treatment programs is particularly useful. We ( the public and the government) could agree to fund more programs, but that would only be useful if we knew what would work. Clearly there needs to be an immediate investment into determining what would work. I suspect that such an investigation would suggest that, as in most treatment programs, it is not the short term intervention but rather the long term investment in supportive services that would provide the "cure". I am unconvinced that the public has any interest in providing long term support for anyone. We just want the quick fix so that we are free to go to resolve the next crisis.

Or we could look at the work of doctors Maté and Alexander and see if there is some correlation between their work and the apparent increase of middle class people becoming addictive to a new type of drugs. But that too might require a long term solution..........

Being Intellectual Absent

I am feeling somewhat guilty (although to whom and why I am not clear) as I realize that I have not posted anything for a few weeks. It is not as if there is nothing to write about.....

I suppose this latest attack of the "guilts" derives from my unwillingness to engage in the debate about the American presidency. This feeling was further exacerbated by me consciously deciding to not watch  the American presidential debate last night. My convenient excuse was that I have neither cable nor a satellite dish. I was conveniently ignoring the fact that I do have a computer and access to the internet. I am sure that there were all kinds of ways to watch the debate if I had wanted to. The fact is that I don't care.

In fact, I am slowly coming to the realization that I don't care about a lot of things. When I was actively engaged in the community either as someone who worked in social services or taught at a community college - there was a reason to stay informed/aware and involved. I needed to spend time thinking about the state of my world and the infinite complexities and therefore opinions within that world. Certainly in the last six or seven years of my "professional" life, I think, or at least I choose to believe that I was expected to demonstrate some capacity for critical thinking. Now... not so much.

In terms of social connections, I now spend more time with other people than I have in the past few years. Throughout the summer I have attended a number of farmers' markets, sometimes on both Saturday and Sunday. I have talked to hundreds of people, sometimes for 10-15 minutes at a time. I have spent even longer talking to the vendors on either side of me. I have met some really nice people. Being at the various markets has been fun and I have learned a fair amount about selling etc.

I also have neighbours. For the first time in probably 30 years I actually have people on either side of me and across the street. I don't have to drive anywhere to see someone. And I do see someone every day.  They too are very nice people who are caring and would help if I needed something.  As well I spend three hours on Mondays at  Providence Farm (a therapeutic community) as a volunteer with other spinners to spin wool for their weaving program.  While I have had the chance to help some weavers even more inexperienced than I, I am also getting the chance to observe and talk to spinners who know so much more than me.

It is all quite delightful. On the surface I have more social contact with more people that I have had for years. But it is all rather superficial. Without disparaging my fellow vendors, my potential customers or my neighbours - it is all rather unstimulating intellectually. There is no need to get myself all fired up about some issue when there will be no one to talk to about it. In fact getting all fired up may not even be healthy as all it does is cause that issue to fester inside my brain. As I weave or spin I end up having endless conversations with myself about whatever issue. So perhaps it is not that I don't care but rather that I am tired of winning all of my arguments.

Or perhaps I am just being lazy and what I need to do is to get off of my butt and start writing and then find people to argue with.

Dumb Judge

In Calgary, there is a most unusual event occurring. An inquiry is being held to determine whether or not a judge should be allowed to continue to hear cases. This judge, during a rape trial made a few grossly inappropriate comments to the victim including  "Why couldn't you just keep your knees together?" (CBC).The inquiry is unusual in that there have only been two other cases where judges have been judged by their peers as to whether or not they are fit to be judges.

The fact that the judge made the above comment clearly indicates that his thinking is out of step with both the law and what many Canadians think. The law is clear: All that a woman needs to do to prevent rape is to say "no". For the judge to suggest anything else should immediately disqualify him for passing judgements on others. On the other hand.................

I must confess I have a tiny little bit of empathy for the judge. I don't agree with him. He should have known better but I think it is fair to say that what is allowable and not allowable in terms of sexual conduct between two adults is a bit of a moving target. The evolution of thought as to how two people should relate to each other, specifically sexually, has in the past thirty years changed in profound ways. It clearly has a long way still to go. Those values are constantly shifting - moving one would hope to a point where no one would ever feel coerced to do anything they did not want to do. But unfortunately the language and the message is not always as clear as it apparently needs to be.

The question that occasionally floats through the back of my mind is how does one know that know consent is freely given? There was a time, not that long ago, when consent was implied if the other person did not say no. We are, at least in some courts, thankfully well past that point. It is no longer enough for a person to assume that a kiss or a nice meal in a restaurant means consent for anything else. It is accepted (I hope) by many/most that partners need to validate the consent throughout at least the initial stages of a relationship. And that at any time when either of the individuals expresses discomfort or concern, the other must stop. The "no" does not even have to be explicit. I think that is clear. But my question is - in a society that is still overwhelmingly patriarchal, where power relationships are unequal, where advertisers  target the genders differently, where the expectations of behaviour and dress are clearly different - are women comfortable in saying no? Do they know that they can?

Supporting my concern is a MIT 2014 survey in which it was reported in the New York Times that       

" Large numbers of undergraduates, male and female, also agreed with statements suggesting that blame for the assault did not always rest exclusively with the aggressor. Two-thirds agreed that “rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved”; one-third said it can happen “because men get carried away”; about one in five said it often happened because the victim was not clear enough about refusing; and a similar number said   that a drunk victim was “at least somewhat responsible.”

MIT is a university full of some of the brightest young people in the USA. It is scary that they could think that the victim is at least partially responsible. As some women continue to rightly place the responsibility onto men to listen to what their partners are saying and to respond to it, other women appear to be still looking for excuses to explain men's assaultive behaviours. As long as they do so - men will use those excuses both be legitimately confused and to justify their behaviours. Unfortunately people in positions  of power such as the above judge will continue to say dumb things.

Labour Day and Our National Parks

Today is Labour Day. For many Canadians, this national holiday is just the last long weekend of the summer, for others having the first Monday of September off is a chance to catch their breath and to get ready for the start of school, fall recreation programs and the cold weather that is coming. For those who have to work, the national holiday is simply a chance to get paid time and a half. Relatively few Canadians are aware that Labour Day is a Canadian invention and that it has its roots in a strike by the Toronto Typographical Union's 1872 strike demanding a 58 ( no - that is not a typo) hour work week. Twenty seven other unions joined the protest. At a parade in April, 10,000 people marched in support of the strike. There were numerous arrest but eventually the government of the day both revoked some of the more oppressive labour laws and changed the number of hours in a work week. Far too many of us forget that some of our grandfathers and great grand fathers marched and in some cases put their lives on the line so that we might have protection from unscrupulous employers.

By coincidence I have been reading a book by Bill Waiser, a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan called Park Prisoners - The Untold Story of Western Canada's Parks, 1915-1946. Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly it is a bit dry, lacking in human interest stories. None-the-less it is fascinating read in that it discusses in some detail the history of how the infrastructure of some of our best known national parks in Canada got built.

During WWl there were a number of foreign nationals (people who had come to Canada to work and to live but were from countries that were allied with Germany) were interred into labour camps and forced to, under very harsh conditions, to clear bush and to build roads within the national parks. There was no indication that these men were a risk to the Canadian government. They were interred for the simple reason that they appeared to be not quite the same as others.  Some of the language of their Anglo-Saxon peers demanding that they be locked away is reminiscent of the language used by Mr. Trump and his supporters when discussing either Muslims or Hispanic/Americans.

 A decade and half later, during the Depression the Government of Canada re-instituted the program. On the surface, it seemed like a win-win proposal. The national parks would get some desperately needed work done and men who were unemployed would get the chance to work and to do something useful. In reality for many men, especially the single men who were supervised by the Department of National Defence, it was a horrendous experience. The men had very little choice. If they chose to not work in the parks, they lost the right to get welfare. The conditions in the camps (again specifically the DND camps) was horrendous with men initially spending part of the winter months in tents insulated by bales of hay. The clothing they were offered was inadequate, the food frequently insufficient and the work was physically demanding (for example - clearing a road from Golden to Revelstoke mainly by manual labour and hand tools).  While the program was successful in that a number of structures and roads were built (and are still being used today), it is clear that program's main emphasis was to get the single men out of the large cities were they were both draining the financial resources of the municipalities and talking to each other about the need to protest the lack of jobs and opportunities. The government did not want people to get together and to organize. The spectre of workers overthrowing the government as they had done in 1917 in Russia was still far too fresh in the minds of politicians and capitalists. Sending them all to remote camps seemed like an ideal solution.

It didn't work. The men did go on strike in the camps, they did talk about the need to organize and to in some cases overthrow the government. The On to Ottawa Trek and the subsequent riots in Regina in 1935 had its genesis in the labour camps on the West Coast. While neither of those two events closed down the labour camps directly, the next federal election saw the Conservative Government lose its power to the Liberals who did close down the program.

Canadian labour history is full of successful protest/strikes that changed how the companies interacted with their employees. Those changes affect how we in 2016 live. The number of hours we work each week, the conditions of employment in terms of safety, how many holidays we get and what protections we have under law to ensure that we are treated fairly are all there because someone fought for them, because someone thought it was important enough to risk something to get them.

We forget, at our peril, the hard work done by those who fought for us. As important to some people as are the sacrifices soldiers make on behalf their country, the sacrifices made by union members are equally as important. Virtually all of our employment rights are ours because someone fought for them.

We should, at least once a year, take a few minutes to give thanks.