The communist that everyone loves to hate, Joseph Stalin, is credited with having said that, “The death of one is a tragedy, but the death of millions is just a statistic.” This obviously refers to the intimate heartbreak of having some one person in our lives pass away versus the math class-styled boredom humanity possesses toward the deaths of millions of “other” people. Now I can very easily link this to the anti-vaxxers who either shrug off or outright deny the literal millions of people who have died from Covid-19, but I’m not going to because the vast majority of Canadians have recognized the severe nature of the disease and acted accordingly. The point I’m actually going to make is that the response to this pandemic refutes the quotation: millions died, but there was action taken to mitigate those deaths on a global scale. Despite the impossibility of connecting on a personal level to all of those who were dying, we all got together to do something about this catastrophe. Covid is more than just a statistic; it’s human enough to elicit a response.
On the other hand, we have the communist that everyone hates to love, Karl Marx, being credited with having stolen this line from Friedrich Engels, “First as tragedy, then as farce.” This is referring to the notion that when tragic history repeats itself, the second instance is often a cruel parody of the first. If the deaths from Covid are the tragedy, then drug overdose deaths are the on-going farce.
In British Columbia, we’ve had 3,547 deaths from Covid so far; in contrast, since the start of the pandemic until March of this year, there have been 4,552 deaths from drug overdoses, with 2022 set to outpace the previous record from the year before. Certainly the measures taken to limit the impact of Covid have significantly reduced the number of deaths that we would have faced otherwise, but we have harm reduction measures to mitigate drug deaths too with remarkable success (no one dies from overdose at safe injection sites, for instance). My point is that one set of deadly statistics was collectively agreed upon to be a tragedy, and the other was not.
Some might argue that a drug overdose death isn’t the same because they cynically believe addiction to be a choice, and therefore, a death arising from that choice is the addict’s own fault. I don’t think that this belief is as prevalent as it used to be. BC just decriminalized small amounts of all drugs, and even the conservative news outlet, the National Post, is framing this decision as being in response to a health crisis. Obviously it’s a health condition, right? Everyone is saying so.
In response to this fading belief of personal choice resulting in death, alleged advocates will point out that many of the overdose deaths are not regular substance users, but result from those who casually use drugs receiving a sketchy concoction that they were not physiologically prepared for. This is trying to paint a picture where real humans are dying from drug overdoses, so please care about them! Don’t think this is just sub-human junkies! This could just be someone who likes to party! You like to party, right? Even Marx liked to party!
This mad dash to declare addiction a health crisis to eliminate stigma is inevitably destined to fail. During the AIDS epidemic, people were stigmatized not because of the disease ravaging their bodies, but because they were gay. Everyone knew it was a health crisis, but nobody cared because it was ideologically chained to the homos. Similarly with opioid deaths: you can scream all you want that it’s a health crisis, but no one is going to detach drug use from drug users. Destigmatizing drug use will never work so long as we’re ignoring the stigma attached to the users themselves.
If we see stigma as being attached to the addict in the same way that AIDS stigma was attached to the gay community, then what is it about filthy junkies that we just hate so much!? What biblical sin have drug users committed that earned them this stigma? Well, drug users are racialized, for one. They’re poor. They’re abused. They’re hobbled. They’re men (not in a femi-nazi way, but in a “failed men deserve to be discarded” way). Drug users are imbued with the sin of being socially despicable across all fronts. When society starts to embrace its homeless, when Indigenous people stop being followed around in stores, when we stop pitying the disabled, and when we allow diversity within masculinity, then maybe, the stigma against drug users will wane. Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near that.
The ads I see around town regarding substance use these days are linked to the Drug Free Kids organization which, hence the name, advocates an abstinence-based approach to drugs. We’re still teaching our kids abstinence-only programs like we were sex educators in 1950s America. It’s like we haven’t progressed at all since Nancy Reagan told us to just say no. We seem to have evolved passed the puritanism that demonized sex before marriage, accepting that kids are gonna bone and that’s okay, but we have not yet exorcized the demons from the devil’s weed.
Remember when sex would immediately result in pregnancy and syphilis? From my old textbook on addiction, “Estimates are that only around one-third of people who have injected heroin become addicted, compared to 22% for cocaine and 8% for marijuana. Only one drug causes addiction among a majority of its users—nicotine.” This little tidbit is completely irrelevant because we don’t want our babies to grow up to be crippled natives living on the street, and complete abstinence is the only way to be sure. Our reaction to drug users is an emotional response curated by centuries of racist, ableist, and classist attitudes, and patriarchal definitions of men. Any kind of drug education or strategy that isn’t addressing that is actively harming our chances at overcoming the opioid crisis.
The millions of deaths from Covid-19 are a tragedy because in theory, if not in practice, it can impact anyone regardless of status. There’s no stigma to it. I got Covid. You probably got Covid. Overdose deaths are for “them.” No matter how much the term “health crisis” gets bandied about to proselytize a benign neutrality, it won’t stop drugs from being a social issue. When we stop the farce and address those social issues, then maybe it will be just as okay for people to use drugs as it is for kids to bone.
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