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Smokers stigmatized more than crack users?
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| MarkT |
From today's Toronto Star...I love this columnist...almost always insightful and blunt (forgive the pun, lol).
A good point...Toronto's crack problem isn't Vancouver's heroin one and is less of a public health issue (needles spreading disease vs. inhalation) that may require radical means of treatment such as
"safe houses".
| quote: | Why won't city stigmatize crackheads?
But smokers seen as social pariahs, public health risk
New drug strategy eschews term `drug abuse' as pejorative
ROSIE DIMANNO
So let me get this straight: I can't smoke cigarettes in Toronto but I can smoke crack?
The former is a public health risk, nipped in the butt at nearly every indoor venue, with bossy and vilifying interdiction campaigns that have transformed smokers into social pariahs. But the latter is a personal choice that ought not to be stigmatized by a judgmental society.
I am not making this up. I am merely taking to their presumptive conclusions some of the recommendations advanced in a drug strategy scheme unveiled at city hall on Friday.
So very non-condemnatory of drug use is the report by the Toronto Drug Strategy Advisory Committee that its members have quite deliberately eschewed even the term "drug abuse'' as inherently pejorative. The word "abuse,'' the report states upfront, "perpetuates social stigma and judgment which can marginalize and alienate people from the very supports they need."
These supports could, come the day, include "supervised injection sites or inhalation rooms'' in Toronto — inhalation rooms because crack cocaine is the most frequently used street drug in this city — as posited by Recommendation No. 55. That recommendation does not overtly call for the establishment of such 100 per cent toleration zones. It merely asks the city, in partnership with the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health and community groups, to further study that option in developing strategies to address the "stigma and discrimination toward people who use substances.''
The report's authors do acknowledge that supervised consumption sites — a 50-cent euphemism for what most of us would call a crack house — would provoke tremendous controversy, as indeed the matter did, does, within the committee's own membership. Clearly, there was not enough agreement from within its ranks to make a bold, unambiguous proposal. But it's just as clear, from reading this section, that the committee wants to venture further in the direction of what I can only describe as legal crack arcades, which can only be created, in this country, after obtaining formal exclusion under the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
It's been done already in some 50 jurisdictions around the world, and, as of this past July, in Vancouver, where the issue is heroin rather than crack.
It is not that I wish to see drug addicts busted, because the last thing a crackhead needs is the burden of a criminal record, or incarceration in penal institutions where drugs are so easily obtained. There was a time when I believed that decriminalizing all drug use was the wisest approach — treating abuse as a health issue, not a matter for law enforcement. But I was taken aback, on my last trip to Amsterdam — where soft drugs are legal, marijuana and hash for sale in drug cafés — at how very stupid much of the mellowed-out adult populace had become, so sluggish, slack, slothful. The potency of these "soft drugs'' has increased dramatically, as laced as they are with THC.
This is not your father's ganja, as I discovered while on assignment for a story about legalizing drugs. (It took me three days to recover from my "research'' and I may very well be the only Canadian reporter who has charged spliffs and hash brownies to her expense account.)
Further, despite assurances that this wouldn't occur, the use of hard drugs in Amsterdam has skyrocketed, the city crawling with wasted junkies.
There are compelling social reasons, I now concede, for rejecting the whole premise of legalizing drugs as the lesser of two evils. And, as Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair noted last week — he is utterly opposed to the notion of crack sanctuaries — no one in this country gets charged for possession of small amounts of marijuana and hash any more. The personal use rule of thumb is being respected, largely because police forces have bigger drug problems to deal with, particularly the gun violence and organized crime that is driven by the drug appetite.
It is troubling that the drug advisory committee pays minimal attention to that drug-perpetuated violence in Toronto, especially after the lethal summer we've just been through. Or frames it within the context of how neighbourhoods could be made safer if some of this activity was more properly supervised — yes, even in a smoke-up drop-in environment, envisioned as a one-stop shopping emporium where addicts could also obtain clean needles and condoms and counselling, provided that counselling was non-invasive and moral-neutral.
"Effective harm reduction approaches are pro-active, offer a comprehensive range of coordinated, user-friendly, client-centered and flexible problems and services and provide a supportive, non-judgmental environment.''
The report does make many sound recommendations — from providing better addiction services in prisons to reinstating addiction as an eligible disability under the Ontario Disability Support Program — even if this does all boil down to a great deal more public money spent on intervention and the mushrooming of the anti-drug bureaucracy, indeed with the added creation of a new drug secretariat for Toronto.
But it's the tone of the thing that I find most objectionable — the de facto premise that our society has no right to project any judgmental values because, if you follow this logic, it's this very disapproval that prevents addicts from straightening out.
I would think it's the other way around. Making it easier to obtain and use crack, for instance (which, unlike heroin, doesn't involve the shared use of flesh-piercing implements that spread HIV and Hepatitis C), would not discourage such ruinous drug use. Rather, the message would seem to be that we, as a community, are prepared to facilitate your drug problem.
It's perfectly reasonable for any society to express its opprobrium for a drug scourge that makes victims of us all, be it the destruction of residential neighbourhoods or by wayward bullets that strike children.
And it's hypocritical to say that public revulsion is counter-effective in stigmatizing drug abuse when these are the very same people — check the public health authorities involved in preparing the report — who sanctioned such bullying tactics against smokers, and who claim their campaign has been marvellously effective.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. |
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: |
And it's hypocritical to say that public revulsion is counter-effective in stigmatizing drug abuse when these are the very same people — check the public health authorities involved in preparing the report — who sanctioned such bullying tactics against smokers, and who claim their campaign has been marvellously effective |
just like how i spell out the hypocrisy of people on this board who smoke pot but are against tobacco smokers.
You cant have it both ways. |
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| MarkT |
^^^ who is "against tobacco smokers"? I'm against smoking carcinogenic cigarettes in public.
and let's be clear...there's a lot more in a cigarette than tobacco. If everyone walked around smoking pure organice tobacco we wouldn't have any of this debate, now would we ;)
there's zero hypocrisy in pot smokers (who don't smoke it in public) being in favour of limiting cigarette smoking to private space as well.
anyway...the debate concerns smoking and crack...two harmful, addictive drugs with serious public and personal consequences for their use/abuse.
leave pot out of this :p |
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| EvilTree |
| quote: | Originally posted by MarkT
^^^ who is "against tobacco smokers"? I'm against smoking carcinogenic cigarettes in public.
and let's be clear...there's a lot more in a cigarette than tobacco. If everyone walked around smoking pure organice tobacco we wouldn't have any of this debate, now would we ;)
there's zero hypocrisy in pot smokers (who don't smoke it in public) being in favour of limiting cigarette smoking to private space as well.
anyway...the debate concerns smoking and crack...two harmful, addictive drugs with serious public and personal consequences for their use/abuse.
leave pot out of this :p |
People don't smoke pot in public because it's illegal to do so.
If it's legal to smoke pot in public, you'll see more people doing it in public. |
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| MarkT |
^^^ I realize that.
Jayx1 likes to think that it's hypocritical to smoke pot and be against smokers be able to light up in public.
*completely* illogical for him to say so for a number of reasons that I'm not going to list for the millionth time in this thread because it's not the point of this article at all. |
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| psychosomatica |
| I'm not against the use of drugs. I'm against the abuse. I would say cigarette smokers have a much higher tendency of abusing the substance than say pot smokers. |
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| Jayx1 |
funny but i smell pot in public very often.
People smoke pot and i breathe second hand pot. Which is fine cuz i dont care. But pot smokers should know what its like to be ostersized by society for doing something they enjoy. |
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| Cosmic Fur |
I'm against restrictions on smoking any substance. Obviously there should still be *some* rules for where you can and can't smoke, but what we have right now in TO is over the top.
And I don't even smoke. |
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| mushyflowa |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
funny but i smell pot in public very often.
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mwahhaha hopefully.. pot doesnt become legal.. it wud be very frustrating having all this kids high on the streets.. those who think drugs are super cool.. those who cant control themselves..
go crack! :wtf: |
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| Mag1k |
Somkers Unite :disbelief
Go Go PowerSmokers |
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