Juno News - August 19, 2021


The government prepares to enable hard drug use

Mentioned
Patty Hadju Ms Hadju Trudeau Rehab
The issues that actually matter to Canadians this election Canadians can’t trust the CBC

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

137.02

Word count

588

Sentence count

28

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Is the federal government preparing to enable hard drug use? Well, it would certainly seem so if the Liberals win the September 20th election. An export task force on substance use created by Health Minister Patty Hadju in March has weighed in this week suggesting there no longer be criminal penalties for the possession and use of hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, LSD, meth and fentanyl.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Is the federal government preparing to enable hard drug use?
00:00:08.840 Well it would certainly seem so if the Liberals win the September 20th election.
00:00:14.260 An export task force on substance use created by Health Minister Patty Hadju in March has
00:00:20.720 weighed in this week suggesting there no longer be criminal penalties for the possession and
00:00:26.120 use of hard drugs.
00:00:27.860 We're talking about drugs like heroin, cocaine, LSD, meth and fentanyl.
00:00:33.340 The task force claims that Canada's laws making the possession of hard drugs a criminal act
00:00:38.440 has been part of an ongoing structural racism in this country and that Canada's Black and
00:00:45.700 Indigenous communities are unfairly and more often targeted with criminal charges for drug
00:00:51.740 offences.
00:00:53.220 They also contend that substance use in the Indigenous community is a consequence of
00:00:57.580 colonialism and the never-ending drug war has caused irreparable harm to Black communities.
00:01:05.860 The report comes up with no data to back up these claims but this is not important to progressives 0.96
00:01:11.740 in Canada these days who use hurt feelings and oppression to justify the most ridiculous
00:01:18.840 of contentions.
00:01:19.840 In a statement Ms Hadju says they must redouble efforts to save lives and meet the needs of
00:01:27.120 people who use substances.
00:01:28.840 Well it's not surprising that the task force members, all of them academics or supporters
00:01:34.480 of the trendy harm reduction philosophy that has gathered steam across Canada would come up
00:01:41.820 with further efforts to enable hardcore addicts and it's just as unsurprising that Hadju and
00:01:49.100 her task force would use COVID as an excuse to further their enabling agenda citing the increase
00:01:57.360 in opiate deaths during the worst months of the pandemic last year.
00:02:02.100 However, never mind that loneliness, isolation and the lack of mental health supports would
00:02:08.160 drive people to do things they normally don't do.
00:02:12.380 That's not mentioned at all.
00:02:14.300 And I'm not sure how making hard drugs legal will change that.
00:02:18.940 But here's the thing.
00:02:20.500 Safe injection and harm reduction sites provide clean needles and a safe space for addicts to
00:02:25.760 shoot up their drugs.
00:02:27.100 In other words, they enable drug addicts to take their poisons but safely.
00:02:32.480 Rehab is most often either not in the mix or just an afterthought.
00:02:38.580 And so the deaths from drug overdoses continue even at a faster rate despite the increase in
00:02:46.000 safe injection and harm reduction policies.
00:02:50.100 In Toronto, the number of safe injection sites has grown like weeds along with the federal money
00:02:56.240 given to host these sites.
00:02:58.100 There are now nine safe injection sites clustered around the downtown core and four urgent public
00:03:05.240 health needs sites in hotel shelters, all of them approved and funded by the Trudeau government.
00:03:12.040 The fallout on the communities around these sites has been tremendous with vandalism, break-and-enters,
00:03:19.240 loitering, nudity, and assaults, including sexual assaults, rampant.
00:03:25.340 One woman living right beside the Novotel shelter in Toronto's Asplanade neighborhood says without
00:03:30.680 effective detox and rehab programs, the addicts are just enabled and propped up.
00:03:36.200 She says decriminalizing hard drugs will increase drug trafficking and violence, which goes with
00:03:41.240 the territory.
00:03:42.240 It will also make the already increased crimes in areas way worse, she says, and lead to more
00:03:48.340 violence.
00:03:49.340 Health Minister Patty Hadju claims that substance use is a health issue, not a moral or criminal
00:03:57.340 one.
00:03:58.340 Well, go tell that to the neighborhoods infiltrated with crime from the government's enabling policies.
00:04:05.840 I have an idea.
00:04:07.240 Let's call these proposed policies what they really are.
00:04:10.760 If enacted, our politicians and the special interest groups will be killing addicts with
00:04:16.700 kindness. 0.95