Western Standard - August 31, 2023


Plan is needed to deal with the growing number of street addicts before cold weather hits...

Topics
fentanyl addiction crisis street addicts
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

214.22

Word count

1,191

Sentence count

88

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the growing problem of homeless drug addicts living on the streets and the desperate situation they are in as the weather begins to get colder and the number of addicts on the street continues to rise. We need to do something about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 I went out yesterday. I guess, you know, I do some field trips and so on. I went and checked out a homeless encampment in Calgary. The police had begun dismantling and cleaning up. This was like at least the third time in this location that the police have had to go down there and dismantle the encampments that's in the area. It was littered with everything from propane canisters to mattresses and syringes. It was a mess. And it's also been a hub of local crime for months.
00:00:26.940 So the site of tent encampments, you know, and attics in various states of inebriation and population centers, I mean, it's become ubiquitous. Police policies of enablement have failed catastrophically. Let's just face it. They aren't working. And the number of street attics has expanded exponentially in every city in Canada, throughout North America, as far as that goes, particularly those cities, though, where they provide a safe supply of drugs.
00:00:51.220 So we've got snow is going to start flying out here in a couple of short months. And every Canadian city is going to see a disaster as these attics are exposed to the elements. I know we prefer not to look at it. And we prefer not to talk about it. But unfortunately, burying our heads in the sand, we're just going to let this looming wave of crime and death build up. And it's past time to start ringing the alarm bells on this. 0.94
00:01:15.220 I go out and about all the time. I'm on the road. And I look around. And I mean, these people are in terrible, terrible condition. They're in danger. They're in rough shape.
00:01:23.840 And they're not going to fare well when it gets to minus 30. So what do you think is going to happen? You know, when when people on the streets hit minus 30 weather, well, they're going to become desperate.
00:01:34.620 That's where the crime aspect will come along. Transit systems, they'll probably become rolling heated drug consumption centers again. Robberies will rise as addicts can no longer apply their trade of theft and bottle picking due to the deep snow and low temperatures.
00:01:48.160 I mean, the fentanyl addiction, it's a crisis like we haven't seen before. That drug is plentiful, it's powerful, and it's incredibly addictive. So the addicts you see, you might have seen on the streets, you know, they're bent over, they're oddly paralyzed while staring at the ground.
00:02:02.300 Well, they've usually taken fentanyl. And the behavior is called nodding. Now, sometimes they just simply fall and pass out with a pipe in their hands. Other times they stand there strangely like that after smoking their chosen poison.
00:02:13.740 And the drug can be laced with a number of substances. Now, the drug consumption itself, of course, is dangerous enough. And that's killing 1000s of them every year. But when it becomes far more dangerous, once the Canadian winter sets in, I mean, what do you think is going to happen when they nod off, and it's minus 30, they're going to lose digits, or they're going to die death by exposure.
00:02:32.260 I mean, the issue isn't a lack of shelter in general. It's a lack of shelter for addicts. You know, I've been listening to advocates and the usual anti-poverty folks, you know, they feel that if they oppose poverty hard enough, it'll go away. I see them talking on social media. And they're saying, we need more affordable housing. That's the problem. Come on. Yes, we do. But that has nothing to do with these addicts. Okay. They need more than a house. They need treatment. They need to be taken off the streets. You can't put them in a house.
00:03:01.600 How low will the rent have to go? How low? If we put the rent down to $100 a month, you think those homeless addicts from that encampment will say, Oh, okay, I'll move into the house and become a responsible citizen and pay my $100 a month in rent. No, if they've got $100 in their pocket, they're going to buy $100 with a fentanyl. That's the way it works. This problem is much deeper than just needing affordable housing. You can't put them in shelters, unfortunately, because shelters won't allow them to keep consuming drugs. So they can't manage those strung out addicts, you know, because it's unfair as well to the other people stuck in these shelters.
00:03:31.020 So I mean, citizens and governments that we're both going to need to embrace a reality check on this issue and really fast. If we continue down the road we are on right now, we're going to be seeing horrific number of deaths and witnessing new levels of misery for addicts and those impacted by them. We need to intervene. There's the big word that people don't like. But every civilized nation has legislation allowing for the removal of a person's liberty if it's evident they're going to harm themselves or others if they're left to their own devices.
00:03:57.020 This can be done in cases where people have serious mental health issues. There's no good reason why such an intervention isn't justified when it comes to street addicts. We have more than enough evidence they're going to harm themselves and others if they're left in the condition they're in right now. Put it bluntly, we wouldn't leave a dog in an alley like that. Yet we're leaving people there. You listen to the advocates, we can't infringe upon their liberty or their dignity. There's no dignity left, guys. They've hit rock bottom.
00:04:27.020 It's going to come as they're going to die. And yes, when we intervene, the success of treatment, you know, and things like that, it's low if the addict didn't come in willingly. But the survival rate of the street addicts were left alone is even lower. So we really don't have much to lose in intervening.
00:04:40.160 The cities right now should be seeking out and securing heated spaces somewhere where people can be kept when that need comes because it's going to come.
00:04:47.860 And, you know, it'll be, yes, a space to warehouse addicts, somewhere to safely take them when we do take them off the trains, when we do take them out of the alleys, when we do take them somewhere, put them on a cot, get some heat on them, get some food into them and hope we can push them into treatment.
00:05:02.740 But if we keep pretending that this is just a lack of affordable housing, we keep turning our heads and saying this addiction is manageable. If we could just give them enough safe supply, they'll be OK.
00:05:11.920 Hey, guess what? You take fentanyl, even if it's government supplied when it's minus 30, you're probably going to frigging die. 0.95
00:05:18.720 There's no safe supply of that. Quit listening to these enabling idiots and let's get prepared because we're going to have a disaster on our hands if we don't do something with the addicts when it comes. 1.00
00:05:28.940 There's so many more of them out there. And winter's coming, guys. Winter's coming. 1.00