Western Standard - July 20, 2021


Vancouver Councillor Swanson hands out 'safe supply' of meth, heroin, and cocaine


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

109.09588

Word count

399

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Dolph and Van Du are giving out free and safe drugs to Vancouver's drug addicts in order to help them get the help they need. They are fighting for a safe supply for everyone who needs it, not just for a few hundred people.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The
00:00:14.720 model has no provisions for safe supply. If decrylamization continues to crack down on 0.98
00:00:21.240 both users and dealers, the policy will only lead to more toxic drugs on the street. We
00:00:28.800 need clean, safe, distributed drugs by the community now. And we have to do it.
00:00:35.040 You know, these limits that are part of this model are far too low. We are giving away more
00:00:42.520 drugs. In these boxes are more drugs than these limits. We are still breaking the law
00:00:48.540 because you know what? The law isn't helping us. We help us.
00:00:58.800 Thanks so much to Dolph and Van Du for organizing this. It's so, so, so bad that you had to
00:01:07.000 organize it. I was crunching some numbers yesterday. In the last 15 months, about four people a
00:01:15.360 day have died of COVID. So what is the government doing because of COVID? They closed down businesses.
00:01:23.080 They closed down Carnegie for a while. They stopped travel. They stopped in-person doctor visits.
00:01:28.820 They stopped evictions. They gave us a rent freeze. But almost six people a day are dying from poison
00:01:38.140 drugs. Six precious humans. And what did we get? A little bit of harm reduction, a teensy bit of safe
00:01:49.520 supply. A model of decrim with thresholds that are way too low. We need government to act like the
00:01:58.480 people who die from poison drugs are just as important as the people who die from COVID.
00:02:06.800 Because they are. And that means we need safe supply now for everyone who wants it.
00:02:13.280 For over 30 years, the drug-using community in Vancouver has been at the forefront of trying to get a just system.
00:02:26.720 Remember about 30 years ago, we had the first safe injection site here. And guess what? It was illegal.
00:02:35.680 Just like it's illegal to give out safe drugs now. So you guys are following in the footsteps of a great
00:02:45.360 tradition where you start doing something illegal and then it becomes legal.
00:02:50.320 If Dolph and Van Du, with hardly any resources, can give away free and safe drugs, why can't governments that have billions in their budgets?
00:03:11.760 All of the public health folks, everyone who knows anything about drugs, all of the people who use drugs,
00:03:22.960 they say we need a safe supply. Not just a safe supply for a few hundred people, but a safe supply for
00:03:31.040 everyone who wants it.