Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2020

The Current Transcript for January 8, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Well, you know, I look at what changed the game, right? Fentanyl has really changed the game for anybody working in addiction.

MATT GALLOWAY: Mae Katt has seen that change firsthand. She ran an addiction program for students at a Thunder Bay high school. 40 percent of the student population was using opioids and other substances. This morning, in part two of our look at how Thunder Bay is grappling with the opioid crisis, we hear from workers on the frontlines of that fight and from the chief of police on the gangs from Toronto and Ottawa selling the tainted drugs in her city. That's in 30 minutes. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: In real time, you can via a touch on the software interface in front of you, reproduce an artificial sense of touch on my body.

MG: It's the next step in virtual reality, a skin that allows you to touch someone from hundreds of kilometres away. We'll give it a spin in an hour. It's only slightly creepy, trust me. But we begin along with much of the world, with our eyes on Iraq, where Iran has struck back and meanwhile, a plane crash in Tehran has left 176 people dead, including 63 Canadians. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Trump wants Europe to do more in Middle East. It's in their interest to do so, says professor

Guests: Pesha Magid, Mark Hosenball, Christian Leuprecht

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We've said very clearly that if the United States takes any further action, Iran will respond accordingly and we will respond in a very harsh way. But proportionately. We did not start this process of escalation. The United States has to come to its senses. They should stop listening to clowns.

MG: A sound from video of onlookers to one of the Iranian missile attacks in Iraq. And Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif staking his position afterwards. The U.S. Iran tit for tat reached another level last night. Iran launched more than 20 missiles at two military bases in Iraq where U.S. troops are stationed, a response, it said, to the U.S. killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, with Zarif adding that his country was not escalating or looking for war. There are no reports of American or Iraqi casualties. And the chief of the defence staff, Jonathan Vance, has said that all Canadian troops are safe. Pesha Magid is a freelance journalist based in Baghdad. Pesha, good morning.

PESHA MAGID: Good morning.

MG: You're in Baghdad as these attacks were happening last night. What were you hearing in the capital?

PESHA MAGID: After the attacks took place, we did hear a fair amount of helicopter and activity over the city of Baghdad coming from the Green Zone.

MG: What do we know about how much damage these missile strikes caused?

PESHA MAGID: It's very likely that they caused damage to, at the very least, you know, equipment on the bases, particularly the Assad military base in western Iraq, which is one of the biggest military bases in Iraq.

MG: Why these bases? The U.S. has a presence throughout Iraq, but why would these bases targeted, do you think?

PESHA MAGID: The U.S. is hosted on Iraqi military bases, but these two in particular have a fairly large U.S. troop presence. In the Assad military base in western Iraq, is known for having kind of the largest amount of U.S. troops in Iraq. So, you know, I think the goal was to aim at U.S. personnel and U.S. interests within Iraq.

MG: Is your sense that the Iraqi leadership knew that these attacks were coming?

PESHA MAGID: Well, they just said that they knew. The acting prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, just released a statement saying that Iran alerted him to the fact that they were going to launch missiles and he in turn, let the United States know to essentially watch out. He also has not come outright and condemned the attacks.

MG: What does that tell you?

PESHA MAGID: I think it tells us that the Iraqi government has a fairly close relationship with Iran. You know, Mahdi was originally brought to power by a coalition that has Iranian backing. And, you know, prior to all of this happening, he met with Soleimani several times. You know, it shows a clear difference in rhetoric. At the same time, you know, we have to look at the damage caused by these strikes and it appears like nobody was killed in these missile strikes.

MG: The thrust of the statements coming from the Iraqi prime minister, if you take them in its totality, seem to suggest that the Iraqi leadership wants the heat to be turned down. The prime minister has called on all sides to practice self-restraint, adhere to international agreements, respect the Iraqi state, and is concerned about a devastating all out war in Iraq, the region and the world. What do you think the leadership wants from the two forces that that have put Iraq in the middle of this conflict?

PESHA MAGID: You know, I think, of course, they don't want to be trapped in the middle of a proxy war. Iraq has just gotten out of several years of conflict and I think the you know, the prospect of being plunged into another war between two states that, you know, are fighting battles that have nothing truly to do with Iraq. It's something that is, you know, terrifying to many Iraqis. And I know that Iraqi leadership, you know, it's very much against the possibility of being plunged into violence and chaos again.

MG: Tell me more about that in terms of how Iraqi citizens feel. You tweeted, as you said, that in many ways they feel trapped between the United States and Iran.

MG: Yeah. I mean, so we also have to look at kind of the local context in Iraq. Right? So Iraq is coming out of three months of mass popular protests where people had been demanding for an end to a corrupt government, they'd been asking for internal reforms. They were asking also for Iraq to be free from foreign influence from both Iran and the U.S. with a particular emphasis on Iran. And now they see their country potentially getting, you know, those demands kind of getting swallowed up in a proxy battle between two mega powers. And it's you know, I think it's quite depressing. It's a quite depressing you know prospect for almost everyone I've spoken to.

MG: One of the protesters that you spoke with in a piece that you wrote said, we just want our Iraq.

PESHA MAGID: Yes, exactly. I mean, I you know, what people have been saying is that they want the very simple things. Right. They want to people have the ability to have a good education. They want to be able to have jobs and they want to have the rock belonged to Iraqis and not be dictated by the not have their future dictated by the interests of foreign powers.

MG: Which nation do you think they're more upset about today? Would it be Iran or the United States?

PESHA MAGID: I mean, you know, if we're talking about protesters, I think that they would probably be more upset at Iran to a certain extent, just because Iran's, you know, Iranian backed militias have also been targeting protesters over the past few days and also have been using this moment kind of as an opportunity to claim that protesters, you know, are pro-American, which they're not, but I'd also say that frustration is pretty across the board. You know, like people are very upset that the United States has again acted unilaterally and has, you know, seemed to take Iraqi life and Iraqi blood very cheaply.

MG: What will you watch for in the coming days? This seems to change sort of not just day by day, but minute by minute.

PESHA MAGID: I mean, you know, things are very hard to predict. I think we have to look carefully to see what the US's next move will be. Iran seems to be signalling that, you know, with these missile strikes, maybe that would be, you know, enough ever a retaliation for now. The other thing we have to look for is that it wasn't just Soleimani who was killed in U.S. strikes, it was a militia leader called Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis who is an Iraqi leader of a militia called Kata'ib Hezbollah, which is one of the biggest militias within Iraq. We also have to look out for revenge and retaliation from them. I think it would be very odd if there wasn't some sort of reaction from those groups.

MG: Pesha, we'll leave it there. I appreciate you speaking to us this morning. Thank you.

PESHA MAGID: Alright. Bye-bye.

MG: Pesha Magid is a freelance journalist based in Baghdad. Mark Hosenball is the National Security Correspondent with Reuters. He's in Washington, D.C.. Mark, good morning to you.

MARK HOSENBALL: Hello. How are you doing?

MG: I'm well after these attacks. U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted, "All as well. So far, so good." Not perhaps what people may have expected from the president on his favourite medium of Twitter. What do you make of what he said?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, by the sound of things, it's kind of an attempt to put a bit of a damper, a lid on hysteria that may have welled up as a result of the attack from General Soleimani, which, of course, nobody in Washington really was expected, had expected. People after the attack on General Soleimani occurred and after the Iranians retaliated, you know, there was a great deal of worry in Washington that this was going to blow up into something really, really bad, some general war or more general war between the United States and Iran. Given that, however, that the Iranian attacks on the air bases in Iraq don't seem to have killed everyone, and maybe that was even a deliberate strategy or tactic or whatever by the Iranians, Trump seems to perhaps have joined in with the Iranians who were kind of restrained in their language, at least internationally, in maybe wanting to calm the whole thing down. Certainly, while there are people around Trump who clearly encouraged him to go ahead and attack Soleimani, generally, the view in both American politics and probably more on the Iraqi government is that this is a rather extreme step to take. So the idea of backing away or not getting carried away in reacting to Iranian attacks that didn't actually kill anybody suggests that there is a desire or at least a recognition on the part of Trump in particular, that maybe you don't want to stir this up to, you know, to the point of the whole area is in flames.

MG: What are your national security sources telling you about what the next steps from Washington could be?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, given that this stuff all happened late, late last night, it's a bit hard to catch up at the moment. There are gonna be secret briefings for members of Congress today. There was a small briefing for what they call the Gang of Eight, who were the top congressional leaders and leaders of the intelligence community late yesterday, which went on for several hours. And normally you can get a bit of a readout from that, but it was very hard to get a readout last night because of all the attacks that were actually going on by Iraq. Sorry by Iran in Iraq. So it's a bit hard to know exactly what's going to happen next here in Washington.

MG: Well you mentioned the Gang of Eight and it's interesting because the Democratic congressional leaders were notified immediately after these Iranian strikes. That was not the case last week with the attack that killed General Soleimani. So do you see a change in that?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, normally they should have been informed before the attacks on General Soleimani as well. So we're returning more to normality and again, that's probably not necessarily the way Trump wants to operate because he's not doesn't liked operating according to normality. But I think even the professional people, the permanent government around him wants to act that way. And I think you see evidence of the permanent government, you know, at least having more influence on him now, given that there's no particular evidence that the Iranian strike on the base used by the Americans actually killed anybody.

MG: The supreme leader of Iran said in a televised address today that the U.S. presence in that region should come to an end. Is there any likelihood that that would happen?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, I don't think there's going to be a complete end to the U.S. presence in the region, especially regarding, you know, U.S. presence, not so much in Iraq, but in other countries nearby, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, where the U.S. has very extensive interests and certainly, you know, some serious military bases. So I think that's just noise basically, but it's noise that you would expect from Iran.

MG: The president didn't address the nation last night and as we mentioned, the tweet seemed restrained for how he usually speaks on Twitter. Is there the real opportunity do you think now for de-escalation or perhaps diplomacy to try and turn the heat down?

MARK HOSENBALL: I could see de-escalation. Diplomacy is not Donald Trump's favourite modus operandi. So, you know, we'll kind of have to wait and see on that front. But I mean, certainly there's a large opportunity for de-escalation at the moment, given the lack of deaths in the Iranian attack on the American bases.

MG: Something that you have said it could have been perhaps if not intentional than then a way to try and telegraph their intentions. That they didn't mean to kill anybody. They're doing this as a show tied to you know, perhaps internally to show that they were responding to the death of Soleimani.

MARK HOSENBALL: That's certainly the way I kind of read it and it's the way I think a lot of people in America at this point read it.

MG: Mark Hosenball, we'll leave it there. Thank you.

MARK HOSENBALL: Thank you.

MG: Mark Hosenball, National Security Correspondent with Reuters. We reached him in Washington, D.C. For more on how these attacks are being felt across the region, I'm joined by a Christian Leuprecht. He's a professor of political science at Royal Military College and Queen's University. He is in Kingston, Ontario. Christian, good morning to you.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Good morning.

MG: I want to start with the story that's unfolding in that region that's top of mind for so many Canadians right now. That's the death of 176 people onboard a Ukrainian plane that crashed in Tehran. 63 three Canadians among those dead. People will wake up this morning. It's shocking news. And people wake up this morning in the knowledge of the attack that we've just been talking about, but then hear of this plane crash as well and might initially connect the dots betweem the two. How are you reading what's happening?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: I mean, the official statements have been, of course, that they're not related. But one things the Iranians would have done in anticipation of possible U.S. strikes against the missile launchers or for instance, radar sites, is that they might have used GPS trackers and would have possibly turned off either all sorts of other electronic equipment or try to use electronic equipment to mis guide any U.S. assets, cruise missiles, planes or whatnot. And so it's entirely possible that in that field of circumstance, a civilian plane would readily get disoriented and not get, for instance, the proper sensors, not the proper impane on height, for instance. So I think we would need an independent investigation to ascertain that. Whether we're actually going to be able to get that out of Iran, that'll be difficult to ascertain.

MG: We'll follow that along as it develops. In the meantime, the attacks last night on these two bases, why do you think those bases in particular were targeted?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: So I think the Iranians were trying to minimize the prospect of hitting allied assets or allied personnel other than the US. And look, the Iranians would have very good intelligence on what's happening on these bases. It seems that several of the missiles also missed their intended targets. And that was probably the greater risk that a missile might fall somewhere where the Iranians had not intended it to fall and then inadvertently caused collateral American damage. So I think it was meant as a clear signal that this was a strike against the United States. It was not a strike against the NATO mission or against partner countries within the region.

MG: Why do you think no one was hurt? Mark Hosenball was suggesting that perhaps that was by design from the Iranians.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Oh, sure. I mean, the Iranians could have retaliated right away. They have the intelligence. They have the capabilities. There was no reason why the Iranians had to wait other than perhaps to honour the fallen general in mourning. So the more time they gave the Americans, the more time the Americans obviously had to move assets and people out of harm's way. And I think that was very much the intent of Iran. And the Iranian propaganda machine had to retaliate in some capacity. The Americans would have very much anticipated that. And so this is largely for the exploitation of the sort of domestic propaganda and for the existential continuity of the regime rather than trying to inflict maximum damage on the United States.

MG: Canadian military has hundreds of troops in Iraq, began moving those troops to Kuwait yesterday and the operations in Iraq have been paused. Do we know whether all of the Canadian troops got out of Iraq?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: I suspect the tweet by the chief of defence staff would have indicated that if that had been the case. Of course, now moving troops out gets a lot more complicated because you wanna make sure in case there's further strikes, you don't confuse Canadian vehicles with Iraqi or U.S. vehicles or whatnot. So I think they'll be considerable thinking at the department of national defence and Canadian Armed Forces this morning about how to ensure both safety of the personnel and the ability of Canada, of course, in its leadership position will also have a leadership role to play in assuring the safety of personnel and allied assets.

MG: Where does that leave the role of Canada? A pause in operations isn't ceasing operations. Where does that leave the Canadian troops?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: So Canada will have an interest in a united NATO. So Canada has, like some other allies, has withdrawn its troops. The commitment by Secretary General Stoltenberg has been to restart the mission as soon as possible. And that's in the broader interest of Canada because it wants to shore up the alliance. The NATO alliance is arguably the most important multilateral institution of which candidate is part and a significant interest and a force multiplier for Canada. And so Canada will not be the one breaking ranks. It will be taking its cues from its allies and from the NATO, the North Atlantic Council.

MG: Just in the final minute that we have, when these attacks were launched last night, I think a lot of people probably wondered, is this the start of something that could get much larger and perhaps spiral out of control? Mark Hosenball suggesting that perhaps there's the opportunity, if not for diplomacy, then certainly for de-escalation. Do you see that opportunity as well?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Sure. I mean, a dozen missiles is a fairly modest response. The European Union on the line, has been really very active in trying to mediate with Iran. Germany has indicated that it is actively talking to both Iran and Washington. And I think the statement by Secretary General Stoltenberg about de-escalation is also an olive branch to Iran, that perhaps there is a silver lining here and there may be an opportunity to negotiate and generate an end game that is acceptable both to the United States and Iran, both out of the current situation and for the region more broadly.

MG: And I guess the first signs of that would be what the U.S. president says this morning. He's expected to talk later on today.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Well, as unpredictable as he is, the unpredictability may also play to his strengths in terms of restraining the Iranian leadership because if you're targeting arguably the second most important person in the country, who knows who may be next among the Iranian elite if they try to escalate.

MG: Christian Leuprecht, thank you.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: It's been my pleasure.

MG: Christian Leuprecht is a professor of political science at Royal Military College and Queen's University and an Eisenhower fellow at the NATO Defence College. Still with this story, we wanted to correct something from yesterday's program. One of our guests yesterday was speaking about the downing of an Iranian airliner in 1988 by U.S. forces that killed all 290 people aboard. The guest said that the U.S. later apologized for that incident. Actually, the U.S. has never apologized. Though eight years later, it did express deep regret and paid more than $61 million to the victims families to settle a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice. The CBC News is next. And then we head to the frontlines of a very different kind of crisis. This one in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where paramedics and police are often first on the scene for overdoses. And it's taking a real toll. Our documentary from Thunder Bay coming up after the news. That's in about six minutes time. Stick around. My name is Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Tainted drugs are fuelling Thunder Bay's opioid deaths, say advocates. They want a safe supply to fight it

Guests: Dan Irwin, Sylvie Hauth

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, imagine being able to touch someone's 700 kilometres away and they can actually feel it. That's what I'm going to do or at least try to do with some pretty amazing technology. It's pretty weird, I'll admit. It's coming up in about half an hour. But first, the people coping with a crisis.

[Music: Theme]

MG: This week on The Current, special programming from a trip we took to Thunder Bay. That community is struggling with an opioid crisis. It's taking more lives per capita than anywhere else in the province of Ontario. Yesterday, we heard from families who believe the deaths of their loved ones should be considered murder. They died from overdoses of fentanyl and car fentanyl. Today, we're looking at how the crisis is playing out for frontline workers in that city. This is our documentary, A Hard Hit.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

VOICE 1: Well, you know, I look at what changed the game, right? Fentanyl has really changed the game for anybody working in addiction.

VOICE 2: Addiction touches everyone. All of us have been touched by addiction in our professional and personal lives in one way or another. It touches everybody.

VOICE 3: They deserve to be saved. They deserve to be alive, regardless of what they're struggling.

VOICE 4: There are more charges, more gangs, more incidents of, you know, person next door could be the dealer, right.

VOICE 5: I think there's lots of compassion, but I just I think there's just a lot of work to do and sometimes it seems very daunting.

[Music]

MG: It's a freezing night in Thunder Bay and I'm about to go on a ride along with two of that city's paramedics. James Frizado has almost two decades of experience. His partner, Cody Marson, almost seven years. How has the arrival of the opioid crisis in this city changed what you do?

JAMES FRIZADO: It's definitely exploded a lot over the last few years. Like when I started, honestly, the advanced care paramedics were only ever giving Narcan, maybe once every two months. And now it's pretty routine. That's been given daily by some people. And if it's not by us, the community's handing that out. We've done several calls where people have given two or three Narcans to people.

MG: Naloxone, also known as Narcan, is a medication that's become the norm in many cities used to counter the effects of opioids and often saving people from otherwise deadly overdoses. We've only been on the road for a few minutes before a call comes in. A woman reportedly intoxicated outside, despite the fact that it's minus 20. As we head her way, James picks up where he left off.

JAMES FRIZADO: I think a lot of the times it honestly starts off with the person that prescribed it legitimately. And then I think maybe they take one or two too many and get that high sensation and then get addicted. And unfortunately, it's hitting anyone and everyone. I've never really thought it was that bad until just recently and then with all the violence that goes along with it and the gangs and stuff like that.

MG: We've pulled over to the side of the road where a woman is sitting on the edge of the sidewalk. James and Cody begin to check her over. She's barely coherent.

[Police chatter with intoxicated woman]

MG: I'm really struck by how young this woman is, maybe 18-years-old. No gloves, no hat, open jacket and clearly in distress. This level of intoxication has become familiar to James and Cody.

[Police chatter with intoxicated woman]

MG: And though they're not sure what this person is on, Cody tells me that opioids have really changed the way they do their jobs.

CODY MARSON: We never know, like we never know who we're getting. I mean she can be super nice woman and then the next minute she has a knife in her pocket.

MG: Beyond the erratic behaviour they encounter, Cody talks about a recent call where three teens insisted they'd only smoked a joint.

CODY MARSON: And all three of them collapsed and the students actually had Narcan kits and gave all three of them Narcan kits and they all woke up. So you're telling me that the Narcan worked on your weed, right? Like it's not how it works, right.

MG: These days, she says, everything is laced with opioids and that's made everyone prepared.

CODY MARSON: Like we went to a call, the drug dealer actually saved the gu he gave the drugs to. So he whatever sold the drugs to the guy, the guy did the drugs, overdosed. He ran into Shoppers, called 9-1-1, gave him the Narcan, left and literally saved his life. So it's a good thing, right? It is a good thing.

MG: Does it make people too casual? I mean, are people using things and thinking that things can be reversed because of Narcan?

CODY MARSON: We picked up the same person three times in the same day and overdosing because of the fact that he came here got Narcan or we gave him Narcan, he got better, went back out, did more drugs. Someone found him unconscious. Like it's a repeat, like all the time that happens.

BRAD KING: This is a little memorial we started and this is people that have come into the site use this to memorialize some of the folks that they lost.

MG: Brad King stands beside a large mural. It's paper butterflies with the names of people who've died from drug use. He runs this place, Thunder Bay's only supervised injection site at NorWest Community Health Centres. Do you know some of the people who are, whose names are on the board?

BRAD KING: I put some of those up there. Each number is a person that's important to somebody. It's somebody brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter or friend and that's whole that's in somebody's life that won't be filled again. Each person is important. And when we talk about numbers, it's easy to lose that. It's easy to lose sight of that. It's like ripples in a pond and they shouldn't be forgotten.

MG: Brad is a tall, soft spoken man and he tours me through the site.

BRAD KING: This is the injection room. So this is where people come to inject with supervision from a registered nurse. It's pretty bare bones.

MG: It's a largely empty room. A few tables with clean needles.

BRAD KING: There's a lighter and mirrors where we can observe people better. And we also have a variety of naloxone if we need to respond to an overdose with naloxone.

MG: I ask him what kind of drugs people are using.

BRAD KING: It's mostly been opioids that people have been using and they're of the unidentified variety. That would be the purple downs and the blue downs and the various colours of that sort of mystery substance.

MG: Drugs like fentanyl laced with any number of things.

BRAD KING: Literally anything could be in the drugs that people are injecting from things like cattle dewormer, bath salts. You never know what you're getting when you're buying drugs off the street.

MG: That's because the supply is controlled by gangs here, unregulated and unpredictable. I asked Brad why fentanyl is now being cut into drugs like cocaine and marijuana.

BRAD KING: It is cheaper, it's stronger, it's more bang for the buck. So it makes sense for them to do that. And it's also if they have a stronger product, it's more attractive to people and seeing as how most of what's on the street has fentanyl, people's tolerance has become so high that they actually need that fentanyl.

MG: Brad believes that given the size of the opioid crisis in Thunder Bay, there needs to be more than just one supervised injection site.

BRAD KING: People feel safe when they come here and they feel like they're not judged when they come here. So they're able to be honest about what's going on in their lives. And thus we're able to build that relationship of trust with them and we're able to help them.

MG: He's helped addicts with everything from getting into treatment to finding housing.

BRAD KING: I just try to take everything one day at a time and focus on small victories.

MG: There are a lot of people who still will say these are drug users, they're addicts. It's not about giving them a safe space to use the drugs, it's about the fact that they're using drugs in the first place. And we'll look at them and look at a site like this as sort of facilitating that. What do you say to those people?

BRAD KING: Well, lack of access to new harm reduction supplies does not prevent drug use. We're encouraging people who are already using drugs to do so safely and we're reducing the amount of HIV and Hep C transmission in the community and we're reducing the amount of deaths.

MG: Upstairs from the supervised injection site, I meet Juanita Lawson, CEO of the NorWest Community Health Centre. That addiction treatment is available in this same building is crucial. Nurses who see an addict considering health can move quickly.

JUANITA LAWSON: We want to make sure that they can get upstairs and that they can see the physician because that, yes, is really important. We don't want that individual to be turned away or have to come back tomorrow because they might not come back tomorrow.

MG: Juanita believes that a legalized safe supply of drugs would prevent deaths and get more people into treatment. I push her on the politics of this. There's not a big appetite among many Canadians for legalizing hard drugs.

JUANITA LAWSON: I mean, I think we have to dig deep in terms of where we're at with this.

MG: What do you mean by that?

JUANITA LAWSON: I think in terms of our own values of how we judge and how we value life, I think.

MG: And then Juanita stops speaking. Can I ask why that's so hard to talk about?

JUANITA LAWSON: It breaks my heart seeing all the all the comments that people make from their computers in their own homes, and it breaks my heart when I see just the total disregard for people. That's what's hard. So I don't get angry, I just get sad.

MG: A few minutes drive away is one of the city's busiest homeless shelters, and that's where we're meeting Mae Katt. She's a nurse practitioner who divides her time between Thunder Bay and surrounding flying communities providing opiate addiction treatment. Mae is a member of the Temagami First Nation.

MAE KATT: Well, you know, we've been hit really hard with the overdoses and one of the group that's, you know, high numbers are the young native youth coming in from the north.

MG: Teenagers leaving home often for the first time to go to school here in Thunder Bay.

MAE KATT: You know, we're not urban dwellers, right? We don't know the dangers of cities.

MG: Mae is the school nurse at Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School. She ran an addiction program for the students there. 40 percent of those students were hooked on opioids and other substances. In urgent need of a solution, she used Suboxone, a replacement drug not normally used on kids under the age of 18.

MAE KATT: Well, I think the youngest student we treated was 15-years-old. And we knew that if we didn't provide treatment because there was injection drug use, that we were probably looking, he wasn't going to, you know, live to be 18 when you're supposed to use the drug Suboxone.

MG: As shocking as this all is, Mae says it actually makes some sense.

MAE KATT: The northern communities have had over 600 suicides. And so if you bring that degree of grief to any population, they're going to look for an outlet. And opioids were the outlet for them.

MG: Her compassion is evident in everything that she says.

MAE KATT: Every human being, I think, has the potential to be a drug user. And I think if you don't have those supports or if you don't have the people to talk to, you know, anybody can, you know, turn to the drugs.

MG: And that is what I've heard again and again. Talk of just how many people have taken that path. Thunder Bay has become an exceptionally lucrative drug market. Gangs know there's a lot of money to be made in this city.

MAE KATT: In the early, you know, 2010, a $10 OxyContin from Toronto would sell for $80 in Thunder Bay and 800 in the north. So you're looking at 10 times the cost for an illicit drug. And people were having to spend every penny, you know, and how did they obtain their money? It's a lot of poverty there. So they were doing things that, you know, once they were able to get into a treatment program, realized that the behaviour was driven by the drugs, it was not driven by who they were as individuals.

MG: And of the 63 students that she treated.

MAE KATT: The nice thing is they're all still alive.

MG: Our ride-along with the paramedics, Cody and James, finishes outside Thunder Base Hospital. This is where we've brought that very intoxicated young woman. She was threatening to kill herself.

CODY MARSON: That takes a toll on us. It does for sure. To come back and do the same job over and over and have these same talks over and over and over, right. It seems like it's what do you call it, Groundhog Day, some days.

MG: I ask her to tell me more about that toll.

CODY MARSON: Like I give you example, how I talk to my daughter, right. Like I'm sure not everyone at 8-years-old tells their kid these things, right. I think I've put in her mind that she knows that not to think that everything's good. If that make sense. Makes you a little harsher, I guess. A little more aware of that she needs to watch out for a lot of people. She knows places in Thunder Bay not to go. I've shown her them. I don't let her walk to school by herself. She knows bad things that happen. She knows that in Thunder Bay. She knows. I tell her about drugs and I tell her about drinking and yeah.

MG: Cody grew up in this city and has always thought of Thunder Bay as a beautiful place, but admits today that when she drives around, she wonders what happened.

CODY MARSON: Like it's not a secret anymore how bad it is here. It's definitely changed all of Thunder Bay. Yeah, it's sad. It's really sad.

[Music]

MG: The documentary, A Hard Hit, was produced by The Current's Lara O'Brien, Joana Draghici and our senior documentary editor, Joan Webber.

[Music]

MG: The Thunder Bay police station is a sprawling brick and glass building.

[Sounds from Thunder Bay police station]

MG: We went there and climbed the stairs to meet with Police Chief Sylvie Hauth and Sergeant Dan Irwin with the Drugs and Gangs Unit. And I began our conversation by asking the chief what she sees happening with opioids in Thunder Bay.

SYLVIE HAUTH: I think for us, what we see is a very unprecedented situation in our city. I've said it a few times now. The reality is that we are seeing a large influx of guns and gangs members from other communities, more so from the Ottawa area, but as well from the GTA and Toronto coming to Thunder Bay. It's a lucrative market and I think people have found that coming here they can make a lot of money and unfortunately, that influx continues.

DAN IRWIN: I think like the chief said, we have a really high addiction rate right now in Thunder Bay. And I think it's across the country, it's not just here in Thunder Bay, but we have a high addiction rate and it's just like anybody that's looking for business, you want to go where you have a clientele. And I equate it to that. It's really simple. It's we have the clientele and they know it's here and that's why they come here.

MG: How did we get to this point and how did you get to this point where it's at this crisis point now?

SYLVIE HAUTH: I think when you look from a police perspective, socioeconomic issues have been something that we've been dealing with in our community, not only from if you're looking at a substance user dependency issue, bigger picture is that from police resource, we deal with mental health, high crime in terms of violent crimes in our community. You know that our stats are high as well for homicides and when you look at specifically, even in the last year, lower crimes are also on the rise. For example, our theft from motor, from vehicles, that's of vehicles break and enters and those are often attributable to the fact that people are dependent, need to make easy cash to feed that addiction. So I think kind of over the time what we've seen is the increase and the addiction rate really isn't slowing down. So you end up in a position right now where people are needing to fuel that addiction often by any means that they can get their hands on.

MG: Why are the gangs here? Explain a bit more about why they ended up here. If they have roots in other parts of the country, why do they come here?

DAN IRWIN: We have drug houses in Thunder Bay that people can make a lot of money really quick. Toronto, maybe is not as fast. Here we have just a huge clientele. There is no other way to explain it than that. It's simple.

SYLVIE HAUTH: I think bigger picture too, is that when you look at our location, we are the hub for the northwest. So I think when you look at the proximity of our communities, northern communities, indigenous communities, they understand that once you're here, there's also branching out that can occur where you can make even more so in terms of of returns on your investment, in terms of drugs in those smaller communities, only because the addiction rates there are quite high as well. The unfortunate part here in our community too, is that the individuals that are coming from the GTA, for example, are prying on a very vulnerable population here in Thunder Bay. And oftentimes it's through means of, you know, offering, offering to help. You can't make ends meet. You come in as a friendly face who can provide, you know, money to to help supply baby formula, for example, or diapers and that quickly turns into a, you know, a position of authority or of really being in a bind where now you're wanting to continue in the lifestyle, but very quickly kind of get sucked in if you want to call it into the into that world without oftentimes even realizing it. We ended up partnering with the Crime Prevention Council not too long ago and putting out what we call just an education campaign for people to to really understand. Sometimes when you see a situation with your neighbour or friend and kind of labelling it as, you know, a house takeover, people not understanding that, you know, the root causes of an addiction or are kind of being incorporated into a drug trafficking situation without really understanding it, people taking over a house, setting up shop and really having no control or feeling like you have no control. So it's been important for us to put that message out there just so that people are aware and that people can hopefully reach out, get the help they need, or at least alert us so that we can become involved and help with our partners to intercede if we can.

MG: The fact that that's happening and again, it's nnot questioning the work that you're doing, but the fact to some people and we've heard this in the conversations that we've had already, that these houses open almost at an unmanageable rate suggests that the police have lost control of that situation. Is that fair to say?

SYLVIE HAUTH: For me, as the chief, it's looking at the bigger picture. So right now, in terms of my budget, for example, we are looking at an ask from the board as well as city council to increase my current compliments so that we can increase the number of officers that currently work actively on drug issues alone.

MG: What is it like for you? I mean, you've been doing this work for a while and if you see that game whack a mole where you smack one down and the other one pops up, what is that like for you to see that happening?

DAN IRWIN: It's just something we continue to do. I think that's why we became police officers to continue to do the best we can. You have two different sides. You have us, the police, we have books and books and rules and rules to follow. And then we have the other side. They have no rules. They can do whatever they like. So that's the issue. We have to follow rules. They don't. And it's time consuming for us and I look at it as continue to do my job the best I can with the guys and girls that I work with. And I think I speak for everybody that works here, we continue to do the best we can.

MG: Are you frustrated?

DAN IRWIN: Not at all.

MG: Because I think a lot of people would be frustrated in that situation. Why wouldn't you be frustrated?

DAN IRWIN: I think when you started getting frustrated that's when you lose the game.

MG: Sergeant Dan Irwin with the Drugs and Gangs Unit in Thunder Bay and Sylvie Hauth, the city's chief of police. The rest of our conversation coming up in our next half hour. My name's Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

[Music]

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. In our last half hour, I was speaking with Thunder Bay Chief of Police Sylvie Hauth and Sergeant Dan Irwin about the gangs and the drugs that have flooded their city. Here's the rest of our conversation. We spoke with a father whose son died to cocaine, was laced with fentanyl. He said that this shouldn't be considered an accidental death, that this is murder. The act of spiking a drug, the act of lacing a drug should lead to that person charged with murder. Do you agree with that?

SYLVIE HAUTH: So we think the OPP has laid a similar charge in a similar incident. And I think you will probably start seeing that should we able to trace the drug itself back to someone that that will be something that we'll start to consider as well. I think we've had some instances where we've seeked input from the crown.

DAN IRWIN: I think most of us know somebody or somebody in their family or friends that struggle with addiction and how powerful it is. It consumes their whole life. So when somebody does pass away from consuming something, it's the whole building a case again, it's finding out where it came from and they took it voluntarily, too. So there's a whole side and getting the input from the Crown attorneys, it's just there's a whole lot of work there and there's more research and things that need to be looked into for all these cases and it's not just here in Thunder Bay, it's across the whole country.

MG: That's the other part of it, is that everybody we've spoken to has talked about how this is such a universal story in many ways, that it's not about these people who are addicted to something, but that we all have some sort of connection to this. What does that do in terms of changing how people think about what's happening here?

SYLVIE HAUTH: I think people forget that when you talk about addictions, it's not one particularly class of people you need to really look at. Basically your whole community and understand that your neighbour, doctor, your friend, lawyer or the teacher, there's lots going on that people are not aware. And people tend to generalize and really kind of pigeonhole to say that while it's only, you know, a certain class of people or it's certain portion of our society, there's really a bigger picture. We've we keep trying on a number of occasions with partnerships with the health unit and in our other policing partners to really educate people and to really show that be aware. I mean, there was a whole campaign on and be aware of what you buy and kind of be mindful as to what you think you're getting pot. Even just pot sometimes isn't just pot. And that in itself can be laced.

MG: One of the things that we have heard from a number of people is that you hinted at this when it came to cannabis, you need a clean supply. If people are going to use, if people are going to and people will use drugs whether we want it or not, if they are going to use, you need to clean supply. And the way to do that is through legalization. Is that something that you would support?

SYLVIE HAUTH: Well, I mean, it is legal right now. I think what happens is that people will always look for the best deal, the quickest deal and kind of satisfy what they need at the time. So if you can get it cheaper somewhere else or somebody else is coming to you, people will, the black market will always exist, whether it's legalized or not, only because you always have people that will have a need or a fix or an addiction and they will find it any way they can, especially if they can get it at a better a better price or with other strings attached, unfortunately.

MG: Would further legalization make a difference in terms of the work you do on the streets, not just cannabis, but if you look at legalization across the spectrum?

DAN IRWIN: I don't think so, no. Because again, you have the black market who doesn't have to follow rules and then you'll have the other side that has to follow rules and has to pay tax.

MG: What are you most worried about? I mean, this is this is something that you're in the midst of a fight and then whether you're winning or losing, what are you most concerned about?

DAN IRWIN: The people and the public with regards to the violence, the home takeovers. And then I worry about us as the police too, as well, which I really haven't over the years, but I do a little bit now, yeah.

SYLVIE HAUTH: For me, the bigger question, when you look at our community officer safety is huge. We are seeing way more handguns, loaded handguns, firearms in our committee than we ever have. And those usually come in obviously with, you know, we see guns and gangs or gangs are coming in and there are a lot more violent than they have ever been. So not only towards our officers, but really the violence that they are inflicting on people in the community. Pay your debts or else or become a member or else or do this for me or else. So those are the level of violence that we've never really seen before. We're very public in terms of the work that we do. You'll see sometimes on a weekly basis, we put media releases outlining who we've arrested and how much money was seised. General location, reassuring people that we understand. Well, you know, the best of our abilities, we have to prioritize, but to the best of our abilities, we're on top of things and we're trying to keep up and doing the work so that people feel safe. People understand sometimes the limitation of our resources, but that we will get to the house that just spring up in the neighbourhood so that we can shut them down and kind of move on. Federal gave money to the province to basically allocate and the province decided that guns and gangs money was distributed, I think between 13 or 18 municipalities or police service sorry, in the province out of 51. Then basically what's left is that we have to apply on a competitive basis with the rest of the services for a very small pool. So right now for us, when we see funds coming through, it's not at the tunes of millions towards projects. It's $100,000 here, maybe $200,000 there. So it's very frustrating for us. We are receiving money, for example, for human trafficking. So it's in the tune of $300,000. There is a correlation, obviously, and the work as is has similarities with guns and gangs, but it's very specific in terms of what we need to do with that money. And it's really not all towards you know officers and boots on the grounds, ass we say. So often I think the Northwest is forgotten. We do not have we don't have very similarities in terms of what's going on in the GTA and often decisions that impact the south really have no bearing as to what's happening here in northwest Ontario. So my message to council was really to unite boards, different agencies in northwest, other police services and other municipalities as a united voice and really come at it from a Northwest Ontario perspective, to say what's happening at Thunder Bay impacts what's happening in Dryden, what's happening in Kenora and all the First Nation communities in the Northwest. So having that united voice to have a stronger appeal to the province.

MG: Very generous with your time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Sylvie Hauth is Thunder Bay's chief of police. Sergeant Dan Irwin is with the Drugs and Gangs Unit. Tomorrow, my conversation with Patty Hajdu, the federal minister of health and member of parliament for Thunder Bay-Superior North. I met her in her riding to discuss what the federal government is doing about the opioid crisis and whether a safe supply of drugs is the answer to this crisis.

[Music]

MG: My name is Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. It has been a morning of tough news and so up next, something a little, well actually, a lot different.

Back To Top »

Ethical concerns raised as researchers build a virtual skin

Guests: John Rogers

MG: Alright. Bear with me here for just a moment. I'm sitting here in the studio. In front of me there's an iPad and I'm looking at an app that we've downloaded for this interview that you're about to hear. The interview is all about how the sense of touch is being developed for virtual reality. John Rogers is one of the people leading those efforts. John, hello.

JOHN ROGERS: Hi.

MG: Where where exactly are you right now?

JOHN ROGERS: I'm in Evanston, just north of Chicago.

MG: OK. And what do you do? What is your job?

JOHN ROGERS: Well, I'm on the faculty here at Northwestern University. So I have an appointment in biomedical engineering and material science and engineering.

MG: Alright. So that sounds really interesting. But that's in some ways leads us to where we're going, which is this thing that sitting in front of me. I have this iPad, there are these green dots on the screen. Why is this thing in front of me? The dots are kind of in this weird kind of square random sort of arrangement. Why is this in front of me?

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah. So that's kind of a software interface that provides kind of a remote control capability around a soft, flexible device that I have in front of me that interfaces with my skin. And so when I wear this device and you touch that, those green dots on your screen that causes a local force actuator to initiate vibrational sensations on the corresponding location on my skin. And so in real time, you can via touch on the software interface in front of you, reproduce an artificial sense of touch on my body.

MG: What is an actuator? What is a force actuator?

JOHN ROGERS: So it's basically a device that causes motion. It imparts forces normal or perpendicular to the surface of the skin. So it creates kind of a slight poking sensation. You can imagine it is a platform that allows you to stroke my skin virtually right through that touch screen interface on your iPod, if that doesn't creepy out too much. That's what's going on.

MG: Just a little bit, yeah. Just a tiny little bit. So, you have this thing somewhere on your body right now?

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah. So, I mean, it's sort of a soft sort of tacky surface on this device. It's flexible. Like I can like I said, you know, I can wrap it on my arm, which is what I'm doing right now. I can put on the back of my hand. I can put it on my stomach or my back or wherever I want to locate this. It's relatively thin. It's like maybe like a mousepad is maybe one way to think about it, like a thin spandex type material, maybe like a wet suit if you've ever gone scuba diving. That's kind of the mechanics, the thickness, kind of the weight. But it's flexible enough to conform to the contours of the body really easily. And that soft, tacky surface kind of keeps it adhered to the skin.

MG: OK. So again, without being too creepy, I'm going to touch you through the iPad that's in front of me so that you feel it in Illinois.

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah.

MG: Alright.

JOHN ROGERS: Right.

MG: OK. So I just I'm going to push one of these buttons, one of the circles here and it's gone yellow.

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah. Yeah, I feel that.

MG: Yeah. That's only slightly weird. What happened? What happened when it went yellow, what happened?

JOHN ROGERS: Well that caused the corresponding actuator in the ray that particular force delivery device to vibrate corresponding location on my skin where that devices is sort of laminated. So it creates a little tickling sensation. I think you might have touched again, a different actuator.

MG: I am.

JOHN ROGERS: I can kind of feel that. There went another one. So it's very much real time and the idea is to extend kind of the virtual or augmented reality experience beyond video and audio to touch, you know, is kind of the concept.

MG: So here I'm randomly touching these spots here. What is it? What is that? Describe what it feels like.

JOHN ROGERS: So the actuators are set up to vibrate. So they're not sort of poking in a static manner. They actually vibrate up and down at a pretty high frequency. We selected two hundred cycles of vibration per second because it's well known that your skin is most sensitive to vibrations in that frequency range. But that's all sort of programmable. The amplitude of the motion and the frequency of the motion can be changed. I see you're poking me at different places here.

MG: Sorry. How strange is this that you're there talking and I'm sitting here many, many kilometres away? Pushing buttons that make you feel odd.

JOHN ROGERS: It's profoundly strange. I would have to say. I'd have to, you know, take that opinion on this. We think it's a pretty interesting, unusual way to think about, you know, remote engagement. Right. And not only in the context of social media and you know, communication, gaming, entertainment, but we think there are going to be a lot of applications in remote medicine, digital medicine, rehabilitation, things like that are areas that we're very interested in.

MG: OK, I want to talk about that in a moment. But you ever do the thing where someone is sitting in front of you and you draw, maybe it's with a kid, you draw symbols on their back and they try and guess what it is that you're drawing.

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah. Yeah. You want do that?

MG: I'm going to try and do that. Okay.

JOHN ROGERS: So the caveat here is that the array may be rotated relative to your touch screen. So if you do an A, it might appear as an inverted A on my skin. So it might be a little tricky. So, you know, I might not get it 100 percent here so.

MG: Alright. Guess. Here we go.

JOHN ROGERS: That looked like an eight. Like a figure 8.

MG: It was indeed.

JOHN ROGERS: Or an infinity symbol that's rotated around 90 degrees.

MG: Alrightt. That's the number eight. Well done. Here we go again.

JOHN ROGERS: Maybe a seven? I guess it looked like, you know.

MG: Sort of. It was a question mark. I guess maybe the dot in the end. Alight. Here, I will try another one here.

JOHN ROGERS: That looked like maybe an N. It went up and down and then came back down again. So I know if that was a number.

MG: It was an M.

JOHN ROGERS: An M. Well I got pretty close.

MG: But you can actually feel, as I do that, you can feel like a character that's being drawn on your arm?

JOHN ROGERS: Well you can feel it. Yeah. Just the temporal sequence of where you're feeling motion. It looked like a big O rotating. At least on my my arm it looked like it was counterclockwise. I don't know if it was clockwise on your side or not.

MG: That is so strange. I will say doing this on this other end, it just feels, I'm not feeling anything, but it feels bizarre to be able to do this and kind of control exactly what you're feeling.

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah.

MG: Tell me a little bit about where this comes from, why would you want to create something like this?

JOHN ROGERS: Well, we got started in this area more kind of from the medical perspective of things. You know, we've been working on soft skin interface bio sensors of various types. So moving beyond just monitoring to devices that could offer therapeutic benefit. And in particular, we have a class of device that mounts on the throat and allows you to measure frequency and cadence and time of talking and swallowing. So stroke survivors have a difficult time with speech and swallowing conditions known as aphasia dysplasia respectively. And so the ability to measure speech and measure swallowing and then provide input to the patient through a vibratory actuate or that we can put in the same device can help people relearn how to swallow and to swallow at the appropriate time relative to the respiratory cycle turns out to be very important. So that's kind of where we got started. And then we begin to think, well, if you have one vibrating actuator, what if you take advantage of our flexible electronics capabilities, scale it up into arrays and think about, you know, that is as a new form of for VR, AR, you know, entertainment, gaming. And so it's kind of a natural extension of what we're doing in medicine.

MG: If you game it out down the road in terms of how it might be applicable in the medical field, what else could this thing do?

JOHN ROGERS: Well, so we've worked with patients who've who are amputees. And if you think about the loss of a limb, you've lost, you know, a substantial sensory channel, you know, that helps you interact with the world around you and engage with loved ones and so on. And one particular amputee that we've worked with lost his arm in Iraq and so he has a robotic prosthetic, a robotic hand that has sensors embedded in it. But he has no way to sort of experience that. That sensation is just kind of a digital signal coming off of those sensors. So what we're able to do is take these yo yos, skin interface, you know, haptic devices and get them talking to his prosthetic limb. And so we can recapitulation the sensor responses that are being measured at the tip ends of the fingers in his prosthetic hand and reproduce that in a pattern of vibration on his upper arm, the unamputated part of his arm. And so over time it becomes kind of an interesting surrogate for physical touch at the fingertips reproduced on the on the shoulder, you know, is kind of something that that we're looking into as a way to sort of help amputees kind of re-engage in a more natural way with their environment.

MG: What about outside of the medical world? I mean, you mentioned augmented reality and the promise so many companies are offering is that augmented reality won't just be used in gaming, but could be used in daily life. And there are technologies that have tried to do this and failed. Google Glass, for example. But people keep talking about this being the next phase of how we see the world. How could something like this add to that?

JOHN ROGERS: Well, I mean, I think it's really additive to, you know, your sensations of sight and sound, right. And so we've worked with the military, for example, if you think about a fighter pilot. They are always sort of grappling with information overload, you know, in terms of the instrumentation, gauging that they're looking at and the sounds that they're being exposed to in the cockpit. And so adding sort of a sense of physical touch to expand the range of sensory channels through which information can be piped, that that turns out to be pretty interesting. And we're deep in discussions around, you know, how that may may work. I think there's a huge space in gaming and entertainment. The other thing is, you know, haptics and thinking about a sense of touch and, you know, kind of a machine interface based on touches is a very old concept. So we're not claiming to have invented this this idea, but if you take a look at the way people have approached it from a technology standpoint, I think compared to what we're doing, it's much more sort of discrete and modular in the way that the body interface works. So you can think about, you know, your smartwatch. Most of them have an haptic interface. Your smartphone also has a vibrator. But it's just a single location on the body and I think going from a small number of interface points with kind of bulk devices like smartwatches or, you know, bulk actuators wired together kind of in your way and moving towards something that's scalable and fully integrated, kind of monolithically into a single device that's thin and skin compatible, that's kind of the change in thinking that we're trying to put forward with this particular technology. And I think if you ask yourself, you know, could you engage all of the sensory, you know, skin interface channels, you know, with a device technology like this? It turns out that the answer is yes. If you forget about the fingertips and the toes and the feet for a second, if you add up sort of what is the spatial resolution of touch sensation that your body supports, it's around 2000, you know, individual channels of information. You know, so you can imagine a body suit, I mean, just projecting out into the future that that would really fully engage all of your tactile receptors, you know, across the skin of your body and we think we have an approach that gets you there. So it scales all the way to full engagement, you know, at the high end of the spectrum of what you might imagine. So I think that's what's kind of exciting from our perspective is the ability to scale and do this in a way that allows large numbers of channels and kind of a full spatial representation, spatial temporal representation of stroking and touching at a real time sort of refresh rate. These are the aspects of novelty, I think, around what we're doing, but it's building on a history. You know, lots of, you know, people been thinking about haptic interfaces and we're contributing to that broader community in this way.

MG: I was going to say it seems as though I mean, a lot of this technology can be really isolating, but if you have the opportunity to try and connect to somebody else through the device that's in front of you, there could be the potential for real social interaction there as well.

JOHN ROGERS: Well, we think so. I mean, you know, if you do a Skype call or zoom call or something like that, you add video to the audio that increases the depth of the experience and the kind of engagement you can have with loved ones and family members and friends and so on. But ultimately, I think touch, you know, physical touch on the skin is probably the deepest, most emotional connection that can be established between two people, you know, and if you can add that capability, you know, in a virtual remote sense to that kind of interaction, I think it could be very, very powerful.

MG: It would seem as though the pornography industry would be very keen on what it is that you have been exploring as well.

JOHN ROGERS: No comment. We're not going there. So that's sort of an obvious one, but yeah, somebody else will maybe move forward on that possibility.

MG: How thin could this get? I mean, would you be able to, the idea of putting on the suit might be a bit cumbersome for people who want to seriously get involved in something like this. Could you incorporate this technology in to the clothes that we're wearing now?

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah, we think so. I mean if you take a look at the thickness of the device. I mean, I think that's an area where we can improve. It's currently dominated by these force actuators that we talked about before. They're about three and a half millimetres in thickness. We know how to reduce that three and a half to about one. So if you think about the electronics, it's very thin already, maybe a half millimetre in thickness. If we go from our three and a half to something more like one millimetre in thickness for the actuator, I think we're at a total system level thickness of maybe a couple of millimetres. We know how to do that almost immediately. We're working on prototypes that have that type of form factor. I think if you ultimately get into that one millimetre total thickness range, then you're talking about something that is truly kind of wearable at the full bodysuit level and we're pretty optimistic we can get there. We're kind of more than halfway there already in terms of what we know how to do in scaling the thickness of these actuators. But that's a great question and that's kind of where we're pushing the technology, not just scaling up the size and the numbers of actual orders, but decreasing the thickness, decreasing the mass as well to make it as light as possible.

MG: Do you worry that somebody could hack into this and control the sensations that you feel in the body, that you don't want to be in control of those sensations?

JOHN ROGERS: Well, I guess you always think about that. I mean, I think they're pretty sophisticated encryption, you know, technologies out there that's kind of out the outside of the technical competence of our research group here. But ultimately, you know, it's just gently interface to the scan. If somebody hacks it, you just take it off you. There's not, it's not implanted in your body or anything like that. So you just strip down and get rid of it you know if somebody hacked.

MG: We've seen in the world of virtual reality the ways that the interactions, even the people can have in VR can become violent. There have been cases of sexual harassment in games involving VR. How do you think a technology like this would change those kind of interactions?

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah, I mean, I think it will enhance the experience you know, for and that can go in both directions, right, in terms of the nature of that experience. And, you know, I think these are great questions. I would make a more broad sort of comment around, you know, technology and innovation in general. I think any new technology can be used for good or bad purposes. I mean, I think that's kind of an intrinsic feature of how the world works, right. And you know, we try to, you know, develop new ideas and develop technologies that we think have societal benefits associated with them in terms of some of the applications we've talked about, and I think you have to put some thought around, you know, how they could be used for ill purposes and kind of think about that a little bit, but you can't anticipate everything. And I think that's just kind of a reality you kind of have to grapple with is that there may be scenarios, right, in which this type type of technology could be used, you know, for for purposes other than good. But ultimately, it's a device, you strip it off. It's not a problem. You turn your computer off or whatever, right. So I think theintrinsic risks are minimal, you know, in terms of your health, in that sense, physiological health, your mental health, and maybe you suffer a traumatic experience that, you know, at that level and I wouldn't rule out the possibility, but it's not something that we view, as, you know, an extreme concern that would be an impediment to continued development of the technology.

MG: Alright. Concentrate. I'm going to draw more things on your arm. You have to figure out what I'm drawing. Ready? Here we go.

JOHN ROGERS: OK. That's easy. You spelled out my name.

MG: Well done. It's not gotten any less strange in being able to do this from a distance. I'm curious to feel what it is like on the other end of things. John, thanks so much.

JOHN ROGERS: OK, thanks for having me.

MG: Talk to you soon. Bye bye.

JOHN ROGERS: Yeah. Okay, bye.

MG: John Rogers is a professor of material science and engineering and biomedical engineering in medicine. I was touching him remotely. He was in his lab at Northwestern University in Illinois. Still trying to wrap my head around this whole touching someone from a distance thing. Yeah, it's a bit creepy. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Bruce Springsteen was thinking of a much more personal connection when he wrote Human Touch. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Song: "Human Touch" by Bruce Springsteen]

Back To Top »

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Jan. 8, 2020 episode transcript

More Stories Like This