Misinformation a central barrier to harm reduction work, say advocates
Political debate around harm reduction can be 'disheartening', says Native Council of P.E.I.
Groups working to reduce the harm caused by illegal drug use on P.E.I. say their work is being hindered by misinformation, some of which is promoted by Charlottetown city councillors.
Members of the Native Council of P.E.I. and PEERS Alliance who are involved in harm reduction say their staff have found themselves the target of anger over drug addiction in the province.
"Many of them have received death threats, as well as other threats of violence toward them and of harassment," Bradley Cooper, chief policy analyst of the Native Council of P.E.I., told Island Morning host Mitch Cormier during a live panel discussion on harm reduction.
Tessa Rogers, harm reduction manager for PEERS Alliance, said her staff is not as visible as the Native Council's, which spends more time on the street, but they have not been immune.
Rogers blames displaced anger, but that doesn't make the aggression less real.
"There has been an ongoing safety concern, specifically within social media and people just being harassed and their face being posted," she said.
"There's a lot of community members who want to throw stones, as harsh as that sounds. I think the reality is a lot of us are dependent on something — whether that is caffeine, whether that is shopping. We all have something."
'Somebody to talk to'
Harm reduction on P.E.I. includes needle exchanges and strips for testing street drugs for fentanyl.
These programs have been accused of enabling drug addicts, but Cooper said it is about saving lives.
"Our most frequently accessed service is just somebody to talk to, somebody to listen, somebody to connect with," he said.
"Within the Indigenous ways, we look at health not only being a physical thing, but looking at it being an emotional, a mental, a spiritual, a relational thing."
Disheartening discussions
Perceptions of harm reduction are growing worse in the city, said Cooper, partly driven by opinions voiced at Charlottetown City Council.
Coun. Mitchell Tweel in particular has called for the Community Outreach Centre, which offers services to homeless people, to be entirely shut down.
"It can be very disheartening," said Cooper, of the tenor of debate at city council.
"For our political leaders, we expect them to have a very educated, a very evidence-based opinion on a lot of these things. Unfortunately, it seems to be very much a fear-mongering situation."
Measuring public opinion
One Charlottetown group is trying to understand the perceptions of harm reduction among a certain sector of the public.
Fusion Charlottetown, which advocates for people aged 18 to 40 in the city, launched an online survey this week to gauge opinions about the Community Outreach Centre and potential mental health and addictions service delivery in the city.
"In our conversations around youth engagement and advocacy work in Charlottetown we've had mental health and addictions come up a lot," the group's vice-president, Cecilia Williams, told Cormier.
"We want to get a deep dive into what mental health and addictions services mean to the youth and the vulnerable populations that we speak to."
Harm reduction is still a taboo topic, she said, but that seems likely to change in the long term, because younger people will talk about it more readily.
Perhaps because of that taboo, solid information about how harm reduction works can be hard to come by, she said.
"There's a real lack of credible information and data around this. There's also a high presence of misinformation, especially in the Charlottetown area," said Williams.
A foreseeable problem
At its core, said Rogers, harm reduction is about levelling the field, offering services that people who rely on legal substances or practices may take for granted.
"The difference is — they cannot go to a store," she said.
"Alcohol, you can go to a store. You go to a liquor store, you know exactly what you're getting."
Part of Cooper's frustration is that the province is having this conversation now. There were warnings from other parts of Canada that the drug addiction epidemic could come to Charlottetown, he said.
"Despite people knowing this was coming, there was very much the mindset of 'Don't see it, don't believe it, keep your head in the sand, don't want to recognize it,'" said Cooper.
Now that there is more open drug addiction on display in Charlottetown and people are seeing the full effect of it, opinions are hardening on both sides of the debate, he said.
With files from Island Morning