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The Current Transcript for July 25, 2015

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Engine]

If you look at the cloud as a factory, we're inducing a lot of raw material into the factory so that the factory becomes more efficient. You're not going to beat mother nature. Let's just understand that right up. We work with Mother Nature. We try to help Mother Nature.

LAURA LYNCH: Sometimes Mother Nature just doesn't cooperate. Consider the wild fires in British Columbia or earlier this year the floods that threaten the same area, then there's drought and storms that damage crops and come the rain makers promising, like this man in Texas, to see the clouds ordering up showers, when and where you need them. The idea isn't new but has better technology made cloud seeding a must have for today's climate challenges? We'll try to answer that question. After that:

SOUNDCLIP

It's not… If I'm going to OD it is pretty much when, right? You have got to look at it that way. You gotta be ready to die pretty much when you’re using these drugs.

LL: Kyle knows he's facing death every time he shoots drugs into his veins on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The death toll from the fentanyl crisis continues to climb there and across the country. But our guest believes there is another way to confront the problem, a proposal that he insists is an answer to what he calls “The pathetic strategy in place now”. I'm Laura Lynch. This is the summer edition of The Current.

Make it rain: Can geoengineering technology prevent wildfires?

Guests: Daryl O'Dowd, Robert Jackson

SOUNDCLIP

In the last two days, or two or three days, we've been getting lucky. We are getting a good overcast and we have a good downpour of rain, a couple of days ago. It dampered down a small part of it, so the breathing data, it's getting a lot better. It is starting to get cleared out [unintelligible]. And we are just taking it one day at a time.

LL That is Evan Fuller, a resident of Riske Creek, British Columbia. Despite an evacuation order he stayed behind to help fight the wildfires and protect his community over the past few weeks. He was speaking with CBC News this week about the one thing that's helped to push back the smoke and flames and bring some hope back to the front lines there; Rain. A few good downpours is what so much of the BC interior needs right now. And while we've always remained at the whim of Mother Nature, when it comes to rain, the rash of extreme weather events we've been experiencing across the country from wildfires to flooding and everything in between has some exploring the idea of engineering the weather ourselves, as in cloud seeding to make it rain.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Engine Starting]

VOICE 1: Closeting is the process of introducing favorable nuclei into convective thunderstorm to create more ice within the cloud, then pull as much moisture out of the cloud as we can.

VOICE 2: The flares attached to the plane's wings fire off silver iodide which helps freeze existing water droplets in the cloud.

VOICE 1: They become heavy enough to fall and as they fall through the cloud they begin to melt in false precipitation.

LL: Okay, that is how cloud seeding was described on the National Geographic show The Big Picture with Kal Penn. And seeding clouds is something we've been doing in Canada since the 1960s, though it remains controversial. Well, Daryl O'Dowd is a consulting meteorologist who heads the company Weatherdyne International. He has advised Canadian companies and government bodies on cloud seeding and he is in Calgary, Alberta. Hello.

DARYL O'DOWD: Yes good morning Laura.

LL: Now we heard that explanation but could you take another run at it. What is cloud seen seeding and can we really make it rain?

DARYL O'DOWD: Well I think the short answer is: Yes indeed, we can make it rain. We do actually a really good job making rain and making it snow in fact, here in Canada. Almost every raindrop we get actually starts has a nice crystal or snowflake. So from a cloud seeding perspective, we need to make more snow and ice, which ultimately melts to give us rain. The National Geographic sort of short review of cloud seeding, in a sense is correct. We put materials into the clouds we fool the clouds into thinking there's natural ice and it just precipitates it, builds on the natural ice crystals and the artificial ice crystals and falls out as rain.

LL: Can you shoot it into any club formation and make it right?

DARYL O'DOWD: [Laughs] Well, that's a very good question and one of the biggest things that has faced cloud seeding is that we just can't create clouds and we can't use every cloud that's available. There has to be an ideal sort of window of cloud types that we can work with.

LL: Well Okay. Without getting too technical, what cloud types are we talking about? Fluffy white ones? Thunderclouds? What are we looking at?

DARYL O'DOWD: There we go. I like that. The fluffy white ones would be often a good target. We're looking for clouds that have a large amount of natural moisture in them, so there's a high vapor content But also, for could seeding to be effective, there also have to be deficit in certain natural particles in the atmosphere. We call them ice nuclei. Many parts of the earth don't have enough ice nuclei natural dust particles that work in a cloud. And so the clouds merely float along and they don't precipitate. We're in a position then to add some ice mutilating material, or silver iodide in many cases, and convince the clothes that they need to go to that next step of going from simple vapor and small cloud droplets to precipitation and rain and snow.

LL: What countries are using cloud seeding now to make it rain?

DARYL O'DOWD: It's almost one in four of the countries on Earth, one in four has got some sort of program, some 40 or 50 countries are running some sort of cloud seeding program. Some of these go back all the way to the nineteen fifties, and even earlier. For example, in France since 1952 they are being cloud seeding the vineyards, in the Loire and Rhône and Bordeaux areas, to decrease the amount of hail.

LL: That is another function of it too, is not just making it rain, is actually manipulating the weather system, right?

DARYL O'DOWD: It's too. It's all part of the same process. If you can make more snow, you can make more rain. And through that same process you can diminish the amount of hail coming down, so diminishing hail is something that's particularly useful in areas where you have high value crops or, as we have here in Alberta, we have high value houses and cars and there's a hill project here that attempts to mitigate the amount of hail that damages urban structures.

LL: And that's why insurance companies get interested.

DARYL O'DOWD: Absolutely. Absolutely. The biggest losses can be a single 30 minute or one hour thunderstorm running through an urban center. You can see potentially four or five hundred million dollars worth of insurable losses.

LL: Can we just go back to the number you cited I think it was about 50 countries that you say are using cloud seeding.

DARYL O'DOWD: That's right.

LL: Are these all government operated programs or are these private enterprises?

DARYL O'DOWD: In the majority of cases, they are slightly on the government side. But there are a huge number of private organizations. In fact, a significant number in the United States are privately operated.

LL: But the biggest ones are in China and Thailand. Am I right?

DARYL O'DOWD: Yes indeed. China Thailand and Russia, the former Soviet Union. Those would be, those are government sponsored programs.

LL: Let's focus back here on Canada, then. Tell me how the history of in Canada and how it's evolved?

DARYL O'DOWD: Well it, interestingly enough, it kicked in first in the late 1950s, 59 to 63. There was some way the modification activities taking place in Western Quebec, in conjunction with a hydroelectric dam in the upper Ottawa River basin. So that was really the very first start of cloud seeding in Eastern Canada. In about the same time in Western Canada, there were significant hail losses and a group of farmers got together and they hired a US weather modification firm, called Irving Krick and Associates, to conduct a cloud seeding program out [unintelligible] into the country. And that began in 1956 and in one form or other, and the 1956 program out here, ran to 1985, stopped for a while and then restarted as the recent hail project. So our history in Canada goes back to the mid 1950s. Just as a quick sidebar, there was actually some cloud seeding research done into forest fires, in Yellowknife in Thunder Bay in the early 1970s.

LL: And?

DARYL O'DOWD: Well, I don't have a lot of information on that and it appears not to be successful, or at the very least, the danger of creating worse or more intense storms at the same time as you're trying to increase more rain, was possibly a likelihood, back in the 1970s.

LL: Well that was one of the things that was going to ask you, because we're obviously talking about this in the context of the wildfires in British Columbia, and you'd think: “If this cloud seeding technology was effective they'd be using it all over the place and BC right now”.

DARYL O'DOWD: Absolutely. One of the difficulties of course with forest fires, is that the smoke itself has a sterilising effect in many cases on the on the clouds above. So what we end up doing is having the fires smoke and the particles make the cloud droplets much smaller and it makes it difficult for them to actually naturally precipitate, yet alone through processes of artificial injection. The clouds are sterile after forest fire, in many cases, and those clouds in around the forest fire can't cannot generate precipitation until some distance away from the fires, in which case they don't have much value.

LL: So in Alberta it's being used to reduce the severity of storms, correct?

DARYL O'DOWD: Severity of hail.

LL: Severity of hail, solely. And you say it's working? That the weather has become milder, correct?

DARYL O'DOWD: Well, I won't I use that term because this is on a storm by storm basis. What the intention is with hail suppression is to paradoxically increase the number of hailstones. But in doing so, you decrease the net size of each hailstone. It's a process called beneficial competition. You presume that there's a certain quantity of moisture in the atmosphere and that's well-defined by radar and you introduce a certain number of particles, and the more particles you introduce, the smaller each and each individual hailstone is. Ideally, you get to a size that these hailstones fall and they indeed melt before they reach the surface.

LL: How do you know that what you're doing is having that effect instead of the weather just becoming - I'm going to use that word again – milde, because of changing weather patterns?

DARYL O'DOWD: Well, as they say this Laura is a cloud by cloud basis. And one of our best tools, for evaluating the effectiveness of our cloud seeding, is radar. In the early 1970s, when they were conducting the original research into forest fires, They didn't have the advantage of digital technology. We have radar now that we can actually inspect clouds, individually, and compare clouds that have been cloud seeded, to clouds in the adjacent area that have not been clouds seeded. And we can determine the nature, the internal mechanics of those clouds that have been seated, versus those that have not. And in many many cases, not every case of course, but in many cases there's a distinct signature that indicates that the severity of the individual storms, that we do cloud seed, do decrease.

LL: Mr. O'Dowd thank you very much.

DARYL O'DOWD: You're very welcome.

LL: Daryl O'Dowd is a consulting meteorologist and he joined us from Calgary, Alberta. For a sense of how much we know, about where and when closeting has been proven to work I am joined now by earth scientist Robert Jackson. He's chair of the Earth Systems Science department at Stanford University in California, where we have reached him. Hello.

ROBERT JACKSON: Hello, Laura.

LL: You've been listening in, we just heard from someone in Alberta about how it's been used there. In your view, how effective is it?

ROBERT JACKSON: Well, what's interesting is if you look at the picture overall, there's been many many decades of research on cloud seeding, especially for trying to get a little extra water out of clouds. And surprisingly, we still don't really know. I think the evidence is that you might be able to get a little more rainfall, for instance squeeze a couple of extra drops of juice out of a lemon, but you can't make a second glass of lemonade. That you just don't get very much rain out and most times, we don't get a statistically significant result. So frankly the evidence is pretty weak that cloud seeding works.

LL: In spite of what's our previous guest has said? He seems have a lot of confidence in it. China has claim to have had a lot of success with it. Do you think it's been overblown?

ROBERT JACKSON: I think there's a lot of potential. I think there's a lot to learn but I also think there are a lot of companies and institutions with money to make. The U.S. National Research Council published a big report, about a decade ago, that essentially concluded that the evidence for it was weak or inconclusive. The Israelis did a similar study, five or 10 years later, they reached the same conclusion. So, I do think there's important work to be done, with rainfall and hail and even fog around airports and much more broadly hurricanes and things like that. But the evidence for actually working a lot right now, is not very strong.

LL: You use that phrase “statistically insignificant”. Is there a percentage that you can attach to that?

ROBERT JACKSON: Well, one of the best studies that I like was a six year experiment in Wyoming, in the central U.S. And they did paired clouds, so they see, imagine more than 100 events, where you took one set of clouds and seeded them and you took another [unintelligible] out of the cloud and didn't. And then you didn't tell people which ones you had seeded. And so what they found after six years was a little bit of extra rainfall, maybe 5 percent, as much as 10 or 15 percent in some cases. But they did not get a statistically significant result. That means that they don't know whether the trend was real or whether it was just random chance, the fact that weather varies a little bit.

LL: Even if there is a 5 to 10 percent difference, or even 15 percent, and it doesn't sound like much is there a downside to all of this?

ROBERT JACKSON: Well, there are some potential downsides that we don't think about too much. One issue is where the rain would have fallen, if you hadn't clouds seeded. So for example; does a cloud seeding event in Alberta keep a farmer in Saskatchewan from getting rain that he or she might have received? Maybe. It's not a simple answer to that question. If you did a lot of cloud seeding over a particular area, for example a ski resort, and you put a lot of silver iodide or other particles into the air over that resort, eventually you could have an environmental effect. There's not evidence that that's happened to date. But there are things we need to think about, if we carry this out at large scales and over long time periods.

LL: It reminds me of countries that get close to war over things like rivers that cross borders and trying to block those rivers.

ROBERT JACKSON: Yes, exactly. Imagine Jordan or Syria or Israel, carrying out large scale cloud seeding, and another country, a neighboring country, thinking that they're stealing their rain. There's a long history over there and not just over there about dams and water manipulations and you know pulling water out of the Sea of Galilee and all kinds of things. So there are fascinating implications. There is even a treaty, called the Enmo treaty, The Environmental Modification Treaty, that entered into force in the 1970s. That treaty bans the use of weather modification for harm. And surprisingly it arose out of the United States, using cloud seeding during the Vietnam War. So, the United States military seeded clouds to try and wash out the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When that story broke, in the early 1970s, it caused an uproar here in the U.S. and led to an international treaty.

LL: We've got about 30 seconds left and I just want to get back to today. We know that, in spite of everything you're saying, there are extreme weather events. Partly because of climate change. So, in spite of what you say is a minimally effective thing, do you think we're likely to see more cloud seeding?

ROBERT JACKSON: Oh I do. There are important questions to be answered. People may get better at it,but there are also people who stand to make a lot of money at it and it's a mix, what we're seeing right now of all of those factors.

LL: Mr. Jackson, thank you.

ROBERT JACKSON: Thank you, Laura.

LL: Robert Jackson is chair of the Earth Systems Science department at Stanford University in California. And we have a moment now to get to some of your feedback on a story that we brought you yesterday about one Ontario woman's fight for her right to go topless.

SOUNDCLIP

There is this huge lag between what gets legalized and what gets normalized. And we have a really long way to go. We have to look at why women are uncomfortable doing it. When you put the onus back on woman, to not dress in certain ways, to try and avoid unwanted attention, you actually turn the conversation upside down. The question is: Why are women afraid to do it? And what can be done to shift the environment?

LL: That's Gwen Jacob who, 26 years ago, was arrested in Guelph, Ontario for walking down the street without wearing a top. Her legal challenge resulted in establishing an Ontario woman's right to bear her breasts in public. But this summer the issue is back in the news. As we discussed yesterday, an anonymous Ontario woman has filed a complaint with the provinces human rights tribunal, after being told she couldn't go topless at several public pools and also at hotels and a water park. After our story we heard from Kathleen Wilson Coleman on Facebook who wrote: “If we tell young girls that it's their body and no one has to touch it or see it but them, and then turn around when they're older and say it's okay to show your body off, what kind of confusing message are we telling them? I personally don't care what you do or don't wear. But to me breasts on a woman are not just something used for feeding a child. There are also sexual. Mens breasts are not”. Rita Johnson in Ottawa wrote: “As for protecting our children from being exposed to nakedness, let's remember that kids are frequently trotted through art museums with the proliferation of naked ladies and gentlemen, too. So they've already seen lots of idealized nudes. Maybe real bodies can be another part of their education. Meanwhile, unless I'm at a designated nude beach there's no way I'm stripping off in public. I'll put up with the discomfort of a full swimsuit rather than the discomfort of being stared at or even shouted at”. Timothy mills in Edmonton writes: “I support top freedom, as advocated by Gwen Jacob and others. This isn't because I'm a man wanting to leer, but because I am a man conscious of the long history of men telling women how to behave and justifying it because of how we or other men might react. A woman is not responsible for a man's behavior and her freedoms shouldn't be made less because of an expectation of men's inappropriate behavior”. You can always contact us to comment on anything you hear on the program. Find us on Facebook or on Twitter @TheCurrentCBC or me @laura lynchcbc, or you can send us an email go through to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and then click on the contact link. The CBC News is coming up next, then, how to solve Canada's fentanyl crisis? Through more of the same or a radically different approach to drug policy? We'll hear an impassioned plea for a wholesale change in the way we deal with drugs. And yes that means decriminalization. That is coming up, after the break. And after all that talk of seeding clouds to make it rain. We've got some music now from Kate Bush. This is Cloudbusting.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: Couldbusting]

I still dream of orgonon

I wake up crying

You're making rain

And you're just in reach

When you and sleep escape me

You're like my yo-yo

That glowed in the dark

What made it special

Made it dangerous

So I bury it

And forget

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. We'll be back, right after the news.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: Cloudbusting]

Everytime it rains

You're here in my head

Like the sun coming out

Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen

And I don't know when

But just saying it could even make it happen

ENCORE: Drug controls are 'absolutely pathetic,' activist says regulation will save lives

Guest

LL: Hello I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: If Canada’s Sentinel crisis has a ground zero, it's the city of Vancouver. Last month alone more than 25 people died of suspected overdoses in the city. That is up more than 91% from June of last year and it puts the city on track to see more than 400 deaths this year. The Current’s host Anna Maria Tremonti visited Vancouver's downtown East Side in January, when health officials had set up so-called pop up overdose prevention sites in tents, to help deal with the spike in overdose deaths. Volunteers armed with naloxone kits kept watch there, and that is where Anna Maria met a man named Kyle.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: What did you come here today to do?

KYLE: To use drugs, and you know you’re going to be fricking safe.

AMT: What do you use?

KYLE: Heroin and crack.

AMT: Mhm. How long have you known about this place?

KYLE: When I got here three weeks ago. Yeah, like I was surprised they actually had something like this and it’s made me happy to actually find it, just because, you know, it’s comfortable, you can actually sit, you know, there’s actually no wind. I don’t know, you can just use your drugs peacefully here, right? You’re not in some alley crunched over fricking smoking crack right?

AMT: Yeah. You worried about all the stuff about fentanyl and carfentanil now on the street?

KYLE: Honestly, I look for it, so not really.

AMT: You look for it because?

KYLE: Because it’s strong, it gets you high.

AMT: Do you worry you could OD on it?

KYLE: There’s always that thing in my head. It’s not, if I’m going to OD, it’s pretty much when, right? You gotta look at it that way. You gotta be ready to die pretty much when you’re using these drugs so.

AMT: But you don't really want to die.

KYLE: No, but you just got to be ready to right?

AMT: Are you glad to be here or you want to get out?

KYLE: Of this place?

[Sound: sirens]

AMT: Yeah.

KYLE: Yeah, I definitely want to get out. It’s not a good place. You get sucked in pretty easy down here. And once you get sucked in, it’s pretty fricking pretty hard to get out of here right? Like most people.

AMT: Let’s just take your chances.

KYLE: Yeah. Like I said, it’s not if it’s when you’re going to OD, right?

AMT: Well I hope there’s somebody there for you if it happens.

KYLE: Yeah.

AMT: Take care of yourself.

KYLE: Yeah.

LL: That was Kyle who spoke to Anna Maria Tremonti at a pop up overdose prevention site in Vancouver's downtown Eastside. But of course the overdose deaths have only continued to rise and officials are scrambling for long term solutions amidst the crisis. And Don McPherson has some ideas on what to do. He is a drug policy researcher in Vancouver. In 2001, he published his four pillars approach to drug policy. It was an outside the box approach that outraged many at that time. But Don McPherson has continued pushing for this approach and even in the chilling era of fentanyl, he is calling for the decriminalization and regulation of illegal drugs. Don McPherson is now the executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and, as part of our season long series Disruptors, he spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti from Vancouver, in April.

AMT: Hello.

DON MACPHERSON: Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: I’ve got to tell you I was really surprised to hear Kyle tell me he was actually looking for fentanyl.

DON MACPHERSON: Yes. There's a market out there for strong opioids and he's looking for them. And unfortunately what he will get he will not know how strong it is.

AMT: And he says you've got to be ready to die. How familiar is what he was saying to you?

DON MACPHERSON: Well it's very familiar and it's a result of our drug policies over the last 100 years, focusing on criminalization and punishment. I'm assuming he's addicted to opioids and he seeks out opioids that work for him, kill the pain, whatever that may be. And he's sort of accepted the reality of our drug policies, which is a very bleak reality that at any time he could take a dose and die.

AMT: You know, fentanyl overdoses dominate the news these days, but around the time you started working on the downtown Eastside heroin was the big killer. What did you see? What was happening?

DON MACPHERSON: Well, in the late eighties, early nineties, we had a very similar situation. It was high potency heroin came into the market because of some business decision somewhere else in the world and with the drug cartels in British Columbia for some reason heroin became very powerful, very strong and people began to overdose. In 1988 there were 17 overdoses in Vancouver. By 1993 there were 200 overdoses. So we saw the same patterns that we've seen in the last three years with regard to fentanyl. A change in the product at the street level and people not being able to ascertain exactly the dose that they are taking when they're using their drugs and many of them dying. It was a tragedy then and it's a tragedy now.

AMT: How did police and community leaders react at the time?

DON MACPHERSON: Well early in the day and in the early nineties there was sort of the usual discourse around, you know, people need to stop using drugs, just say no to drugs. There was lots of enforcement. The Vancouver police used to throw lots of police in the neighbourhood. They'd sweep the neighbourhood, arrest 70 drug dealers, the drug market would calm down for a day or two and then everything would be back to normal. It came to the point where the police were saying we can't arrest our way out of this. You'll hear that often now too. And we need social health programs to deal with this problem.

AMT: And what were you doing at the time? What were you thinking as you saw all this happening?

DON MACPHERSON: I was thinking that this is an absolutely absurd situation in a modern advanced society with scientific knowledge about substance use, addiction, that we were basically stuck in this emergency situation, which was declared in the mid-nineties too, Vancouver Richmond health board declared a public health emergency, but no one knew what to do because we lapsed to the same old same old. Oh, we need more treatment beds, oh we need more policing. Oh, the judges have to put dealers away for a longer times. And that was the discourse until well into the nineties, when we began to shift the discussion towards more of a public health approach.

AMT: And you traveled to some European cities to see how some of them were dealing with the same illegal drug issues. What did you see? What was your take away?

DON MACPHERSON: Well I was on the corner of Main and Hastings running the Carnegie Centre, and I really didn't know much about this but I'd heard that the situation we had at the corner of Main and Hastings was a very similar situation that the Europeans had experienced in Switzerland and Germany and the Netherlands about 10 years before. So I set off to Europe, as others were in Vancouver at that time, trying to figure out what a new approach might look like. And of course landed in Switzerland, who had pioneered, over time they'd arrived at a situation that really did reduce overdose deaths, reduce HIV transmission, brought people in from the cold connected them to services, housing, employment, et cetera. And it was quite stunning to have the president of Switzerland at a conference I was at just sort of outline this with her PowerPoint presentation and it made total sense. And came back to Vancouver and decided to try and influence people enough that it would get implemented in Vancouver.

AMT: Mm. And so in around 2000-2001 you were working for the city of Vancouver under Mayor Phillip Owen, and you authored that report, the Four Pillar Approach to drug problems in Vancouver based on that research?

DON MACPHERSON: That's right. We basically said look, if it worked here it will work in Canada. Because the Swiss had been through a real good process of trying different things. The ethos in Switzerland was well, if it's not working let's try something new. In Canada it was always 101 ways why you can't do something. Oh supervised injection sites won't work in Canada. Well, why?

AMT: And what are the four pillars?

DON MACPHERSON: The four pillars are treatment, prevention, policing, and harm reduction.

AMT: And why is that revolutionary?

DON MACPHERSON: Well, it was revolutionary at the time because harm reduction was seen as a bad thing in those days. We had one of the largest needle exchanges in North America and we had an HIV epidemic. And people were connecting those two things and there was a lot of angst about harm reduction. You know, people need to stop using drugs, harm reduction is enabling drug use. When in fact harm reduction was actually helping people live another day to make decisions about their life the next day. Advocating for heroin prescription programs, so treating people with heroin addictions with heroin and surrounding them with other kinds of supportive services. These were quite radical at the time. And it's sad to say that we're still stuck with one small heroin treatment program in Vancouver and only two supervised consumption services here in Vancouver.

AMT: I'm wondering, fentanyl entered as a legal drug. It's actually prescribed. We know many opioid addicts actually began with legal prescriptions. Is there a difference now in how we have to look at this?

DON MACPHERSON: I think there is a difference. I think what you're seeing now is that the illegal drug market, which is a pre-existing market, it's existed for many years and from time to time it becomes toxic. In Vancouver and Alberta and Ontario, well, I'd say the illegal market in Vancouver is toxic. So it will kill you. It's a warning sign that our system is not working anymore. It is a total mess and it is deadly and we need to really rethink what we're doing.

AMT: So what would you see? Like if you could say do this this and this, what would you have them do?

DON MACPHERSON: I would have governments, it could ideally be a federal government, do what has been called for since the early seventies, which is to look at in a critical review of drug prohibition and see if we can come up with a better system of controlling drugs. The irony of our drug control strategies, and that's what they're called, they don't control drugs. They actually create a free market for these substances and the free market is managed by organized criminal gangs with a global reach. So it's a bit of an irony that our drug control strategies do that. So we need to do what we do with all the other drugs. We need to move towards regulating and controlling them through public policy analysis. That's what we do as a society, we regulate most things, we regulate as much as we can, in terms of property and cities and height of countertops and alcohol and tobacco. Why we haven't chosen to do that with these other small category of drugs is, again, it's a question that has bothered me since I got involved in this field. What's stopping us from actually moving towards a better system?

AMT: I’m going to pick up on your choice of words because you say regulation. You're not talking about like, we often hear about legalization, decriminalization. You're talking about having control but allowing use of.

DON MACPHERSON: That’s right.

AMT: In a way that is controlled. Tell me more about how it would be controlled?

DON MACPHERSON: Well, you would treat it like you would other substances. So and people, you know, when you say legalize drugs they say: “Well, heroin in 7-Elevens”, that won't happen. We don't want that. Well that's not what we're talking about. Right now we have a clinical model of heroin regulation. We learned that again from the Swiss. There's a small program in Vancouver that allows access to legal pharmaceutical grade heroin at the dose that works for the individual in a clinic. And so it's the same substance as molecularly what people are searching for on the streets. It's just no one overdoses in this clinic, no one dies in this clinic because they know exactly what they're getting, they’re experienced drug users and it's a health program. Their health improves, their mental health improves, their housing proves, their employment opportunities improve because they're no longer living day to day, suffering multiple non-fatal overdoses, ending up in the emergency wards or being evicted from their hotel rooms or housing.

AMT: So in other words, you're saying that they're like anyone else who has medication as they go through their life? This is just their medication.

DON MACPHERSON: That's right. And the results of the Swiss study show that, you know, a certain percentage of people cease using heroin. When everything else gets better, when you start to deal with some of the traumas that led you to addiction in the first place then you have the inner courage and strength to move on in life. And sometimes that means you stop using heroin.

AMT: And I was going to ask but I might answer. So someone might say yes but then they're still addicted, and how do you know it isn't going to destroy their life? But we could say that about alcohol addiction as well.

DON MACPHERSON: You can say that about sugar addiction. People are addicted to sugar, junk food, we joke about it. We have to separate the harms from our drug policies from the harms of addiction. We can treat addiction, we can manage addiction. Fentanyl is a product of prohibition. Prohibition favours substances that are highly concentrated, easily transportable in small packages and delivered clandestinely through the mail. I sit across from the port every morning and watch container ships coming into Vancouver. You can imagine how easy it is to get a small package of fentanyl in within a container ship. The borders aren't going to stop fentanyl from coming in, no matter what they do. And I fear that the illegal market has changed forever and that is going to force us to change our ways. And it's a matter of how long will it take us? How many people have to die before we start to look at a new approach?

AMT: So you're saying essentially that if people who are addicted can go to a place that is safe and use that drug they're not going to go to the street at all. The street will dry up because it will be available to them but they will be taken care of and then they can actually live a life.

DON MACPHERSON: Absolutely. And if you look at the Swiss and Dutch results, the Swiss will say that they see very little uptake among young people. They're dealing with aging heroin users now, they've come a long way.

AMT: And you think you can replicate that, that new users won't be intrigued by the highs of the illicit drug?

DON MACPHERSON: It's not cool to have to go to a clinic three times a day and hang out with doctors and social workers and counselors. So it starts to deconstruct the illegal market.

AMT: What about the cost?

DON MACPHERSON: Well, the cost of prohibition is immense. Billions of dollars are spent. Ralph Goodale, our Minister for Public Safety, commented in releasing the cannabis legislation, two to three billion dollars are spent by enforcement agencies on cannabis enforcement today in Canada. You can't tell me we're going to not save a lot of money when we bring cannabis into the fold and treat it like a regulated legal product.

AMT: So it would be the same for all these other illicit drugs?

DON MACPHERSON: Yes it would and it wouldn't be perfect. Remember it's not going to solve your addiction problem, that is something that is the drivers of addiction will remain the same, trauma, poverty, displacement. That's an issue we have to address and that's what we should be doing. We should be putting our resources into figuring out how to help people who become dependent on these drugs because most people do not become dependent on these substances.

AMT: Prime Minister Trudeau was on the Downtown Eastside in March and he was asked about this. He was adamant that there will be no legalization or decriminalization or regulation of drugs beyond marijuana. Listen to him.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: I always listen very carefully to what people have to say. But at the same time I will absolutely confirm that we are moving forward on a framework to regulate and control marijuana, to protect our kids and to keep our communities safer from criminals and organized crime. And we are not planning on including any other illicit substances in the movement towards legalizing and controlling and regulating.

AMT: Don MacPherson, that sounds definitive. Is that door closed?

DON MACPHERSON: He has to say that. It's all political Anna Maria, and that's why we have to encourage and look for those courageous politicians. And I will give Trudeau credit. Look what's happening with cannabis. I suspect he gets it, he's no fool. He can look at the evidence, as other political leaders can as well. Maybe mayors are the ones that lead this discussion. They're closer to the ground, they're closer to the reality. Look at some of the comments that Gregor Robertson, city of Vancouver has made recently about the drug issue. It's so political and that's sad, that's very sad that a government that says they want to base their policies on evidence has to be forced into saying that denial of moving forward with any other drugs. That’s because it's political suicide.

AMT: You've been pushing for this for decades. Do you ever get tired? Do you ever get mad?

DON MACPHERSON: I get very angry. I get very angry. And unfortunately, my experience is that many people have to die before something comes along. People were dying in the nineties, 200 a year in Vancouver, 400 a year in BC. The idea of establishing a supervised consumption service was in the air in 1996-97. It was implemented in 2003, so six years went by, thousands of people had to die before we opened one little service in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. We’re one year, we celebrated, well celebrate is the wrong word. The one year anniversary of the public health emergency declared by the province of BC around the fentanyl issue. It's clear that everything we're doing is not working. Those overdose prevention tents that you interviewed Kyle at, they're a godsend. But is that the best we can do? It's absolutely pathetic that we cannot move beyond this paradigm that we have supported for so many years and at the cost of so many lives.

AMT: Some people would walk away by now Don.

DON MACPHERSON: [laughs] You can't walk away from this.

AMT: Why does it matter to you so much?

DON MACPHERSON: Because it's one of the unspoken about and largest social injustices of our time. And we've been able to make significant movement in other areas on social justice issues but for some reason this issue is difficult to move and it's unconscionable for our society to allow this to continue.

AMT: Mm. This is more than policy for you. This is emotion, this is in your heart.

DON MACPHERSON: [deep breath] Yes it is, very much so. I've known way too many people who have lost their lives, who have burned out trying to work on this issue. [sobbing]

AMT: I didn't mean to make you do that.

DON MACPHERSON: Thank you. Thanks a lot. Yeah, it's happening to me a lot these days and it's happening to others. I've been at several conferences when, you know, where CEOs or doctors will get up and start to talk about the epidemic and yeah, they'll start to cry.

AMT: Yeah.

DON MACPHERSON: You know, there are people in positions of power and authority who are rightfully confused and desperate and feel they don't have the control. But it's on our watch that this is happening. So the imperative to explore new approaches when there is decades of scholarship around the area of regulation that we're ignoring and we're choosing to put aside. Something has got to give. And I guess that's why I become emotional because it seemed so difficult to even broach the issue, have the discussion, explore what regulation would look like. So people go back to their offices and they try and work within the box, they try and work within the system and the system doesn't work.

AMT: But you're telling me there's a critical mass of both the public and people who work in this field who really want this change now?

DON MACPHERSON: Absolutely. The public health community is united on a new approach, a public health approach. We talk about a public health approach to drugs but we don't implement a public health approach to drugs. We continue to criminalize people who use drugs and to use drug prohibition as our primary response. So the public health community, the Canadian Public Health Association released a paper last year, which basically said we should regulate and control all drugs. That’s what a public health approach does, it regulates the manufacturing, the dosage, the distribution of these substances. Right now, the Hell’s Angels and other organized criminals are regulating all of that stuff. So, the public health people get it and they're not being listened to.

AMT: Don MacPherson, thank you for your ideas. Thank you very much.

DON MACPHERSON: Thank you Anna Maria.

LL: That was Don McPherson speaking to Anna Maria Tremonti from Vancouver. He's the executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, an adjunct professor at the Center for Applied Research in mental health and addiction at Simon Fraser University. That is our program for today. And following, our conversation about Canada's problems with drugs. Stay tuned for a different take on the subject from the CBC summer series on drugs. This week host Geoff Turner investigates the long and often messy relationship between drugs and sex. This is the British sex educator David Stewart on what's known as Chemsex that is gay men using drugs like Crystal Meth and GHB to heighten sexual experience often with dangerous results.

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[Music]

I've had people tell me it was like looking in the mirror at themselves naked, when they are sober, and they hate what they see. And what they ask me is: “Why is it that when I'm on Chems I look in the mirror and I see a very attractive guy?” They are asking me: “Are the drugs like warping my vision, are they confusing me? Or am I tripping out on the drugs and I'm actually really am ugly, but the drugs are making me look beautiful? Or am I actually really beautiful and the drugs are disinhibiting me and stopping me from judging myself so harshly?”

[Music]

LL: That's coming up on drugs. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Full Episode Transcript for July 25, 2017

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