This week the City of Toronto unveiled its new Drug Toxicity Crisis Acknowledgement, an addition to its existing Land Acknowledgement and African Ancestral Acknowledgement.
It didn’t actually unveil what City Hall staffers are expected to read or display at the start of certain formal events or meetings. The drug acknowledgement was leaked to an Instagrammer who sent it to the world, including my Instagram feed.
Here’s part of what it says: “We acknowledge that this crisis is rooted in systemic discrimination. People who use drugs often experience stigma, and multiple intersecting forms of discrimination, including racism, sexism and colonialism.”
I don’t mind these acknowledgements. I may be bored hearing them recited over and over, like grace before dinner. But they do remind me of the great ill that was done to Indigenous and Black Canadians, often in the name of colonialism.
But I do mind the Drug Acknowledgement because its righteousness is wrong on so many fronts.
First, it confuses “drug use” with “drug addiction.” Most drug users aren’t drug addicts. Many people can take street drugs and walk away and not clean out their savings and end up living on the street. What’s different from 30 years ago when I was addicted to cocaine is that your chances of dying are much higher today. One snort of fentanyl laced with whatever and your life is over. Russian roulette is a safer bet. In this environment, you may not live long enough to become addicted.
Second, drugs are equal opportunity destroyers. You can be rich or poor, Black or white, come from Yale or jail, and these drugs will find you. If you have control of your schedule and some money, that just means your bottom will be lower than if you get intervened on sooner.
I spent four months at a treatment centre that was geared to help doctors, lawyers, pilots and even admirals. They weren’t poor, a very few of them weren’t white and yet all were just as addicted as the all-Black population of the county-run treatment centre where I interned as a very junior addiction counsellor.
My real problem with the Drug Acknowledgement is that it doesn’t go far enough.
Rich white men haven’t generally been using drugs to keep poor Black men and women sick and powerless. Nor have colonizers, whoever they are.
The fact is, everyone has been discriminating against drug users since forever.
The reason isn’t colonialism; it’s human nature. Even though addiction was labelled a disease back in the 1970s, vast swathes of us still think it is a character flaw: “You’re ruining your career! Your family! Your life!”
“Why can’t you just stop?!”
Well, maybe we can just stop in the same way that we’ve slowed the incidence of discrimination around mental illness. Three decades ago, no one raised their hand to say: “I’m depressed.” Today for the most part we do, knowing we won’t be labelled as weak or crazy.
It will take 20 to 30 more years to de-stigmatize drug addiction, the same length of time it took to de-stigmatize mental illness.
Maybe City Hall’s Drug Acknowledgement will help speed that change; I doubt it, though, because it lacks the crucial benefit of being true.
Meanwhile…
1. Who knew…? Children are like horses…marriage is so last year…snakes kill 1,000 people a year…Ben Franklin fled Montreal 250 years ago this month…this week a German YouTuber won the Gloucestershire cheese rolling race for the third year running. The cheese roll reached a speed of 70 mph…and yes, there’s a Canadian Gap Year Association.
2. Gender bending. Are you a boy who sits like a girl? Plus what it’s like to kiss a stranger for the first time. Plus Michael Jackson beats it two ways….And finally, Noah Wylie isn’t a nurse, though his mom was.
3. Regaining your rep. What better place for Kevin Spacey to fight his blacklisting on false sexual assault charges than the Oxford Union? Plus Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor who commissioned a report that showed what a fine job he was doing as Britain’s trade envoy. Plus Russian conductor Valery threw his lot in with Vladimir Putin and hasn’t performed in the West since 2020. His talent is undimmed.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy served time in prison for using Libyan money from Muammar Gaddafi to finance his campaign. As this BBC podcast shows and tells, he may be innocent.
Finally, who’s very wise about where AI is leading us? The Catholic Church of England and Wales. And of course, The Pope himself, who spoke in depth about the dangers of AI. and who may have been targeting Peter Thiel in it.
4. Blue and white. There’s the flag of Scotland. The Toronto Maple Leafs. The Blue Jays. Houses on Greek islands, UN Peacekeepers, and now, 500 pieces of blue and white porcelain going back to the 1600s and given by their collector, Rosalie Sharp, to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art where it’s now in their permanent collection.
5. I could look at these people for ages. August Sanders, the German photographer set out to document every type and profession in the fading epoch of prewar Germany. The New Yorker called it his “enormous attempt to capture a lost world,” and you’ll see why here. “People of the 20th Century” is on at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 28, and online forever.
6. Are you a newcomer? Canoo, the app from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, opens all kinds of doors to your new country.
7. Can tech nerds be nice? There’s a new club in New York, Maxwell Social, that’s inviting young tech entrepreneurs to develop their unkempt social skills. As they say, it’s not your third place, it’s your second home, and it’s attracting a new generation of talent and money.
Speaking of making it in America, Alfred Kazin wrote about it back in 1965 and it sounds just like today when just being an American can be your career.
8. Graphic answers to big questions. First, what do Albertans think about leaving Canada? Angus Reid thinks not much. Next, which countries have the most doctors? Not your home and native land. Next, how does the Gini Coefficient work in different countries? And how well do you remember colours? And can you spot the error? And finally, what will you die from? I ask because your body knows how to die.
9. Counterfactuals. It means ‘what might have been”, and once you think of one, it’s hard to stop. Like, what if the Nazi’s had invaded Britain (and what if Russia attacks Britain now)? Or, what if gravity were a bit weaker? Well, for one, birds would be gigantic. Your flight into fantasyland takes off here.
10. What I’m watching: Legends, on Netflix, the 6-part tale of how British Customs agents worked undercover during Margaret Thatcher’s reign to stem the rising tide of heroin coming from Turkey into Liverpool and London. Like its cousin, The Gold, this cops-and-robbers procedural gripped me from the start, with scads of familiar faces in key roles. Vedy Bwitish.
What I’m anticipating: Tuner, directed by Toronto’s Daniel Roher in his first narrative fiction film. It’s a crime thriller about a peculiar piano tuner (Leo Woodall) and his surrogate father (Dustin Hoffman), and opens in theatres this weekend. Part of it was shot in Koerner Hall.
What I’m also anticipating: From June 5 – 7, TIFA presents MOTIVE: The crime and mystery festival where some of the leading masters of mystery discuss their thrillers and true-crime secrets.
What I’m inserting: What? An entire blog without a single mention of Donald Trump? Never!