LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Words matter, minister

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/03/2023 (547 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon Overdose and Area Awareness would like to take a few minutes to respond to the article in the Winnipeg Free Press on March 14, 2023 and The Brandon Sun on March 15, from Janice Morley-Lecomte, the provincial minister of health and community wellness.

We would like to address your choice of wording and comments toward harm reduction and supervised consumption sites. It’s incredibly insensitive and misinformed. Ideally, we all want to live in a world that’s free of suffering. It’s heartbreaking to see people struggling.

Yet, you’re not willing to acknowledge that, in order to really help and support people, you have to meet people where they’re at.

Choosing to call supervised consumption sites enabling and keeping people mired in active addiction is judgmental and stigmatizing. The very thing that stops people from asking for help and receiving the help they need.

People need to feel safe. They need to feel loved and free from judgment in order to be open to the possibility of recovery. Stigma and shame are what continues to fuel substance use. Your words matter.

Have you ever sat with a mother whose child died from toxic drug poisoning because they didn’t have a safe place to use? Have you ever heard her cry at the possibility that her child might still be with her today? Have you really listened to the depth of that pain or urgency? Because if you have, you would consider using appropriate language.

You’re still holding on to an old ideology and language that would suggest it’s a choice. You’ve forgotten to acknowledge that the vulnerable population are carrying pain and trauma in the best way they know how to, and it affects their ability to choose. Instead, you’re sitting in the waiting room judging them for how they carry it.

In your announcements we hear you saying your compassion and respect is reserved for only those who walk through that door, which isolates the people using substances even more. You’re saying people who “choose recovery” have more value and are worthy of your help. That is the furthest thing from compassion.

Compassion is not something you reserve for those who you feel morally deserve it. Compassion is inclusive — there’s no line that separates or discriminates. It’s an embodied way of being which includes the whole perspective.

Something that’s missing. Something that you are judging.

We hope you will consider that the lens you perceive as helping people with substance use, is only directed to those people moving toward recovery. This lens is adding to the suffering, leaving people behind and causing more harm. Your announcement suggests conditional love. It’s evident this approach has never worked and is failing.

Giving people a fighting chance requires you to open and be in your own heart. To hear and see people from this place. It’s time to move out of the waiting room and meet people in our shared humanity. Lives are counting on it.

BRANDON AND AREA OVERDOSE AWARENESS