Good News Monday: Harm reduction advances in Alberta

Content Notice: Opioid addiciton.

Alberta, as with many places in the United States, is in the midst of an opioid crisis, with a particular cocktail called fentanyl (10x more powerful than heroin, 100x more powerful than morphine) and it’s sadistic cousin carfentanyl (like fentanyl but somehow even worse) making the rounds, especially among vulnerable populations. It’s been clear to the evidence-based policy crowd that the best way to intercept the casualties in this crisis is to treat the issue as one of public health rather than of public crime, building relationships between addicts and health services instead of making them afraid to seek out help. Decriminalization of possession is a vital step. Officially, possession is still on the books in most municipalities as well as the Criminal Code of Canada, and we are in the precarious position of asking police to exercise discretion when dealing with addicts.

However, Alberta is taking a few steps towards harm reduction, a series of policies designed to simply keep addicts alive long enough for them to access help. Edmonton announced several safe injection sites integrated in existing emergency housing and hospital services.

The supervised-injection locations would offer individuals a list of resources:

  • Sterile injection supplies
  • Education on safer injection, overdose prevention and intervention
  • Medical and counselling services
  • Referrals to drug treatment, housing, income support and other services
  • Attention to medical needs that require an immediate response.

The services would also be intended to be an entry point for users to receive further social supports, primary health care and treatment.

Each location would be staffed with a nurse, social worker/addiction worker and peer support worker.

While the police chief has the right attitude…

“I think the big issue is the unmet care issues – the people that are mentally ill that are homeless that are addicted and they need help,” Knecht added. “I think if we can get them to a place where they have a safe warm bed at night, some meals, proper medication – they will become productive members of the community.”

…His officers might not.

I’m glad Alberta’s health and social services are stepping up, but we ought to be decriminalizing possession, too. Still, this is an important step to reducing the fatalities, and for once our provincial government isn’t cutting the essential services to try and give a helping hand here.

-Shiv

“Unexpected legal implications”?

Well slap my side and roast me for dinner. Those two Baptist schools that are defying Bill 10, a law which compels all schools to form a Gay-Straight or Queer-Straight Alliance if the students request one, have given the Education Minister David Eggen some “unexpected legal implications.”

For more than two months, Education Minister David Eggen has had a copy of a report and recommendations from inquirer Dan Scott, whom Eggen hired to investigate two Edmonton-area private schools.

“Yes, we are working with it, but it’s more complicated than we had originally foreseen,” Eggen said Wednesday.

Gee, you’re just now figuring out the finer details of entrusting a god damn cult with the public education of our children?! Fuck me, Minister, it’s a little early in 2017 to be awarding Understatement of the Year, but you are off to a smashing start!

In response, Eggen demanded a written promise from Coldwell to comply with laws unanimously approved by the legislature in 2015 that protect gender identity and expression as grounds for protection from discrimination, and compelling schools to help students organize a support group for LGBTQ students when they ask for one.

Eggen then received a letter from the school board’s lawyer that the minister won’t discuss.

The minister appointed Scott, a lawyer, to study the schools’ policies, documents and handbooks, and interview students, staff and families, to see if they are in line with the law.

Although he’s had the report in hand since December, Eggen would not divulge its conclusions or recommendations.

“It extends past just the individual case. The legal complexities that have come to light with this particular case have to have larger implications, so that’s about as far as I want to say about it right now,” Eggen said. “We’re working hard, because I want to make sure we get it right, and we want to make sure that we’re sending a safe and caring message right across every school.”

The “legal complexities” are thus:

  • Alberta’s federation with Canada back in the good ol’ days enshrined Catholic participation in government as a means of warding off Protestant persecution of Catholics.
  • We’ve since matured and developed a human rights code that says you can’t be a piece of shit to people just because they’re Queer.
  • Catholics continue to be pieces of shit to people just because they’re Queer.

Funnily enough, the United Nations awarded Canada a failing grade on separation of church and state, pointing to our numerous publicly funded religious schools.

In other words, David Eggen is wandering into a minefield that secular and queer Canadians have been pointing out for fracking decades: Our human rights codes and our tolerance of oppressive religious beliefs contradict each other, and at some point one has to be ruled subordinate to another.

-Shiv

24 hours in the life of a trans writer

05:30 — I’m an early riser, and sometimes I even beat my alarm clock. How much of that is just heightened anxiety and existential dread, I’ll probably never know. The sun hasn’t even risen, but it’s when I do my best work.

05:41 — I’ve brewed my coffee and opened my email. The first message says I should be “interned” at an asylum. I write back, saying I’m flattered he has such confidence in my abilities that I’d qualify for an internship at a psychiatric hospital. It’s a facetious response. The content of his email clearly indicates he meant “interred.” He doesn’t seem to know that interrogating my own sanity has become a daily ritual thanks to a culture of persistent, sustained, and uncoordinated gaslighting directed at people like me. I consider sending him the history of psychiatry’s abuses with trans people and how none of that torture stopped us from being trans. He doesn’t care. He’ll unknowingly comment on another piece of my work under a handle similar to his email, saying the exact same thing.

He isn’t wishing for my health. He’s wishing for my disappearance.

06:24 — I see the Daily Mail has accused me of being a “gender fascist.” Well, not me specifically, but if the Daily Mail was in the habit of dealing in specifics it wouldn’t be in business at all. Whatever. It’s a fact-free hit piece, not that the consumers care. They’re just paying for another pundit to foam at the mouth over some nebulous spectre of slavering trans fuckbeasts.

[Read more…]

Conservatives blast NDP for following conservative energy plan

I’ve been blindly poking and prodding at the Mythical Centre everyone seems to insist exists in Albertan politics, insistently pointing out that our current government run by the New Democratic Party isn’t all that aggressively socialist after all. In fact, I don’t even have to go as far back as Peter Lougheed, widely considered one of the Progressive Conservative’s most reasonable and productive Premiers, to find similarities between the energy plan of the NDP and the PCs–Rachel Notley’s policy is nearly identical to that of the late Jim Prentice.

Which seems… odd… given how Canada and Alberta’s mainstream media has a never-ending lineup of pundits screaming of the coming plague over the NDP’s governance.

Yesterday, journalist Jason Markusoff published a story in Maclean’s Magazine outlining Mr. Prentice’s recommended approach to making Canada a true energy superpower, as opposed to the blustering would-be powerhouse we saw during the years Stephen Harper was Conservative prime minister.

“Prentice’s arguments are striking not only in their closeness to those of Notley and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but also in how far they diverge from the orthodoxy of today’s Conservative Party, where Michael Chong is the clan’s black sheep for daring to advocate a price on carbon,” Mr. Markusoff wrote.

In the book, Mr. Markusoff observed, Mr. Prentice “gives Notley credit for instituting a carbon tax and suggests he’d helped lay the groundwork for her approach.” (Emphasis added.)

Mr. Prentice also credited the approach taken by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Notley with more success than the “amateurish” bullying favoured by Mr. Harper and his acolyte Mr. Kenney.

These so-called Centrists that everybody insists exists ought to then be confronted with the basic reality that Notley’s NDP is behaving a lot more like Lougheed’s PCs and not the Communist Diktatorship Post Media pundits have cooked up in their feverish imaginations.

Hell, Jim Prentice even answered the open-ended question I was concerned with regarding Indigenous treaty rights: (emphasis mine)

Mr. Markusoff quotes Mr. Prentice’s argument that if Canada won’t commit to serious coastal protection measures as demanded by so many people in British Columbia, “then we shouldn’t be shipping oil at all.” The late Conservative premier also advocated that Alberta help bear the costs of protecting the West Coast and include Canada’s Indigenous peoples as full partners in our national energy policy.

There remains the big question–with Jason “I don’t get caught up in the details” Kenney slated to win the PC leadership race and steer the party into an iceberg, are the Centrists everybody insists exist going to wake the fuck up and vote for the not-terribly-liberal NDP? Or are they going to continue slamming back that delicious Red Scare whipped together in the dingy basements of Alberta’s gasbag political pundits?

-Shiv

Oh joy! More cults!

Disclaimer: This isn’t a new cult, just a particular cult I hadn’t previously been aware of. As with all ultra-conservative religious sects, content notice for the usual strains of intense and inhumane abuse.

This time it’s Hasidic Judaism. Batya Ungar-Sargon details with stomach-churning precision some of the communal practices that lead to appalling human rights abuses. And the worst part? They’ve found psychiatrists to help in the job.

But two Hasidim married to other people don’t just get a divorce and start a new life together. The community got involved. A rabbi and what’s known as an askan, a person of influence in the Hasidic community, were given Joseph’s “case.” The role of an askan — collectively called askanim — is part politician, part good Samaritan, and part busybody. Together, Joseph’s rabbi and the askan appointed by the community to his case staged an intervention. Joseph says they got involved in every level of his life, in order to prevent him from leaving his family and starting a new one. They took away Joseph’s BlackBerry. The askan started monitoring Joseph’s computer, a mirror image of Joseph’s screen under surveillance at all times. Joseph’s brother-in-law started tracking Joseph’s car, where he went and whom he saw.

Joseph was faced with a choice: surrender to the will of his community’s leaders, or risk public shaming, and worse — losing his children and friends. He capitulated, and promised never to see Dini again. But that was not enough. The askan chose a psychologist to provide Joseph with talk therapy, and then a psychiatrist for medication, who started Joseph on a course of chemical treatment for sex addiction.

It’s some pretty grizzly reading, but if you’re up to it, there’s more on Hasidic Judaism here.

-Shiv

Conservatives prove how anti-terrorist they are by mailing bomb threats

Three Concordia University buildings had to be evacuated this morning because a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens of Canada (or C4) mailed bomb threats to their facilities:

The threatening letter, purportedly from a group that calls itself Council of Conservative Citizens of Canada (C4), complains about Muslim students at Concordia.

“The suspect sent by email that he put some explosive items inside a few places inside the buildings,” said Montreal police Const. Benoit Boisselle.

“Lots of police officers are on site right now. They looked around, they did not find any suspect items,” Boisselle said.

McGill security also informed

CKUT — the campus community radio station at McGill University — was among the media outlets to receive the letter threatening Muslim students at Concordia.

“Since we will [spread] our fight to McGill too, we at C4 decided to give you a heads up of the emergency situation at Concordia University,” said the email, from someone identified as the “C4 co-ordinator.”

An official at CKUT said the radio station had shared the email with McGill University’s campus security.

Remember folks: It’s not terrorism when white people do it.

-Shiv

Snark of the Month, February edition

For the sake of our collective survival, cathartic snark is prescribed by the hostess of Against the Grain in order to support your health. To that end, we hope the complementary confetti being mailed to you as we speak stimulates the reward centres of your brain so as to encourage snark.

February’s “Snark of the Month” winner: dangerousbeans

Dr. Zucker is a bit of an odd duck, because his public advocacy against the health and wellbeing of trans people is refuted by his own research. In response to this revelation, dangerousbeans says:

If transgender activists had the power we would have fired Zucker years ago.
Out of some sort of cannon, into another giant pile of shit.

AtG’s numerous anonymous sources confirm this is true.

February’s runner-up: CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice

On the same topic of Dr. Zucker’s firing by quote-un-quote “trans activists:”

It was me, Giliell. I used my many coerced visits to CAMH to gather naughty facts about Zucker, and got him fired.

Nah. If I’d got him fired, a kiln would have been involved.

As it turns out, the former patients of Dr. Zucker seem to generally hate his guts! I wonder why this is never mentioned in all the puff pieces mainstream media keeps pumping out on his behalf.

-Shiv

 

Signal boosting: Trans people shouldn’t have to be perfect

Alex DiFrancesco touches upon the observation that trans women with high visibility are held to ludicrous standards, and that these standards stifle perceptions of us as just ordinary flawed human beings:

None of this made it into the final piece. I am shaking just writing these things now. Because I know, as a trans person, as someone writing about trans people, as an ally to trans women, that I am never ever supposed to publicly suggest something that could make any trans person look bad. I am never supposed to write that I was abused by a trans woman, because this is exactly what the people who want to see all trans people disappear off the face of the earth want everyone else to think is true of all trans women. I am never to suggest that a vulnerable population (which I am part of) could be anything less than perfect.

For the record, the idea that a relationship with one abusive trans woman validates all the horrible things trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and others say about trans women is absurd. Were a cis person, male or female, to be abusive in a relationship, no one would ever take that to mean all cis people are abusive.

My ex-wife is one person out of the large community of trans people I know and love. The wonderful people I know among this community, most of them transgender women, have taken me into their homes when I was homeless, supported me mentally and emotionally when I was at my worst, helped me find jobs, and fed me when I was hungry and broke. They are people I turn to when I am unsure about my own often imperfect politics, or the many issues I myself have as a person. And yet the fear instilled by TERFs is so real that many trans writers, when telling their stories, feel we are not supposed to talk about anything that questions any trans person beyond the confines of our own community. Certainly not in venues for public or cis consumption.

You can read more about it and the silencing effect of TERF-perpetrated oppression has here.

-Shiv

Man, Earth is fucking weird

Every so often somebody writes about the wildlife on Earth I have yet to encounter. Typically it’s the deep sea animals that get a resounding “wtf” from me, but today I learned about another weirdo endangered mammal called the pangolin.

Like an armadillo’s shell, a pangolin’s scales are made of keratin, the same material that comprises mammal horns and fingernails. In a real sense, pangolin scales are made of densely fused hair, and they can be lifted and moved to, for example, crush ants defending their nest by getting between them to bite the underlying skin. Combining this highly unusual protective coat with the pangolin’s specialized tongue, which is disconnected from the hyoid bone in the throat to allow it to be up to a third of the animal’s total length, and their tiny, narrow heads provides an alien visage that no other creature on Earth can match.

Read more about these adorable weirdos here. Warning: It’s a story of frauds exploiting mystical myths and as is often the case with animals targeted for these practices, the harvesting methods are gruesome.

-Shiv