Season 2, Episode 4

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Daniel chats with Off the Clock Toolbox Talk partner, Kat Wahamaa from Mom’s Stop the Harm about losing her 25-year-old son Joseph to the unregulated drug crisis, and about the unintentional and intentional harms that are taking place in Canada, from decision-makers in Ottawa to families sitting around their tables at home. Kat points out how the drug poisoning crisis is traumatizing an entire generation of children whose parents have been killed by unregulated drugs, including Joseph’s two young sons.

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Kat expresses her anger at some politicians’ willful obfuscation to frame safe supply as the cause of approximately 23,000 deaths in Canada since 2020. Daniel and Kat discuss the political polarization of harm reduction versus abstinence-based treatment that aren’t opposites at all, but part of the same spectrum of treatment for a dangerous disease.

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The conversation turns to the moralizing that happens to humans who use particular drugs, and how some potentially dangerous drugs like alcohol are acceptable, and others have been historically categorized as criminal through American politicking that spread to Canada alongside prohibition ideologies. Kat says the real criminality is with the politicians that continue to allow thousands of people to die by refusing to create safe supply because it doesn’t support their political standing. She believes that the majority of Canadians do not moralize drug use, but the only education many Canadians receive on drug use is media propaganda that is not connected to any actual evidence or research, but is a relic of twentieth century American political rhetoric.

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Daniel and Kat agree that keeping people alive, and using drugs, is more important than trying to stop people from using drugs and having them die.

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Daniel asks what has changed since the beginning of the “overdose crisis” when Joseph was killed? Kat considers that people are tested, but then are sanctioned for testing positive. Men in the trades don’t trust the confidentiality of accessing their Employee Assistance Programs (EAP’s). Employers still have very long shifts in order to make project deadlines.

 

Some changes that have happened are the Building Hope series, the Tailgate Toolkit project and Off the Clock Toolbox Talk. But men in the trades - including friends of Joseph’s - are still dying. Young tradespeople in the 25-35 age range are going to more funerals than weddings. Daniel agrees that seven years into this crisis, the number of deaths are not going down. And it seems like places like British Columbia are taking steps backwards. 

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Kat talks about the national work of Mom’s Stop The Harm, whose primary role is advocacy, but also support groups like Holding Hope and Healing Hearts.

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Kat and Daniel discuss some of the shame-based narratives and practices that are actually harming vulnerable folks, leaving them with no other option for relief except substance use. They include the regretful, but common use of  ‘tough love’ as well as abstinence-only movements that leave the person to struggle with the weight of their own trauma on their own shoulders until they hit ‘rock bottom’ when ‘rock bottom’ may actually be death.

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 Kat finishes with “we need a fence at the top of the cliff, not an ambulance at the bottom of it.”