Water Cooler: Changing drug crisis terminology | NanaimoNewsNOW

Becoming addicted to these street drugs will have been the result of many different causes. Few such causes will have been a person saying, “I wish to become addicted to opioids and adopt a lifestyle that will ruin my body, entrap and wither my mind, and lead to probable death within a year.”

Blaming the victim by continuing to call it an “overdose” avoids zeroing in on the real problems: the outright lying by the original manufacturers (such as pharmaceutical megacorporations, one of which has been convicted and is still squirming around in its effort to guard Billions of dollars in profit); those smaller scale, sometimes off-shore, manufacturers of fentanyl which are selling to the next level down; the mobsters who are cutting their illegal opioids and fake opioids with the cheaper fentanyl; and the slugs who rope their victims in then callously sell them crap that has no resemblance to the expected opioid. Not to forget the righteous trumpeting of some people in positions of power who, in the fashion of the bullies they are, do everything they can to re-victimize those who have nowhere to turn.

There are many further investigative avenues to follow, if you want a good story, rather than being that person standing in the circle cheering as the bully kicks in the face of the victim.

NanaimoNewsNOW: How we refer to the ongoing crisis in B.C. which has claimed so many lives is always a fluid conversation.

After reading your explanation, turning to an organization involved for their input and discussing it in the newsroom, we’ve decided to change how we talk about the overdose crisis.

From now on we’ll be calling it the “toxic drug crisis.”

As members of the Open Health Collaborative pointed out to us, there wasn’t an overdose crisis until the drug supply became tainted with fentanyl, which then led to further substances such as carfentanil and now benzodiazepines.

Our use of the term “overdose crisis” was never designed to victimize the people suffering overdoses. We felt the term had enough context to be referring to the drugs themselves, not the person using them, but sometimes that isn’t enough.

We always try to be on top of changing terminology and stay current with how to reference the many issues we see in Nanaimo.

For instance, a few years ago we did a multi-part series on homelessness in Nanaimo and a worker at the Island Crisis Care Society mentioned she didn’t refer to people on the street as “homeless” but as “people experiencing homelessness.”

We took that phrasing and started using it in our stories, since we believed it was a valid point. If it’s how the people involved in the struggle to find housing were referring to people living rough, then we would as well.

Thank you so much for your considered and evocative advocacy for this issue.

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