Women Are Leading Canada’s Safe Supply Movement
Everyone deserves access to health care. It should be unconditional. If you have diabetes and still enjoy the occasional unhealthy snack, a doctor will still prescribe you insulin—and yet equivalent humane treatment is often withheld from people who use drugs. This population is dying at alarming rates,leaving patients and advocates fighting for evidence-based responses including decriminalization, safe consumption sites and safe supply.
Here in Canada, the safe supply movement in particular—the push for a legal, federally regulated supply of drugs like heroin and meth so that people may consume them more safely, free of dangerous adulterants—has been led primarily by women. When it comes to research, prescribing and, crucially, sharing their experiences around drug use, women are driving this movement.
Many of these women were calling for safe supply long before it was a widely known concept. People who do this work are often criticizedby the public, and even by a large majority of the addiction medicine field; most addiction medicine doctors have not yet been able to wrap their head around this new way of prescribing.
It’s time for more of us to acknowledge the women who are doing so much to make this life-saving movement possible.
Read whole article here.
By Matthew Bonn
Here are a few of these amazing women…
