Thread by @classicdylan

The pictured tweet is in reply to a post by Mike Ellis (AB Min. of Mental Health & Addictions) about the cancellation of a planned SCS in Calgary & I am so fucking tired of bad faith assholes like @Twolfrecovery & @sheldonbailey promulgating this incredibly damaging idea (1/x)

that harm reduction & recovery are mutually exclusive, which they do in order to discredit harm reduction (distorted facts & outright lies) & thereby promote their grift - aka abstinence-based recovery - as the one magic solution to addiction, homelessness & the mass (2/x)

poisoning crisis. These ghouls do not care whether people who use drugs live or die so long as Recovery™ triumphs; meanwhile, ppl in Alberta ARE dying because they have no access to HR services & public support for HR across Canada is being eroded by disinformation (3/x)

suggesting it is the cause of not just the drug poisoning crisis, but also of all visible poverty & the rise in "social disorder" - which are, of course, the result of decades of underinvesting in housing, healthcare & social services. And what really sucks is how receptive (4/x)

people are to bad-faith claims about HR thanks to decades of tough love bullshit & being told that the worst thing you can do for an addict is to enable their addiction in any way, a myth that no amount of evidence for the efficacy of HR seems sufficient to debunk. I'm (5/x)

esp. bothered by the suggestion that HR providers/advocates don't support treatment b/c we've "given up" on ppl who use drugs. I have never met one person who advocates for HR who doesn't also advocate for more & better treatment options, but self-aggrandizing recovery (6/x)

bros need a villain to save the world from, so under the bus we go. As for giving up on ppl, perhaps that's what actually seeing & understanding people as people & respecting their agency & autonomy looks like when you only acknowledge the humanity of people who use drugs (6/x)

once they've stopped using.

In closing & for the record, harm reduction & treatment/recovery are entirely complimentary modalities, the Alberta Model of abstinence-only treatment is a grift, and HR peeps are the fucking bomb. #safesupply #bcpoli #abpoli END