βPrevention in its truest essence β is Justiceβ #ACEstoAssets #SmartJustice #Prevention #KeepThePromise
Scotland
Joined February 2014
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We brought @DrGaborMate to Scotland to highlight βWHYβ we have such high levels of drug and alcohol deaths, mental illness, and what also contributes to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide. #ACEsToAssets youtu.be/H9hcrf3xtx4
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This is @Annemarieward, a recovery advocate from Scotland. Annmarie says our systems of care are run by people who fundamentally do not understand the nature of addiction. Drug policy is filled with activists and bureaucrats instead of people with lived experience. She's right.
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The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption. #NoDeathPenalty
HR services do not "create" demand or induce non-users to start taking drugs. However, over-concentrating both high-needs populations and low-barrier services into a single downtown core creates visible street level drug markets that make recovery harder for those living there!
The Downtown Eastside didn't become impoverished because supportive housing, harm reduction and recovery services showed up.
Those services showed up because poverty, homelessness, addiction and mental health struggles were already there.
Stop confusing the concentration of poverty with the concentration of services responding to poverty.
I agree that supportive housing should be built in every municipality and every community needs to do its part.
However, spreading people around without addressing poverty, affordable housing, healthcare, treatment and ongoing supports isn't solving anything.
Businesses deserve safe communities, residents deserve safe neighbourhoods, and people struggling with homelessness and addiction deserve those exact same things.
We should be asking why so many people are living in poverty and homelessness in the first place.
The goal isn't to make poverty less visible, the goal is to eliminate it.
That's the structural change we should be fighting for!
The hardened criminal, was once a sensitive child who had to emotionally and psychologically harden themselves against a harsh environment! In the short term this survival adaptation allows you to survive. Long term itβs a disaster. Gangster life is short and unhappy one!
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Pope Leo's tweet this morning is profound. Whole books on spirituality have been written on this concept, like St. Francis de Sales "Introduction to the Devout Life" and Brother Lawrence's "The Practice of the Presence of God" (which the Holy Father admires) but the Pope sums it up perfectly.
"There exists a martyrdom of those who offer their lives in a single moment, and the more hidden martyrdom of those who give their lives day after day. This is exactly what all Christians are called to do: to give our lives with love, every day.
"Our age needs men and women who have the courage to do good even when it comes at a cost. Draw close to those who are alone, support those who are weary, and seek out those who have drifted away. Have the courage to forgive, to begin again, and to engage in dialogue.
"Doing good does not always receive recognition and often requires effort, but this is the daily courage of charity. Friendship with Jesus Christ gives us the strength to live this way."
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Drug policy is filled with academics who refuse to admit they might be wrong about aspects of harm reduction. Now that data is showing it's failing, they'd rather go down with the ship than admit that because it means 20 years of their work down the drain. @drdrew @DRsLoungePod
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Let's not call for more resilience, diagnoses, drugs, medicalisation & neurofication to address escalating rates of poor mental health, let's call for new social policy to tackle its social determinants & properly fund demedicalised psycho-social support. That's it in a nutshell.
Addiction by definition means βslaveryβ, so donβt ask if thereβs good addictions βthereβs no such thing as good slavery!
What the body is stuck in survival mode (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn? In that state, resistance to the present moment isn't an egoic choice, it's a physiological reflex. And why spiritual definitions of the ego can accidentally become gaslighting if we ignore human biology.
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βRage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.β
β Cormac McCarthy
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More golden nuggets from last yearβs oral evidence sessions on the Right to Addiction Treatment Bill:
"You could be stigmatised as a service user because you already have rightsβ
Ah yes. Those rights. The non-enforceable ones.
Apparently, giving people an enforceable right to treatment might be stigmatising.
Because nothing tackles stigma quite like making sure your rights can't actually be enforced.
#AddictionRecovery #RecoverylsPossible
#AddictionTreatment #RightToRecovery #stopthedeaths
You cannot call it prevention if we are not breaking cycles!
βFor years Scotland has debated drugs policy as though we must choose between keeping people alive and helping them recover. It is a false choice.
βWe need naloxone. We need good evidence-based medication. We need rapid access to treatment. But we also need residential rehabilitation, recovery communities, housing, relationships, employment, purpose and somewhere for people to go after the immediate crisis has passed.
βTreatment should not simply ask whether somebody is still alive. It should ask whether their life is getting betterβ @Annemarieward
glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/2658β¦
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I am struggling to comprehend where Western drug policy is heading. Today in British Columbia, the Supreme Court stayed the trafficking convictions of activists who bought cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine from the illicit market, tested it, and sold it through a so called βcompassion clubβ.
To be precise: the court has NOT declared ordinary drug trafficking a constitutional right.
But the direction of travel is extraordinary.
We have moved from the entirely reasonable principle that people should not die because they use drugs towards something very different: that facilitating continued drug use may itself attract constitutional protection.
I have spent decades working in addiction and recovery. Of course we must keep people alive. But keeping somebody alive was supposed to be the beginning of our ambition, not the end of it.
Addiction is not simply a consumer-safety problem solved by providing a safer product. It can consume relationships, family, health, work, agency, purpose, community and eventually life itself.
Yet instead of asking how we help people become free from that domination, we are constructing increasingly sophisticated systems for making it safer to remain within it.
That is the UTTER madness .
There is something profoundly wrong when we can contemplate a constitutional argument around the supply of illicit heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, while people still struggle to obtain timely treatment and meaningful pathways into recovery.
Keep people alive tonight. Absolutely.
But tomorrow morning there had better be somewhere for them to go.
Treatment. Recovery. Family. Community. Work. Purpose. Community. Belonging.
Otherwise compassion risks becoming the indefinite accommodation of human despair.
People with addiction deserve far greater ambition than that.
#BREAKING: BC Supreme Court Justice Catherine Murray has ruled that banning people from possessing drugs for trafficking purposes is unconstitutional, claiming such laws "discriminate" against drug users and violate their right to "life, liberty, and the security of person."
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A very good start! We know what the ideology of austerity has done to an entire generation. Undoing that harm needs to centralise prevention and investment into developing humans. It's a huge task...
gov.uk/government/news/1000-β¦
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I guess Scotland wants to learn about decriminalization of drugs the same way Vancouver π¨π¦ did and the entire state of Oregon πΊπ² did. The hard way. @ScottishSun @scotgov
@kmckenna63 in today's @heraldscotland tears into John Swinneyβs plan to decriminalise all drugs β and rightly so.
More than 1,100 people died from drugs last year. The SNP has had nearly 20 years to get treatment and recovery working, yet Swinney would rather blame Westminster and listen to campaigners than face families and communities living with the consequences.
He wants more powers. I want him to answer for what he has done with the powers he already has.
heraldscotland.com/news/2658β¦
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This isnβt harm reduction. Itβs institutionalised delusion and it would be hilarious if it werenβt so utterly lethal
Let me be blunt: no country on Earth has ever successfully legalised or decriminalised Class A drugs without unleashing a Pandoraβs box of misery addiction, death, and chaos spilling out in every direction. Yet somehow, weβre meant to believe that Scotland with collapsing services and the highest drug death rate in Europe will be the one to crack it. I've written extensively about how this has been tried elsewhere if you dare to look beyond the facebook memes and legalisers propaganda - start here
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annemarieward.substack.com/pβ¦
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4. annemarieward.substack.com/pβ¦
@kmckenna63 in today's @heraldscotland tears into John Swinneyβs plan to decriminalise all drugs β and rightly so.
More than 1,100 people died from drugs last year. The SNP has had nearly 20 years to get treatment and recovery working, yet Swinney would rather blame Westminster and listen to campaigners than face families and communities living with the consequences.
He wants more powers. I want him to answer for what he has done with the powers he already has.
heraldscotland.com/news/2658β¦
βBeware of unearned wisdom.β
philarist.com/the-perils-of-β¦
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It's almost as if @theSNP have zero respect & utter disdain for people with addiction..& shocking lack of respect & disdain for those recovered addicts speaking out showing depth of knowledge & have genuine compassion for each and every addict's nightmare. Call me an old cynicπ€
βYou do not determine your success by comparing yourself to others, rather you determine your success by comparing your accomplishments to your capabilities."
β Zig Ziglar
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Do Safe Injection Sites actually help?
Does the data support it? According to a study published in March of 2026, not necessarily. This is Kym Kaufman, CEO of @RecovExcel explaining the study and it's findings out of Alberta
β’ Letβs unpack.
#stopthedeaths
#AddictionRecovery #RightToRecovery #recoveryispossible #RecoveryCapital