Open Letter to the Alberta Legislature Select Special Committee to Examine Safe Supply

Dear Members of the Select Special Committee to Examine Safe Supply,

While we are honoured by the invitation to contribute our perspectives to the Select Special Committee to Examine Safe Supply, we hereby withdraw our participation as panel presenters.

UCP Caucus Tweet regarding the Safe Supply Panel, Feb. 4, 2022

Regrettably, it was made clear from the moment of the Committee’s announcement by Associate Minister of Mental Health & Addictions Mike Ellis that the outcome of the Committee had been predetermined: the potential benefits of providing safe supply to Albertans at risk of death from drug poisoning would not be weighed fairly against perceived risks.

Further comments from MLA Calgary-Cross MLA Mickey Amery suggested that the Committee would “follow the evidence and use the information provided by North America's leading experts, not the radicals or the activists", presumably referring to us and others working to mitigate the rapidly increasing death toll of Alberta’s drug poisoning crisis.

Unfortunately, the UCP-selected panelists appear to have been hand-picked for their stances against safe supply.

While American-style prohibitionist views feature prominently among the UCP-selected panelists, critical omissions among the UCP selections betray unmoveable bias in the committee that lends itself to consent manufacturing for maintaining the status quo:

Representation of people who are prescribed safe supply,
Representation of the academic community conducting primary research on safe supply, and
Representation of safe supply-prescribing physicians.

This knowledge manufacturing echoes the 2020 Supervised Consumption Services Review, a hopelessly biased proceeding that provided false justification for closure and cancellation of desperately needed services for Albertans who use drugs. The evidence presented by those in

support of supervised consumption was not included in the final report and many participants were left traumatized by a hostile process.

We ask: in what ways does this government’s track record encourage us to take part in a process that appears to be following a similar predetermined course?

We hope these critiques help steer improvements to translation of academic, practical and lived knowledge to public policy by our United Conservative government. We remain open to evidence-informed dialogue on safe supply with a shared purpose of ending the compounding traumas of the drug poisoning crisis.

Sincerely,

Petra Schultz, Moms Stop the Harm

Euan Thomson, EACH+EVERY: Businesses for Harm Reduction