How much it hurts
A reflection on the harm caused by criminalizing the people we love.
Will McCorriston, MSTH board member (SK) and chair of the Criminal Justice Committee.
How Much It Hurts In the beginning…
We had three beautiful daughters. One had some extra struggles, more than other kids. Our family looked for help, for mental health support, later for substance use. We didn’t find much help, and neither did the other families we knew who had kids who struggled. Our beautiful girl is so sad, and she hurts. I can’t find words to tell you how much it hurts.
In the middle…
She found something that made the pain go away for a while. Now she is very sick. Detox is 7 days. Is that long enough to fix this “thing”? We aren’t fixing a “thing” though. My beautiful daughter is so sick, she weighs 80 lbs. Another detox, this time in a really far away city. Is 7 days long enough? Call the rehab every morning before noon for 3 months to try to get in. If you miss a day you go to the back of the line. I didn’t know what dopesick looked like, I didn’t know how sick people get from withdrawal from opioids and benzodiazapines. So many young people like my daughter are dying from these drugs. I can’t find words to tell you how much that hurts.
In the end…(the ending people who use drugs NEED…not the one our family experienced) Criminalization of people with substance use disorders was ended by thoughtful, humane policies that created real solutions for real people. Let it be…
I was asked to write a short contribution on the impact that criminalization of drugs has had on my daughter and my family. The words to explain how much it hurt are not available to me but I will try here.
Love, it is said, cannot be put into a cup and measured. I would put forth that the harms from criminalization of substance use also cannot be quantified, and from our family’s perspective, are an entity that continues to hurt our family many years after the courts rendered their sentence. No member of my family has been spared from the despair of seeing our loved one who needed help to be put into handcuffs and led away to a far-off prison subject to a mandatory minimum sentence.
I have no ability to capture in a few sentences the personal trauma that our family carries or to express the pain that so many families have experienced in the name of “justice” when it is applied as a punishment to people that are suffering from substance use disorder. For most of us who have been down this very dark road, we had already spent many years trying to get help for our kids who struggled with mental illness and did not find it. My loved one has her own stories to tell about the trauma she experienced as an incarcerated person in Canada. I would not even attempt to tell her story for her or to repeat the horrors that she experienced. I can tell you that my own pain includes seeing how her future is limited by a criminal record that might prevent her from obtaining a post-secondary education, an apartment, or even meaningful employment. Though my daughter is now healing from her substance use disorder, the long arm of criminalization has a firm hold on her ability to succeed in the future.
Peer-reviewed data provided by the John Howard Society on prisons in Canada tells us that at least 10 percent of inmates meet the criteria for fetal alcohol syndrome, and 80 percent have substance abuse issues when incarcerated. 70 prisoners overdosed inside federal prisons in 2017. This data from 2017 is the latest data we have, which is in itself unacceptable knowing how pressing these issues are. It costs $110,000 per year to house each person who is incarcerated, with about three-quarters of that number going to employee costs. Correctional Services Canada (CSC) has a $2.6 billion budget which makes it the 15th largest department or agency by spending, larger than the CBC and Department of Justice combined. With all of those resources, 40% of prisoners are returned to prison within a two-year period. Prison does not resolve substance use issues. For most people, it makes their substance use worse, and it often leads to the drug poisonings of people who have been incarcerated. Good research data tells us that up to 40% of the people who die from drug poisonings were incarcerated in the 2 years previous to their deaths. Criminalization is contributing to the drug poisoning crisis in a huge way that cannot be ignored.
Those are the numbers. The people behind those numbers are what really matters to those of us who love someone who uses substances deemed “illegal”. Real, meaningful help could come at a fraction of the cost of incarceration and would make a world of difference to so many families, to the generations to come who haven’t missed their mother or father throughout their childhood or to parents and siblings who must experience the trauma of seeing their loved one live in communities where they are treated as “less than.” Discrimination and stigma hurt people long after they have had their “day in court” and the sentence has been served. It hurts us, all of us. We wish for other families to NEVER know our pain from seeing our loved ones caught in a disease they can’t escape or from losing them to drug poisoning. We want the harms to end, the unnecessary harms of criminalization to be a thing of the past and we especially want the deaths of our loved ones at the hands of terrible drug policies to stop.
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