Harm Reduction Advisory Committee Grows

I joined what was called a needle exchange advisory committee, which has since become the Harm Reduction Advisory Committee and that sort of bled into being our CAT team, which then embraced over 60 local organizations. And there’s all sorts of little initiatives, parent, or parent groups. There’s quite a very impressive example of networking through this community and one of the results has been a recovery centre, which is something needed here, but to get back to what I can see back then, was that the clientele who used to fall off the wagon very regularly where I worked in Vancouver, didn’t here because public health looked after them so well. As soon as fentanyl arrived on the scene and the drug supply became toxic, then that changed things entirely, of course across the whole province, but it made it more publicly visible what was happening here. As the mayor says, this community is so well networked, there’s a social and a cultural sense of abundance and wealth in this community that then blinds most of us to the fact that all the other social problems are actually going on as well but they’re very much there. The whole works. Now we can’t handle them as well and so now we need to find new solutions, but I really believe and I think the CAT team is heading in that direction. The innovations that will solve this problem are exactly what already is working here and this fabric that we have in this community. I think that’s why we were chosen as examples of successes from the healthcare centre.