Canada's necrocapitalism craze

Socially acceptable drug use (or, what you get when you Google ‘rich guys doing drugs’)

Picture this: your average blonde, older suburban mom (or young suburban grandmom). She’s wearing an ill-fitting red peacoat and doesn’t look like she’s slept in days. Her eyes look to be about 40% closed — whether from the lack of sleep or from her own idea of what a smokin’ hot suburban mom might look like on camera. Anyway. In a monotone voice that I imagine would run on the speakers of hell, tells the camera, “Let’s go get a free crack pipe and cocaine smoking kit.”

The woman is Gwen O’Mahoney. I’ve never heard of her but I must admit that my BC Conservative Party playing card deck got lost in the mail. She looks like a typical drug user, perhaps a wine mom, but this is a stunt. She’s outide the Emergency Room at the Nanaimo Hospital to steal from the safe supply vending machine that the hospital has set up.

Interestingly, she doesn’t steal cathetars, IV bags, Tylenol — other stuff that Canadians can expect to get for free if they go to a hospital and need it. She steals material that reduces the spread of illnesses and diseases among poor drug users — i.e. the ones who can’t afford to make sure that they’re always using clean materials. There is little editorializing in the video — the disgust on her frozen winemom face is supposed to tell the reader that she thinks that this is abhorrent. That, instead, drug users should just use whatever they can scrape together, regardless of how clean it is.

One can imagine O’Mahony wandering into a bar in 1998 and yelling at the bouncer because she took a handful of free condoms. Can’t get an STI if you’re too busy making terrible videos to have sex!

O’Mahony didn’t start as a Conservative. She was first elected as an MLA for the NDP (oops), a position she held for just over one year. She also ran in 2011 for the federal NDP. But something broke her brain — a combination of disgust for harm reduction and attending a rally about the biological sex of prisoners in Toronto (??) radicalized her towards the Conservatives. The gender essentialist-necrocapitalist nexus is real.

Take, for example, a similar stunt video made by Natasha Biase. She filmed herself going to a needle exchange and discovering that she can … exchange needles (and get other clean drug-use equipment). Biase is similarly obsessed with gender and is trying to make a career out of terfascism.

There isn’t much that trans people and drug users have in common; any more than say drug users and men, or drug users and women. Except for one very important similarity: both populations have been marginalized and in their marginalization, have become the whipping post for right-wing politicians and media who know that their small numbers make them easy targets for scorn.

Politicians and media have discovered that playing politics off these two marginalized populations is a goldmine. In right-wing circles, they are used to whip up support for the Conservative party and in the centre, they influence how both groups of people are covered (or covered poorly) and what public policies may be enacted to keep them safe (or not safe). It’s a crisis for both communities.

The influence these two campaigns have over The Discourse is enormous. They influence how otherwise centrist media and political parties interact with both issues. For drug users, the consequences are so deadly that the deaths have become mundane.

Take, for example, this sympathetic opinion article at the Toronto Star by addictions doctor Vincent Lam. He argues that the Ford government’s decision to close safe injection sites in Ontario is wrongheaded. But in the subheading of the article, this is written: “While well-intentioned, the Ontario government plan to close 10 supervised consumption sites and create 19 new homeless and addiction recovery hubs fails to recognize the complexity of addiction.” Well intentioned? How brain poisoned does someone have to be to look at this campaign against safe injection sites and think that there’s any part of it that’s well intentioned?

Or BC NDP Premier David Eby’s decision to ban drug use in public spaces, something that only criminalizes poor people (as drug users in Eby’s circles are doing their drugs in their homes, on their desks, in their washrooms).

O’Mahony is part of the growing chorus of necrocapitalists who want to accelerate Canada’s drug crisis to rid society of drug users they hate: the ones who might be unhoused, who might use in public or who might ask them for a buck or two as they avert their eyes at the door of the supermarket. What’s worse, these are the ones who have power to make things worse. Whether through media campaigns and rhetoric that convinces the Toronto Star to say that anything that Doug Ford is doing is “well-intentioned” or whether that’s the NDP going back on a progressive drug policy to make things worse, the right is winning this battle.

Nearly 50,000 people have died from drug poisoning in Canada since 2016. Safe injection sites and free, clean drug use material are not solutions to the drug crisis — they simply keep people alive one more day. Someone who is alive one more day is still alive. To help someone whose addiction is out of control requires them to be alive. That is, of course, if you want to help them at all.

We know what is needed to help people deal with an addiction: social supports, mental and physical healthcare, perhaps a job, perhaps a living stipend, an appartment and medication (i.e. clean drugs). We know that forced treatment doesn’t work. We know that pushing people out of public spaces doesn’t work. We know that charging someone for using drugs in a public place doesn’t work. We know that allowing dirty drug equipment to circulate in cities doesn’t work. We literally know exactly what is needed to mitigate the toxic drug crisis and help people thrive. But instead of doing what will help, Canadian politicians and journalists choose to chase what will cause even more harm.

And that’s the point of necrocapitalism: to accelerate the crisis with things that do not work because in the end, the system that we have, and that they defend, prefers these people to die.

As long as the mainstream discourse on drug continues to be pulled by the right, the decisions that are made will make the crisis even worse. Unfortunately, the centre isn’t prepared to take this fight on at the level that’s required. It folds too easily and bends the knee to the right. The more than a century of racist drug policy in Canada is especially potent when mixed with colonial genocide, and for all Canadian institutions, whether media or political, they just cannot help themselves but support the genocide.