Drug Policy Experts Say BC Conservatives’ ‘Dehumanizing’ Rhetoric About People Who Use Drugs is Going Too Far

Drug policy experts in British Columbia are calling out John Rustad’s BC Conservatives for weaponizing “dehumanizing” rhetoric aimed at people living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.

One of the party’s top candidates recently compared people who use drugs in the Downtown Eastside to stray animals while the party itself has been posting inflammatory videos using exploitative footage of people using drugs in public to score political points.

Guy Felicella, a Vancouver-based harm reduction and recovery advocate, says this kind of rhetoric only serves as a way to justify coercive policies like involuntary care for people who use drugs.

BC Conservative candidate Elenore Sturko recently faced criticism for comments suggesting people who use drugs on East Hastings should be treated the same was as stray animals, with the SPCA rounding-up “dogs and cats” and taking them into care.

“When she mentioned that song, ‘The arms of an angel,’ and was singing that song, I was just appalled,” Felicella told PressProgress. “I was like, is that a joke? That’s not funny.”

“What they’re mentioning as well is rounding people up and putting them in forced treatment, and it can cause catastrophic damage to people’s lives.”

NEW: BC Conservative candidate Elenore Sturko compared people living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to stray animals:

“If these were dogs and cats or pets, the SPCA would come and they would take the animals into care, adopt them out”https://t.co/gRH7DbxamZ #bcpoli #bcelxn

— PressProgress (@pressprogress) September 23, 2024

In Sturko’s full speech at the Freedom House in August, she mentioned she was downtown to visit a business which had been impacted by “street disorder” due to a nearby SRO. Felicella says this demonstrates the BC Conservatives focus is not on improving the lives of people who use drugs, but on demonizing them instead.

“She goes down there to see a business, because her narrative is really policing instead of supporting (people), the frustrating part about it is that they are seriously focused on criminalizing people who use substances and criminalizing people who struggle with addiction,” Felicella said, adding they are talking about “criminalizing people for the way they’re coping and using substances to distract them from the underlying issues of trauma, verbal abuse, physical abuse sexual abuse.”

Felicella says that forcing people into treatment will further push them into isolation and make them afraid to reach out for support.

“What that will do is it will cause the reverse which will not make people reach out for support,” Felicella added. “If you look at the Conservative platform as well, which talks about basically the shutdowns of supervised consumption sites and harm reduction services and making things more challenging for people to access.”

“Essentially, what they’re going to do is they’re going to force people into treatment, which if you struggle with addiction, it is a chronic relapsing condition,” Felicella said. “What happens when people get out and what happens when people relapse and use again and there are no services available? We’re gonna end a lot more lives.”

According to Felicella, forced treatment doesn’t address underlying societal issues that are contributing to the worsening toxic drug crisis.

“The forcing of somebody in the treatment, I think it’s just the simplest approach to unaddressed societal issues and then we’re going to put them back in the same environment that they’re trying to break free from and expect them to survive.”

Karen Ward, a drug policy advocate in the Downtown Eastside says the BC Conservatives’ use of this kind of rhetoric is only “trolling people to provoke a reaction.”

An election ad shared on social media by the BC Conservatives included footage filmed inside a Port Alberni Dairy Queen showing two individuals using drugs outside. The BC Conservatives mockingly wrote: “What’s your favourite flavour? Vanilla, chocolate…meth?”

The BC Conservatives then shared a post alluding to the video while using an image of a child with an ice cream cone for comedic effect.

Source: BC Conservatives (Twitter)

“This was directed at drug users and advocates but it’s accurate across the board—they’re eliciting emotional reactions like disgust, fear and anger to prevent the desperately needed public policy discussion we’ve never had,” Ward told PressProgress.

“If you don’t want public drug use, you need to implement public indoor spaces to use drugs,” Ward said. “Governments realized this when there was alcohol prohibition. We don’t want public drinking so we have government licensed indoor liquor establishments, aka public houses or pubs.”

Ward says treatment instead of harm reduction is offered as the only solution to people who use drugs, who are seen as “expendable.”

“The lie inherent in the discourse on ‘Addicts and Addiction,’ and the creation of an expendable outgroup, a despised population—the not-yet dead, which in turn blames the dying for their own deaths.”

“The ‘addiction’ framing insists this is an individual medical issue – not a result of policy choices that come together through time to be lethal structural violence. This framing prevents us from understanding this as mass social murder in which we are all complicit.”

Ward notes the BC Conservatives also aren’t the only party that has put forth involuntary treatment as a band aid solution to the current public health emergency.

“The Conservatives and BC NDP rely on eliciting fear and disgust and dehumanization,” Ward said.

BC NDP leader David Eby recently announced that the government would expand involuntary treatment and open “secure facilities” to detain people apprehended under the Mental Health Act.

Tyson Singh Kelsall, an outreach worker on the Downtown Eastside and a PhD student in the faculty of Health Sciences at SFU, says the lack of response to Sturko’s comments may have to do with two of BC’s major political parties being in alignment on involuntary treatment.

“I think part of why Eleanor Sturko’s comments might not have resonated as widely compared to the ridiculousness of John Rustad’s ‘eating bugs’ comment is that the two main political parties are actually consensus on involuntary treatment,” Kelsall told PressProgress.

“The BC NDP and BC Conservatives being in consensus around this issue silences critique around it. The dehumanizing rhetoric is on both sides of the aisle.”

Kelsall adds that research on involuntary treatment has shown that it is ineffective and “rounding people up” is not a solution to them “feeling like animals.”

“Involuntary treatment has been studied for decades, either forced detention or coerced detention in drug court settings and the research shows that it’s not only ineffective, it actually has a net harmful impact on those who participate.”

“They actually just want drug users and people living outdoors to disappear without solving the inequities that people are surviving under in our society.”

Kelsall says it’s disappointing to see vulnerable people being dehumanized and being used as political props in an election.

“They actually are okay or happy to have more drug users die if it means that they will win the election,” Kelsall said. “I think underlying that is this sense of dehumanization, weaponizing the people we have lost from this toxic drug crisis as a category of people who will not vote and don’t have political value.”

“It’s violence and I cannot stand to see one more person I know die from this crisis.”