Many people who are experts in their field have expertise and know the science behind their expertise. They publish. They know their work very well. We rely on them often for evidence so that we make informed decisions. We don't typically understand or give credit to the experience of living life every day with the types of conditions we're talking about: living with a dependency on opioids, having to survive the processes of coming to the right dosage for them and how people feel about that. Every person's being, their physical being, is different from every other person's. The type of medication needed, the amount of medication needed to address the issues of dependency, and the neurotransmitters that are significantly changed because of the types of drugs being used are all in the story of lived and living experience. It's a credible source of evidence.
If you listen to people who use drugs, you will find similarities. Whether you're talking to somebody in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside or somebody from a first nations community in northern Ontario, they've never met each other, but they will describe the same experiences of withdrawal. They'll talk about their tolerance of incremental increases to their addictions medicine. That's credible evidence.
Listening to their voices means that we give credit to people, not because of their status in life because they're using and not because we're judging them or discriminating against them. We're listening to them because they can tell us a real story that is mimicked across the country. That's important evidence. Listening to those voices is just as important, if not more substantial, to the decisions that need to be made about the health care system and the wraparound services that are provided to any population of people to ensure they can continue living life without the mental anguish and physical anguish that go with withdrawal.
People don't wake up every morning wanting to die. They get to those hopeless stages when we have opinions that form decisions and when we make decisions without looking at all the variables that impact something like we are talking about: safer supply and the toxic drug crisis. We can look at any one perspective and say that one perspective is credible evidence, and it may be, but if we don't look at it in the context of the determinants of health, for example, and how people learn to survive every day, then we're short-sighted and we end up making decisions as though we're God. Not one of us has the right to decide who gets to live, who is expendable and who should die.