Pubdate: Wed, 11 Jan 2017
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2017 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Marcus Gee
Page: A8

A NEW PLAGUE, AN OLD PREJUDICE

The stigma illegal-drug users face today is reminiscent of the attitudes
toward gay men when AIDS broke out in the early 1980s

In 1981, doctors in New York began noticing the first signs of a
modern-day plague.

Patients complained of violet coloured spots on their bodies. It was
Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that could kill by spreading to the liver,
spleen or lungs. "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," reported The New
York Times.

The underlying disease that would later become known as AIDS cut like a
scythe through what was still a marginalized, often despised community. As
David France notes in his new book How to Survive a Plague: The Inside
Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, homosexual acts were still
illegal in most of the United States. Just being suspected of
homosexuality could get you banned from teaching, denied an apartment or
blocked from entering the country.

As AIDS spread - claiming hundreds, then thousands, then tens of
thousands, then hundreds of thousands of American lives - some called it
God's judgment on sinful behaviour. Republican senator Jesse Helms said
that "we've got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a
perverted human being."

Led by the handful of activists portrayed by Mr. France, gay organizations
fought back, educating people about safe sex, pushing the government for
more AIDS funding and working with researchers to explore the drugs that
would eventually tame the disease. In the end, they triumphed, helping not
only to combat the plague, but to speed the liberation movement that led
all the way to the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Today, North America faces another deadly plague. Again, most of the
victims come from a shunned group. Again, authorities have been painfully,
shamefully, slow to take action. Only now, with hundreds already dead and
the plague spreading from the West Coast to Central Canada, are
governments coming together in earnest to do something about a shocking
wave of fatal drug overdoses, many linked to fentanyl, the potent
synthetic opioid.

When AIDS was spreading, activists often argued that governments would
have moved much faster if a plague had cut through middle-class America
instead of the gay ghettos of New York and San Francisco. It is hard not
to avoid a similar conclusion today. Imagine the outcry if scores of
people had been cut down by tainted water in North Vancouver or a virus in
Surrey instead of an illicit drug in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside or
another disadvantaged place. Political leaders would have fallen over each
other to show they were attacking the problem.

Illegal-drug users face even more prejudice today than gay men did when
AIDS broke out in the early 1980s. It is hard for most of us to muster
sympathy for those who snort, inject or swallow an illegal drug that could
leave them dead. We think of them - when we think of them at all - as a
shadowy alien tribe, unknown, incomprehensible and probably dangerous. It
is the same failure of empathy that led authorities to overlook the fate
of missing and murdered indigenous women.

To beat the plague, those attitudes need to change. After a meeting in
Toronto on Monday about the overdose crisis, Mayor John Tory said that
governments should look on drug addiction and dependency not as a criminal
or moral problem but as a health problem, and sufferers should be treated
no differently than if they had lung or heart trouble. The move to open
three supervised drug-injection sites in Toronto is one sensible,
nonjudgmental step toward making this shift in thinking.

The AIDS crisis helped people to understand that its principal casualties
were simply fellow human beings facing a terrible affliction. If the
overdose crisis can persuade Canadians to feel the same way about those in
the thrall of dangerous drugs, then something good may come from all this
suffering.
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