 We're in a beautiful Edmonton, Alberta, holding a national stimulus conference, drugs, policy and practice. So we're trying to connect the work on the ground and the disaster on the ground that's taking place in terms of harm reduction on the overdose crisis and connect that with the higher policy level. Some people say there's an opiate crisis in Canada. We say there is an overdose death crisis in Canada. Last year, 4,000 people died in Canada from a toxic illegal drug supply. The discourse around this being an opioid problem and addiction problem, a substance use disorder problem, it captured everyone for a long time when in fact it's really, it's a poison, it's a problem of poisoning or it's a problem of dosing. And I think it's 83 over 75, 85% of the deaths in British Columbia involve fentanyl. How do you feel when you're seeing this graph? I can't look at the year 2016 without, that's, my son is in that category, he's represented there. It still, it still hits me. For some people it's just a stat, it's just a graph, it's just a bar. When my son died in 2014, Jordan, he was 25 years old, he died of a prescription drug overdose. We have spoken to media and to groups and to innumerable people over these last three years trying to educate people on harm reduction, on bad drug policy and what it will take to stop the deaths. People listen to their moms, that's part of our success. What is the Canadian government's plan to tackle this problem? We've made Naloxone available without prescription. There are overdose prevention sites established under a federal exemption from Health Canada in both the province of Ontario currently as well as the province of Alberta. We also have numerous supervised consumption sites that again have been authorized by Health Canada. We're at about 26 of these now, more of these also in review. We are in the overdose prevention site. This is a place where people are able to come and use substances in a manner that we hope is safer for them. We do in Edmonton have three supervised consumption sites, a fourth one coming on very soon. But we also felt that it was very important to have a temporary site here for the time, length of time of the conference. In this site we have private booths for people where they can go, you can sit, while you can gather the supplies that you may need and then actually inject in the site. And in this room there are nurses and other folks that have experience with overdose prevention sites. On the Saturday we went into a park and opened up the Moss Park overdose prevention site, which was the first supervised injection site in Ontario and it started intense. We stayed in the park for over a year, we reversed 261 overdoses within that time. We helped establish overdose prevention sites in the province of Ontario, but also changed drug policy by the federal government overnight. Months later they create an exemption that jurisdictions across Canada can apply for an exemption to open up a temporary overdose prevention site. Can you maybe call this a public health emergency? The view of the government has been that calling for an emergency would not have provided more than what has been done to date. Sometimes they admit that it is a public health emergency, but they could give us the resources that we need on the ground. The federal government could step in and say, we are actually going to fund you. We will protect you, we will make sure that these continue if the provincial government decides to pull out. The federal government talks a lot about the stigma. I mean stigma really, if they really care about stigma, then it's ending criminalization of people who use drugs. If you put a heroin addict in jail two or three times a month, it's not a two-day sentence, it's a death sentence because sooner or later they're going to get out, they're going to be junk sick, they're going to shoot fentanyl, and they're going to die. The only options I would ever have is to be medicalized, as in I have a substance use problem and therefore need to be fixed or criminal, and I will be in an institution in a prison and have all my rights taken away from me. The women don't have an option to be eating healthy. They don't have an option to go get clean clothes. They don't have an option where they could even go and wash themselves and keep themselves clean. No mother wakes up and chooses to be a bad mom one day. It's not safe for them. She chooses to be a bad mom one day. It's not something that she chooses. Without any kind of strategy for eliminating poverty, for dealing with those underlying structural issues, stigma in the health care industry, right, you're never going to deal with this crisis. Today, where we're calling on governments to really put their minds to implementing a safe supply of substances for people who use drugs in the context of an emergency. We have substances in our medicine cabinet. They're called pharmacies and they're called hospitals. We have those drugs available, but we won't give it to them because I don't know why. What I would like to see is so that I can sign up, I can get whatever drug I want and take it home with me. I promise never, I will never rob again. I will never hurt another person. I will pay my taxes. I will go to work every day. You just give me my drugs. I'll do my thing and let's just get over this. We started doing drug checking at a local music festival called Shambhala. This is called an FTIR. It uses infrared light. We pair it with the fentanyl test strips. This can tell yes or no for fentanyl, but then we can look at it and say, okay, there's all this other stuff in there too. This machine can't tell strength and this is the next step. We really need to be able to tell strength of the fentanyl so that they can dose accordingly. Can you explain us what's happening in Canada around cannabis right now? Yeah, absolutely. So we're moving to legalize cannabis in about two weeks. So how it works is we have kind of a federal cannabis act, which lays out minimums, right? So the minimum age of access is 18 years old, for example. And then the provinces across Canada and territories actually have the powers to kind of adjust those. The main benefit is that we're not going to arrest people. I think that public health impacts, you know, will not be a rising prevalence of use and associated harms for teens. That's the biggest thing that, the myth, I feel like I've been trying to battle. One of the things I think is really important for people in Canada to understand is despite all the problems that they have with drug policy in Canada, there are some remarkable innovations going on here, and Canada is, in fact, way ahead of much of the rest of the world. So, you know, there's quite a lot of gripes amongst some stakeholders with cannabis about that the new regulation system is too restrictive or that why can't we, you know, grow in our garden and sell cookies on our front porch or whatever it is. But actually, 98% of the world doesn't have access to legal cannabis at all. In the UK, we don't even have any supervised consumption rooms. They have 25 of them now in Canada, and that leadership and that evidence is actually incredibly important for the global debate. I truly think that this is an issue of a system we live in that's of exploitation and oppression that has created this crisis that we're in today. We don't live on islands. We actually live connected. We live in communities. We need to get back to this idea of supporting each other. Our reduction does fit into the Indigenous way of being. The non-shaming, the non-judgmental, loving you for who you are, that is part of the Indigenous way. And so we use that and incorporate that into our harm reduction.