 This is a great treat to follow up from Raul Zoe Dodd is I love to watch and listen to you speak. I'm really just a fan girl Zoe. But Zoe is a longtime harm reduction and drug user advocate who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She's a co-organizer with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society and helps to coordinate the Moss Park Overdose Prevention site, which ran unsanctioned in a park for nearly a year before finally receiving minority of health funding and then moving indoors. The Moss Park OPS was successful at helping to change the overdose response in Ontario and the general public's understanding of the overdose crisis. In addition to all of that, Zoe is a graduate student currently enrolled at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. So you just do that on the side, right? So she's focusing on people's experience with the drug treatment system who have been mandated to it. So you're really in for a treat Zoe, please join us on stage. Weird setup. I'm going to show a series of photos over the last year, sorry the last two years in Toronto. I don't know why it's blank on the screen. It's weird, no. So like tell me what do you want to do? Oh well, this is getting ready. I just want to say today is a workers' holiday and it's May 1st and in the country I live we do not celebrate this day, but I don't have it off, but people's working conditions and capitalism are intrinsically linked to the overdose crisis, the war on drugs. And yeah, so power to the workers. They moved it. Sorry? Because I moved it? I don't know. This should be timed. Thank you to the organizers of this amazing conference and for the opportunity to speak today. This has been like a fabulous last few days and for the experience to be in Portugal. I always had different visions of what the Portuguese model looked like and I'm going home knowing that it isn't completely the model that I would want to have. I think what I would like to see in the lives of people who use drugs is less police in people's lives. As the overdose crisis has escalated and taken the lives of thousands of people, people across Canada in big cities and smaller communities have taken action to respond. From distributing the lock zone acquired underground to supervising injections and responding to people's own homes to putting up tents and alleyways and parks, street patrols, sticker campaigns on doors and bars, training each other on overdose prevention, providing support groups, organizing healing circles and memorials, actions and demonstrations. People, predominantly people who use drugs and their allies, have been organizing and responding in the face of devastating loss. My name is Zoe Dodd and I am a co-organizer with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society. We are people who use drugs, harm reduction workers, advocates, nurses, allies and who come together in solidarity to respond with direct action to address the overdose crisis in the summer of 2017. I'm going to talk to you today about some of our recent efforts to break rules and save lives, what we won, what we lost and what we all need to do next. I live in Toronto on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, the Huron-Wendat, the Patoon and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Canada is a settler colonial state with a long history of oppressing Indigenous peoples. Some of the first policies of prohibition exist in the Indian Act with the prohibition of alcohol. Indigenous people have been deeply impacted by colonization and in recent years the overdose crisis. Given the historical nature of the state and its relationship to marginalizing and oppressing people, I am never not surprised by its lack of action and the state's willingness to allow thousands of people to die from preventable death. Canada as a settler state has always amassed casualties in its drive to exist within the prevailing system. I also recognize that Canada seems to be ahead of many places when it comes to the treatment of people who use drugs. Although we aren't where we'd like to be and harm reduction is inconsistent across the country, in Toronto we have for decades been able to slowly push forward a harm reduction agenda with the creation of a city drug strategy, distribution of safer supplies, which include condoms, naloxone kits, needles with different gauges, sizes, and from different companies, safer crack kits, foil, crystal meth pipes, testing strips, and information from 50 organizations in a city of 3 million. And where the majority of the harm reduction workforce are people who use drugs and where they hold positions from managers to coordinators to outreach workers to satellite workers to harm reduction and overdose prevention and supervised consumption site workers and please do not come up to me ever and ask me again how do drug users get employed and how do they work? They have jobs in all of these different areas and if they don't at your organizations then you're just depressing the shit out of them. Direct actions responding to the overdose crisis created a community of people who identify as harm reduction workers who are willing to see harm reduction and drug use issues as their professional and personal responsibility that they have ethical obligations to stand up for drug users. There are classist and prejudice distinctions of expertise that continues to pervade organizations and service delivery and it is why organizing grassroots gives opportunity for people who are central to their own struggle to be part of it, to fill positions and organizations and to be seen as the real experts who should be paid for their labor equitably. In the face of this crisis we have lost more than 10,000 people in less than three years, indigenous and racialized people, people living in poverty, women, youth, young men and although the crisis can impact people of all walks of life it is not the wealthy who are dying of overdose at high rates. If it were the response to this crisis would look very, very different. We often talk about this crisis as a public health emergency that needs an emergency response but that response hasn't come. It is not one created by over prescribing, it is one created by prohibition and the drive for greed and punishment, governments focused on prescribing will elicit fentanyl took over the drug market where you can't easily find heroin or pills. They didn't listen to us when we begged them to stop and that prescription drugs were safe and we needed them. Instead the response has been window dressed as summits where reports are made acknowledging the need for decriminalization, legalization, a safe drug supply, ending the war on drugs but our current federal government has no desire to substantially change policies, call a public health emergency or respond appropriately. They talk, we die, has become the mantra and instead we are forced to reconcile that we cannot do everything, that people will die and we are forced to fight for very basic emergency services that are downstream that we barely have time to fight for what we really need. What we really need, what we truly need is a clean supply of drugs, safe supplies of heroin, prescription pills and an end to prohibition. In August 2017, after a spike in deaths, we set up tents in a park both for injection and inhalation and created Ontario's first overdose prevention site. We were inspired and informed by the Overdose Prevention Society in Vancouver, which had begun the year before. Shortly afterward, the Ottawa Overdose Prevention Society did the same thing and we worked to pressure the provincial government who were entering into an election to act. Community Looxone distribution increased, a provincial overdose task force was formed and the supervised injection sites people had been working on through formal channels for years in Toronto and Ottawa finally opened. There hadn't been a site indicated for the neighborhood we set up in the tents. Organizations from across the city haven't asked if they wanted to set up a site formally and only three said they felt ready or had the capacity. We had to challenge each other and the organizations to respond. This is really hard work. Organizations that were once too afraid are now running awesome drug user led small scale sites. We showed them how easy it was to save drug users lives and we stayed organizing in the park not wanting to leave because we knew we would lose our political power and we didn't want to abandon people. We were first intense with union support, we brought in a trailer and then moved inside with government funding. We also received an enormous amount of public support. People dropped off donations of food and supplies. Every day we crowdfunded over $250,000. By the time we left the park 11 months later, we had over 9,062 visits and reversed 251 overdoses. We fought to get the funding, the laws changed to approve the sites and help the government create their application. But July of 2018, one year later, there were eight sites operating in Toronto. But then in August, two months after they were elected, a new conservative government declared they were putting the sites under review and stop their expansion. A rash of overdose deaths in the west end of the city forced us to set up tents again and operate another illegal overdose prevention site. While a fully stocked trailer sat empty and staff were told they weren't going to start work until the review was finished. In September, we staked 1,265 crosses into the lawns of Queens Park as a symbol of those who had died in 2017 from opiate overdoses most legally linked to fentanyl. This was a 46% increase of deaths from the year before. Since August of 2017, all nine sites in Toronto have had over 100,000 visits and reversed more than 1,800 overdoses. Our rule breaking helped to create a harm reduction workforce to respond to overdose as well as community of harm reduction activists and organizers and nine sites instead of slated three. But like everyone who are not safe, we are not safe from changing political powers and we are currently fighting within the context of new and deep cuts to social services, education, healthcare and right wing free market ideology at the provincial level. There are three sites across the province have recently been told to close despite continued service use and escalating overdoses. We continue to fight with direct action in the forms of fundraising, protests, disruption and solidarity. We cannot abandon people to die. SCS has become an essential service. We have reversed almost 2,000 overdoses and prevented many, many more but this is not normal. And we cannot continue like this and we cannot bank on small scale pilot projects of safe supply that won't reach drug users equitably. People should be able to use alone in their own homes. People also need homes, which is a large challenge people face in a city where the average rent is out of reach for many, where thousands of people are staying in emergency dome tents or on costs or on floors and where overdoses have risen and deaths to not only in the shelters but also in the prisons, jails and detention centers where if we decriminalized and legalized drugs and offered safe drug supplies, we would see a massive reduction of not only prisoners but of overdose deaths. Constantly fighting for an adequate response to the overdose crisis has limited our views of possibilities. Although OPS and SCS are necessary, they should just be extension of our harm reduction services, not a solution to a crisis whose causes are much further upstream. They also fall into traps of being sites of surveillance, paternalistic, over medicalized and do not always respect the ways in which people use drugs. Rules of no sharing, no passing, no talking, no assisting are imposed to set a clinical experience for something that is not a clinical experience. Sites should be created with respect for the ways in which people use drugs. They need to be hygienic, not sterile. People using the sites have expressed that they, like the camaraderie, the social aspects, the ability to be part of the spaces they want to work in them, they go to them because they need a break from the burden of constantly responding to others overdosing, knowing we won't have to take off for fear of arrest if they OD. Working at Moss Park has both been rewarding and hard and also a dream to see a drug user resource center with an injection site come to fruition that we're in this together offering respect and kindness and fighting for lives. Research has been most helpful and necessary but also a hindrance to our response. Everything should not be a research project. We don't need to do ethically problematic RCTs or pilots. We can implement practice-based evidence that is responsive to not only the crisis but people's needs. Sometimes it literally feels that drug users are being researched to death. To the government representatives who are watching this or here in this room, it is not too late to help us end this crisis. Health Canada, we need you to implement five years of secured funding resources and bulk buys of safe drug supplies that we can easily access and so we don't have to fight province to province. You need to change our exemptions to operate SES so they are not time limited and you need to be prepared to directly fund them. You have only a few months left before the election where we could see a right wing conservative government win. We need you to invest to change laws and access to safe supply and we need you to do it quickly. Leave a legacy where you actually responded to this crisis with real political courage, something you are currently lacking. Our movements are inspiring. We are showing how you organize and how you hold those of power accountable and we can't stop. We need to continue to fight for a better world. This fight needs to be continuously rooted in racial, environmental, economic and social justice. This isn't about behavior change or service delivery. This is about liberation. To quote Rafi Balian who died in February 2017 of an overdose while attending a meeting in Vancouver about supervised injection site who was a winner of an international harm reduction award that he received in Lebanon some day soon. An enlightened society will look at those names as victims of war crime. The enlightened society will regard the politicians, the judges, the police, the doctors, the reporters who perpetuated this war as criminals. I am deeply proud of everyone who has stepped up and stepped in. Some of you from our organizing efforts are actually in this room. We have been working together in solidarity and we will win. We are responding and fighting in the face of so much loss, the loss of our leaders, our mentors, our coworkers, our lovers, our friends, our family and we can't give up. One day the drug war will end and we can be really proud of our contributions to end it. We have honored those we have lost in the most powerful of ways and don't forget that we are power. Fight to win.