Safe consumption sites are proven to keep communities healthier, safer, and cleaner. There’s no excuse for not having one in our community when people are dying of overdoses left and right and our healthcare system is overwhelmed beyond comprehension. Tell the City of Williams Lake that we as a community DO support the opening of a safe consumption site and support the original decision made by City Council on October 1st. No more delaying life saving services being brought into Williams Lake. Furthermore, we as a community do not support the opening of a forced treatment facility in Williams Lake. Forced treatment facilities disproportionately affect black and indigenous communities and are proven to make recovery a longer and more dangerous process. We want our solutions in the Cariboo to be based in human rights, dignity, and evidence, not community division.

#SupportDontPunish 

Learn more here and read the letter presented to Mayor & Council :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w9E6W9tbfwJcgsRzUtyVzr-uScJuSR4l/view?usp=drivesdk

Le7 te sítest, Cianna O’Connor ren skwest, good evening, my name is Cianna O’Connor, but some of you already know who I am. I’m here today to read a letter I wrote to you all in August. I would first and foremost like to acknowledge and remind you all that drug use and houselessness are not synonymous. Today is August 19th. The day my childhood best friend Kyla Sydney-Ann James would have been 23. She died of an overdose in early 2023 living in an encampment in Prince George. I’m writing to you today because I’m tired of seeing the municipal and provincial governments neglect parts of the community that they don’t deem valuable; and respectfully, speaking about people, let alone people I love and care about as a burden or expendable under the guise of “well, we tried” doesn’t sit well with me. I am just a regular person, who works a regular 9 to 5, with hobbies and passions outside of this. I come to you as someone who HAS friends on the downtown Eastside. Who HAS lost friends in town to the opioid crisis. Kyla and I were friends for around 17 years, so most of my life. I don’t know if any of you know what it’s like to attend your childhood best friend’s funeral, but it definitely wasn’t on my itinerary for my early 20s. She didn’t even get to turn 22. Kyla was the first person to teach me about harm reduction. I’ve personally gone with her to Service BC in town to get safe supplies. She taught me how to ice skate and longboard, and what it means to have and be a friend. David Eby doesn’t live here. Justin Trudeau doesn’t live here. This is OUR community. Turning our backs on people because “that’s the province’s problem” isn’t what good neighbours (or leaders) do. It has been proven time and time again in many places around the globe that criminalizing substance use increases mortality rates of the substances themselves, provides more opportunity for crime, clogs up our justice system, and wastes tax payer money that could otherwise be invested back into the community. This can easily be observed in historic examples such as the Nixon War on Drugs, the Mexican cartels that persist to this day, and most famously, the failure of alcohol prohibition and the existence of the Mob; fun fact: did you know that the term “organized crime” didn’t gain popular use until alcohol prohibition? Alcohol prohibition made the mob rich, and the alcohol deadly. It can also easily be observed in the rise in overdoses and HIV rates in the provinces such as Saskatchewan who recently ended their safe supply program that supplied people with new, clean pipes. The idea was that if you make drug use miserable enough, people will just quit, but that’s not the case. It just forced regular pipe users in Saskatchewan to switch to injection.  According to the latest numbers, from 2022, Saskatchewan has, by far, the highest new HIV diagnosis rate among the provinces and is close to five times higher than the national rate. Then there’s Alberta’s treatment centres and most recently the forced treatment model, which violates charter rights and fails to take into account that forcing people into treatment increases risk of overdose. In 2016 and 2021, at least 3 people died in Alberta treatment facilities, and that number is likely a low ball. 
You cannot police your way out of this, no matter how hard you try, that includes criminalizing houselessness with bylaws. Criminalizing drug use and houselessness pushes people to the sidelines so they have even less access to vital resources, which only further exacerbates the issue that you’re claiming to be trying so hard to solve, we’re just going in circles at that point. You’re throwing money at the wrong resources just so you can say you did something, and then when your performative “efforts” don’t show results, all of a sudden it’s not worth “throwing money at” anymore. It’s worth noting, that according to the Williams Lake homeless count 2024; 72% of our houseless population in town identifies as indigenous, and of those respondents, 83% reported having lived or generational experience with residential school, a statistic I want you to keep in your mind when you so proudly put on your orange shirts this September and call yourselves “allies”. As a good friend of a lot of ours in the community said, Kyla was a fighter, and I’m going to keep fighting for her and those like her. The people you insist on leaving behind. Why are we putting a price tag on lives? On a healthy community that takes care of each other? I disagree that being kind isn’t enough. Money doesn’t build community, people do.
And respectfully Mr Nelson, you have no right to demonize addictions when you feed into them. You own 4/7 liquor stores, and have a monopoly on real estate and rentals in town. You are actively fuelling the fire and adding to the stigma. You’re the first person to have your camera out and accuse people of allegedly starting fires, eating swans, or being prolific offenders. You’ve been serving Williams Lake as a councillor (and also as a mayor) since before I was born, often going by Walt Cobb’s playbook, working against community efforts to improve the lives of regular people in Williams Lake. Remember; most people’s first gateway drug is alcohol.  My request is for the City of Williams Lake is to push for the opening and protection of a safe consumption site with the collaboration of Interior Health, First Nations Health Authority, and other social service providers in town, because families deserve the chance to buy a little more time, and because it’s been proven time and time again that they make communities safer, cleaner, and healthier. Not only would it give people a safe space to use besides in public which reduces drug-related litter and public nuisance, it would also ease the stress on our emergency services by reducing the amount of overdoses first responders get called to. More than 40 peer reviewed studies on Canada’s first Safe Injection Site In Vancouver (Insite, opened in 2003 in response to the rising overdose and HIV rates in the Downtown Eastside) prove that Safe Injection Sites save lives and healthcare dollars, reduce transmission of diseases, and provide pathways to treatment. I know this is a big ask given the state of our healthcare system in town currently, but it’s a vital step that we need to take to address overdose mortality rates, and should not be forgotten about when you’re making your “out-of-the-box” suggestions to the Minister of Health. Additionally, I would also like to see public washrooms be made more accessible and widely available, (meaning don’t close them during the winter and at night, and build more of them where necessary) , put more garbage cans around town that are easily accessible, more sharps bins in public bathrooms and areas, and public use fire pits for winter use (as well as corresponding fire safety stations, such as keeping shovels and bucket stations on hand with sand/water, and making sure pits are lined to prevent fires from escaping, or another option could be propane fires), seeing as fires and unsightliness are the two most common reasons cited for encampment removal. (Quick note: After making my letter public I received a helpful tip from a friend that told me propane tends to freeze, so I’ll retract that particular suggestion and stick with the original point, and further suggest that we look into building some temporary solar panel warming huts such as the ones in Winnipeg and Edmonton.)  I do hope that my suggestions will be considered, seeing as the Elk’s Hall shelter is not expected to be ready until February 2025, and we will have to rely on the Hamilton Emergency Shelter once again this winter.
We spend a huge chunk of our money on JUST policing, when we should be investing it back into the community, so I will also further suggest that we divest money specifically from policing services and put it towards harm reduction services, mental health services, and other social service providers better equipped to deal with the issues we’re facing in the Cariboo. We have a strong community, we just need to be investing in it in the right ways. And on a personal level, Overdose Awareness day is on August 31st, and I challenge each and every one of you to try and learn more about harm reduction and its importance in the road to recovery, as well as truth and reconciliation, and to help you with that I’ve attached some reading material that I put together, and I ask that you read it with open minds and hearts. We’re not going to see an end to the opioid crisis until we start listening to the evidence, and most importantly the people that are actually affected by it. Your ignorance is killing my friends. 

Kukstemc

I’d like to leave you tonight with this quote from
John Ehrlichman, former White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under U.S President Richard Nixon; 

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. 
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” 

This letter was written today in honour of Kyla Sydney-Ann James 
2001-2023