Across Great Divides: Innovative work on the opioid crisis…in Alberta?
Part of our mission with this Grey Matters project is to amplify good work by people who are trying to stretch past divides – social, rhetorical, political. This is the first in what I hope will be a continual blog series I’m calling “Across Great Divides”. It starts with one of the most challenging problems faced by our country, and an author who is working hard to see past the headline-grabbing bombs being lobbed around in political circles.
Paul Wells is now an independent journalist working through Substack and on podcast platforms. His long career started at The Gazette in Montreal, and took him through the National Post and Macleans before going independent in 2022.
In 2024, he published a three-part series on Alberta’s work to address the opioid crisis. This was in the middle of a rhetorical war of words between politicians, especially focused on safe supply and harm reduction. Things were cast in terms of an either/or decision, with treatment on the other side of the ledger, and harm reduction on the other. Vancouver was in the middle of a struggling experiment with decriminalizing possession of small amounts of hard drugs, and the backlash was well underway. Discussions in the press and around the dinner tables of the nation were becoming almost as toxic as the drugs themselves.
Paul Wells decided to spend some of the money from his few thousand paid subscribers on a trip to Alberta to talk to people on the front lines of the fight. That included police officers, people working in shelters, and a man named Marshall Smith. Mr. Smith had been appointed to lead Alberta’s work on the drug crisis by Premier Danielle Smith (no relation), who had been very publicly critical of Vancouver’s approach and of harm reduction in general.
Marshall Smith is himself a recovering addict, and has a pretty crazy personal story that gives him some serious bona fides to work on this issue, whether you agree with his philosophies or not. Under his watch, Alberta seriously increased its investments in drug treatment, including partnerships with First Nations governments. I’ll leave it to Mr. Wells to walk you through the rest of the scene. This three-part series has been left open for free access with no paywall, to help reach a wider audience.
I want to be clear that the point of this post is not to celebrate or judge any particular approach to battling this confounding crisis. It’s to amplify the serious work of a committed journalist, one who took a risk by “platforming” the work of a province and administration that has raised the ire of many people involved in the drug battle. Mr. Wells’ work helps us get past the either/or rhetoric on harm reduction vs. treatment that has dominated the headlines. (It’s worth noting that Alberta’s approach does not completely do away with harm reduction, despite what the Premier might say at press conferences).
One of our biggest motivations for starting the Grey Matters project is a belief that we can’t possibly tackle hard issues if we’re hopelessly divided and stuck in a pattern of trading rhetorical bombs to defend the positions we’ve staked out. There’s really good work happening out there by people trying to bridge these kinds of divides, and that work doesn’t get allocated enough of the bandwidth in our public forums. There are no illusions here about fully cleaning up the toxic morass of media in all its forms - bomber’s gonna bomb, after all - but we can still do our part to take up some more of that space.
By the way, if the comments on social media and on news sites that still have them leave you thinking there’s no hope for humanity, spend a few minutes with the comments below Mr. Wells’ articles. It just might help reassure you.