dan small
intro’d to Dan while reading Travis Lupick‘s fighting for space:
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was student of bruce alexander.. ‘i though the was crazy.. i thought drugs were inherently addictive’ – small.. he made it clear that he intended to disprove alexander’s work on addiction.. to which the professor replied: ‘why don’t you become my honours student?’
‘i spend every ounce of my being as a young undergrad writing an honours thesis to prove his theory wrong.. but i didn’t succeed.. i started to have questions.. then i realized that bruce was right but actually *hadn’t gone far enough’ – small..t
*did dan go further..? emailed him – (kind/quick/insightful) response:
undisturbed ecosystem – rat park for people – hari rat park law
small gets phd.. then evans and townsend call him to eastside.. to work with what they described as a ‘drug user union’..
10 – a drug users union
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(on informal meeting bud and ann had).. ann: ‘it was just me and bud, and we had a big piece of paper and i made notes.. it wasn’t that it was massively well attended. but i wrote down everything people said, and they could see me writing down what they were saying’.. that alone had a huge impact.. drug users were speaking and somebody was listening..t
imagine 7bn people experiencing that .. everyday.. but in rat park space (undisturbed ecosystem) .. where the voices were more about curiosities than complaints/needs.. et al.. ie: as it could be.
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2018 article by Travis – Insite co-founder requests the prime minister convene a royal commission to investigate Canada’s overdose crisis
At least 5,869 people in Canada died of an opioid overdose between January 2016 and September 2017, according to the federal government
A pioneer of Vancouver’s harm-reduction movement has called for a federal investigation into Canada’s opioid epidemic and drug-overdose deaths.
‘The barriers that have prevented harm reduction service innovations are not scientific, medical or epidemiological,” reads a letter addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and dated May 15, 2018. “The barriers are implicit and explicit values, the bedrock of our culture and institutions, regarding addiction and drug use.
“As such, in the public interest, I ask that you establish a royal commission to examine the variables that have accounted for the dramatic overdose tragedy
The letter was written by Dan Small, a medical anthropologist who previously worked for the Portland Hostel Society, where he played a key role in establishing North America’s first supervised-injection facility, Insite.
“Should an Inquiry or Commission not be struck, then it will, in my view, provide a further illustration of systemic violence towards a population of people that has been failed repeatedly when the circumstances that took their lives were entirely amenable to efficacious intervention,” the letter continues.
“In order to understand why medical, scientific and legal findings have not been enough to move forward substantively on supervised injection until the advent of an astronomical overdose epidemic, we need to investigate the underlying structural cultural forces that have been at play.”
almaas holes law – 2 missing pieces
“It took the tragedy of an astonishing overdose epidemic in order to bring about significant government or institutional action to substantively address the dangers of illicit drug use. Were this any other group, the failure of societal institutions to address the preventable deaths would be a source of public outcry.”
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2012 – Insite Safer Injecting Site: lessons for the UK? – 10 min video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBO-DJJolZw]
the first purpose of injection site is to reach a group who’s forgotten
3 min – people often think you have to get people ready for work
5 min – anybody can access insite.. don’t even have to use real name in interview
6 min – no barrier housing
7 min – we need to find more complicated/sophisticated ways of evaluating success
ie: eudaimonia
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find/follow Dan:
on uni of british columbia site: https://anth.ubc.ca/faculty/dan-small/
Research Interests
- The Lived Experience of Illness
- Medical and Healthcare Culture
- Peer to Peer Regulation and Assessment
- Therapeutic and Healing Narratives
- Hereditary Cancer
- Globalization, Capitalist Culture and Contemporary Social Problems: Homelessness, Mental Illness and Addiction
- Removing Healthcare and Housing Barriers
- Addiction, Harm Reduction and Marginalized Populations
- Law Enforcement and Harm Reduction
co founder of incite.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insite
Insite is the first legal supervised drug injection site in North America, located at 139 East Hastings Street, in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia.
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healing (roots of) – maté basic needs law – have to get to the core trauma..
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be you. 