By Cheryl Jahn

The Face of Addiction

Aug 18, 2020 | 4:09 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – “I chose to inject my drugs. And, with heroin, you could be feeling really uptight and stressed and, the minute you inject it, you fee a sense of warmth and calmness. You feel it from the tops of your toes to the ends of your fingers. You feel it working through your body.”

That’s how Daniel Roy describes the feeling one of his drugs of choice, heroin, made him feel. But his addiction pushed him to the edge. At one point in his life, he was standing on the John Hart Bridge, ready to end it all. Until a police officer talked him down.

He’s been clean for years and takes an active role in helping those who are down and out in Prince George.

Much emphasis of late has been put on harm reduction. Jordan Harris runs the POUNDS program in downtown Prince George.

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“It’s an overdose prevention site. So there’s some legislated pieces that make it a little bit different. So we offer a peer-witness model for monitored consumption.”

But the city’s top cop is not a fan of that philosophy.

“My opinion is harm reduction is easy,” says Supt Shaun Wright. “There are lots of metrics you can put towards that and it does something to address the issue, but I think there’s been an extensive focus on harm reduction. Particularly over the last four years. And I think that’s been heightened during the COVID pandemic with the prescription of opiates and I don’t think, in the long term, that serves to eliminate the problem. It really just perpetuates it, so while you remove some risk from that behaviour, there’s no end game there. So, still, the missing pillar is definitely treatment.

That “missing pillar” is rehab, something Daniel Roy believes is the only option.

But Harris counters those arguments.

“Dead People can never recover. So if we can people alive and well until they’re ready to make different choices. It’s not even different choices, it’s about having different choices available to you. So if you can keep people alive until the resources and supports that they need are in place and until they’re ready, then that treatment bed actually means something.”