Communication comes in increasingly different forms in our post-modern age, from Twitter to T-shirts.
We share how we feel, what we believe, what we want and more via Facebook posts and tattoos.
Some of us probably share too much, too often and too divisively. (Having said that, seeing the proclivity of the new U.S. president to divide and conquer within 140-characters, maybe I over-consider Canadian sharing.)
It’s a cliché to say that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. It’s also anathema to many users of social media. But typing on a keyboard is easy, physically making a sign or engaging in a political act of graffiti is another altogether.
Many Chilliwack drivers will have seen Dave’s sign. I don’t know Dave. But a man with a large flatbed truck in town with “Dave’s Towing” on the side has been driving around for months with a crooked sign on the back. It says: “Give ‘em all fentanyl.”
An interesting if confusing sentiment. One might speculate Dave has been the victim of property crime, which he then projects on to opioid-addicted individuals, many of whom have fallen victim to the current overdose crisis hitting the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.
Speculating further from this, maybe “Give ‘em all fentanyl,” means, “Kill all the addicts”?
But really, what does he mean?
On the one hand, I’m told anecdotally by some who are on the front lines of drug use on the streets in Chilliwack, that fentanyl is popular. It’s not simply as we often hear, laced into what people think is heroin, but is specifically sought out. One source tells me that fentanyl is not only cheaper than heroin but it’s a better high. If that’s true, then heck, sure, give ‘em all fentanyl. That’s what “they” want.
Then to the pronouns. Notwithstanding the illiteracy in the use of “’em,” who are they? Who is this other that Dave so loathes?
There is a generalization made by those opposed to taxpayer dollars going to harm reduction or addressing the opioid crisis at all. With blinders on, there is not just an inaccurate picture painted of the street-level addicted person, it’s a caricature so exaggerated and/or narrow in its encapsulation of the problem as to be an outright lie.
The picture so easy to abhor is something like this: Someone young who chooses to start doing drugs, gets addicted, turns to crime to fund his addiction, leaching off social assistance and out robbing hard-working folks, all on a whim to fuel his drug-fuelled life of his own making.
“Give ‘em all fentanyl?”
As with conversations about the homeless, who are we talking about? There are those who choose to live “rough” and eschew society, but there are mentally ill, addicted and the truly down-on-their luck.
Remember, too, that there have been many stories of otherwise “normal” and middle-class young people and adults taking recreational drugs laced with fentanyl.
Give it to them as a punishment for doing illegal drugs?
As well-known homeless advocate Judy Graves told me in an interview last year, the so-called junkie on the street is but one sliver of the addicted population.
“Most people who are drug-addicted and alcoholic pay their mortgages and go to work,” Graves said.
No, I don’t think Dave’s sign is directed at those middle-class young people, nor is it directed at mortgage payers such as himself, some of whom are quietly spending fortunes on addictions to beer or wine or cocaine or gambling or guns or clothing.
I suspect “Give ‘em all fentanyl” is simply class war. The sign looks like an attack on the poor, a finger-wagging moralism akin to the get-a-job mentality of those born on third base living their lives as if they hit a triple.
But make no mistake, if you are so bold as to make a sign, put it on your truck, your business, you don’t think you are alone. And Dave is definitely not alone.
“Give ‘em all fentanyl.”
It’s a sign on a Dave’s Towing truck in Chilliwack.
It’s a sign that someone is grossly oversimplifying a nuanced subject.
And it’s a sad sign of the times.
paul.henderson@theprogress.com
@PeeJayAitch