“Police pretty much DGAF”. That is the caption on a recently viral post of a man doing drugs outside the London Police Station. The reddit post, which at the time of publication has achieved over 53 000 upvotes, provoked many different discussions about the open drug use in London. “lol it’s London Ontario, seems pretty normal” said one commenter. “Gotta smoke it all before he goes in.” Another joked.
Sightings of open-air drug use such as this have grown all the more common in London, despite the fact that London Police have issued a specialized project to combat this type of drug use, called “Project Pathways”.
Project Pathways consists of police officers, being assisted by mental health and addiction professionals, confronting people using drugs in public, while taking on a more compassionate, helpful approach, rather than a punitive one. Some experts however, feel that this program isn’t doing enough to fight against the core of this issue.
“There’s going to be occasions when that seems like a good fit, but it’s still the same as anything else.” Said Dean Anderson, an addiction and clinical counselor, and founder of “Epic Recovery”. “The vast majority of individuals are probably just going to get up and move on.
“What we want in society is we want instant satisfaction.” Anderson continued. “We want it that you walk up to somebody doing open drug use, you say the magic words and they get up and they’ll even go, okay, I’ll never do that again, and that’s not how it works. It works through interactions.”
Anderson also thinks that society focusing more on instant satisfaction leads to posts like the man outside the police station to become popular, and
“we live in a in an instant gratification society, judging the guy who’s sitting there with the drugs in his hand, I think it’s a more systemic problem. It’s a huge upstream thing.”
“If we treat humans as humans, and we figure out how to teach them to cope and strategize and understand, we’ll end up with a society that’s more in line. There’s no need to escape.“
The London police were reached out for a comment, but have not responded by the time of publication.
