In the two patient stories I discussed near the beginning of this session, I highlighted two women, one with HIV and what was considered palliative AIDS, and another who was declined a heart valve replacement because she was a person who used drugs. That is stigma in action. The medical system assumed those two women were going to die—that this was going to be the outcome. Except, when we provided an intervention that stabilized their substance use, which was safe supply in this case, those women lived. They received their medical surgeries and medication for AIDS and they are thriving and doing well.
In these instances, stigma almost killed these women. Stigma kills many more our team doesn't hear about, isn't able to intervene with and doesn't get wind of. Those stories absolutely break my heart, because we hear them every day from our patients who have friends who went through it but didn't have a team to support them.
We're hearing so much about diversion today. It's a critical issue that we discuss, but the premise behind many of these questions is that people who use drugs can't be trusted—that they're nefarious criminals looking to sell their medication to children and other people, or looking to profit off the medications they are receiving.
Starting that conversation with those assumptions is also stigma in action. The stigma from our assumptions about drug users is limiting our ability to respond to this crisis in a timely manner. It's limiting our ability to respond to this crisis with research-based evidence. To your first question, we're spending so much time responding to the disinformation campaign that it's taking away from our ability to provide that direct clinical care and research we need to do to save lives.