Jen Gerson: Stigmatisierung ist eigentlich gut
https://www.readtheline.ca/p/jen-gerson-stigma-is-good-actually
Jen Gerson: Stigmatisierung ist eigentlich gut
https://www.readtheline.ca/p/jen-gerson-stigma-is-good-actually
6 Kommentare
>The people who drove cigarette smokers out of bars and insisted on printing packages with nasty images of blackened lungs ought to understand this. We’ve only recently undergone a generational project to use shame, stigma, and access barriers including consumption taxes to radically *and successfully* reduce the harmful behaviour of cigarette smoking.
>This is good! We may never totally eliminate smoking, but we did a damn good job reducing the habit.
I do think it is too often overlooked how *incredibly successful* the intentional stigmatization of cigarettes was. It was just over a decade ago that [concerned editorials were being written](https://www.thestar.com/life/health-wellness/the-vice-that-dare-not-share-its-shame/article_d520b77d-f9b2-5da4-83e8-2570562e4598.html) about „*closet smokers*“ and yet here we are, [cigarette smoking continues to decline](https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canadian-tobacco-nicotine-survey/2020-summary.html). Of course, [vaping became popular in the interim](https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canada-teen-vaping-survey-e-cigarettes-1.6845408); perhaps we need *more* social stigma, this time directed at vaping.
Importantly, we banned smoking of *any kind* from inside publicly accessible spaces, and within a certain distance of the entrance of those spaces; and in some municipalities, smoking was banned entirely from public parks. When the legal tolerance of illicit substances came into effect here in BC, that intolerance of smoking in parks came up against the tolerance of smoking meth in public, and [some municipalities took action](https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/tri-city-news-archive/news/its-common-sense-port-coquitlam-bans-drug-use-in-city-parks-7209400).
It’s a balance. We can stigmatize behaviours when they are undertaken irresponsibly and/or in inappropriate times and locations *and still* provide safe injection sites, clean needles, drug testing, and so on. I think that’s what we expected! Few people wanted full, unfettered, open and unavoidable drug abuse.
The threats of stigmatization and ostracization only work on people living *inside* the bubble of civil society. For people outside this bubble, these are meaningless tools.
Stigmatizing a fentanyl addict who has fallen through the cracks is no more useful than stigmatizing a mobster working outside the law.
Does this person genuinely think that teens are seeing people sprawled out on the street unconscious and thinking, „wow neat I should start doing fentantyl“.
Policy makers are not doing any of the things she is accusing them of doing. Either she’s being incredibly disingenuous or simply hasn’t been bothered to try to understand this policy area.
Jen Gerson seems to believe that if we start shunning fentanyl users from our book clubs, cocktail parties and fantasy hockey leagues, they’ll miss the social interaction and, on that basis, decide to stop banging.
We forbid smokers from going into bars and resturants, but we didn’t stigmatize them going to doctors or hospitals. Yet this is what Gerson is saying we should do to fent users, push them back into the margins where doctors and aid workers can’t find them.
And as usual, her prose resembles that of an edgy pre-teen who has just recently learned about sarcasm for the first time, but doesn’t quite understand how it works.
I think stigma could be better wielded to prevent people from starting in the first place. That said, drug users are already about as stigmatised as a group can get, so I’m not sure how much further we can push on that front.
People didn’t stop smoking because of the stigma lol. There’s pretty much a direct causation between the price and the smoking rate, and basically anyone who has quit smoking says they did it for health reasons. Nobody is quitting smoking because it’s not cool.