Starting this month, WCSS’ Nesters Road office will offer drug-checking services to the wider Whistler community, one tool WCSS and other social-service and care providers hope can help chip away at the stigma around substance use in a town where few want to rain on someone else’s parade.
“This is about normalizing reaching out for support. It’s about creating a sense of community and belonging so people know it’s OK to talk about these things, creating space and time for each other with those support networks and knowing who are the safe people to talk to,” said Lisa Coulter, outreach services program manager for WCSS.“That’s our hope. That’s our goal. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight. It’s a small step in the right direction to open up those conversations, and it will take time to build trust with community members to know it’s a safe place to come and test and have those conversations—and that doesn’t happen right away.”
The centrepiece of the WCSS’ drug checking will be a FTIR spectrometer, a machine that tests small drug samples for a range of substances, including opioids, stimulants, and other psychoactive drugs such as MDMA, ketamine, methamphetamine, and benzodiazepines. That will be supplemented with fentanyl and benzo test strips. Read the full PIQUE article here