As toxic wildfire smoke returns to the White Heritage City after a mere six months interregnum, just like regular clockwork, the corrupt Konservatives and their local municipal acolytes in the colonial racket are demonizing those who are addicted to decriminalized hard narcotics, misled by MP Cranbrook Cop who swears he doesn’t discriminate against drug-users even when he’s painting the delayed safe inhalation site at the Interiour Health’s downtown Clubhouse as an “approach that prioritizes illegal and harmful behaviour” that will “take away the right of our community’s youth and senior citizens to live in peace”.

Now while I’m sure that most uncivil servants involved in the partisan cult of pro-industry politics are publicly in favour of peaceful lives for youth and seniors, Robber Morrison invokes the classic cynical ploy of right-wing gun nuts who decry their lack of freedom while they support the legalization of killing weapons that slaughter far too many youth and seniors everyday in Canamerica. Love AR-15s and hate safe consumption sites for health-challenged addicts is the motto for neocon fascists who misstate key stats about Greater Albertamerica’s harsher approach to drug enforcement that rewards the armed power of the Konservative Klub’s killer gunmen. When MP Thin Blue line blows hot air about how he “will continue to fight for safer streets and a path to life and recovery for all who struggle with addiction”, for whom is he promising these supposedly safe streets? How safe can the mean streets of smoky Nelsonia be for those sufferers of chemical addiction who are denied a survivable place to inhale their potentially deadly substances by local-yokel herrenvolk and supposed do-gooders such as our cautionary Mayor B&B?

In her defense, the current leader of the real-estate profiteering cabal in the Queen Consort City, Mayor B&B, insists that, “The issues are not lost on me, the societal issue of mental health and addictions. This is not a crime, it’s a disease. We have to get together as a community and as a region, we have to get the services in place to help these people and [overdose prevention sites are] a stop gap.” Meanwhile, aren’t stop gaps like safe sites needed to save thousands of lives in a neverending provincial emergency story that will refuse to go away until the imperious Manmorons we put in charge of the civic capstone realize that they are the ones tasked by us to solve these problems in humble subservience to our Indigenous?

Obviously, we don’t want youth and seniors to be confronted by good ol’ bad boys and their destructive behaviour on the sidewalks every day, and it seems more than obvious that Premier Dweeby and the Nihilistic Democrats should belatedly declare that synthetic lethal drugs cannot be used anywhere where children and elders congregate on the regular in public (even though some convincingly argue that it’s better to keep overdosing patients out in the open and not hidden away where they can’t get help), but it’s extremely disingenuous for future PM Pepe Le Poilievre and his pigheaded former paramilitary minion from the Koots-Columbus riding to unilaterally decree without backing evidence that “the government’s approach to the opioid crisis” via quantifiably effective safe-use sites which have saved tens of thousands of lives “isn’t working and there is no evidence-based success in Nelson or Cranbrook”.

At the same misinforming time, Rob More and Pierre LePue parrot the same unproven Konservative talking point that Albertamerica’s more tyrannical mistreatment has led to less overdose deaths, when experts in the field of health-care and not blood-sport politics disagree with them, such as Edmontonian family doctor Dr. Ginetta Salvalaggio who “says that it would be premature to credit a decrease in deaths to the Alberta government’s recovery-oriented care model… (as) they haven’t subjected that (claim) to rigorous study. No one’s released any data to demonstrate that… (so) before we go making pronouncements like that, we better have evidence. I don’t see it”. And in case you think that the Albertamerican system beloved by the Kalgary Konservative Klub’s frat-boys is that different from Brutish Colonia’s approach, harm-reduction strategist Euan Thomson echoes Beastly BC’s decriminalization critics when he emphasizes how he “would like to see the provincial government include drug toxicity data to decide how to most effectively address the crisis… but instead, we’ve chosen a policy and now we’re trying to fit the data to justify that policy,” and that “what’s needed most is a low-barrier, regulated supply” that is disdained by the Neo-Kons. Contradicting the right-wingers’ veiled threats of caring, Thomson suggests that we “worry about all the other interventions after… (and) first focus on keeping people alive with regulated versions of the drugs they’re using anyway”. Dr. Salvalaggio adds, “that her patients, too, tell her that they are concerned about the level of toxicity in the drug supply, the lack of a regulated alternative, as well as the lack of access to community-based support… (and) the social stability needed to access these services, the complete and utter lack of attention to housing, the disruption of encampments and so on… (because) you can’t be asking people to insert themselves into a pathway of care that was prescribed to them if you’re not providing them with any of the supports, even if they want that treatment”.

So while the two-faced authoritarians eager to kowtow to Fuhrer Drumpf and his MAGA-army of white power misogynists are pretending to be concerned about the welfare of anyone not in league with their gangster-capitalist cronies, the scourge of wildfire smoke has invaded our summer dreams once again to highlight the ongoing damage of climate extreming and the utter lack of responsibility shown by the same corporate-sucking politicians who act like they give a damn about poor mental-health patients and drug sufferers, let alone non-WASPy youth and seniors who don’t vote for their bigoted jackasses.

As usual, the tragically unhip christo-fascists in charge of our elitist democracy choose to ignore the Indigenous who are most affected by the ravages of wildfires and drugs, even though our First Nations and those descended from the original inhabitants of this stolen land know more about healing and stewarding our landscapes, waters & airsheds — and our bodies, souls & spirits — than any retired armed enforcer of the billionaires’ god-given right to pillage, raid & destroy our ecosystems and our daily lives.