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BIGGER THAN ME PODCAST
164. Dr. Julian Somers: Tackling Addiction, Homelessness & Political Hurdles
Aaron Pete discusses the key to addressing addiction and homelessness with acclaimed clinical psychologist Dr. Julian Somers, exploring his transformative work, the clash between science and politics, and potential solutions inspired by global strategies.
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Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host.
Aaron Pete:Aaron.
Aaron Pete:P Addictions, homelessness and mental health issues are impacting people across North America. These impact First Nation communities more than most. I believe it's important that we approach these conversations with humility, understanding, respect and a desire to do better. My guest today is a clinical psychologist and we talk about where we are, how we got there and how on earth do we get out and start to support individuals struggling with these complex issues. My guest today is Dr Julian Summers. I'm so honored to be sitting with you today. I read your article, I started diving into your work and I was really fascinated, because it seems like it's a tough conversation to raise. It's a very delicate topic. But first would you mind introducing yourself and the work you do?
Dr. Julian Somers:Yeah, and Aaron, I'm delighted to be with you here. You wrote a fantastic note which struck me as so open-minded and curious as well as well-informed. So podcasters out there that want to be successful follow what this guy's doing. So, yeah, in terms of where I'm coming from, I'm a clinical psychologist and I started at the very beginning of my career focusing on addiction. That was because of the people I was working with, and the first was a psychologist named Bruce Alexander who developed a theory of addiction. And then I went to work with a guy named Alan Marlatt, who is a clinical psychologist like me and was very focused on what was then a new practice known as harm reduction and the US.
Dr. Julian Somers:I started working clinically and then doing research on addiction training clinicians I taught in UBC's medical school and in other settings, and I focused on research because I realized fairly early on that working clinically, I could spend multiple careers and not make much progress in terms of the need.
Dr. Julian Somers:That was already apparent in the late 80s and 90s.
Dr. Julian Somers:So I switched to research and I've been incredibly fortunate just unbelievably fortunate to have opportunities to try things out on a large scale, so large randomized control trials with people who are living homeless, living with almost constant involvement with our justice system, our healthcare system not getting better and being part of, I guess, almost a generation now, of researchers and clinicians who have developed an alternative way of helping people that is, for a variety of reasons, having a very, very difficult time getting implemented.
Dr. Julian Somers:It's almost as though we have an allergy to changing how we go about helping people. So it got to the point where my efforts to advance awareness of these alternatives that I you know that I've only contributed to, but along with many others that that wound up leading to a kind of like a backlash, like silencing, and that's kind of where I've been the last few years, as I'm no longer able to do the work that I was doing and I'm instead speaking with people like yourself. Speaking with you, know, community groups and anyone who's motivated to have the conversation. Fortunately, many people are about. Well, what is all this evidence about? You know alternatives, and why are we doing things that seem not really to be helping?
Aaron Pete:I'm really. There's so many questions that come from that. The first I just want to make sure we understand your background a little bit more so that people understand the work that you've done. You were involved in two of the largest controlled randomized studies. Can you talk a little bit about those? Sure?
Dr. Julian Somers:So the two main areas of intervention that I've focused on for about 20 years now involve people who are living homeless and involved with courts and corrections. Set of comparative studies involved interventions that originate in courts, so like drug treatment court or community court, compared to regular court, the one that you referred to there was now. It's really the world's largest project investigating in a comparative way what are the differences between alternative ways of helping people or responding to people who are struggling with addictions, are struggling with homelessness and struggling with other forms of mental illness. And that project we called At Home Chez Soi. And that project we called At Home Chez Soi, I led the two randomized trials. We're currently doing it and it's really the same way we were doing it back then, about 10 years ago.
Dr. Julian Somers:Now was the middle point and an alternative that focuses on what the Portuguese described as social reintegration, an approach that's very oriented to helping people find ways back into communities, back into society that they choose.
Dr. Julian Somers:So it's not telling them what to do but enabling, giving them options that include pathways into healthy communities, healthy buildings, into healthy communities, healthy buildings, workplaces.
Dr. Julian Somers:Almost all want to resume paid work when we meet with them and a large proportion, about a quarter have kids under age 18 that they're separated from, and the fact that they're homeless and separated from not only kids but other people that really matter to them is an ongoing kind of silent aspect of their suffering. But once they establish a degree of stability, reconnecting becomes a really powerful motivator and is one of the illustrations, I guess, of reintegration. So we did that work, published a lot of papers based on it, showed in BC, where there's evidence of people who need exactly this type of opportunity. Because we've been doing it so long, we have comparative costing studies and other evidence that would help make kind of the business case for why we should be doing this, apart from the fact that it helps people far more effectively. And despite all of that, we remain quite fixated on delivering services that don't help, are very expensive and that are increasingly demonstrably harmful. So that's back to where we are.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, the last piece around your background is I just want to hear about why you got into this work. What made you interested in being a clinical psychologist, and then that educational pathway.
Dr. Julian Somers:Cool. Well, I started off interested in physics and I had been I had been kind of an unusual path, I guess you'd say so. I was adopted and I had a really hard time fitting into families that I was living with. I dropped out of school and I was struggling with my own mental health, um, as well as substance use, and I was moved away to another family out in the country this is in rural Colorado, southwest Colorado and I lived with them for about three years and realized early on that working for $6 a day or something like that was, was not a sustainable path for me. So I've had to figure out can you get back into school? And I and I read a lot and I became quite nerdy. I think, if I was to look at myself today, a very nerdy kid.
Aaron Pete:What pulled you in that direction? What made you interested in learning so much more? Um I.
Dr. Julian Somers:I, I thought it. I thought it was, um, somehow really attractive to develop abilities that I could apply with nothing more than my body and my voice and or, you know, like the things that you take with you, so I didn't, I wouldn't need, or the things that you take with you, so I didn't have any money. So I limited myself, in a way, to all the things you could do if all you had to work with were your hands and your spirit and the things that we have always with us, strengthening your mind yeah yeah, and I could go to libraries and that's free.
Dr. Julian Somers:I think it's still free, I'm pretty sure it's still free and you can go into libraries and those were. You know that's free, I think it's still free, I'm pretty sure it's still free and you can go into libraries and or these days, of course, the libraries come to you, open your notebook, right, and you can read like everything, everything you can learn languages. And so I thought, well, I've lost some time by virtue of dropping out of school, but I can easily make up that time, because very few of the people I know who are even adults have read a lot of what is considered kind of classic material to learn from inspirational things, to learn from informative things. So I thought, okay, well, this is actually like I don't know why more people aren't doing this was kind of my thought process. Like, cause this is? You know it's free, it's available and it doesn't take a lot of physical energy. You know you can do it. You can do many hours a day of reading and writing.
Dr. Julian Somers:So that's kind of how I got back into school and because of that path, my some of my professors thought, well, this guy's, you know, like he's probably risky to work with.
Dr. Julian Somers:But he's also kind of interesting and that was the case when I met my first mentor, bruce, and he happened to be a psychologist in the area of addiction, but I saw that he also was an incredibly I shouldn't say also like to compare him to me, but I saw that he was at a much more mature stage of his life and his career.
Dr. Julian Somers:He was doing the things that I thought were really helpful to me and kind of cool. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of psychology and especially the history of addiction, how people have talked about addiction. So I felt this immediate I don't know inspiration from Bruce and he was very kind to me and I think, partly because I was adopted I hadn't really landed in any kind of a, you know, I didn't have a family per se, but I didn't really know who my group was really gave me the sense that, wow, there's a community here of people that are very caring of younger members, and not all of them, of course, but there is that ethos in academia all around the world. Of course you go to places where the senior people eat their young and that happens too, but it's also possible to find people who are very nurturing, very caring, and that was my good fortune.
Aaron Pete:Interesting. The reason that I wanted to start all of that with your background is because the topic we're going to discuss is a political topic. Now it's left, I would say. The scientific realm is a political topic, now it's left, I would say. The scientific realm it's become two-sided. I've seen some of the people who have been interested in speaking with you and they do come from one political side of the aisle more so, not all of them, but there's this interest from more conservative people to have these conversations and then it almost seems two-sided, when I think being curious is both sides should be looking at ways to help these people.
Aaron Pete:This shouldn't become a political one-sided issue or the other. These are people and their lives and they need the support and we need to remove all of the rhetoric and just figure out what is actually going to tangibly help these people. I see this with my own First Nation community as well. The people who are grandstanding on TV rarely are the people who are actually developing solutions to improve the people's lives. And I'm in community seeing the improvements we're taking.
Aaron Pete:And then I look at the political leaders who are talking about it and it's two different worlds and I want to reconnect these worlds so we can talk about it and have like just a scientific conversation about how we can help people get through this and kind of remove the idea that if you're against, say, safe supply or something, that means you don't care about people in poverty, like that's.
Aaron Pete:These are the positions that I feel like have been formed and then we're trying to figure out how to fit ourselves within these positions. When the positions are arbitrary, they're political in nature we can just look at what's the evidence, what's going to work, and then let's all agree that let's do this based on an evidence-based scientific approach where the science has led us. And I do feel like from our conversation prior that perhaps your team, your community of psychologists, may have not been supporting you. You're saying more people are interested in talking to you from, maybe podcasts or this world. Could you talk about just your perspective on where we are? Am I correct in my analysis about where we're at? This has become more of a political conversation.
Dr. Julian Somers:That's been my experience as well. I'm just sitting here nodding as you were speaking. I, I, I, I see that for sure, and I also share your observation, uh, that that's uh not an optimal frame. Excuse me for how we should be discussing these issues. They they shouldn't be capital P. These issues, they shouldn't be capital P politicized.
Dr. Julian Somers:So you know, I kind of stumbled into that whole political realm, starting in the mid-90s. I had opportunities to begin working with governments and most of my involvements were with public servants and I kind of avoided the elected officials. First of all. They came and went and the public servants were their sources of advice. So I was sort of a step removed.
Dr. Julian Somers:I was working with and, at times, advising public servants, who then in turn, advised if they were a senior.
Dr. Julian Somers:They were then advising ministers and other members of government, elected members of government, and I thought, when we had an election here in 2017, if I'm not mistaken, a new democratic party, a left of center party, was elected after several years of more right of center parties, and I thought, wow, the timing is excellent that there's sort of a, because I thought left of center would mean more likely to be interested in humanistic types of opportunities for progress and social issues and maybe even because they were new, a willingness to engage in some change.
Dr. Julian Somers:And it turned out I could not have been more wrong and I was asked to provide some briefings to senior members of government provide some briefings to senior members of government and so I said things the same types of things that I'll say to you and that I've written about and there was a very, very hard sort of rejection of what I was saying. So we were forced to pack up, basically, our lab destroy data, and I experienced some you know what we call canceling through officials and scientists who are affiliated with the provincial government. So it was really a terrible time and I, you know, I lacked some kind of a filter because I didn't see it coming.
Aaron Pete:What was the rejection of the science? Like how you were gathering the data, like what was the rejection?
Dr. Julian Somers:Well, what I learned was that I provided a briefing to senior officials. That was a kind of a summary of what did we learn in those randomized trials. What are the implications for things we could be doing differently and maybe more effectively to help people, and that involves both helping people who are living in crisis but also preventing people from entering into those situations in the first place. And I didn't know at the time that the government had already committed to a large expansion of the services that we were already doing. So my recommendations were kind of doomed from the start. They had already put in place the budgeting and all of the planning. The machine was already moving. It was moving exactly. And so one week after that, sfu, where I work, received a letter saying immediately Summers Group has to destroy all of their data which goes back more than 20 years. But you have to destroy it all.
Dr. Julian Somers:And this came through the public service right. I don't know exactly the backroom discussions, but the timing is pretty clear, and there was no indication of anything like that previously. In fact, we were in the process of rebuilding the database for a new project that had already been cleared with government, so it was hard not to interpret it as a reaction to what I had said, part of which included that because we had these data now for many years and we'd used them in interventions showing what's possible in terms of the magnitude of reducing people's hospitalization or reducing their involvement with courts and corrections. We had those kinds of benchmarks. One of my recommendations was hey, why don't we use these data to evaluate new government investments, see how close we're getting to what's been shown to be achievable? That was a bad message, because the people I'm speaking to already knew that the government was committing to growing things that we had shown were not that effective. So me saying, and we can evaluate what government is doing, it's kind of like I'm just a living liability because I'm declaring that we have the ability to show a year from now, two years from now, that what you guys are doing isn't working. Well, that's not a very set. You know, I didn't. I didn't have the intel to put all that together, of course, um, but in hindsight, uh, you know, I, I, I really was walking into a bit of a, a bit of a trap. So, um, part of the reason I tell this story is that the? Um, the door to working more with public servants closed and it also closed in terms of working with the elected government because they were they were both equally kind of opposed to what we had been doing.
Dr. Julian Somers:So that meant that because the issues that I've been working on have become more relevant to the public. I think that's really the main reason that the same issues have become politicized. Mainly they are relevant to people's votes. Now, same issues and we can talk about First Nations people's experience of homelessness, poverty, the annihilation of culture and traditions, the related mental illness and the likelihood of problems with substance use which overlap with other signs of hardship like intergenerational strife, having children in care. So all of these things we can see as being powerful indicators that we need to make changes. And we don't. We simply don't. Now we see that drugs are the leading cause of death among young people, 10 to 19. And two-thirds of them are or were in provincial care and two-thirds of them are or were in provincial care. So the magnitude of these issues that have been simmering more than simmering, seriously harming people for decades.
Dr. Julian Somers:I guess what I'm trying to say in all of this is that the advice that I've been giving for decades has been more or less the same. We've had more evidence. We have our own experiences, but we had evidence from other places. And now it's become. It's touching so many people that it's become capital P political, that it's become capital P political. So now, for the first time, opposition party leaders provincially, federally, in Canada, are taking a real interest in these things. Not because anything substantive has changed in the underlying problems, but it's boiling over to such an extent that, hey, so many people are touched by this. This could influence how elections are determined. So now, for the first time, I'm talking to elected candidates, or people who are aspiring to be elected candidates, and not so much to public servants, at least federally and here in BC. So it's kind of an odd reversal for me.
Aaron Pete:I want to get back in a little bit back into how Premier Eby and like how that government back then it would have been John Horgan how that all came about. But I just I do want to touch on this. My concern is what I'm seeing and the reason I was also interested to speak with you. I don't love the rhetoric I'm hearing from Pierre Polyev. Either bail or jail, not bail. These moves are equally concerning it's. We've tried those policies as well big time.
Dr. Julian Somers:They don't work either, and so how do you feel about that approach or what you're hearing federally on this issue? I agree with you, or one of the main ones now for almost 100 years has been a swing between interpreting problems involving substance use and addiction more generally as either a medical problem, a biomedical problem so people refer to addiction as a disease or as a criminal justice problem, a moral failing of some kind. We go back and forth, and what my mentor, bruce, outlined, I think, in very compelling detail, is that neither of these are effective. Neither one, and our long stay in this purgatory of back and forth is precisely because neither is actually very helpful. So how does that get to somebody like the leader of the Conservative Party or the leader or any of the aspiring elected officials? I think that there's an opportunity, maybe for the first time in Canada, to be involved in conversations with elected leaders that allow their positions to evolve positions to evolve Basically. There's a curiosity. We've seen it in some leaders already. So in Alberta, no leader is going to be attractive to everybody, but a few years ago Jason Kenney as premier, and currently Danielle Smith have created a lot of space in their own agendas to learn more about how to prevent addiction and other forms of mental illness, and also how to help people reestablish lives once they've experienced those syndromes. Once they've experienced those syndromes. It's an ongoing process, but the main change that I'm encouraged by is the fact that leaders, including Pierre Pauliev, appear I'll say this from my limited experience appear sincerely interested in learning more.
Dr. Julian Somers:So what actually happened in Portugal, for instance? This is a road I know that he's been down, and how would we replicate the effective things in Canada, given our governance models, the fact that we have provinces and territories, as well as different and, of course, differences in culture? Yes, um, but how? How? How could we adapt those? So then he gets his staff thinking about okay, how could we do that? Um and uh, but it starts with what actually worked. We've a few years ago, only three years ago now, in BC, we, in a way that is completely clueless Really, I mean, it's not a report that's going to age well, because it more or less waves a hand that Portugal achieved great things by decriminalizing drug possession, and then it sort of waves a hand at some other things. But if you listen to people or if you do any kind of serious analysis of the Portuguese national strategy and what actually worked. Decriminalizing possession is a very, very small part of what they did that resulted in change. So the shift from sort of grabbing onto Portugal almost like a marketing slogan as your rationale, and instead looking much more thoughtfully at the details of the plan. What worked?
Dr. Julian Somers:It doesn't guarantee that what a leader does or a politician does is going to be dramatically different. We all know that people can say one thing to get elected and do other things once they're in office. But we also have to do what we can to try to create change, and one thing we can do is with candidates for office, for high office, get them interested in learning the substance of issues. Get them to go on record before they're elected saying what they understand to be the pathways to success, things like you know jail, not bail, or you bail. That's kind of a quip. It doesn't really tell you too much, but when people are talking about a commitment to a recovery-oriented system, okay, that actually says something. That says something. If you're going to achieve progress by implementing something like that. That has a lot of implications for how you're going to govern and it makes it pretty easy for people who've been listening to you to then say you are or you are not following through on what you said.
Aaron Pete:I think that's incredibly important. Do you think this is a solvable problem? Do you think that we could address addictions and homelessness in a meaningful way?
Dr. Julian Somers:You know we are such an important region ecosystem on our planet and the people as part of that. We are incredibly, incredibly important. We have, you know, so much area and beauty. We are able to communicate with one another and we have resources that we must work as stewards of for the good of everyone. Right now, we're doing like crazy things like shipping Western crude oil offshore to be refined and we're buying some of it back. That's crazy. That's crazy economically, it's crazy from a resource stewardship standpoint. It's crazy from a safety standpoint environmental safety, safety. So we have a lot of opportunity to be much better for ourselves and for future generations, to establish a way of.
Dr. Julian Somers:What does it mean to be a British Columbian? We know it costs. We've known this for some time. It costs as much to support people year over year while they are living in crisis, including homelessness. It's about $55,000 per person per year on average. Society with support and effectively rescuing them immediately from encampments, from street scenes where predation and other forms of harm are just facts of life. It's incredible how much we've lost sight of the truth that less than 100 years ago, was global. I'm talking about the Nuremberg trials and the aftermath of the Second World War, when we realized collectively that there must be international laws, there must be commonly held commitments to human rights, because if we turn our backs on those things, we are not only being unjust, we are sowing the seeds of conflict. That's kind of what we've been doing here in BC. We are exposing people to forms of degradation and abuse and vulnerability, and it's not because it costs less to do that than to help them, you know. So we absolutely can do far, far better and the path we've followed, coming out of COVID many people were inspired during COVID I was that we're going to come out of this and we're going to build back better. We're going to use this enforced pause to devote serious thought and planning to building back better. And we haven't done that at all. We've built back worse, if that's possible. So you know, the trap we somehow need to excise ourself from is the trap of only finding potential solutions within the sort of the paradigm that we're in right now.
Dr. Julian Somers:Safe, what's been called safe supply is essentially providing pharmaceutical alternatives to people who are living in desperate conditions. They are the people living currently in encampments. Many are living in First Nations communities. I was recently in Port Hardy and talked to many people living. They've been kicked off the reserve. In many cases They've been kicked off the reserve. In many cases, some of them were taking drugs onto reserve and the social conditions that are responsible. If we talk about core issues, the social conditions that are responsible are very clear to see. People have no opportunities for prosperity, for really being engaged in their culture, to be connected with their kids just incredible, incredible psychological burdens.
Dr. Julian Somers:What's been referred to as safe supply is that advocates have not been referring to the modifiable and quite obvious core issues and have instead advocated for a commercial and even free market response, which is let's make drug companies the dealers instead of gangs and narcos. That's not likely to work, first of all, and several people have written about why that's not likely. But it's also possible to see that as offensive because it is papering over a series of social problems that we must address. We cannot afford to simply medicate people living in despair. The Stanford-Lancet Commission warned against the pharmacological sedation of poverty and that's really the looming threat and what we've seen evidence of in BC's recent experiments with decriminalized possession and making a public supply of addictive drugs.
Dr. Julian Somers:People, for various reasons, the drugs that they're able to receive are not the preferred drugs of the people that are eligible to get them and so, sensibly, they either sell them or trade them, and that's been a known activity for many years. It didn't start with what we call safe supply, so that actually has the additional risk associated with it diversion to who? And does it create additional harms? It's telling I mentioned earlier that the government was not in favor of us continuing to have our measurement capabilities, but it's also telling that they chose to introduce both of these measures decriminalized possession and a public supply of drugs without any ability to measure foreseeable consequences, including diversion. So we wrote about this in 2021, that there was this risk.
Dr. Julian Somers:An easy way of checking it over time would be to have some kind of traceable component in the drugs that are dispensed so that if they're seized by police or if we're monitoring our groundwater, we can see okay, are these drugs showing up elsewhere, in places where they shouldn't, in high schools or you know other places and there was no effort made to hold themselves accountable in these ways. So it's you know. At least with COVID, which came along at around the same time, we went through the appearance, at least, of conducting randomized trials on vaccines and seeing you know whether they appear to be safe and appear to be effective. In this case, we didn't do anything. It's mainly been sustained by rhetoric.
Aaron Pete:Dogma.
Dr. Julian Somers:And what seems yeah, what seems like you know in its best form, maybe kind of a misguided belief that because the war on drugs as we know, that because that hasn't been successful, the alternative should be a legal and regulated market for everyone. That's a little bit like saying that because gun control hasn't eliminated gun deaths, we should have an open and regulated market for guns. There's a lot of room in between those two extremes.
Aaron Pete:Okay, so I have two more quick questions for you. One you've dedicated your life to this work, to understanding these issues and trying to help people. I imagine you've met so many people struggling in these circumstances and not often do government policies play a direct role in people's lives. Like, we can talk about the carbon tax yes, it has these impacts on how much you pay the grocery store. Yeah, it's like a little bit removed. These problems are more complicated and there's 15 different reasons why.
Aaron Pete:This is a moment where we can look at these people in these circumstances and say we could address this. We have a responsibility to address this. It's the provincial governments that are responsible for, in large part, addressing this issue and we don't feel like it's getting solved. Like I don't talk to anybody who feels like we're doing a terrific job on this file, and so what is it like to know that there are tangible solutions, that this is real people's lives? This isn't't do we do a bigger carbon tax or small like, where it's like a little less personal. These are people's lives and it feels like we're playing politics yeah, it does.
Dr. Julian Somers:Um. Yeah, well, you know, conversations like this one, I think um are think are an important part of what we need to do all of us talking with one another, talking in ways where we're conscious of having an open mind, because the divisiveness that you've referred to it's it, it. We can't all assume that it's separate from us. So how do we play a role in that? And that's some that's hard to see. I find it hard to see, but I I know what it's like to practice being open-minded. I know what that's like to listen, and listen. Listen to people who disagree with you know either what I've said or what they think I've said. So that's a real opportunity we have to develop a greater sense of solidarity Tangibly. Things that we can do involve. There are a number of areas, and I've tried to articulate some of the things that we could be doing starting tomorrow, and others have done similar work. I'm part of a chorus, really, but my focus has been on BC Can.
Aaron Pete:I ask how can people follow your work?
Dr. Julian Somers:I think X is good, so that's my last name S, o, m, e, r, s, p, s, y, c, hcom, um, and also on YouTube the same thing summer psych, um, those. Those would all be uh, ways of, of, of having a look. Um, the, uh, um, yeah, the. The Stanford Lancet Commission is is another big group, and and it's one that people in BC won't necessarily have heard a lot about, um, they spent two years examining the opioid crisis in Canada and the US, came up with a long list of recommendations, and the reason I think our government has avoided this report like the plague is they. In addition to listing all the things they said we ought to do or could do, they said there are two things that we shouldn't do. One is we shouldn't be providing a pharmaceutical source of drugs to people in the hope of displacing the illicit supply, and they explain why. And the second was and we shouldn't consider dispensing drugs to people from, like, a vending type machine, automated dispensing, and we do both of those things. In fact, our former provincial health officer became the co-owner, or he established an opioid company, poised to follow through on safe supply, and his deputy formed an opioid dispensing machine company, and so these are ideas that have attracted a lot of interest within our government, within the small circles of people, to the point where they appeared to believe that developing these as businesses was part of a better future. It turns out, I think, to have been a horrible mistake and also just a bad look, to be advocating for policies while also developing corporate interests. So we need the courage somehow to persuade our leaders to spend differently. That's kind of the main thing, and it's not as though large swaths of people would suddenly be out of work. Even though large swaths of people would suddenly be out of work, the same people working in mostly in not-for-profits around BC need to be supported to provide services that are effective for people, and so the same people and when I've had the opportunity to talk to not-for-profit leaders about this type of change, they have been strongly supportive.
Dr. Julian Somers:We put together what we called a willing to spend for some area of need and instead to be delivering services that are based on evidence of what kinds of intensity and mix of support has been shown to be most effective for people who have a certain complement of needs. So it begins with triage and assessment and then a matching process. They all got behind that. We looked at where's the evidence of need in BC. So this document, this call to action, summarizes all of this, came fully budgeted and was submitted to the government, and I think that's the last thing I heard from David Eby was the syllable O when I handed it to him, and that was the last time we've had any kind of communication, but it didn't go anywhere. But it didn't go anywhere.
Dr. Julian Somers:The uplifting side of it is that people in positions of responsibility share the desire to do things better, more effectively, more professional, more accountable. Measure what we're doing. Compare it to benchmarks that have already been established. How close are we getting? Where are we doing better? How can we learn from what those people are doing? So this is the kind of the opportunities for improvement that we're essentially just sort of leaving out of the equation completely.
Dr. Julian Somers:Landlords and employers in the private market are hugely important partners. Remember that most of the people we're losing to poisoning are young and unemployed. So if we're to meet them where they are and talk to them, we already know that most will say among the things they want, a healthy, safe place to live and a job. Those will be right up there for almost everybody. Okay, how are we going to do that?
Dr. Julian Somers:Well, in the current system, we've got various. Well, we've got this motel over here or this low barrier place over there. What about employment? Oh yeah, well, no, they have a team that does graffiti removal through the low barrier. Okay, that's not really a job. We've restricted ourselves to what can be done through publicly funded and publicly administered entities and we've essentially turned our backs on the private sector. This is not meant to be like a conservative shout-out, by the way. I'm saying that the long-term course of helping people establish wellness involves living in a decent place, which probably means having a regular private apartment or condo or someplace, and a job, which is likely not a government-funded job but a job in the private sector. So, again, we're turning our backs on some of these opportunities for partnership and if we're willing to shift our focus and develop these partnerships, spend differently, not more. We can do immensely better.
Aaron Pete:Amazing, julian. It's such an honor to sit with you. I appreciate everything. I hope to have you back on because there's so much more to discuss. I'd love that man, but so many insights. I appreciate you, me too. Thank you. So much. More to discuss? I'd love that man, but so many insights, I appreciate you, me too. Thank you so much Amazing.
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