Maureen Pollard interviews Missy McLean, a Registered Social Worker and Community Organizer who works with people impacted by the toxic drug crisis, homelessness and poverty. They discuss the idea of 'Community Grief'. "When someone dies from a toxic drug poisoning, it hits people who use drugs really hard because we know that in this moment, the way the toxic drug supply is, that it's like russian roulette every time folks are using to a certain degree .. it's really, it's a marginalized grief ... like a disenfranchised grief. And so I was thinking, like, wow if we were in this space and this was a group of students let's say, and they had lost one of their piers, we would see the parachuting in of grief counselors, of crisis workers, of people to wrap around these students and to acknowledge their loss and sit with them in their pain and work with them on strategies to process their grief and how they're going to cope with this loss and all of these things. And you know how many crisis workers and grief counselors were brought to the community centre to sit with the folks who lost their friend? Not one. I've seen that neglect and that disenfranchised grief play out in a lot of different ways in our communities, especially working with folks who use drugs - who use criminalized drugs I should say - and who are experiencing homelessness; where they lose someone who was so close to them, right, because a lot of the folks when they are street involved and when they are using criminalized drugs, they are each other's family. They are each others network of support and survival, and so those losses, they cut deep but they're not recognized in the same way."
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