Harold Johnson speaks at New North’s Northern Justice Symposium. Photo by Chelsea Laskowski
A presentation at New North’s Northern Justice Symposium in Prince Albert Wednesday morning inspired the audience to tell their own stories about addiction.
A number of men came forward from an audience of more than 100 people, talking about their personal struggles with alcohol.
One man from La Ronge said he has been sober for 28 years.
“I’m not saying that to brag about it. I’m just sharing it to help people understand it is possible to be sober,” he said.
Another began crying as he recalled how he took his last drink more than 30 years ago. That was the same night he got into a head-on collision while driving with his wife. She didn’t survive.
These tough stories came after a speech from Harold Johnson. He is an eight-year Crown prosecutor and author, and has most recently been working with Lac La Ronge Indian Band to come up with La Ronge’s community alcohol management plan.
For the past five months, Johnson has been telling the story about alcohol and how it relates to First Nations people.
A gifted storyteller, he looks back at when alcohol first came into the hands of Aboriginal people, and since then, the hold it’s taken on crime in northern communities.
He says it’s time to change the story — and this involves using a new word to describe alcoholism — from “disease” to “injury.”
“If I say, ‘I’m at the end of my drinking career and I have this thing called alcoholism’, if I tell myself that it is a disease, ‘I got it by chance. It was God’s will. There’s nothing I can do about it’ — I won’t do anything about it,” he says. “If, on the other hand, I say, ‘This is an injury I gave to myself because of my drinking pattern. It’s my fault’, then I can also say, ‘It’s my responsibility’, and then I will do something about it.”
That said, he did point to a drug called Naltrexone that’s been used by the medical profession to help people overcome alcoholism. Its success rate is 78 per cent, Johnson said.
He says it’s time to change the story.
“We tell ourselves that alcohol helps us to speak – you know, ‘I can speak freely after I’ve had a few drinks.’ Change that story and tell the truth; ‘after a few drinks I slur my words so bad that nobody can understand what I’m saying,” Johnson said.
This June, he will be part of the release of La Ronge’s community alcohol management plan, which includes a pilot project to keep those who have committed alcohol-involved crimes to take a breathalyzer test twice a day or face a possibility of two days in jail.
He said one man in the community has already been put under conditions similar to that. Even though Saskatchewan’s Criminal Code has no punitive measures of that nature, Johnson said court conditions can be made to mimic that practice.