Agreed, and I was always talking about this, even with my manager. My coworkers and I were always talking about how we felt like we were constantly in damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situations, and I feel like there were at least a handful of instances where I did the exact same thing with other students and there were no complaints. I can definitely remember at least one instance where I also mistakenly discharged a student up to the dorms who was apparently still intoxicated, no disciplinary follow up for that one, though.
Worth mentioning I suppose that the dorms, understandably, had a zero tolerance policy for possession of alcohol on premises or consumption of alcohol on or off premises, and I think a lot of the shit we ended up dealing with was because of that. However, they also I feel actively impeded students from using the harm reduction site because they would get reprimanded and even potentially evicted from the dorms for using the harm reduction site…! Which I think actively discouraged the residents of the dorm using the site and staying safe, and instead encouraged residents of the dorms to do the kind of thing where they’d try and sneak back into the dorms drunk or high, because we of course also reported them being there to the dorms. No one working with the students wanted them to be putting themselves into dangerous situations, like, say, they figure they could get in less trouble for missing curfew than for being caught drunk or high, but I feel that the expectation that they willingly submit to processes which could lead to their eviction was totally naïve. So I guess a lot of the issues we faced were because we were a harm reduction (adjacent) service that had a massive service overlap with a housing situation that was really not compatible with a harm reduction ethos.
It really often felt like the higher-ups did not really understand what we did, and why, and I also feel that they were very paranoid about poor service outcomes, such that they would give our manager shit, who would then give us shit, for not just poor service outcomes, but even if we were to have allowed the possibility of a poor service outcome. And, of course, they always saw these events through the clarity of hindsight.
To be fair the funding for the service came about as a response to an inquest about the suspicious and unresolved deaths of young people who came to the city to go to high school from remote communities. So, I get the paranoia. It’s more just that I resent how they, yes, as you said, set workers up to take the fall for being unable to respond adequately with incomplete information or limited resources. And I personally took umbrage with practices which I felt were judgmental, invasive, or did not show trust or respect towards the clientele.
Again this is probably due to the novelty of the service but frankly I would hope that other harm reduction sites don’t have to compel their workers to be narcs about what they do in nearly the same way. Much less legal complexity with regards to offering safety and food and warmth to intoxicated adults who don’t live in a shelter on the other side of a building where intoxication is completely prohibited. Ain’t nothin’ illegal about being drunk or high, as an adult, it’s only illegal to possess illicit substances in large enough quantities (or if after the fact you cause a public disturbance, I guess).
Then again I don’t even know for sure. There is a hysterical politically motivated hysterical backlash against harm reduction here right now so maybe the loopholes in question are actually tighter than I assumed they are, and so there is a motivation within harm reduction operation right now to buff out even perceived rough edges.
On one hand, I imagine that it’s complicated. It was a pretty novel gig, to remind everyone I was working in a harm reduction site which operated within what is basically a private high school. So, to some degree, we were operating within somewhat of a legal gray area (pretty off-white light gray if you were to ask me) in terms of harbouring people who were intoxicated on either illicit substances, or lawful substances with which they are not the legal age to obtain and consume. Like, if if any of our actions or procedures or services were technically against the law I would unashamedly say it was Good, Actually, but, I did always assume that the reason we weren’t using things like breathalyzers or blood tests was because of procedural limits that were the result of, I dunno, procedural compromises imposed on the site itself in order for it to qualify for Ministry funding, of which I was pretty sure it was majorly dependent on (I could be wrong but yeah I’m pretty sure it existed because of government subsidization).
Like, I know for instance in our jurisdiction it is lawful for someone below the legal age to consume alcohol, but only if it is supplied by a parent or guardian, and, only if it is consumed under supervision of that parent or guardian, and said alcohol can only be consumed in the same place it was supplied, which I believe must also be a private domicile. And as far as I can tell in the letter of the law being drunk in public while also not of legal age to consume alcohol is not lawful either, but, like, you know how these things are, the law is written like that mainly to retroactively justify law enforcement after one has caused some kind of public disturbance.
It’s also more of a best practice than a lawful requirement but workers in community services like that are encouraged to collect only what personal information as is necessary to perform their duties, and I would think that though the results from the simple motor skills test are ambiguous enough that, say, it couldn’t be retroactively be used after the fact to establish something like a public disturbance charge, I do wonder if the result from a breathalyzer test would be a lot closer to something that could retroactively determine criminal liability (or maybe not, as I understand it there are serious problems with the admissibility of the result of breathalyzer tests), so there would be reluctance to collect that information.
I could imagine a scenario where eligibility for a stay at the harm reduction site in question would demand the motor skills test, as it does now, but could potentially employ a breathalyzer test only with the consent of the client, with the option to not consent to it (though I would expect that the narc tendencies of my former jobsite would just indirectly urge people in my position to interpret a refusal to submit to a breathalyzer test as an indirect admission of the consumption of alcohol, so, that’s kinda opening up a whole other bag of kettles of cats, worms, and beans).
On the other fucking hand, like a week or two ago, I saw a bag sitting in the site’s office that had, lo and behold, several unopened breathlyzers in it. They weren’t buried inside of some storage closet as if to suggest they were at one time purchased by the site to be used but the administration could not justify their usage and hid them away, they were by the manager’s desk as if they had been recently purchased. So… I might have Cassandra’d my own damn self here lol. If they do soon allow breathalyzer results to be collected during intake, and for that to factor into any monitoring or discharge determinations, I am going to be so fucking pissed. I lost my job because I didn’t have a lie detector, basically, and I guess even with its problems, a breathalyzer is the closest thing to a lie detector (without using a medical lab anyway) when the sole question is “did you recently consume alcohol?”
