Liam Michaud was awarded the 2024 Research Impact Canada Engaged Scholarship Award for his project, A Legal & Policy Ethnography in the Toxic Drug Overdose Crisis: Experiences of people who use drugs of reforms across health & justice sectors.
ABOUT PROJECT
Located at the intersection of health and law, my research focuses on changes in criminal-legal policies and practice in the context of the overdose crisis, and the experiences of people who use drugs of these shifts. My project consists of a legal & policy ethnography that includes interviews, caselaw research, and policy analysis. The legal environment faced by people who use drugs poses wide-ranging challenges with respect to health inequalities and access to justice. Certain reforms to law enforcement and prosecutorial policy and practice claim to address and alleviate some of these harms, while other reforms have further entrenched these disparities. The devastation of the toxic drug overdose crisis – which has claimed the lives of over forty-four thousand Canadians since 2016 – underscores the need to move forward with urgent changes across institutional practices and policies. Urgent policy innovation is also key to addressing enduring racial disparities both across the criminal legal system, including in drugs policing, as well as in overdose mortality.
Through a participatory and policy-oriented approach grounded in critical legal studies, medical sociology, and policy studies, my research engages the lived experiences of people who use drugs who are in conflict with law, and brings this into dialogue with the professional practices of front-line actors in healthcare and criminal legal systems responding to the crisis. In doing this, the project seeks to map how shifts in policy and practice are experienced by those directly impacted, identify factors that impede effective implementation, and surface areas of ongoing tension.
Chief among the shifts in policy and practice my research engages is the use of homicide charges against people who have shared or provided drugs that have led to accidental overdose death, a rapidly growing phenomenon in Ontario and across Canada. This issue is crucial to questions of health equity. Criminal charges laid at accidental overdose events are known to impede access to emergency medical services, as those who are present often fear criminal charges due to police attendance. This issue further exacerbates the already significant legal challenges experienced by people criminalized for their substance use. This focus on homicide charges for accidental overdose is in dialogue with previous research in which I have been involved, including of peoples’ experiences of the Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act as a missed opportunity in addressing legal harms, resulting in moral injury for many.
In the lead-up to my fieldwork, and throughout, my project has engaged with impacted communities, namely people who use drugs and front-line harm reduction workers, to identify priorities in relation to peoples’ experiences of criminal law and the legal determinants of health, and to identify what tools, resources, and outputs might be needed and relevant to support their work.
The knowledge mobilization phase of the project, funded by SSRHC and which will begin later this year, will continue to engage with impacted communities to workshop and develop research outputs. These outputs will include a community toolkit for front-line service providers and organizations of people who use drugs to increase legal literacy and inform key messaging to clients, as well as a legal toolkit for lawyers that will synthesize Canadian caselaw regarding homicide prosecutions for accidental overdose and will assemble the relevant social context and expert evidence. The toolkits will build the capacity of impacted communities and health service organizations to develop responsive messaging and programming for their clients, and aim to respond to a critical gap in knowledge among health and legal practitioners.
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Please see the following studies mentioned above:
Michaud, L. (2024, in press). Prosecuting overdose: The use of manslaughter charges and enhanced penalties against people who use, share, and sell drugs. Canadian Journal of Law & Society. Michaud, L., van der Meulen, E., Chu, S. K. H., & Butler-McPhee, J. (2024). “The Law is too Grey”: Liminal Legality and Moral Injury in Encounters with Drug Law Enforcement. Social & Legal Studies, 09646639241249074.
ABOUT AWARD RECIPIENT
Liam Michaud is a PhD candidate in Socio-Legal Studies at York Universiry and graduate scholar at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. Drawing on ethnographic and community-based participatory methods, his research focuses on the legal environment as experienced by people who use drugs, healthcare access, and drug policy reforms in the context of the drug toxicity / overdose crisis.