There were eight deaths in the Sea to Sky region in 2017 due to fentanyl overdoses. This number does not include people who are from the region but died elsewhere. And for every death, there are 20 people who have overdosed but did not die. Considering 1,422 people died in B.C. in 2017 from an overdose, that means there were almost 30,000 overdoses in B.C. in one year — staggering.
When you translate statistics into human beings and think about the heartbreaking social impacts, it is horrifying. So why have our governments not rethought how they approach this epidemic and taken real measures to combat it?
No community is immune; statistics indicate the increase is greater in small towns and rural areas than larger metropolitan areas.
Mayors from around the province met in Squamish last week at the BC Mayor’s Caucus to engage in peer-to-peer discussions and tackle big issues facing all our communities. Dr. Mark Tyndall, the executive director of the BC Centre for Disease Control, and Faculty of Medicine at the School of Population and Public Health at UBC presented some powerful information about the opioid crisis in communities throughout B.C. and proposed a call to action.
The overwhelming message: Our global drug policies of prohibition are simply not working, in fact, they fuel conflict and crisis and make our communities less safe and less healthy. The evidence is compelling: our drug policies fail to curb either the supply or demand side of the equation and fail to address any of the issues underlying a person’s need or desire to self-medicate.
Policing has had no impact on the importation of synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil that are fuelling the crisis.
So how do we deal with our toxic drug supply? Firstly, as advocates like Tyndall and Don Macpherson with SFU’s Canadian Drug Policy Coalition espouse, governments need to acknowledge this catastrophic failure of our policy framework and stop pretending that more of the same will work. We need to initiate work in a new regulatory system that eliminates the illegal and corporate markets that result in greater health and social problems and invest in harm-reduction solutions.
We need to immediately de-stigmatize and decriminalize drugs for personal use, and as an emergency response, replace the existing toxic drug supply through a public health distribution mechanism.
Bottom line?
We need a public health, harm reduction approach to drug addiction.
One only has to look to jurisdictions like Portugal, the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland, who have brought in progressive drug policies, to see significant evidential success at reducing overdoses and related deaths, problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, drug-related crime and incarceration.
