Image Credit: Global News

By Jill Sperling

OVERDOSE DEATHS

“An absolute tragedy”: Kamloops mayor calls for change in response to opioid crisis

Nov 26, 2020 | 4:30 PM

KAMLOOPS — The COVID-19 pandemic is one of two major health crises in British Columbia.

The province has been engaged in a battle against illicit drug overdoses for years, racing to save peoples’ lives and providing safe spaces to check and use drugs.

Despite these efforts, the overdose crisis is worsening. In Kamloops, the city has surpassed its annual record for overdose deaths.

“The numbers are nothing short of shocking and it’s an absolute tragedy,” said Kamloops Mayor Ken Christian.

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The City of Kamloops recorded seven more overdose deaths in October, bringing the total number of deaths to 50 for the year, a new record. The previous record of 46 deaths was set in 2018.

“We’re losing particularly young men between about 24 and 40 at such an alarming rate in this city that we really need to rethink the whole way that we’re dealing with this,” Christian said.

Across the province, 162 people died of an overdose in the month of October, a number Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says is unacceptably high.

“If you know somebody who’s using drugs, now more than ever as we’re moving into this critical phase of our second wave (of COVID-19), we need to care for each other, we need to reach out,” Henry said.

Even as the pandemic requires significant health resources, Interior Health says it has not given up its focus on the overdose crisis.

“We do realize that there’s two public health crises going on at the same time,” said Dr. Albert de Villiers, Chief Medical Health Officer for Interior Health. “We do have people with our Mental Health Substance Abuse group specifically working on that. We’ve got one of our medical health officers specifically focusing on that piece as well. We’re not keeping that in the closet somewhere that we’ll get back to when the pandemic is done. We keep on working on it because we know people are still being affected and people are still dying.”

Within Interior Health, supervised consumption sites have been used to reduce harm, but this service can only help those who choose to us it.

“There’s another part of the population that are young, seemingly healthy people living in their parents’ basement at the age of 35,” de Villiers said. “They’re not necessarily the typical person that will go to a supervised consumption site.”

Health officials are renewing their pleas for people to avoid using drugs in secret, but with a stigma still associated with drug use, it may be difficult for some people to feel comfortable reaching out.

“We need to look at more treatment options,” Christian said, “we need to look at detoxification, we need to look at legalizing the personal possession and decriminalizing drug use so that we can start treating it as a medical problem.”