GENDER FACTOR IN OVERDOSE CRISIS BEING OVERLOOKED
B.C. health officials are slowly waking up to the fact 85 per cent of victims are male
VANCOUVER Are public health officials facing up to the fact that the overdose epidemic in Canada and the U.S. is mostly devastating boys and men?
There are small signs some health officials are slowly, awkwardly, hesitatingly beginning to acknowledge the obvious: The overdose crisis is predominantly an issue of men’s health.
Public officials have much denial to make up for. It was just a year ago that former B.C. Liberal health minister Terry Lake pulled out the public relations stops to open a 38-bed Vancouver facility for women to overcome substance abuse. Months before an election, Lake also announced an overdose prevention site exclusively for females.
Lake’s many media splashes never made a nod to the overdose plight of boys and men — despite males accounting for four in five overdose fatalities across the country; the portion recently hitting 85 per cent of the almost 1,000 deaths in B.C. in just one year.
Despite his questionable efforts dealing with the scourge of fentanyl deaths, Lake was given the annual “Hero” award by the Canadian Public Health Association. Yet when Lake left office, he sent a decidedly mixed message on drug use by becoming vice-president of a “luxury” medical marijuana company.
The federal Liberal government has been equally tone deaf to the gender factor in the opioid crisis. Health Canada announced in October it was granting $842,000 to B.C.’s Centre for Excellence in Women’s Health to explore “gender-informed” substance use and addiction.
The main web page of the Centre for Excellence in Women’s Health (CEWH) says it’s devoted to “research and evaluation that produces evidence to improve girls’ and women’s health.” It has an exclusively female board of directors.
This is not to mention the media, which, when it tallies up the terrible statistics on overdose deaths, typically either ignores the figures on males or alludes to it in a phrase. There have only been rare exceptions to such gender blindness in media coverage of Canada’s crisis, including, of all things, by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
What are some tentative positive signs?
There are indications public health officials are starting to face the self-evident, which was explained clearly by B.C.’s Leslie McBain, whose 25-year-old son Jordan died of an opioid overdose, when she said, “Mostly men … are dying, at home, alone?”
The main sign of fresh gender awareness in B.C. came recently from Fraser Health Authority’s chief medical officer, Dr. Victoria Lee, who appears to have the backing of the NDP’s minister for mental health and addictions minister, Judy Darcy.
In a late January news conference, Lee put males front and centre. She said men between the ages of 19 and 59, especially those in the trades, are disproportionately affected by a hidden epidemic that’s shrouded in secrecy among those too ashamed to get help.
The second significant sign public officials are starting to, as they say, “get it,” is the new antioverdose, anti-stigma campaign organized by the B.C. government in partnership with the Vancouver Canucks, a team with which men can connect.
With former Canucks goalie Kirk Mclean as campaign ambassador, a website called StopOverdoseBC.ca offers information on how to access treatment and recovery. The site doesn’t specify males as primary victims, but at least it boldly features photos of men (and Aboriginals) and sends a male-accessible message, while confronting what Darcy calls “the worst public health crisis in decades.”
Meanwhile, I have been trying for a week to find out what the Centre for Women’s Health has been doing with its $842,000 in federal grants. So far I’ve received a polite response that a report is not available at this time.
My perusal of the centre’s website, however, suggests the lion’s share of its work on gender and substance use has streamed into projects emphasizing girls, women and the LGBQT population.
There are only a relative few references to males among the long list of centre research projects and webcasts. In one example, a new webcast on males and substance use, which features University of British Columbia UBC nursing faculty John Oliffe and Joan Bottorff and the centre’s Nancy Poole and Lorraine Greaves, a slide says, “Sex and gender are among the most influential of the determinants of health.”
The next slide then fleetingly acknowledges an imbalance: “When gender has been addressed (as a determinant of health), it is common for women and girls to be the focus. … Men have often been ignored as victims and survivors, less so as perpetrators.”
That sentence amounts to a small admission of a gender double standard in this health crisis. If 85 per cent of the victims of overdose deaths had been female, it’s clear there would be no reluctance to zero in on that gender factor.
There might well be a stigma against those who use opioids, but there may be a stronger stigma against recognizing this epidemic is predominantly a male issue.