Big issues familiar on OD Awareness Day

Despite progress, criminalization of drug use hinders harm reduction, activists say

For harm-reduction workers on the front lines of Ottawa’s overdose crisis, International Overdose Awareness Day starts to feel a bit like the movie Groundhog Day.

Politicians’ and people’s minds change, and so do the services workers are allowed to give. But the core of the problem, which is that drug use is still partly considered a criminal issue, hasn’t gone away.

It’s Sean LeBlanc’s eighth time helping organize an Overdose Awareness Day event, scheduled for Friday at the Human Rights Monument on Elgin Street. LeBlanc, founder of Drug Users Advocacy League, said the message they’re sending to policy-makers hasn’t changed much.

“As long as there’s toxic drugs in the streets and the powers that be are doing nothing,” he said, “people are going to continue to die.”

A lot has shifted in the fight against the overdose crisis in the past year. At this time last year, the city had zero supervised injection sites — now it has four. Harmreduction groups are also dealing with a new provincial government. One of Premier Doug Ford’s first acts was to freeze the opening of and funding for overdose prevention sites, which are smaller, peer-led versions of supervised injection sites. They’re opening anyway, while a government review is underway.

Much, however, has stayed the same. Harm-reduction workers are still calling for the decriminalization of all drugs, something they say is the only way to get ahead of the problem.

“The demands for Overdose Awareness Day haven’t changed much over the years,” said Cat Hacksel, who was part of Overdose Prevention Ottawa, a grassroots group that opened an unsanctioned supervised injection tent in Lowertown last year. “It’s still crisis response. We’re chasing the problem . ... We’re not preventing the overdoses, we’re just responding to the overdoses. Think about how stressful that is for people who use drugs.”

Organizers want to send the message that this isn’t a faraway issue, but a crisis on our doorstep. Last year, at least 64 people died of opioid overdoses in the city, a 60-per-cent increase over 2016. In July 2018, 25 people were taken to the ER for opioid overdoses. That same month, the Oasis Program (which provides supervised injection services out of the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre) put out a warning after fentanyl was detected in crack cocaine. Rob Boyd, the program’s director, said “every test that we’ve done has had fentanyl in it.”

LeBlanc and Hacksel agreed the drug supply is getting worse.

“There’s this new beige (heroin) in town that’s really strong,” LeBlanc said. “These drugs are who knows how many times stronger than the opioids that were out there previously.”

Organizers are also calling on the police to stop showing up to 911 calls for overdoses. LeBlanc said that, despite Good Samaritan laws that protect people from possession charges if they call 911 in the event of an overdose, many drug users are still apprehensive to do so, fearing police will find a way to skirt those rules. Having police attend at all, said LeBlanc, only serves to criminalize people who use drugs.

“You can’t have it both ways, have it be a medical issue and a legal issue,” he said.

When Ottawa police were asked if they would consider honouring this request, an unnamed spokesperson from their media office said by email that “police are there because we are part of a tiered medical response.”

Other demands that organizers are putting forth: more managed opioid programs, like prescription heroin; improved mental health and addiction care in the prison system; and more grassroots overdose prevention sites to curb overdoses.

Friday is a day, said organizers, to remind people that addiction and overdoses aren’t discerning in who they affect.

“It can happen to anybody,” LeBlanc said. “Addiction knows no boundaries or borders. We need to deal with these issues in an intelligent way.”