Overdose crisis the topic of emergency meeting

Pathways Addictions Resource Centre sponsoring meeting at Okanagan College Wednesday evening

An emergency town hall meeting is set for Wednesday to discuss the growing crisis of drug overdoses in Penticton.

Pathways Addictions Resource Centre is sponsoring the meeting at 7 p.m. at Okanagan College, where a panel of experts from the community will take questions.

“Our goal is to provide education to the public on what we know, what is being done and what people can do in regards to the overdose crisis,” said Pathways agency director Daryl Meyers.

The evening will begin with a short video produced by the Provincial Harm Reduction Program, after which panel members will answer questions put to them in writing by members of the audience.

Panelists will include the regional harm reduction co-ordinator, an Interior Health medical health officer, Penticton’s fire chief, a representative from the RCMP, a counsellor and outreach worker from Pathways, a pharmacist and BC Ambulance’s manager of patient care and delivery.

The meeting comes as Penticton and the rest of B.C. deal with a rash of overdoses, mainly tied to fentanyl.

In November, the Penticton RCMP were called to at least two dozen overdoses in a two-week span, a pace a veteran officer described at the time as unlike anything he’d ever seen in his career.

Most of the victims were revived using naloxone, which reverses the effects of opioid drugs, but at least one person died. The 43-yearold woman succumbed Nov. 21 in her room at the Black Forest Motel.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid pain reliever 50 times more powerful than morphine, was linked to the deaths of 332 people in this province alone — including 28 in the Okanagan — through the first 10 months of the year, the BC Coroners Service has reported.

That marked a 196 per cent increase from the same year-ago period.