Overdose victims are not faceless statistics

The fentanyl crisis and its death toll did not arrive suddenly, but it has taken a painfully long time for our response to catch up to the seriousness of the threat.

Victoria police Staff Sgt. Conor King recently wrote about a cluster of overdoses in that city caused by a potent type of heroin in the spring of 2013. It turned out to be laced with fentanyl.

He joined police officers from across North America to talk about the dangers of this lethal new drug. Experts inside and outside law enforcement predicted that it was going to mushroom — and they were right.

By December 2015, King wrote, people in B.C. were dying every day of overdoses.

Bruce Wallace, a University of Victoria researcher, seeing the same figures, warned that public-health messages wouldn’t be enough to stem the rapidly growing crisis. He called for “comprehensive harm-reduction services … including supervised-consumption services.”

The toll mounted. In the past 3 1/2 years, fentanyl has killed more than 1,000 people in B.C.

In April, Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall declared a health emergency. The province, regional health authorities, the federal government and other agencies have moved in the past six months to try to stop the deaths, making the antidote naloxone more widely available, but first responders are becoming overwhelmed by the number of overdoses.

In November, the average now is up to four overdose deaths a day. The machinery of government has not been able to keep up with the increase.

The previous federal government’s opposition to supervised-consumption sites made it harder to take action.

The most basic life-saving measures — supervised drugconsumption sites — are still moving through the federal application process, even though the new federal government has said it is willing to approve them.

In desperation, health authorities like Interior Health and Island Health, have set up overdose-prevention sites, similar to supervised-consumption sites, but without the added programs and health services seen at facilities such as InSite in Vancouver.

If the killer were a virus instead of an illegal drug, would it have taken almost four years to bring in major changes to save lives? It seems unlikely. Those faceless drug users had too few people going to bat for them.

On Tuesday, the Victoria Times Colonist wrote about Beth Klimek, 17, who died of a suspected drug overdose four days before Christmas. Some people asked why the newspaper would print a story about her death. It’s because she was a real human being, like others who have died in this epidemic. She had a name and a face and a life and people who loved her. She was one of those 1,000, but she was not a number.

Her story helped put a human face on the epidemic. Their loved ones know the faces. So do outreach workers and first responders who see many of them. The rest of us are often too far away from the reality.

It’s too late for Klimek and 1,000 more. There are others, though, who can be saved.

— Victoria Times Colonist