Talking about the drug crisis might not be answer IH seeks

Ever wonder who’s to blame for the fentanyl crisis and Kelowna’s status as an overdose capital of Canada? It’s not the Chinese makers of the killer drug. It’s not the drug dealers who add it to cocaine and heroin. It’s not the people who use illegal drugs. It’s not the enabling attitude of health-care providers. It’s you. You’re not compassionate enough. You don’t understand the many reasons why people use drugs that might well kill them. You don’t talk enough with your friends, neighbours and co-workers about the opioid crisis.

This was basically the message delivered by 10 senior Interior Health managers to Kelowna city council on Monday.

If you had shown up expecting an hour-long discussion about the opioid drug crisis might possibly include a few ideas about how people could be persuaded to stop using hard drugs, you were in the wrong place.

Actually, the idea of quitting drugs was dismissed by health-care experts.

In response to a reasonable question from Coun. Luke Stack about Interior Health’s laggard approach to opening more detox beds in Kelowna, it was suggested by the experts these facilities might do more harm than good.

The reason? As they get clean, a drug user’s tolerance to substances like heroin and cocaine diminishes. But they don’t know this, the health experts say, so when they relapse and take drugs again, at the dose they previously used, it can kill them.

If this is true — and I suppose it must be if detoxed drug users are totally incapable of making even the most rudimentary decisions about how much of an illicit substance to ingest, should they start using again — it’s got to be the most sobering news to come out of the opioid crisis.

Basically, the health experts are saying with this information, quitting drugs cold turkey is not the solution to the drug problem. So what is?

Good question. The health-care experts did say they are trying to get more illicit drug alternatives, such as methadone and suboxone, into the hands of users more quickly than has been the case in the past.

This strikes me as the kind of reasonable and compassionate response we would expect of health-care providers in a time when street drugs are particularly deadly. It might be the only response that has any positive effect.

Beyond that, the health-care experts were full of the opinion we should all be talking a lot more about the opioid crisis, and that something good would certainly come out of that discussion.

“We need people from all sectors to actually talk about how this is impacting people,” said Dr. Trevor Corneil, an IH vice-president.

The opioid crisis has been a permanent feature of the news cycle for more than a year now, and if it’s not sparking enough impassioned conversations in homes, businesses, social clubs and churches for IH’s liking, there’s got to be a reason.

The likely reason, as Coun. Ryan Donn was brave enough to suggest, is that there just isn’t a lot of compassion out there for people who take illegal drugs, much of which they have to know is now poisoned by fentanyl, and die of an overdose as a result.

To be clear, Donn wasn’t expressing that hard-hearted sentiment himself. He was remarking on what he finds to be a fairly widespread sentiment. Anyone who’s spoken with anyone else about the issue could honestly say the same thing.

This, then, is what Interior Health risks if the community does indeed take up the organization’s challenge/demand to talk more about the opioid crisis and say what they really think about it.

You can’t force people to talk about something. And you surely can’t predict what they might say if they do start talking.

Ron Seymour is a reporter with the Kelowna Daily Courier.