Stigma prevents people from accessing services
People dying of drug overdoses are often employed, living in a private home and using alone, highlighting the impact of stigma on people’s lives, says Dr. Silvina Mema, medical health officer with Interior Health.
The BC Coroners Service released a report Thursday analyzing the 872 completed illicit overdose death investigations in 2016 and 2017 across the province. The service estimated those deaths accounted for 35 per cent of the total suspected overdose deaths.
In the report, 44 per cent of the 872 people who died were employed at the time of their death.
In the Interior Health region, 55 per cent of the employed people who died from an overdose were employed in the trades and transport sector.
In addition, 70 per cent of all the people who died overdosed in a private home in the Interior, followed by nine per cent in a hotel or a motel and eight per cent outside, and 64 per cent of people were using alone.
“What I think this tells us is . . . the people that are using and dying are people like us — people that have a job, that have a house,” said Mema.
While services such as the mobile supervised drug consumption site in Kelowna are reaching many people, they are focused on marginalized and homeless people, said Mema.
“We are not doing a good job at getting at people who use alone,” she said.
Interior Health launched a campaign in April providing drug users a place to provide feedback and get information about available resources for harm reduction and mental health.
“What we heard . . . was that stigma prevents people from accessing services, from asking someone to watch them or to keep an eye on them,” said Mema. “Stigma prevents people from accessing services (and) from being safe.”
Many drug users are also taking on that stigma themselves, feeling not worthy of asking for help, she said.
Interior Health is currently exploring options to reduce the stigma not only in the community, but also in health-care settings.
“We need to make sure that our staff are aware of how stigma prevents people from accessing services,” said Mema.
The BC Coroners Service report also found that 79 per cent of people who died from an overdose in 2016 and 2017 in the Interior Health region had accessed some form of health services in the year preceding their death.
“This tells me there is an opportunity that we are probably missing to do more for our own clients,” said Mema. “These are our patients, and why are we not able to provide the services that they need and keep them safe?”
Interior Health was the only health region where the most common mode of consumption among those who died in 2016 and 2017 was intranasal use, at 43 per cent.
The next most common modes of consumption of drugs in the Interior were injection, at 38 per cent, smoking, at 36 per cent, and orally, at 14 per cent.
“Some people may think it’s safer to smoke than to inject, and that’s absolutely not the case,” said Mema. “Smoking, snorting, injecting and oral consumption are all modes of consumption that are dangerous.”
In the 872 drug overdose deaths across B.C. in 2016 and 2017, fentanyl was detected in 76 per cent of them, making it the most common drug detected.
In Kelowna, there were 40 illicit drug overdose deaths from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31 this year, compared to 256 in Vancouver, 131 in Surrey and 64 in Victoria.
Across Interior Health, there were 16 overdose deaths in August, down one from July and down from 26 deaths in August 2017.
This past August was also the first time the provincial overdose death count has been below 100 since October 2017.
So far this year, there have been 160 overdose deaths in the Interior Health region, at a rate of 31.7 deaths per 100,000 people.
Although the number of deaths has gone down, officials are not looking at this as a trend just yet.
“We are cautiously optimistic when we see the numbers decline,” said Mema. “We’ve been here in the past, and then it was back to a higher number of deaths.”