Opioid crisis victims are people, not statistics
NDP Leader John Horgan held a town-hall meeting in Victoria in April, and I got a chance to ask a question.
“John, 914 human beings died here last year of drug overdoses and my child was one of them. What will our party do about that when we form the government?”
The answer was gratifying because it came slowly. First, Horgan spoke to me as a father and expressed his condolences without rushing into some glib reply. Then he spoke of the intention of the NDP to create a Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction so that in this province at least, there would be a clear line of responsibility for realizing some solutions to this national crisis. He did not pretend to know those solutions, but he promised to get to work on them.
Well, death continues to stalk this land. Fentanyl and its cohort of poisonous opioids have killed more than 500 individuals in our province already, and Health Canada proclaims that we are on course to top 1,400 deaths nationwide again this year. But it isn’t a contest, and although we number people, people are not numbers.
Teenagers popping something to jazz up the concert experience, children of cops and preachers and teachers and shopkeepers, middle-aged and elders, and yes, even the homeless men, women and children on our streets — all are becoming part of the deadly “opioid crisis” statistic.
Victims are not, however, mere statistics to their families, and Health Canada cannot solve the problem when over 70 per cent of fatal overdoses occur in private homes.
Only a radical shift in attitude can begin to erase the stigma clouding the issue of drug use and slow the body count, and that shift begins with caring.
I want you to care. Someone in your family could be next. The statistics might tell you that 200 people have died to date in Victoria, but not one of those 200 is just a statistic to those who loved them. Care enough to demand safe-consumption sites be available to the chronically relapsing people who use drugs.
Care that our first responders, the paramedics, have been blocked from negotiating pay raises so that we might now wait hours for a response to a house call because of staff or vehicle shortages.
Care that most of those who die of overdoses will do so because they used alone at home, and keep talking about how deadly that practice is to anyone who will listen until the stigma around the use of drugs starts to dissolve.
Care that so many citizens live with chronic pain and need informed, compassionate medical assistance beyond the walk-in clinic and prescription pad. Just care. On July 31, we who especially care, the family, friends and lovers of the dead — casualties of the War on Drugs — will gather in Centennial Square to mark the beginning of a month of remembrance and action leading up to Aug. 31, International Overdose Awareness Day.
It is perhaps oversimplifying to say that parties campaign on promises but have to govern on facts, even when we have such ghastly facts to address. I invite you to step up to confront the unpleasant facts of our rising overdose death toll and use all of the resources we have to stop it.
We are a community of caring for people, not profits, and it is people like my child who are dying.
Derek Peach is a retired teacher whose daughter died of a drug overdose. He has advocated for a compassionate, evidence-based approach to opioid addiction with the view that it belongs in health care rather than criminal justice.