Pandemic taking deadly toll on users of illicit drugs
‘We supply one addiction yet turn our back on another’
A frank obituary for a Victoria man who died of an overdose lays bare the added harm the novel coronavirus has brought to people who use illicit drugs.
Samuel Stuart died alone on May 3, leaving behind his mother Judith, father Stanley and sister Lisa. The 44-year-old had suffered from schizoaffective disorder and used street drugs to self-medicate, according to his loved ones.
“Many of us are encircled in grief, standing but crumbling,” Judith Stuart wrote in his Victoria Times Colonist obit.
“The homeless, those suffering from mental illness, the abused, the dispirited are left aside. With borders closed and a shutdown surrounding us, how does a loved one get safe supply? What is the matter with us that we supply one addiction yet turn our back on another addiction?”
His death followed the deadliest two months of B.C.’s overdose-related public health emergency since late 2018. In March, 112 people died of illicit-drug toxicity and 117 more died in April, a sharp rise from 2019’s monthly average of 81.5 deaths, according to a new B.C. Coroners Service report.
Fentanyl was detected in 71 per cent of deaths in 2020, down from 85 per cent last year, according to preliminary numbers.
But Stuart’s family and officials across the province remain concerned by damage done by the pandemic to the illicit-drug supply.
Earlier this month, B.C.’s provincial health officer said the closure of the U.S.-Canada border in March to non-essential travel had slowed the smuggling of drugs, leading to the supply being cut with “different things” and manufactured locally with increased toxicity.
During her daily COVID-19 update on Thursday, Dr. Bonnie Henry offered her condolences to the families grieving over loved ones lost to overdoses, adding that she would continue to push for the decriminalization of people possessing small amounts of drugs for personal use.
“People are not forgotten,” Henry said. “We know that we need to continue our activities to ensure that there is access to a safer supply of drugs.”
Judith said Thursday that her son had been a brilliant child who struggled when he entered school and when he found cannabis as a teen. His behaviour suggested he had bipolar disorder from an early age, she said.
In recent years, they would stroll down Pandora Street and notice
scraps of foil discarded by others who used crystal meth like him. A week before he died in his assisted living unit, they talked about the heightened risk of overdose.
When Judith last heard from her son, he reminded her that he loved her, she said.
“You can’t change a person’s path … but you can make that path safer, and that’s what we should be doing,” Judith said. “We have to recognize that people are addicted to things. Some people are addicted to aspirin or to alcohol or whatever, and you can go and you can get that.”
You can’t change a person’s path ... but you can make it safer, and that’s what we should be doing.
In March, the B.C. government announced new prescribing guidelines in light of COVID-19 from the B.C. Centre on Substance Use for doctors and nurses, allowing patients to receive substitutes for opioids, stimulants and other substances. But practitioners have been reluctant to prescribe them, in part because of liability concerns, according to a Globe and Mail report last week.
Meanwhile, the increased presence of benzodiazepines in the street drug supply has been a major cause for concern. Unlike opioids such as heroin and fentanyl,
benzodiazepines do not respond to naloxone, making it far more difficult to reverse the effects of an overdose.
Cheyenne Johnson of the B.C. Centre on Substance Use said they have been responding to “very difficult, hard-to-resuscitate overdoses, which clearly indicates that the supply is very, very potent and very toxic.” As well, physical distancing requirements have impeded access to harm-reduction services such as overdose prevention sites, Johnson said.