Losing the war on drugs

Send addicts immediately to treatment; bust dealers

Holiday Mondays are ordinarily a quiet time to work around The Herald office, especially early in the morning. That wasn’t the case yesterday as a a Good Samaratan was greeted in our back alley by a woman passed out, looking nearly dead, as a result of what appeared to be a drug overdose.

I pulled in a few minutes afterward, having been passed on Winnipeg Street by an ambulance.

A 911 call and five emergency personnel responded, reviving the woman before taking her away voluntarily, presumably to the hospital for treatment.

What we witnessed, although foreign to many of us, was an all-too-common occurrence — not only in Penticton but all across Canada.

The drug crisis is real. It’s also expensive to treat (how much does an ambulance and a fire truck cost these days?), and society is losing the war on drugs.

David Prystay, manager of the Penticton Lakeside Resort where they trained 20 staff members on how to administer naloxone, said there were three cases alone in less than a month at neighbouring Okanagan Lake Park of near-fatal overdoses. The three he referenced were the ones he knew about.

Our system needs to be more vigilant on those who use narcotics which have the potential to be fatal. Patients should immediately be transferred to the hospital and entered into a rehab program.

Meanwhile, the courts can’t be lenient on the dealers. Whoever is selling this is not only getting rich, they’re killing people.

Another thought: it’s not as simple as just throwing money at a wall and hoping something sticks.

An independent study needs to be done that shows whether government and charitable money is actually going to treatment and not to administrative salaries.

Fentanyl is a serious issue, and it’s not going away overnight.