Chances of surviving an opioid overdose? Depends where you live
The day after one of his closest friends died alone in his bedroom from an opioid overdose, Brandon Bailey started sharing his cellphone number across social media.
The recovered drug addict from Windsor, Ont., has a message for other users: If you’re going to use, call me.
“I will come to you and make sure that you are safe,” Bailey wrote in a Facebook post.
Bailey, a member of the Windsor Overdose Prevention Society, said he’s been frustrated by a lack of overdose prevention services such as safe-consumption sites in his city, and he wants to ensure the overdose-reversing drug naloxone is within arms reach for anyone at risk. Since his November post on Facebook, he also has distributed his cellphone number on flyers.
“We need to be doing something,” he said.
The overdose crisis has devastated communities across Canada and is being credited with slowing the progress of life-expectancy, which had risen three years between 2000 and 2016.
Opioids killed an estimated 9,000 people in Canada between January 2016 and June 2018, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. About 94 per cent of those deaths were deemed accidental and almost three-quarters involved the powerful opioid fentanyl.
But access to overdose prevention services varies geographically, prompting some advocates to say a person’s chances of surviving an overdose depends on where he or she lives.
There are eight approved supervised consumption sites in B.C., nine in Ontario, six in Alberta, four in Quebec, and none elsewhere, according to Health Canada.
Supervised consumption sites allow people to use their drugs under medical supervision, many of which provide testing for fentanyl contamination and access to sterile equipment.
Naloxone is now available for purchase at pharmacies in every province and territory except Alberta, Yukon and Nunavut, the Canadian Pharmacists Association said.
Access to the free, takehome naloxone kits is more varied, with Quebec offering the nasal spray to anyone over 14 through pharmacies, New Brunswick giving naloxone to other sites like health and social services, and B.C. offering free access to people at risk of overdosing, those likely to witness an overdose and to First Nations.
Jordan Westfall, executive director for the Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs, said rural and remote areas are particularly underserved.
“There are large parts of the country that don’t have these services pretty much at all. These are lifelines for people at risk of overdosing that aren’t accessible to people,” Westfall said.
A lack of education and political will have been the biggest challenges to preventing overdose deaths, he said. Unlike other health-care decisions that are based on data, the question of allowing services such as supervised consumption sites is often put before the public, he said.
“In a lot of cases, we’ve put human lives up for public consultation. That’s kind of a metaphor for how we treat the health care of people who use drugs, which is stigmatized in society,” Westfall said.