Overdose deaths bring call to listen to young
Twenty-four children between the ages of 10 and 18 died of overdoses last year, a number which B.C.’s representative for children and youth said could be reduced if more of a focus was placed on harm reduction services.
Victoria social agencies echoed this call, saying that too often the focus is on abstinence-based treatment that might deter young people from reaching out for help.
Jennifer Charlesworth released a report to the B.C. government called “Time to Listen: Youth Voices on Substance Use” in which 100 youth were surveyed on what changes could make them safer.
Of the 1,452 people who died of illicit drug overdoses last year in B.C., 24 were between 10 and 18 years old, double the number of youth who died the previous year. Charlesworth’s office also reviewed 154 substance-related critical illness and death reports from 2017.
“We must face the reality today that too many youth in B.C. with significant substance-use issues are overdosing and, tragically, some are dying,” said Charlesworth. “Many are not safe, in part because of the inadequacies of our current system of substance-use supports, and additional help must be offered to make these young people safer.”
Charlesworth is advocating for a comprehensive system that offers services such as education to prevent youth from taking drugs in the first place, information on safer substance use, the development of safe-consumption sites for youth and a one-stop-shop for information on publiclyfunded services.
Researchers spoke to youth who said they were turned away from needle exchanges and felt unsafe in adult safe-consumption sites. This doesn’t come as a surprise to Heather Hobbs, manager of harm-reduction services for AIDS Vancouver Island.
Hobbs has long been concerned about the lack of safe, supervised spaces for youth to use drugs. The alternative is that they will use alone, which creates a higher risk of a fatal overdose.
AIDS Vancouver Island has an overdose prevention service which allows access to people under 19, Hobbs said, but the agency must follow stricter provincial guidelines to ensure there’s informed consent and there are no child-welfare issues.
“For youth who are already using substances and are coming to access safe drug supplies, it doesn’t feel like we’re the most appropriate place to be and we have nowhere to send youth,” Hobbs said.
Colin Tessier, executive director for Threshold Housing Society, an agency that serves homeless youth, said there’s a greater stigma around substance abuse for young people. “Quite often when people think of youth, there’s a values-based judgment that takes someone’s mind directly to abstinence,” he said. Tessier said that fails to acknowledge the root causes of addiction, which often involve trauma.
Many youth who participated in focus groups for the report said they turned to drugs to numb emotional pain caused by events in their lives. The critical illness and death reports showed that 86 per cent of youth had experienced a trauma.
“If the system does not acknowledge that this is their history and their story, you limit the strategies and the doors open to youth and you isolate them further from support in the community,” Tessier said. He cited Foundry Victoria as a positive example of a service that provides wraparound care for youth with physical, mental-health and addictions issues.
The report made five recommendations to the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Children and Family Development.
They include: • Embed youth engagement into the province’s Mental Health and Addictions Strategy. • Create an accessible and youth friendly single source of information about all publicly funded youth substance-use services in the province. • Create a comprehensive system of substance-use services that meet the diverse needs of youth, including culturally specific programs for Indigenous youth. • Create youth-specific harm reduction services, including youth-specific spaces for supervised consumption. • Implement a training program to help foster parents build skills for open dialogue with youth about substance use.