FIGHT AGAINST FENTANYL
Mother Sherri Dolk, Ontario police chiefs, Humber students spread message about the drug’s devastating effects,
Cole Lockie was trying to change his life so he could be a father to his 3-year-old daughter, Sophia. He’d asked his mother to start calling him Andrew, his middle name, as a symbol of change.
But just two days later, he accidentally overdosed on fentanyl.
Lockie, along with four other Canadian youths, are now the faces of a fentanyl awareness campaign launched Tuesday at Humber College by the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police.
The campaign details the dangers and deaths of the drug in the form of a website, facethefentanyl.ca, created by students in the college’s creative advertising program.
It comes at a time when experts say the rising number of overdoses, deemed the second leading cause of death among young people in Ontario, has reached a crisis point and more needs to be done to prevent them.
Speaking at the launch, Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders said the campaign is “just a starting point for this very issue . . . we can’t just arrest our way through this thing.”
The website includes the profiles of Tina Espey, 19, Cole Lockie, 21, Tyler Campbell, 17, Jake Bodie, 17, and Jessie Kolb, 24, as well as resources and information about overdoses and fentanyl.
Espey’s mother, Sherri Dolk, who has been speaking out about the drug, said it’s important for people to know what fentanyl, vastly more potent than morphine, can do.
“Tina might be alive today if she had known more about the dangers of fentanyl,” Dolk said, who described her daughter as an intelligent and active young woman. “It took her from a carefree girl who loved her family and friends, to a girl who couldn’t function without it.”
Fentanyl is a powerful opioid up to 40 times more than heroin. It is often prescribed in the form of a slow- release patch for chronic pain. It has become popular among opioid users — and linked to a wave of fatal overdoses — and has also been found mixed in heroin and OxyContin pills.
Toronto city Councillor Joe Cressy, chair of the Toronto Drug Strategy, also spoke at the event, saying the campaign is one of many initiatives to bring the issue forward. “Drug use is complex . . . drug policy, therefore, must also be complex,” Cressy said.
He pointed out that the coroner’s office released overdose death statistics for 2014 Monday, which showed a 22-per-cent increase in overdose deaths in Toronto. “The painfully sad reality is we know and can assume that it’s even higher in 2015,” the councillor told the Star afterward.
In an earlier interview on the subject, Cressy called the increase in overdoses a crisis “which is literally killing young Ontarians at a disturb- ing rate, and it requires urgent and comprehensive action on the part of all levels of government.”
Experts from across Ontario including members of Toronto Public Health have made calls for wider access to naloxone, a life-saving drug, but say the ministry has yet to act.
Naloxone temporarily reverses the effects of an overdose, allowing time for a user to get help, similar to an EpiPen. It has been deemed “essen- tial” by the World Health Organization, but Susan Shepherd, manager of Toronto’s drug strategy, says more than just drug users need access to it.
The calls for access include adding naloxone to Ontario’s drug benefit plan, and letting nurses and pharmacists prescribe it. “It’s hard — I wish naloxone had been out there back then,” Dolk said after the event.
“A lot more people would be alive if naloxone was (more) available.”