B.C. coroners issue drug death alert

VANCOUVER— An urgent warning has been sent out to illicit drug users in British Columbia after at least 11people died in the province on Thursday alone, six of them in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The warning from B.C.’s coroners’ service on Friday comes at the same time police, firefighters, politicians and health officials in Vancouver joined forces to call on the provincial government to provide treatment on demand for drug users as the death toll reaches staggering proportions.

“At least six persons died after using drugs in the Downtown Eastside in a span of only eight hours,” said the coroners’ service in a release. Five more people died throughout the rest of the province, the service said.

Police Chief Adam Palmer said his department counted nine overdose fatalities in Vancouver on Thursday night alone, but there’s nowhere for drug users to turn when they ask for help in quitting their addiction.

Palmer said that while the city led the way in 2003 by opening North America’s first supervised-injection site, treatment options are not available or wait lists are too long.

Mayor Gregor Robertson said repeatedly that giving people the overdose-reversing drug naloxone isn’t good enough, what they need is treatment to turn their lives around.

Treatment for addicts has been woefully inadequate and the city and its emergency workers can’t continue to indefinitely react to the crisis, Robertson said. Figures show 1,300 people using illicit opioids every day in the city are at immediate risk and “playing roulette” with fentanyl, he added.

The coroners’ service says from January to the end of October, 622 people died of illicit overdose deaths in the province and most of those deaths were related to the opioid fentanyl.