The International Overdose Awareness Day is being marked with ceremonies in all BC on Sunday, since the province continues to lose more than 100 people each month due to non -regulated drugs in the middle of a public health emergency that extends nine years.
The day, commemorated for the first time in 2001, aims to break the stigma that surrounds drugs and addiction while creating awareness about overdose prevention and drug policy.
In BC, where more than 16,000 people have died due to illicit drugs since a public health emergency was declared in 2016, the day is a moving reminder of the human cost of a crisis that has been highly politicized.
Guy Felicella, a former drug user who is now a dissemination worker and defender of damage reduction in the center of Vancouver in the Eastside, said that Sunday was a day to honor people whose deaths could have been avoided.
“We have to make sure that we stop this division created by political opportunism or, you know, votes, the life of the people who are fighting and begin to work together,” he told CBC News.
“This is not a partisan problem,” he added. “This is bipartisan and we should all be working together significantly because if we do not, unfortunately, this will only continue.”
The toxic drug crisis, and especially damage reduction services for drug users, have become political views.
Some politicians have criticized services such as safe consumption sites, saying that they do not help people recover from addiction.
On the other hand, they have pressed for more recovery programs, even when defenders and medical professionals argue that supervised consumption sites save lives.
Felicella said he wants to see services for expanded drug users immediately and said that there is still stigma on the way to do what is necessary to save lives.
“The government has advanced significantly in recovery services in recent years, which is excellent,” he said.
“But still, with addiction as a chronic relapse condition, and without a damage reduction safety network under that, let’s see, you know, people use sadly [drugs] alone and die. “
The most recent illicit drug death number shows that the province is registering a slight downward trend in the number of deaths of toxic drugs per day.
There were 147 deaths due to overdose in June, according to the BC Coronant Service, 185 of the previous year.
Solemn retention in Vancouver
Many defenders of people who use drugs continue to press for a regulated safe supply of illicit drugs to save lives.
Several drug users organizations commemorated the day in the Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver on Sunday afternoon, in an event that saw tributes to those killed by toxic drugs and a call to a greater reduction in damage.
“We want freedom of unjust laws, prisons and institutions that remind us of prisons, stigmatizing medical care,” said the president of the drug users network in the Vancouver area (Vandu) on Sunday.
He also requested drug legalization.
“We want a safe supply and at the end of the ban,” he added. “Respect us. Respect the individual’s agency, [the] Collective community agency “.
BC Minister of Health, Josie Osborne, said in a statement that every lost life due to the toxic drug crisis was a tragedy.
“It calls us to respond with compassion, urgently, and with the resolution to continue building a care system that avoids deaths and supports recovery,” he said.
Osborne said the government was expanding access to treatment and recovery and support services that save lives, including community -led solutions.
The Ministry added that, although it was encouraging to see the toxic drug mortality rate this year, it would not stop “doing hard work to save lives and help people follow the path to recovery.”
