Alberta opioid crisis ‘completely out of control’: overdose advocate
Posted Oct 10, 2021 10:52 am.
CALGARY (CityNews) ─ The opioid crisis in Alberta is killing more people than it ever has, and those close to the issue say without action, the disturbing trend is here to stay.
New data from the Alberta government shows 898 Albertans died of a drug overdose between January and July. Of those deaths, 96 per cent can be attributed to opioids.
That’s compared to 735 deaths over the same seven-month period last year.
“These numbers are staggering. We’re already in a position where this crisis has spun completely out of control,” said overdose advocate Euan Thomson.
“Without serious and concerted efforts on many fronts, including supervised consumption sites, safe supply initiative and a massive expansion of harm-reduction services to way beyond where they were in 2019 − which has been cut down significantly − we’re going to see continued deaths.”
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Jason Kenney’s UCP government has put a large focus on recovery and abstinence programs, while taking funding away from supervised consumptions sites and supplying safe substances.
Ophelia Cara, a client of the SafeWorks harm reduction program, says after being addicted to heroine for years, the program has given her some normalcy.
“I was very lucky that I managed to find a doctor who has managed to prescribe me Dilaudid,” said Cara, who uses social media to help de-stigmatize harm reduction. “There have been some significant changes happening in my life.”
“I take about 24 milligrams in the morning, so that’s a very sizeable dose of Dilaudid. And I’m on it right now. I’m able to speak properly, I’m able to work, I’m able to be productive and it doesn’t interfere with my life in any of those negative ways.”
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Meanwhile, Thomson says front-line workers are in the trenches, begging for more to be done.
“There’s a ton of burnout going on right now,” he said. “People are working similar to what we’re seeing in the COVID crisis in the hospitals, it’s paralleled in the harm reduction world where you’ve got front-line workers where they could normally be helping people with housing or medical needs, they’re right now just in emergency mode all the time responding to overdoses in the streets.”
Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Mike Ellis says “Alberta’s government is exploring options for new supervised consumption services (SCS) in underserved areas of Edmonton.”
The opposition NDP’s Lori Sigurdson said her party is proposing providing safe, regulated alternatives to highly toxic and illegal street drugs, and making drug testing easily available.
