Advocates descended on the British Columbia legislature on Monday to cap a weekend of demonstrations on Vancouver Island marking International Overdose Awareness Day.
Demonstrators laid down a long line of photos memorializing some of the thousands of British Columbians whose lives have been lost to drugs.
Among the faces on the legislature steps was Moms Stop the Harm organizer Jan Mahoney’s son Michael, who died in 2018.
“We’re worse in a lot of ways because the toxicity of the drugs has gotten worse, so I don’t really see a lot improvement,” Mahoney said.
“There’s been a few minor things that have helped, but we have a long, long way to go yet and it’s hard not to feel a little bit depressed.”
Since 2016 — the year B.C. declared a public health emergency amid surging overdoses — more than 17,000 people have died from toxic drugs.
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The crisis has become a hot political issue, capable of stirring up intense emotion from people on all sides.
“Now that I’m retired, I don’t have to follow the party line, although I never really did follow the political party line,” said former chief coroner Lisa Lapointe.
“Absolutely I consider myself an activist. It’s not a role that a chief coroner normally takes, but then again, one of the tenets of the coroner’s service is to investigate, to prevent future deaths, so this is a carry-on of that work, trying to advocate to prevent future deaths.“
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LaPointe believes a regulated “safer supply” of drugs is critical to stop the mounting death toll — up to six people per day in B.C. — by eliminated the toxic and tainted street supply.
Critics, including the Opposition BC Conservatives, have attacked the safer supply program, arguing that significant amounts of prescribed alternatives, such as hydromorphone, are being diverted onto the black market.
In February, the B.C. government overhauled the program, moving away from a model that let drug users take their pills home and replacing it with a “witness model” requiring patients to take their drugs under the watch of health-care workers.
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The Ministry of Health maintains the program has helped separate people from the unregulated drug supply, manage their substance use and withdrawal symptoms, while helping connect them to voluntary health and social supports, including substance-use treatment.
But she argued while the province has taken small steps towards a more compassionate response to the drug crisis, the result has been “more of the same” reliance on criminalizing drug use and pouring resources into police and courts to deal with the problem.
“This is a health issue and absolutely we need to treat people in our communities who struggle with it compassionately. People are owed respect and they need to have dignity,” she said.
“People who use drugs are not our enemies. They are members of our families struggling with a health condition and treating them like the enemy has been disaster.”
Both women said they believe in treatment and recovery — with a caveat.
“I’m in favor of treatment recovery, but it has to be evidence-based treatment,” Mahoney said.
“It’s like the Wild West out there.”
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The former chief coroner agreed, calling on the province to legislate standards for treatment, including legal requirements to report on outcomes.
“There are no treatment standards and there are there is no data for outcome reporting, so all of these residential treatment centres that are costing families tens of thousands of dollars are not required to report their results,” she said.
“We know that many people die following treatment or during treatment, so until we get the treatment system in order — which our government has shown no interest in doing to this point — just to think that treatment is going to get us out of this crisis is a bit of a fool’s game.“
In the interim, advocates say harm reduction approaches, including access to a regulated safer supply of drugs, is necessary to keep families’ loved ones alive.
“People can think, ‘Well, you know, it’s not my family member,’ but you never know. I never thought my son would have a problem with substance use,” Mahoney said.
“But he got put on Oxycontin at the age of 13 by doctors at the pain clinic at Stanford Children’s Hospital.
“Unbeknownst to me, that was the beginning of the end for him.”
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