As the overdose crisis continues to rage the Interior Health Authority is shifting its focus to try and make inroads on a vulnerable group of drug users.
Medical Health Officer Dr. Karin Goodison says, the supervised injection sites are making inroads among addicts and have saved countless lives.
But Goodison says Interior Health is growing increasingly worried about addicts who aren’t showing up at those sites.
“The challenge we are having is that there are people using at home alone and who don’t want to reveal their use for fear of stigma, losing jobs, that sort of thing. Really our focus now is on how do we access this population and how do we help them to stay safe? The simplest thing would of course be to be able to remove fentanyl from the illicit drug supply but unfortunately we do not have control over that.”
Illicit drug overdoses continue to claim lives at an average of four a day in the province, killing 511 people in the first four months of the year.