It has been five years since B.C. declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, but the situation has deteriorated over the past 12 months with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Former BC Liberal Health Minister and Kamloops-North Thompson MLA, Terry Lake, says he never anticipated things to get worse starting in March of last year.
“It’s heartbreaking to see that five years down the road, we’re still in worse shape. I mean we started to make improvements, COVID came along and I think a combination of different factors contributed to more and more families losing members of their family to this terrible crisis,” he said, on the NL Morning News.
Through the first two months of this year, there have been 329 overdose deaths across B.C., the most ever in the first two months of any calendar year. It comes after 1,724 overdose deaths in all of 2020, the worst year on record.
“We were making progress I think because of the expansion of the harm reduction programs, the availability of naloxone, the sort of awareness campaigns that were going on, but the pandemic came along, the drug supply changed again, likely due to issues around the border, and then of course people were using drugs alone,” Lake added.
“We see more people outside sleeping rough because we don’t have a policy to put people inside during COVID. So it was a lot of different things coming together.”
Lake says he thinks it means people and government need to redouble their efforts moving forward to prevent more people from dying.
“I think there are some progressive things happening but I really think we need COVID to be behind us before we will see an improvement in the opioid crisis,” Lake added.
This morning, Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Sheila Malcolmson, says the B.C. government is in the process of making a formal application to Ottawa to decriminalize personal possession of drugs.
To date, over 7,000 people have lost their lives to an overdose in the province since the public health emergency began in 2016. In Kamloops, there have been 248 such deaths since 2011 – 219 of which have been since 2016 – including a record 60 people in 2020 alone.
