It’s not working. There have been big outlays of new money, new programs have been slapped together on an emergency basis and front-line people are running flat-out to deal with the overdose epidemic in B.C.
There are several ways to measure the effectiveness, but the core metric is the body count. That’s the measure that has defined the crisis for the past two years or so. It’s the main indicator that prompted the government’s response. And it’s the number the government has been using to judge whether the response is working.
By the latest monthly measure of fatalities directly attributed to illicit-drug overdoses, it’s simply not working.
Wednesday’s update brought home once again in shocking fashion how bad the overdose crisis is. Health Minister Terry Lake and provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall both acknowledged that they thought they had turned a corner after months of mounting casualties. But December was the worst month in history for overdose deaths, with 142, including 11 in one day.
Any expectation of turning a corner vanished, as the year-end total of 914 deaths was disclosed. That’s 80 per cent higher than last year. That’s despite the system running for eight months under the declaration of a public-health emergency, the first one in B.C.’s history.
Officials were stunned when overdose deaths surpassed motor-vehicle crashes in the 2016 cause-of-death statistics. But that was months ago and the count kept climbing.
During an hour-long briefing on how the fentanyl contamination of the illicit-drug scene in B.C. is killing so many people, the only positive note officials could offer was that it would be much worse without the measures taken to date.
Prevention measures have reversed hundreds of overdoses, although the number of lives saved is hard to quantify.
But that point perversely underscores how bad it really is. Tens of millions of dollars and the efforts of hundreds of people have only managed to slow the rate of increase in the death toll.
The death count specifically for December is particularly frightening because by then, the emergency measures were mostly up and running.
Twenty OD prevention sites were opened that month, and had counted more than 5,000 visits. A mobile medical unit started mid-month in Vancouver. More than 20,000 naloxone kits were distributed by then.
Yet 14 more people died of overdoses than in November, when 61 more people died than in October.
The government has been justly criticized in the past for shorting treatment programs. But this isn’t to second-guess all the thinking that’s gone into the response, or to dismiss the efforts to date. It’s just to register the stark alarm that’s starting to sink in at the enormity of the impact of the epidemic.
Lake is now urging Ottawa to declare a federal health emergency. With fentanyl seeping eastward day by day, that would be the bare minimum required.
Ontario and Quebec are not going to know what hit them if fentanyl has the same impact there that it’s having here.
The frightening statistics prompted another desperate infusion of new money to deal with the crisis. Another $16 million was earmarked Wednesday for treatment services in the short-term. It will go to new beds, intensive outpatient treatment and widening the availability of subsidized addiction medication.
By spring, the full force of the response to date will have kicked in, representing $64 million worth of resources, much of it fixed in programs that will need funding in future years, as well.
You can’t spend that kind of money without having some positive impact. But neither the minister, the public health officer nor the chief coroner were ready to predict a corresponding drop in the death toll. Chief coroner Lisa Lapointe said the crisis has exposed how deeply entrenched illicit-drug use is throughout society. It will take a long-term strategy of education, treatment, prevention and harm reduction, she said.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be an overnight kind of change.”
Taking the most optimistic possible outlook, Lake said the tragedy is a chance to “turn a new page” and boost addiction treatment. For the survivors.
