Another line of cocaine was the last thing a man needed as he lay unconscious in the Paddlewheeler Pub on a busy Friday night before Christmas.
Bar manager Brad McLaren called 911 after attempts to wake up the customer were unsuccessful.
“His buddy is, ‘No, no, he’s fine man. Just leave him. His wife is coming to get him. Maybe he just needs another line,’” McLaren said. “They don’t want to get in trouble, they don’t want you to call the cops or anything like that because they are scared.”
After moving some chairs out of the way so the man could lie on the floor until first responders arrived, an off-duty paramedic, who happened to be at the pub that evening, took control of the situation, speaking to 911 and tending to the man.
“The first responders got here. When they gave him the shot of Naloxone, he sat right up,” McLaren recalled. “It was like, holy shit. For the sake of argument, you are pretty much looking at a dead guy on the floor, and then he sits right up and looks at people. They said to him, ‘Welcome back.’ It just seemed so nonchalant, and we are freaking out because it’s the first time it’s happened in the pub. An hour or two hours later, they are going to do it to somebody else. That’s just going to be part of their night shift. It’s horrible.”
While McLaren was unaware that the man had been doing drugs, he’s not surprised a customer overdosed in the pub.
“It can happen anywhere,” he said. “You don’t know where they are, when it kicks in. I don’t think there’s any rhyme nor reason where we can find them. They are playing Russian roulette right now.”
Following the incident, the Paddlewheeler Pub contacted Fraser Health about getting staff trained on the use of Naloxone.
“I had them come into the pub and train us. We now have three kits – one at the pub, one at the liquor store and a spare in my office,” said pub manager Janet Lucarino, adding that overdoses have hit close to home for pub staff. “After we had our training, one of the girls that used to come out for Monday Night Football, she was 33, she died of an overdose. Just before Christmas one of our server’s brothers overdosed and died.”
The staff training session got Lucarino thinking about how the pub could help the public learn to recognise and respond to an opioid overdose. New Westminster public health nurses are offering a presentation and providing naloxone training at the pub on Saturday, Feb. 24 at 10 a.m.
“I think it’s a great idea. If anything it’s just going to inform people,” McLaren said. “I am not one of those people who thinks we should just sweep stuff under the rug. I have four kids. It could happen to any one of them if they are at a party on a Friday or Saturday night and have had a few drinks and want to try something different. It all depends if that bullet is in the chamber, it seems like. I know friends that have lost kids. I do not want to bury a child.”
If people feel awkward about attending a presentation about the opioid crisis and overdoses, Lucarino said they could just happen to be having breakfast at the pub on Saturday morning.
“It’s a random place that nobody would suspect,” she said. “I just feel it is so important.”
A recent survey by Angus Reid Institute found that 12 per cent of Canadians – or nearly 3.5 million Canadian adults – say they have close friends or family members who have become dependent on opioids in the last five years.
New Westminster MLA Judy Darcy, the province’s minister of mental health and addictions, recently told the Record about 22 people have died of overdoses during the current crisis.
According to the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, take-home naloxone kits have been reported to be used to reverse more than 11,000 overdoses in B.C. Naloxone reverses life-threatening respiratory depression due to an overdose from opioids, such as heroin, methadone, fentanyl and morphine; when administered along with rescue breaths, naloxone can restore breathing within a few minutes.
“Don’t let fentanyl kill you or someone you love,” says a poster about the event. “Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate painkiller that is much stronger than heroin and more potent than OxyContin. It’s cheap and incredibly deadly. In fact, it is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. Learn about recognizing and responding to an opioid overdose.”
