A New Westminster non-profit will soon have a new way to help stem the surge of drug overdose deaths that led the province to declare a public health emergency last month.
Local illicit drug overdose deaths jumped from one in 2007 to 11 last year, according to new data released by the B.C. Coroners Service last week.
The increase mirrors a similar spike provincewide – with fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller 100 times more potent than morphine, accounting for or contributing to a growing percentage of the deaths.
In 2012, fentanyl was detected – alone or in combination with other drugs – in five per cent of overdose deaths in the province. In 2015, that figure shot up to 32 per cent.
For Lynda Fletcher-Gordon, program director for the Stride Program at the Lower Mainland Purpose Society, fentanyl is a game changer, and her organization is in the final stages of becoming a designated distributor of naloxone, a drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose within minutes.
Stride outreach workers distribute harm-reduction information and supplies, like clean needles, antiseptic swabs and condoms, from a mobile health unit in a number of Fraser Health communities.
Fletcher-Gordon said the importance of equipping these workers with naloxone kits was driven home in the tent city erected by homeless campers in Maple Ridge last year.
“Our people were going in there, and people were overdosing in front of them,” she said. “It’s scary for workers who are not medical people; they’re not paramedics, but somebody’s dying in front of them. It just seemed to us, especially with the fentanyl going on the way it is, that it was a really necessary thing to do.”
Naloxone kits will be provided by the B.C. Centre of Disease Control, and outreach workers will be trained to administer the drug.
But naloxone alone won’t stop the spike in overdose deaths, according to Fraser Health harm reduction coordinator Erin Gibson.
“Naloxone can’t be the only answer that we have in our basket of options for preventing and responding to the overdose epidemic,” she told the Record.
Another important piece, Gibson said, is raising public awareness about how to prevent, recognize and respond to an overdose – something that often requires overcoming the stigma and social isolation experienced by drug users.
“You can maybe stand and watch them for a little and see if they’re taking steady, even breaths that are happening at least every five seconds,” said Gibson about responding to an individual who might be overdosing. “At some point I think it’s important to maybe say, ‘Excuse me. I’m concerned about you,’ before you touch them.”
Penetrating the social isolation that makes illicit drug users vulnerable during an overdose is a key part of Stride’s work, according to Fletcher-Gordon.
“For us, harm reduction is the first point of contact,” she said. “Yeah, we give a clean needle, but at the same time it’s about way more than that. It’s about connection, relationship building. You hope that that clean needle is going to lead to a conversation and a conversation and a conversation, and one day that person’s going to say, ‘Help me. I need to get out of there.’ And you’re there and you help to make it happen.”
For more information on how to prevent, recognize and respond to a drug overdose, visit towardtheheart.com and click on the Overdose Survival Guide.
