Unrelenting drug overdose deaths demand an unrelenting policy response from governments
Treatment should be everyone’s end goal. As this space has too often noted, the dead cannot be checked into rehab. But to focus on treatment while minimizing or ignoring a range of harm reduction is a mistake – as is the reverse, too much work on harm reduction without ample treatment beds. Treatment absolutely must be available to those who seek it but relapse after initial treatment for opioids addiction is common. To not invest in services like supervised drug-use sites is a grave error.
Meanwhile, new interventions in B.C. are just starting. Decriminalization, a three-year trial, is five months in. Safer supply gets a lot more public attention – and attacks from the likes of federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre – than its actual impact to date. In early June, B.C. officials said less than 5 per cent of people using drugs have been prescribed access.
“It’s become an ideological debate,” Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek told The Globe’s editorial board last week. “What we need to do is understand that there are many different things that can be done.” Safer supply has a role to play, the mayor said, but she more so emphasized the bigger picture: the entwined issues of mental health, addictions, and housing.
Ms. Gondek is exactly right. As this space has argued before, a singular focus at the expense of an open mind to all possible policies is the wrong way forward. The wave of deaths is unrelenting. Governments’ response must be equally unrelenting.
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