Families pay tribute to their loved ones on International Overdose Awareness Day

Saturday was International Overdose Awareness Day, a day to remember those who have lost their lives due to toxic drug poisoning and acknowledge the grief of loved ones left behind.

In Kitsilano, people gathered to write the names and ages of lost loved ones on a lock to add to a wall installation put together by Moms Stop the Harm, a network of families impacted by substance-use-related harm and death.

The latest data from the BC Coroners’ Service reports 1,365 people have died from toxic drug poisoning up to the end of July this year. Eighty per cent of these unregulated drug deaths were male, and fentanyl was detected in about 9 out of every 10 deaths. The report also says Vancouver has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in 2024, with about 300 deaths, followed by Surrey and Greater Victoria.

Traci Letts, the board chair of Moms Stop the Harm, says her son Michael struggled with problematic substance use from when he was 19 until he passed away in February at age 31.

Letts says she’s confounded that politicians are back-tracking on safe supply and harm reduction.

“Why would we take harm reduction out of the equation, when all we’re going to do is increase overall morbidity and mortality?” she said.

Letts says harm reduction stops the spread of the disease, curtails death, connects people to services, and leads to conversations around treatment and recovery.

She says it’s important to provide this help to people in remote and rural communities and adds those services are not easily accessible outside of urban areas right now.

Guy Felicella is a harm reduction and recovery expert who also has lived experience with drug addiction and recovery.

He says the drug supply will remain volatile as long as organized crime controls it.

“Organized crime is the one that has the quality control over this,” he said. “So maybe they’ve got some quality control as of right now, but at any given day when it’s in their hands, that can change dramatically.”

Felicella notes harm reduction and safe supply have become politicized, and he’s worried what may happen if the government rolls back services.

“If we reduced any harm reduction measures that we already have in place right now, [it would] catastrophically impact this crisis,” he said, explaining it would increase deaths, health infections, public consumption, and healthcare worker burnout.

He says the only way to address the toxic drug crisis is to scale up harm reduction and recovery services.

Sharene Shuster is still morning the loss of her son Jordan, who passed away due to toxic drug poisoning in August 2018 at the age of 25.

“It was pure fentanyl,” Shuster said. “The Coroner said [it was] enough to kill an elephant. He was home using alone by himself.”

She says she wants to put an end to the stigma of drug use to encourage people to get help rather than use alone. She says that would have saved her son’s life.

“Every day I wake up, and the first thing I do is think of Jordan,” she said. “I miss him every day. It never gets any easier. Time doesn’t heal. There is always a missing presence of him.”

B.C. has lost over 15,000 lives to toxic drug poisoning since 2016.