We published a story this week on the staggering — and I don’t use that word lightly — jump in the number of Sudburians who have overdosed on opioids in the past three years.
The crisis has gotten so bad, it’s likely you know someone struggling with opioid dependence or full-blown opioid addition.
We know the situation is bad out there. We’ve been following the rising rates of drug busts, overdoses, and deaths. But, when you see real numbers, when it’s broken down into percentages for you, somehow, at least for me, the situation comes into sharper focus.
Since 2015, the number of people overdosing on opioids has grown 88 per cent. In 2015, there were 58 calls to paramedics for opioid overdoses. By the end of last year, that number jumped to 173. 173 people. That averages out to more than 14 people a month. In November and December 2018, though, paramedics assisted close to 50 people alone.
We’re only a city of 160,000 people. Those numbers frighten me.
For most of us, the most visible aspect of this crisis is discarded syringes. They are so thick, they carpet the ground in tucked away hidey-holes in the downtown area where people are using. Yellow sharps buckets (the kind you normally see in hospitals or your doctor's office) for disposing of used needles, are strategically placed on walls and even in the washroom of the downtown Tim Hortons.
The needles are disgusting, yes, and a public health hazard, too. And while many people treat them as an annoyance, they are more than that; they are a symptom of the immense problem we are facing. You only shoot drugs in an alley if you are incredibly desperate and severely addicted. It’s not a lifestyle anyone wants for themselves or a lifestyle anyone chooses.
Overdose rates and discarded needles. They don’t tell the whole story, because the real story is about the people enslaved to the drug that shoots through those needles.
I said earlier the problem has become so large, you probably know someone struggling with opioids. I do. My cousin Chris Cull began using when he was an immature 22-year-old struggling to cope with his father’s suicide.
He lost years to the drug. He blew more than six figures in cash and nearly lost his house. He isolated himself from friends and family. He lived to get high. That was it. Chris managed to turn his addiction into inspiration, creating an advocacy group, Inspire By Example, to raise awareness about opioids. He cycled across the country a couple of times, filming and producing an insightful documentary about how the opioid crisis isn’t some urban issue that rural Canada can ignore, but a problem that is impacting every Canadian town and city.
The people Chris met became addicts after receiving a legitimate prescription from a doctor, only to find the "safe" drug they thought they were taking was in fact incredibly addictive.
Many, many of the people caught up in the opioid epidemic are not people who made some poor choices. They are people who became ensnared thanks to aggressive and inaccurate marketing that led to over-prescription of a medication doctors were told was safe and relatively non-addictive.
However, regardless of how the path that led to someone’s addiction, everyone deserves help. Forget the tough love nonsense when it comes to addiction. It’s more economical in the long run to treat drug addiction than it is to ignore it and “let the addicts kill themselves” as I’ve seen written too many times in our comment section on Sudbury.com.
Chris managed to channel his addiction into a force for change. He’s, admittedly, unusual in that regard. For too many people, that first taste of an opioid is the beginning of a lifelong relationship that becomes all consuming.
Canada is one of the world’s biggest consumers of opioids, a story we published back in the summer of 2016 reported, and Northern Ontario, in particular, had the highest rate of opioid-related deaths in the country at the time.
My teenage children tell me about how popular pharmaceuticals are among their peers, particularly opioids like Percocet (cocaine is also apparently quite popular in Sudbury high schools, they say). All demographics and all walks of life are being caught up in this.
We are in the throes of a major health crisis that is killing a dozen people a day in Canada (and more than 3,000 a year) and it’s a problem that doesn’t seem to have peaked yet. A national strategy is needed, but in the meantime, we need a local strategy.
It’s our friends and neighbours who are caught up in this, too.
Mark Gentili is the editor of Sudbury.com and Northern Life.
