I personally don’t know much about doing drugs, but I do know that people looking to find someplace to get high downtown sometimes find their way to public places, including public washrooms.
An overdose in the mall Wednesday ended with a trip to the morgue instead of the hospital. At one point people were reportedly scrambling to find naloxone, a common and widely available medication that counteracts the effects of an opioid overdose.
By the time the victim’s friend was able to find a shot at the pharmacy, it was too late.
Naloxone kits are easily available at five different pharmacies within a five-minute walk of Old Quebec Street, and at dozens of other locations across Guelph. If you Google “naloxone kits Guelph” you will easily find the list. They’re free to get, and all you need is a Health Card.
If that fact alone wasn’t enough for people to be on guard, there was the news last week that the very virulent, and very deadly, “purple fentanyl” was back in town. When it was last making the rounds back in July, it killed three people in Guelph. Was it impossible to think that that someone might die this time?
But considering all that, if we can’t get ourselves organized well enough to address this one microcosm of the opioid problem, then how the heck are we supposed to resolve the greater drug crisis in our community?
We know where people use, we know sometimes people overdose, but in this instance no naloxone was in reach when it was desperately needed to save a life. That fact would be astounding if it weren’t so tragic.
What’s more is that the problems of mental illness and drug addiction were key issues in the recently completed municipal election.
If council does adapt Mayor Cam Guthrie’s proposal to invest $750,000 in more policing to help combat the problem, then it will be part of the 2019 budget process. But that final vote is still months away. What are we to do in the meantime?
In the wake of the overdose, my Open Sources Guelph co-host Scotty Hertz shared on social media an NPR article called “A Rural Community Decided To Treat Its Opioid Problem Like A Natural Disaster.”
In Stanwood, WA, population 7,000, the addiction crisis hits home especially hard because of its size. In the United States, the rate of overdoses in rural areas has begun to slightly surpass cities even though the bulk of overdose deaths still happen in urban areas.
The Stanwood case though is showing interesting results. After a mudslide killed 43 in 2014, the local sheriff’s office saw the benefits of co-ordinating across government levels and departments to respond to the immediate crisis of a natural disaster. Could such an approach work for the addiction crisis?
A Multi-Agency Coordination group was created, which is the sort of thing that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does in the wake of a hurricane or a tornado. Representatives across the spectrum of local government meet every two weeks and tackle the issue by breaking down big goals like managing harm to the community by drug use, into bite-size chunks like distributing needle clean-up kits.
The actual to-do list is about 100 items long, according to NPR, but what looks easier to accomplish, 100 little tasks or one giant task?
Whether or not Stanwood’s approach will be a success is still an open question, but they are seeing an impact on the ground as teams of police and social workers tackle the problem one person at a time.
They visit homeless camps and tent cities in the surrounding area, offering a cup of coffee or a lift to treatment depending on the need.
This approach addresses the biggest mental hurdle to addressing the crisis, which is that the problem is too big for us to handle locally.
We then look to the higher levels of government, and while they do have some responsibility, it’s sometimes too easy to pass the buck up and wait for a response than accept the fact – not to mention the awesome responsibility – that we might have it within ourselves to work toward a solution with a lot of hard work and a lot of elbow grease.
If we wanted to, starting tomorrow, we could start treating the addiction issue like a crisis by acting like it’s a crisis. We get every single person and organization that touches on this issue in a room, make a list of the problems, make a list of the skills, make a list of the needs, and start crossing things off those lists.
Hopefully on that list is to put a naloxone kit in the hands of every person that might be confronted with an overdose.
If nothing else, it’s a start.
