Advocates for drug users in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) are calling on the province’s new Minister of Mental Health and Addictions to come to the front lines herself.
Sarah Blyth with the Overdose Prevention Society is one of the volunteers who spearheaded several pop-up injection sites in the DTES, the largest of which has become a formal provincial overdose prevention site.
She said that site sees about 300 drug users per day, and often more – something newly minted minister Judy Darcy needs to see for herself.
Blyth said Darcy, who acted as Health Critic while in opposition, should also bring key members of her new staff to witness life at the injection site.
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She said without speaking to drug users and volunteers, even the best intentioned plans by the new government could go awry.
“You can get a lot of money and you can do a lot of things. But if you’re not spending it on the right things, like proper housing, proper bathrooms in the alleys, it doesn’t quite make it to the level of the people in the streets that are suffering.”
Blyth added that the biggest thing the new government can do to cut down the number of overdose deaths is to give addicts access to a clean supply of drugs.
The idea of treatment programs that prescribe pharmaceutical-grade heroin to addicts has been gaining currency in recent years, with B.C.’s own provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall calling for the change in February.
Currently, a pilot project in the DTES’ Crosstown Clinic offers the only such program in North America.
As of May, 640 British Columbians had died of illicit drug overdoses in 2017, nearly double the number by the same month last year.
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