After trending downwards for two years, Okanagan illicit drug deaths spiked up again in 2020.
One-hundred-forty-three people died from illicit drug toxicity in the region last year. It’s a significant increase from 2019 when 84 people died.
Sixty-one people overdosed in Kelowna in 2020 and 2020 was Vernon’s worst year in the last decade for illicit drug deaths. Twenty-six people died in the North Okanagan city.
2020 was also the worst year on record for illicit drug deaths in the province as a whole. 1,716 people died.
“It’s disheartening to continue to hear those numbers because those numbers are attached to everyday people,” said Doug Mackenzie, owner of Options Okanagan Treatment Center.
“Prior to five years ago you would rarely hear of anyone dying of an overdose and now it’s just a continuing topic. It’s overrunning our frontline workers, ambulance, hospital, (and) fire department.”
Mackenzie said his organization’s two nine-bed treatment centers in Kelowna and Salmon Arm often have waitlists as do many other addictions treatment services.
“It is disheartening to know there is a gap, that somebody is waiting because that waiting could be life or death,” Mackenzie said.
He is calling for a COVID-scale response to the overdose crisis to ensure people aren’t waiting for treatment.
When people are put on a waitlist after completing one phase of their treatment it can have very negative results including relapses and death, Mackenzie said.
The province’s chief coroner also highlighted a lack of access to treatment as part of the problem.
“Decades of criminalization, an increasingly toxic illicit drug market, and the lack of timely access to evidence-based treatment and recovery services have resulted in the loss of thousands of lives in B.C.,” chief coroner Lisa Lapointe said in a media statement released Thursday.
“It’s clear that urgent change is needed to prevent future deaths and the resulting grief and loss so many families and communities have experienced across our province.”
A major provincial initiative aimed at tackling the overdose crisis did take a step forward recently.
Earlier this month, the B.C. government wrote to the federal government asking for an exemption to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs.
Global Okanagan has reached out to Interior Health and the Health Ministry for comment.
— With files from Richard Zussman and Darrian Matassa-Fung
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