First Nations people continue to be disproportionately and devastatingly affected by B.C.’s toxic drug crisis, with 2022 being the deadliest year on record, according to the First Nations Health Authority.
Data released by the FNHA on Friday shows that First Nations people died at 5.9 times the rate of other residents last year, with 373 toxic drug-poisoning deaths in total. It’s a 6.3-per-cent increase from 2021.
“The numbers do not tell the full story of the lives lost or the resulting impacts to the families, friends, communities and nations,” said Dr. Nel Wieman, FNHA acting chief medical officer, in a news release.
“While we continue the good work to provide culturally safe programs and services to support those who use substances, it is clearly not enough. We must also create a climate of hope.”
First Nations people represent 3.3 per cent of B.C.’s population, but the health authority said 16.4 per cent of those who died from overdoses last year were Indigenous. The crisis is especially dire for First Nations women, who died at 11.2 times the rate non-Indigenous women in B.C. last year.
Grand Chief Doug Kelly’s daughter was one of them.
“It shocked my family,” said Kelly, former chair of the B.C. First Nations Health, in a Friday news conference presenting the data.
“My daughter had been on a healing journey for the better part of the two-and-a-half years just before Thanksgiving, and she’d come a long way in putting so much of the pain, the trauma, the stigma, away, and she did so with help from folks following a similar pathway in Surrey.”
Last October, as Kelly and his family sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, he learned his daughter had overdosed in Surrey and suffered serious brain damage due to the number of minutes she had spent without oxygen before she was resuscitated.
Kelly, who rushed to the hospital to see her, made the impossible choice to take her off of oxygen. He said she had done everything she could to heal herself, but noted systemic failures left her behind, including one he feels personally responsible for.
“The mother of my daughter and I failed to protect my daughter,” he said. “We trusted her in the care of a so-called man to take of our daughter and he abused that trust. He abused my daughter.”
According to the FNHA, the reasons First Nations people remain disproportionately impacted by the toxic drug crisis are “complex and varied, but share a common thread in the ongoing and intergenerational impacts due to colonialism.”
They encounter further obstacles, it added, when seeking culturally safe and appropriate health care in a system that has historically been laden with racism and stigma.
In 2003, Shane Baker of the Gitxsan First Nation’s wolf clan suffered a devastating accident that left him blind and with a shattered skull. He was prescribed the opioid Oxycontin, and “in no time, it took everything that I knew,” he said at Friday’s news conference.
He decided to get clean in response to concerns from his mother, he added, and began seeking support for his addictions, particularly from elders.
“When you have good people around you, and have people that love you and care for you, anything is possible,” he said. “It was my culture that saved me.”
Baker is now pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Victoria, and advocating for First Nations youth and better First Nations health outcomes. He said he struggled to find the supports he needed, and now devotes much of his academic life to “the gaps” that exist for Indigenous men.
“Many of my friends and relatives, when we talk about these things, we say, ‘Where are the places for Indigenous men in this city?'” Baker said, adding that he has lost friends to the toxic drug crisis this year.
“I ask that you all show that unconditional love that Grand Chief (Kelly) talked about. Everyone of us needs to be loved and at the end of the day, we only have each other.”
Wieman of the FNHA said “building a climate of hope” means changing how society thinks about, talks about and engages with people who use substances.
“We build hope by having those difficult and courageous conversations with the people around us who use substances – with the people we care about,” she said.
This month marked seven years since B.C. declared a public health emergency due to the overdose crisis and the province estimates nearly 2,300 people died from toxic drugs last year. The B.C. government’s 2023 budget promised $1 billion in mental health and addiction investments that will, in part, scale up detox, treatment and recovery services throughout the province.
— With files from The Canadian Press
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