Canada's Opioid Crisis: Do You Care?
 

I guess the answer would be No, since it's claimed over 900 lives in Vancouver alone in 2016 and yet there's been pretty much zero discussion here. I guess it's kind of like the Picton Pig Farm-Missing Women case. Everyone thinks "tut-tut how terrible", but in the back of their mind thinks "if you live that life, what do you expect"?

No surprise that this is correlated with an increase in influence and lobbying south of the border of large pharmaceuticals broadening and deepening the pervasiveness of opioids in hospitals and for medical treatment.

At least Alberta and BC are doing something about it.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...ticle34227729/

Just collateral damage in Canada.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles...t-legalization

I suppose I haven't talked about it on here because I come here to have fun and talk about my pet topics like development and politics. I care deeply, however. I spend all day everyday on the front lines of this crisis in Vancouver trying to help, it's my day to day reality. It can be tough to talk about, so when it comes to relaxing I won't speak about it easily.

Knowingly selling killer drugs amounts to murder, and here we have at least 900 victims. If these were all middle class people dying from tainted drugs, I have a feeling there would be a much stronger response from the police.

Not sure if the police are doing this, but they should be busting and harassing these street dealers left and right, until they stop killing people.

Who the hell says they don't care? This shit is wreaking havoc here and we need to find a way to stop people from dying. Good documentary on the effects of Fentanyl here.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/d...gqatUoUKpzP6zX

The general Canadian population is extremely poorly informed about drugs. There is little honest discussion of risk, why people use drugs or become addicts, what is or isn't successful for treating them, etc.

A lot of people don't realize, to take one example, that a drug like heroin is not inherently deadly. If a unadulterated heroin is safely administered to an average person in some settings (like in a hospital when they're sick), the risk of problems, including addiction, is low. Put that same person out on the street where they are under stress and have easier access to adulterated drugs, shared needles, etc. and they will have a very high mortality rate.

I hope that marijuana legalization happens quickly and Canada moves on to overhauling the regulations around every other controlled substance.

I'm sure police aren't turning a blind eye to it. Fighting addiction (I mean any addiction) is just a losing proposition. There's always someone looking to cash in in selling and/or creating new products.

If you want to fight opioids or any other mind altering addictive substances, get at the root cause of it, unhappiness and mental illness.

When I was younger, due to operations and intense physical pain, I was exposed to insane levels of morphine for months at a time, and each time I was able to get off it with not so much as a headache.

The doctors said morphine only makes unhappy people or people with chronic pain get addicted as it temporarily gives pain relief and elation. If you have inner happiness then it shouldn't affect you as you feel just as good without it. They never would have allowed me to use it more than once or for as long as I did if I showed signs of craving it.

I think you need to do your homework. One of the big problems with fentanyl is that it causes respiratory depression so that the user (victim) can stop breathing. Quite literally the first time it is taken could mean death. The addiction issues are bad enough, but unfortunately this is a drug can be immediately dangerous to life in even very low doses. Worse yet is that other drugs are being laced with fentanyl. This stuff scares the shit out of me. It is truly that bad.

These days it seems there is a stronger and stronger case for the pharmaceutical industry to be nationalized. The business world is increasingly showing it can't be trusted with it.

For most people in my region, this crisis was something going on in the U.S. and in Vancouver. Then a few months ago there were a few deaths of teens in the west end Ottawa suburb of Kanata. That's when it started to hit closer to home. In Kanata it is apparently a hot topic of discussion. Community meetings have drawn hundreds of people. To my knowledge it has not spread much beyond Kanata yet. I am surrounded by teens and parents of teens here in Gatineau and all is quiet.

Are the demographics of the fentanyl deaths available?

I've been trying to get a Naloxone kit for weeks now but they're not widely available in NS yet. Fentanyl is a fairly well-known "thing" among 20-somethings here at this point although there haven't been many cases of it turning up. Still, people are bracing for when it finally hits. A friend of mine who grew up in Boston knew five people back in Massachusetts who OD's and I briefly dated a girl from Vancouver who knew over 20 people who'd died from it.

I'm not old enough to remember when AIDS first hit, but Fentanyl seems like this generation's version of that, in a way.

Yet SARS was pretty much a "Toronto thing" that killed far, far fewer.

Do I care? Not particularly no. People make life choices, they must live with them. Am I upset people are dying? Yes. Do I feel sorry for those choosing this lifestyle? No.

Services should be there to help those who genuinely want to help themselves.

Thanks for the stats link. Someone said it's a lifestyle choice but I suspect that a number of these fentanyl deaths are people who were not living the lifestyle one would associate with a drug overdose death - one poor decision at a bar or party or whatever does not equate to a certain lifestyle.

People aren't choosing to take fentanyl and die, they're getting it unknowingly.

Many of the people taking the drugs in the first place are not choosing a lifestyle; they're addicts. Some of them got hooked because they were prescribed opioids by doctors, and once addicted many of them are effectively forced to risk death by consuming illegal drugs because there is no safe legal path that they are able to follow.

It's not just opioid users either - I've heard of several cases of people taking what they thought were more common (and typically less risky) substances like cocaine and OD'ing because it actually contained Fentanyl. Not sure how common that truly is, but still scary. I'm just glad I've passed that phase of my life - now doesn't sound like the best time to be a reckless kid.

That's not exactly true, they can come on to the methadone maintenance program and be slowly tapered down off opioids at their own pace, so yes there is a legal, responsible path for them to take besides buying street drugs. What else would you have us do? We even have a pilot program with heroin instead of methadone running in Vancouver.