10/26/2021
The opioid crisis has soared in North America during the pandemic, especially in Canada. In the U.S., deaths rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 to a record 93,000. In Canada, deaths soared 89% over the previous year. Behind the numbers lies a cruel irony that everyone who has lost a loved one understands, and that drives the “safe supply” movement: Opioids were perfectly legal when people were becoming addicted to them, promoted by pharmaceutical giants and doled out by physicians who enabled the crisis by accepting drug companies’ claims they were safe. When the reality became clear, and prescriptions became hard to come by, it was too late. Untold thousands of pain-addled patients had become hooked on what opioids provided, as had many young people who’d begun experimenting with the pills recreationally. They found relief on the streets in the form of he**in, then began dying from illicit drugs either laced with fentanyl or entirely replaced with the compound, which is 50 times more potent than he**in. That is the arc of the Opioid Crisis: From patient to criminal to, more and more often, early death. The “safe supply” movement seeks to counter this deadly progression by ensuring the integrity of the dosages that users have been conditioned to crave while providing care that keeps them alive and could wean them off drugs. “It’s not who we are to stand passively by,” says Jeremy Kalicum, co-founder of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), a community coalition formed to provide solutions to BC's overdose crisis. “We’re gonna do something, and we’re willing to take on personal risks to do that. But we can look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we’re doing what’s right.”
In the U.S., overdose deaths rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 to a record 93,000. In Canada, deaths soared 89% over the previous year.
