Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada's Opioid Crisis - Softcover

Perrin, Benjamin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0735237883 ISBN 13: 9780735237889

Verlag: Penguin Canada, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED for the 2021 BC Book Awards' George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature

SHORTLISTED for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes, for both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes

SHORTLISTED for the 2021 J. W. Dafoe Book Prize

SHORTLISTED for the 2020 Lane Anderson Award

“Overdose is a necessary and searching investigation into a devastating epidemic that should never have happened. Benjamin Perrin painstakingly shows that it need not continue if we, as a society, heed the evidence.”
—Gabor Maté M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction

An astonishing and powerful look at the ongoing opioid crisis

North America is in the middle of a health emergency. Life expectancies are declining. Someone is dying every two hours in Canada from illicit drug overdose. Fentanyl has become a looming presence—an opioid more powerful, pervasive, and deadly than any previous street drug.

The victims are many—and often not whom we might expect. They include the poor and forgotten but also our neighbours: professionals, students, and parents. Despite the thousands of deaths, these victims have remained largely invisible.

But not anymore. Benjamin Perrin, a law and policy expert, shines a light in this darkest of corners—and his findings challenge many assumptions about the crisis. Why do people use drugs despite the risk of overdosing? Can we crack down on the fentanyl supply? Do supervised consumption sites and providing “safe drugs” enable the problem? Which treatments work? Would decriminalizing all drugs help or do further harm?

In this urgent and humane look at a devastating epidemic, Perrin draws on behind-the-scenes interviews with those on the frontlines, including undercover police officers, intelligence analysts, border agents, prosecutors, healthcare professionals, Indigenous organizations, activists, and people who use drugs. Not only does he unveil the many complexities of this situation, but he also offers a new way forward—one that may save thousands of lives.

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BENJAMIN PERRIN is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Peter A. Allard School of Law. He served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, and was the lead justice and public safety advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2012-13. Professor Perrin is the author of two previous books: Invisible Chains: Canada's Underground World of Human Trafficking, which was a national bestseller and named one of the top books of the year by The Globe and Mail, and Victim Law: The Law of Victims of Crime in Canada. He lives in Vancouver, BC.
 
https://benjaminperrin.ca/

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— 1 —
What Is the Opioid Crisis?
 
“I don’t think anybody really saw this coming.”—Dr. Mark Tyndall, Executive Director, BC Centre for Disease Control
 
A sleepy suburb on the outskirts of Greater Vancouver was about to get a wake-up call—in more ways than one. At 1:30 a.m., the stillness of a balmy late-summer night in Delta was shattered by the blaring siren and f lashing lights of an ambulance racing to a family home.
 
“The paramedic walked up to a house in Delta because a friend of somebody called 911 saying this guy’s passed out; he’s not breathing,” said Linda Lupini, who heads BC Emergency Health Services. “Before they got into the house there were two kids who’d overdosed on the front stairs. So they thought they were at the address—the kids are overdosed; that’s the call.”
 
The paramedics began working frantically to help resuscitate them. The tell-tale signs of a drug overdose include unresponsiveness, blue lips, and difficulty breathing—or not breathing at all. The outcome can be fatal.
 
“Are you coming upstairs?!” someone screamed from inside the house.
 
“What do you mean?” replied a confused paramedic.
 
“The kid we called for is upstairs.”
 
There were three simultaneous drug overdoses at the house that night—and that was just the beginning. Within 26 minutes the 911 switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree. Drug overdose calls kept coming in. Paramedics would revive someone only to learn from them that someone else had taken drugs at the same party and could be at risk.
 
“Then we were working with dispatch, trying to find all these kids,” said Lupini.
 
In total, 11 young people who were at the party overdosed the night of September 1, 2016, after taking what they thought was a small amount of cocaine. What they didn’t know was that it had been laced with fentanyl—a potent opioid drug. One went into full cardiac arrest.
 
“We had parents doing CPR on the front lawn on their kids,” said Lupini. “We had 11 teenagers literally not breathing. They were all resuscitated, but barely. A few came close to not making it. It was so traumatic for the front-line staff. We just didn’t have the resources to respond to something like that.
 
“The problem for an ambulance service is that the increase in calls are your highest acuity—Code 3,” she continued. “They’re gonna die in minutes.”
 
Between January 2016 and June 2019, a record-shattering 13,913 people across Canada died f rom opioid-related drug overdoses. In 2018, when the annual death count hit 4588, a life was lost every two hours. According to Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, opioid-related overdoses have become the leading cause of death for 30- to 39-year-olds. And although every part of the country has been affected by the opioid crisis, British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have been the hardest hit.
 
On April 14, 2016, British Columbia declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency after illicit drug overdose deaths began sky-rocketing. Historically, about 200 to 300 people a year had lost their lives this way, but by 2015 the number of overdose deaths had risen to 530. Worst was yet to come. By 2018 that number had almost tripled, reaching 1542. It hit me just how serious the situation was when the BC Coroners Service announced that illicit drugs were claiming more lives than murder, suicide, and car accidents combined. By 2019, the number of overdose deaths in the province finally started to decline as thousands had already died and the response to the crisis ramped out, even as the number of 911 overdose calls continued to grow to almost 25,000.
 
“For the longest while we said it’s a crisis,” said Jennifer Breakspear, executive director of the Portland Hotel Society (PHS) Community Services Society, which provides supportive housing for over 2000 people in Vancouver and Victoria as well as various programs and services. PHS also operates Insite, North America’s first supervised injection site. Breakspear was hired to head up PHS in January 2017. And although she’d had experience in leading a non-profit focused on reproductive health, she described the transition to PHS as a real “crash course.”
 
As I sat on a couch in Breakspear’s office on East Hastings Street, fire truck and ambulance sirens kept interrupting her—a constant reminder that Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is ground zero in this crisis. “The soundtrack of my workday,” she remarked as another emergency vehicle raced by. Without a doubt, several of them that hour would have been heading to overdoses in the immediate area.
 
When the public health emergency was declared in 2016, Breakspear told me, everyone thought it was the height of the crisis. Since then, though, “the numbers have continued to worsen. I don’t want to say it’s become the normal—the new norm. That sounds so offensive,” she said. “This is still a situation in which people are dying every day, and I don’t know how you could ever wrap your head around calling it ‘normal.’”
 
That harsh realization is especially disturbing for the loved ones of those who’ve died during this overdose crisis. “The thought that it’s the new normal is just crushing,” said Leslie McBain, co-founder of Moms Stop the Harm, a national advocacy group of families that have lost loved ones to drug overdoses, including her own son. “Fentanyl is still out there; it’s still killing people. People have no alternative.”
 
“Crisis” is the word that everyone I spoke to used to describe this state of affairs, including police officers, medical experts, and groups of people who use drugs alike. And BC is like the canary in a coal mine; the problem has spread across the rest of the country, too. The only place you’d see more body bags would be in an actual war. But even that’s not an entirely accurate comparison: 159 courageous Canadians died during the conflict in Afghanistan, and 516 died during the Korean War. Combined, those losses are significantly lower than the number of Canadians who died f rom fatal overdoses in 2018 alone.
 
Given the massive fatalities during the opioid crisis, Vancouver’s morgue has been filled to capacity and the BC Coroners Service has been forced to develop extraordinary plans to store bodies while the coroner investigates. “We are in urgent need of temporary body storage owing to the public health emergency,” wrote Aaron Burns with the BC Ministry of Justice in a December 19, 2016, email plea to funeral home directors in the BC Lower Mainland. (The email was released under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.) “Bodies are kept at hospital morgues or funeral homes while the coroner conducts the investigation,” Burns continued. “It would only be situations where those places are overwhelmed by volume that storage would pose a problem for us. That being said, we’ve come close to that point in the recent past and looked into refrigerated shipping containers as a contingency.”
 
The impact of the opioid crisis is widespread. For people who use drugs, it means never knowing whether they’ll be next. It means being blamed. It means being treated like criminals and lowlifes. This crisis continues to catastrophically affect...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0735237883
• ISBN 13: 9780735237889
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland