Jordan Westfall: How can we accept that the fentanyl crisis is becoming the "new normal"?

published on October 19, 2017 by Jordan Westfall, in The Georgia Straight

This Saturday, federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor will be in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to visit ground zero of the worst public-health crisis in decades. In British Columbia, people are dying of drug overdose at a rate of almost four per day. Across Canada, more people are dying than at the height of the HIV-AIDS epidemic.

Despite the horror, however, this is a crisis that is being described as the “new normal” for our society. This means that an existential threat to anyone that uses drugs could quietly become a foregone conclusion. This is an absolute failure of policymakers to ensure the health and safety of a group of people. The public cannot go numb to this fact.

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However, the situation is increasingly bleak and getting bleaker every day. The crisis continues. Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) has made little progress in expanding injectable treatments and has, instead, put more focus on BOOST—a program based on seek-and-treat HIV-AIDS programs of the past that will attempt to put drug users on oral-opioid treatments like Methadose, which is the recently reformulated version of methadone.

A recent study, though, suggests that this reformulation led to an increase in heroin and illicit fentanyl use. VCH seems content to double down on treatments that have not shown much success in stemming the tide of death and that may have even made the overdose epidemic worse.

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Jordan Westfall: How can we accept that the fentanyl crisis is becoming the "new normal"?

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