Zak Matieschyn didn’t let his responsibilities as a father keep him from doing work that really mattered Friday.
Matieschyn, the addiction medicine nurse practitioner fellow with the BC Centre On Substance Use, was on Baker Street with his newborn son to offer information and a kind word during International Overdose Awareness Day.
“It’s a day to acknowledge the losses that many in our community and around the world have felt, and also to keep the momentum up with awareness of the toxic drug supply we face,” he said.
“I think the public can be forgiven for kind of being overwhelmed with the narrative of the media around overdoses and fentanyl … We’re still unclear if we’ve hit the high-water mark on overdoses in BC and even if we have, it’s still a terrible situation we’re in so we need to keep the heat up with raising awareness.”
Matieschyn was joined by Alex Sherstobitoff, ANKORS’ Rise Up community engagement project co-ordinator, at a time in which the province’s death rate continues to climb.
B.C. has already had 878 deaths this year as of the end of July, with overdoses spiking 25 per cent from June to July. The death total in 2016 was 914, which then rose to 1,422 last year.
Matieschyn said front-line workers are essentially in uncharted water during the crisis. A string of heroin overdoses in the 1990s, he said, barely compared to today’s fentanyl deaths.
“Those tended to peter out and be self limited. It would be limited to one shipment and some people would die, then another shipment would be a bit more predictable with its potency. We’ve never seen anything like this [current crisis], even globally.”
Last week the provincial government announced it is launching a class-action lawsuit against more than 40 opioid manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.
That’s good news to Matieschyn. He still remembers Purdue Frederick, one of U.S. pharmaceutical companies being sued by B.C., telling health care professionals in the early 2000s that Oxycodone wasn’t very addictive and should be prescribed freely for chronic pain.
“The egg has been cooked. We’ve created thousands of people addicted to opioids and I think what governments are doing is just try to remediate some of their costs from one of their perpetrators of that.”
The lawsuit was secondary to Sherstobitoff’s concerns. He pointed out more work is needed in the interim to prevent further deaths. That included offering words of wisdom downtown Friday.
“Sometimes I’ve seen family members who have somebody caught in an addiction, and they don’t know who to talk to and they’re scared and they don’t want their neighbours to know,” said Sherstobitoff. “People are just ashamed, the stigma is so strong that they’ll hide this and it can be death. We need to engage with people and offer them treatments and some direction.”
tyler.harper@nelsonstar.com
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Related:
• B.C. suing drug companies to recoup overdose crisis costs
• Two sons lost to the opioid crisis, a B.C. mother calls for change