Chris Selley: Making people suffer this long under lockdown is something we may someday regret

Paramedics treat a man suffering a drug overdose in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, May 2, 2020. JASON PAYNE/POSTMEDIA/FILE

An important fact to highlight is making people suffer so long under lock-in is something that one day we will clearly regret. In this regard, it should be noted that during the past week, the British Columbia forensic office reported that 170 people had died in that province from street drug overdoses in May. It is the most recorded in a single month, and the fourth consecutive month of increase, compared to 68 in December. In the first five months of this year, 20 percent more people died in BC from an overdose than in all of 2019.

At the time of writing, the official COVID-19 death toll in British Columbia was 168.

For their part, advocates of drug law reforms hope this can put things in some perspective. To fight COVID-19, our governments threw us into a recession and wrote endless blank checks. For a small fraction of that cost, they would say, we could prevent a large percentage of overdose deaths: by allowing safe injection sites to be opened where they are needed, and by allowing doctors to receive pharmaceutical grade opioids.

Great controversy

It should be noted that many traditional enemies of law and order will draw a clear line between the two phenomena, being that COVID-19 sufferers are blameless and incurable, while addicts have no trouble eating things in the first place, and they seem to have become addicted without seeking treatment. Likewise, the opioid addiction epidemic ruthlessly cuts across class lines, forcing comfortable and affluent families and their peer groups to face the devastating effects and ignorant ease of the “go to treatment” approach.

Likewise, consider BC’s creepy overdose figure could also put the COVID-19 blockade in a clear perspective. And it is that experts accurately predicted in March that it requires an increase in overdoses, due to several factors. Border closures are likely to disrupt supply chains and thus alter the composition of street opioids, making them more unpredictable and potentially much more dangerous. Even if the safe injection sites remained open, not all did; others reduced their hours, the security measures against viruses implemented probably delayed some clients. Opioids will use and the stress of blocking may have to take more people. And alcohol.

Now, economic deprivation is also associated with all of these negative outcomes, and risky government intervention will not save all Canadians from it, not in the short or long term when the day’s government decides what time it is to pay off our loans.

Source: Chris Selley | National Post