Illicit fentanyl and its analogues in the unregulated drug market is driving the increase in overdose events and deaths in BC fentanyl has been detected in more than 80% of illicit drug toxicity deaths in BC since 2017, a dramatic increase from 5% to 2012 and 25% in 2014. Although the overall rates of overdose have largely continued to increase following the declaration, there was a marked reduction in the lives lost in 2019, from 31.1 deaths per 100,000 in 2018 to 19.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2019. Responding to a rise in fatal drug overdoses, British Columbia (BC) declared a public health emergency under the Public Health Act in 2016 resulting in the expansion of public health and harm reduction strategies aimed at preventing and reversing overdoses. Despite these challenges, participants highlighted factors that protected against overdose and substance-related harm, including the emergence of new programs, the resiliency of communities of people who use substances who expanded their outreach efforts, the existence of established social relationships, and the ways that individuals consistently prioritized overdose response over concerns about COVID-19 transmission to care for one another.
Participants pointed to factors that increased risk of overdose, including: physical distancing measures that created social and physical isolation and led to more substance use alone without bystanders nearby able to respond in the event of an emergency early drug price spikes and supply chain issues that created inconsistencies in drug availability increasing toxicity and impurities in unregulated substances restriction of harm reduction services and supply distribution sites and additional burden placed on peer workers on the frontlines of the illicit drug toxicity crisis.
The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
0 kommentar(er)
