Unlike COVID-19, the overdose crisis has no end in sight.

Based on a graphic I made in 2018, updated in 2019. Wasn’t planning on updating it this year until a journalist asked me about it recently. I mean, who’s not numb to these stats by now; it’s gone on far too long, a little worse each year. What’s more to say?

Glad I did the update though. COVID is what’s new, and it contrasts and clarifies, and shows that even though we’re talking about the same bleak outcome—death—the public health response to date says that some deaths matter less.

More than that, we’ve seen how prioritizing one crisis can come at the expense of another, as @CarlynZwaren wrote about in her in-depth piece in @thelocalhealth recently. https://thelocal.to/the-cost-of-a-stay-at-a-shelter-hotel/

The solutions to the overdose crisis seem so obvious and yet so out of reach: decriminalization, safe supply, harm reduction, social supports, etc. Part of the difficulty has been that responsibility and political will to do them span federal/provincial/municipal jurisdictions.

This pandemic has shown that if governments want to do public health for real, they can. Need resources? No problem. Need regulatory changes? No problem there either.

Response to the overdose crisis has been a series of slow drips. The COVID experience has shown that when there’s a burning fire, we can and must turn on the firehose. That vigour needs to be applied to all public health crises.