Drugs don't kill people, poisoned drugs do

BC's crisis of poisoned street drugs is hitting men in the prime of their working years the hardest. Three-quarters of the 10,000 deaths in BC from poisoned illicit drugs since 2015 have been men ages 30-59.

As this fact-filled story in The Tyee today highlights, one in five of them was working in the trades or transportation when they died. But while this information matters, it's not where we're going to find solutions for BC's poisoned street drugs. 

There are many reasons for why tradespeople are dying from using drugs, as the piece explains. The manly-man culture of the trades, the chronic pain of injury, crazy shifts, intense working conditions, long stints isolated in work camps, reluctance to reach out for help and risk looking "weak."

But BC is a resource province, and we've had manly men working in pain, isolation and wild working conditions throughout our history. They have used drugs to numb all that - or as a reward at the end of a hard day -  for as long as rough jobs have existed. Those of us who grew up with our eyes open in any BC resource town can attest to that.

Admittedly, such men have probably been dying at a much higher rate than the rest of for all this time; we just didn't think to measure those deaths in relation to the type of work the dead man was doing at the time. But they weren't dying like they're dying now.

So what's different this time? The drugs. They're poisoned. How and why they have ended up poisoned is a story I'm still waiting to read, but it seems pretty obvious that we won't slow this crisis until we figure it out. 

The standard how-why responses for illicit drugs having become so toxic tend to focus on suppliers using cheaper substances to increase profits. Street drugs are being cut with fentanyl, benzodiazipines and other weird and deadly stuff because it allows a much greater profit for the supplier and seller.

But cutting drugs with weird stuff to increase profits is also a time-honoured tradition in BC. The crisis in toxic drug deaths that we're seeing now is very specific to the last 10 years, and strangely specific to BC. 

The United States has its own drug crisis going on with opioid overdoses, now killing more than 1,500 Americans every week. But an overdose is not the same as poisoned drugs. The people who are dying in BC aren't dying because they used more drugs than were safe, they're dying because the drug supply is toxic.

This is an important distinction. You can't set about fixing a problem until you fully understand it, and it's important for us to let go of this wrong idea that people are dying just because they used drugs (a belief that lets us fall back on moralizing and dismiss this crisis as something that "good people" don't have to worry about). 

Were you ever a kid who gulped down street drugs without a second thought? Because I was. Happily, I grew up in the 1970s, when the drugs that a kid could access mostly weren't going to do anything worse than send you into a gas station bathroom to barf your guts out, or get you in trouble with your parents. 

Had I been a teen in today's world, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead. 

The Tyee's story notes that the employers of tradespeople have a lot to answer to, from inhumane shifts and their own culture of denying anything is wrong in their industry. But understanding why tradespeople need drugs to hang in at their jobs, while important, will not solve the toxic drug crisis. That won't be solved until we no longer have a poisoned drug supply.

The judgment we feel about the use of any drug other than alcohol so quickly sends us off into pointless and meaningless conversations about why people use drugs. (We use drugs because they make us feel better.) But addressing this toxic-drug crisis has to focus on the poisoned drugs, not the users. 

Imagine for a moment that more and more infant formula coming into Canada was turning out to be poisoned, and babies were dying. 

We would not address that with a public awareness campaign about breastfeeding, would we? We would not call it a solution to distribute pharmaceuticals to new moms so they could inject their babies and stall off the effects of the poison long enough to get to the hospital. We'd just dig in to figure out why the formula was poisoned, and how we could ensure a safe supply.

Where are the big drug importers in this conversation, and what could they tell us about how those imports, or their own practices, have changed? Where are the policy makers who can put aside political qualms and posturing to act bravely in the name of saving lives? 

We are stuck, and so many people are dying. This is so wrong.