Here is an excerpt from a news article yesterday with some staggering overdose statistics from early 2017.
My personal preamble:
- Just imagine if you are a bereaved mother advocate who lost her 25 year old son, 16 years ago to overdose on Dec 23 2001.
- Imagine the pain in realizing her son was one of the "first rounders" in the escalation of this crisis which just keeps exponentially exploding.
- Imagine that the coroner in the picture below is the coroner who handled her son's overdose death 16 years ago ( Dr. Huyer and he was brilliant and kind and my only light)
- Imagine the pain in reading an article that ends with "Someone who is loved by their family, someone who won't be coming home this holiday season."...when her son died two days before Christmas and instead of receiving his gifts that his mother bought him, he received a toe tag.
I always put my self and my late son "out there" in posts like this, and advocacy in general to "bring the reality home" in hopes of keeping other peoples' loved ones alive and/or to improve the quality of life for another that is struggling, and/or family members struggling to help their loved one (s). Humanizing and being "part of the solution" is essential for system transformation and "awareness raising" within and throughout our communities and society.
Over this Christmas season, maybe everyone could think of one way that they could help to humanize and reduce the stigma/ discrimination (albeit most of you on this forum already do that and have been doing so for many years) but I recognize that we have to dig deeper, think well outside of the box, be bold but not divisive.....
The news is not good'
From May to July of this year, there were 336 opioid-related deaths in the province — a 68 per cent increase from the same time period in 2016, explained Dr. Dirk Huyer, Ontario's chief coroner.
Of the accidental opioid deaths the mean age of the victims was 41. Compared to 2016, there was a 90 per cent increase in the opioid-related deaths of men between the ages of 15 and 44, and a 60 per cent increase for women aged 15 to 24.
"The news is not good," said Huyer. "It's only a snapshot. We don't know what this means for the rest of 2017."
Huyer said investigations into the deaths have been expedited to learn how to prevent them. He said numbers for the rest of 2017 will be available soon.
"We cannot forget for even one second that each and every one of these numbers is a person," said Hoskins. "Someone who is loved by their family, someone who won't be coming home this holiday season."
(From left) Dr. Dirk Huyer, Ontario’s chief coroner, Eric Hoskins, the minister of health and long-term care, and Marie-France Lalonde, the minister of community safety and correctional services. (CBC)
