Pubdate: Wed, 07 Aug 2013
Source: Daily Courier, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2013 The Okanagan Valley Group of Newspapers
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/5NyOACet
Website: http://www.kelownadailycourier.ca
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/531
Author: Ron Seymour

SHOW YOUR RESPECTS SOBER, PLEASE

You know you've lived a troubled life when organizers of your 
memorial service specifically ask mourners to please show up sober.

So it was with the candlelight vigil held Monday evening by people 
who were close to Marissa Ginter, the 17-year-old Kelowna teen whose 
death last Friday has received widespread news coverage.

"I ask that you please be sober because I do not want drunk people 
ruining a serious ceremony," vigil organizer Brooke Worrall wrote on Facebook.

The untimely death of any young person is a profound tragedy and few 
of us can imagine the grief being experienced by Ginter's family. But 
is her passing an intensely private matter or a news story with a 
cast of villains that includes, in some people's views, "bad" drug 
dealers, the government, and even the police?

A drug-related death, without any suggestion of foul play, almost 
never makes the news pages. Illegal drugs, unfortunately, are too 
much a fact of life in the death of too many people.

Unintentional injury or accident, a category which includes 
drug-related fatalities, is the leading cause of death for girls and 
women in BC aged 15-24.

What we know about Ginter is this much: She was found unresponsive in 
bed Friday morning by a friend who promptly called 911. From her own 
online postings, it's clear she was a young woman who was streetwise, 
liked to party and re-posted videos of teens fighting one another.

Her grieving parents have asked that donations in her memory be made 
to Club 180, a Boys and Girls program that helped street kids beat 
their addictions and gain employment skills.

 From public condolences offered to the family, a fuller picture of 
Ginter portrays her as a warm, friendly, vivacious young woman who 
liked to sing and explore her African ancestry.

What we don't know about Ginter, strangely, is what everyone thinks 
they know - just exactly what caused her death. It's out there now, 
loose in the Internet, that she died from taking what she believed to 
be the relatively benign street drug, ecstasy, but which turned out 
to be something much worse.

This belief is based on the second-hand, dubious and often 
unattributed comments gobbled up on the long weekend by media.

One local headline flatly stated "Bad drugs claim life of Kelowna 
teenager," though there is nothing at this point to suggest that was the case.

Sad to say, it probably was just ordinary drugs, which of course are 
bad enough.

Three local teens did get seriously ill last Thursday after buying 
and using what they thought was ecstasy. Subsequent testing by police 
showed it was, in fact, heroin.

Although all three teens recovered, Kelowna RCMP did the responsible 
thing on Friday issuing a press release warning that something being 
pitched as ecstasy had the potential to make users seriously ill.

Police were obviously mindful of the fact tens of thousands of young 
people would be in Kelowna for the popular Centre of Gravity 
festival, and they deserved a warning that really bad drugs, as 
opposed to just ordinarily bad drugs, might be circulating, disguised 
as ecstasy.

Then, unfortunately, there was nothing but official silence from the 
RCMP through the long weekend. They said Tuesday morning what they 
could have easily said Sunday afternoon - that it simply isn't known 
what, if any kind of illegal street drugs, Ginter took before she 
died, and that an autopsy and toxicology tests hadn't been conducted.

The police faced some criticism at Tuesday's press conference, and 
the online posters on various media sites have targeted the usual 
suspects for their heapings of blame: the government for not 
legalizing drugs; unscrupulous drug dealers who don't engage in 
sufficient quality control programs; the schools, the health-care 
system, and even capitalism got a good going over for their many failings.

But the people who make, push, and use illegal drugs don't care. 
They'll choose to keep on doing what they do, and more candlelight 
vigils, conducted soberly or not, will illuminate the sad end to wasted lives.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom