Pubdate: Tue, 08 Aug 2017
Source: Penticton Herald (CN BC)
Copyright: 2017 The Okanagan Valley Group of Newspapers
Contact:  http://www.pentictonherald.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/664
Author: James Miller
Page: A6

LOSING THE WAR ON DRUGS

Send addicts immediately to treatment; bust dealers

Holiday Mondays are ordinarily a quiet time to work around The Herald
office, especially early in the morning. That wasn't the case
yesterday as a a Good Samaratan was greeted in our back alley by a
woman passed out, looking nearly dead, as a result of what appeared to
be a drug overdose.

I pulled in a few minutes afterward, having been passed on Winnipeg
Street by an ambulance.

A 911 call and five emergency personnel responded, reviving the woman
before taking her away voluntarily, presumably to the hospital for
treatment.

What we witnessed, although foreign to many of us, was an
all-too-common occurrence - not only in Penticton but all across Canada.

The drug crisis is real. It's also expensive to treat (how much does
an ambulance and a fire truck cost these days?), and society is losing
the war on drugs.

David Prystay, manager of the Penticton Lakeside Resort where they
trained 20 staff members on how to administer naloxone, said there
were three cases alone in less than a month at neighbouring Okanagan
Lake Park of near-fatal overdoses. The three he referenced were the
ones he knew about.

Our system needs to be more vigilant on those who use narcotics which
have the potential to be fatal. Patients should immediately be
transferred to the hospital and entered into a rehab program.

Meanwhile, the courts can't be lenient on the dealers. Whoever is
selling this is not only getting rich, they're killing people.

Another thought: it's not as simple as just throwing money at a wall
and hoping something sticks.

An independent study needs to be done that shows whether government
and charitable money is actually going to treatment and not to
administrative salaries.

Fentanyl is a serious issue, and it's not going away overnight.
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MAP posted-by: Matt