The provincial government recently launched a campaign attempting to raise awareness about toxic drug supplies, and they’re hoping to get the attention of post-secondary students with it.
The Toxic Drugs are Circulating campaign launched in August but has been extended specifically to reach post-secondary students this fall. According to minister of mental health and addictions Sheila Malcolmson, people with lived experience who do a lot of work in forming the government’s approach to these issues say that reaching first-time drug users is important.
“First-time drug users, recreational drug users, can get caught in this just as well, so they really encouraged us to step up the information campaign, to ring the alarm that overdose is not just about peoples’ stereotype of who a drug user is, that it can hit anybody,” she says. “It could hit you the first time that you do cocaine at a wedding, you know, there are these stories out there and we really wanted to make sure that we took that back-to-school opportunity as a chance to let young people know to be careful, that there are supports out there for them, and we just wanted them to have their eyes wide open about the dangers that they might face with this celebratory period of things opening up a little bit and being on campus and being together after a long time apart.”
As for how post-secondary students in particular are impacted by drug toxicity, Malcolmson points to a few key factors but also mentions how there are lots of supports on campus.
“We know that there’s a real circle of care on campus, whether it’s through student unions or people looking after each other, recognizing that a lot of folks are away from home for the first time,” she says. “We want everybody to be keeping that careful extra eye if people make the decision to use drugs, urge them, so strongly, not to use alone, not to hide their drug use, especially if they’re dealing with addiction challenges, and if they do choose to use alone despite the caution there are tools, like the Lifeguard app that has been used extensively since we launched it a year and a half ago or so, and we are trying to meet people where they are at, keep people safe, and do everything we can to separate people from that toxic drug supply.”
The overdose crisis and the toxicity of the drug supply aren’t the only crises BC residents are dealing with right now, of course. But even with the COVID-19 pandemic still going strong, Malcolmson says it was important to get this issue in the public eye now.
“We’re in uncharted times, between COVID and the accelerated tragic loss of life due to the overdose crisis, we just have to find new ways to blow open the stigma and bring this into peoples’ ordinary lives as a conversation point,” she says. “It’s a health-care issue—we want people to see it as such and have these conversations that we open. We really look forward to feedback from students about, what are the best ways to connect and get these messages out, and we’ll be able to modify that approach as we go along.”
The COVID-19 pandemic actually made the drug-toxicity crisis worse, explains Malcolmson. She says that when borders closed, the supply chain of illicit drugs changed “enormously and a lot of drug dealers ended up doing their own home laboratory approach to the illicit drug trade.”
“That’s partly why we stepped up our prescribed safer supply,” she says, “so that people that are willing to work with a doctor or nurse practitioner to be prescribed an alternative to those addictive, illicit street drugs that they can get a stable and safe prescribed alternative that separates them from the toxic drug supply.”
Malcolmson says that she doesn’t expect a return to how things were before COVID closed borders once things get back to normal, though.
“We’re not counting on once the borders fully reopen the dealers returning to that international illicit supply,” she says, “and that’s why we’re really encouraging people to turn toward the prescribed safe supply that gives them the chance to stabilize, get their lives on a better track, and then we have that opportunity to connect them to treatment, care, and recovery.”
Malcolmson says there are three main messages she’d like to see post-secondary students take away from the campaign.
“That everybody who uses drugs is potentially at risk of a drug toxicity overdose, not to use drugs alone, and to reach out for the health care and safety supports that are available,” she says.