Juno News - August 28, 2020


The opioid crisis needs to be dealt with

Topics
fentanyl crisis
Mentioned
Bonnie Henry Donald Trump Fentanyl
Is Canada heading down the same violent path as the US？ It's never enough for Black Lives Matter

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

185.62

Word count

597

Sentence count

44


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the alarming numbers of people dying from an overdose crisis in Canada, and why we have to do something about it. It's not a political issue, it's a humanitarian crisis, and we need to fix it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It was rather upsetting to read the news from the BC government that the opioid crisis during the
00:00:10.200 pandemic has only gotten worse. More people are dying than before earlier on in the year
00:00:16.980 during the pandemic. In British Columbia, January, February, you had about 75 people a month who were
00:00:22.800 dying tragically of overdose deaths. Now, May, June, July, the numbers are in 175 people a month
00:00:29.260 dying from overdose deaths. Dr. Bonnie Henry in BC, she mused that the idea was rather
00:00:35.100 disappointingly, tragically, ironically, whatever the term is, the social distancing measures are
00:00:40.320 actually being followed, meaning that people are not going to these injection sites and they are not
00:00:44.700 doing drugs with a friend or somebody else, so there's no one to watch over them if they end up
00:00:49.860 having an overdose. So they are doing drugs alone, they are dying alone. It is tragic. And I think we
00:00:56.380 all need to acknowledge that. This is not a political issue, whether it's a left-wing activist
00:01:00.880 working on the streets there dealing with these issues. President Donald Trump has said we got a
00:01:05.560 crisis on our hands. He's talking about what's going on in America. It has to be dealt with.
00:01:10.780 Here's the thing. We've got to start going in new directions, trying new things. Right now,
00:01:15.660 the leading mantra, and boy, it is a mantra. They stick to it like a talking point. Harm reduction,
00:01:21.100 harm reduction, more safe injection sites, more money for it, and now giving them free drugs.
00:01:28.160 The government acting as the dealer, as I discussed in a recent video, $1.5 million of taxpayer dollars
00:01:33.480 going to a pilot project to give opioids. Otherwise, the street drugs that these people would be getting
00:01:38.920 on the street, getting them from the government, and they're using them at these injection sites.
00:01:43.920 But a lot of people in medical communities are stepping forward saying, hold on a second,
00:01:47.800 we don't know if this is the path forward. A lot of doctors don't like this talk about
00:01:52.020 client-centered care and so forth. They say they're not clients, they're patients.
00:01:56.600 We have people who have a lot of issues going on. We need to help those people. We need to deal with
00:02:01.360 the underlying issues. That's what some psychologists, psychiatrists are saying, stepping forward.
00:02:05.880 Doctors saying it must be to help to get them off these drugs. The activists, they say, no,
00:02:11.600 we meet them where they're at. And what they mean by that is if somebody is not interested
00:02:15.900 in going through addiction services, they don't push them. They don't try and encourage them
00:02:19.940 to go there, lest the idea backfire. Okay, whatever you're taking, all of that,
00:02:24.840 we've got to be open to all different options. And here's another option that we have to explore.
00:02:29.900 We have to get tougher on the dealers. The majority of these overdose deaths in BC,
00:02:35.200 this report says, was fentanyl. This is not marijuana. This is not, you know, your mom and dad's
00:02:41.880 recreational drug from decades ago. Fentanyl is a drug, particularly car fentanyl, a variant of it
00:02:47.720 that can kill you from one single use. And when I say dealers, you know who I'm also talking about?
00:02:53.300 I'm talking about China and the shipments coming in from China, full of fentanyl,
00:02:59.500 laced with fentanyl that are killing Canadian citizens. We have to deal with these issues right
00:03:05.200 now. These numbers are only going to get worse. And the opioid crisis, it's a nonpartisan issue.
00:03:10.360 I think it's something that should concern all Canadians.