Remembering friends and family lost on Overdose Awareness Day

For many gathered at Dickson Park in Cambridge, Ont., International Overdose Awareness Day is a painful, but necessary, day to bring awareness around the ongoing drug-poisoning crisis that is gripping communities across the country.  

"As a community, we have the responsibility to gather and rally together. We're in a crisis and we need to educate, to learn and make the changes," Melina Pearson, co-chair of the Region of Waterloo's Harm Reduction Working Group, told CBC News.

According to data from the Waterloo Region Integrated Drug Strategy, so far this year there have been 43 suspected overdose deaths and 860 overdose-related calls.

The City of Cambridge held an International Overdose Awareness Day on Aug. 24, a week ahead of before the official day, which is Wednesday.

Hundreds of purple makers were placed across Dickson Park, each representing someone who has died from an overdose in the region in the last five years. Some were plain purple, others were decorated with a person's name or their photo.

International Overdose Awareness Day is also a day for people to gather, remember and mourn friends and family who have died from an overdose.

"I'm overwhelmed right now with thinking about the old memories I had with them and it seems like it was just yesterday," said Kitty, from Cambridge, as she stood in the middle of dozens of purple markers pointing to the people she once knew. 

"Like Jackson over there. I saw him the day before he died."

She said she's in the process of making a marker for her boyfriend, who died five years ago from an overdose. She said she also tries to do her part to help others. 

"I'll go out to work along ACCKWA to give out Narcan kits and clean supplies. I'll go and distribute them to camps that can't make it so easily into town," she said.

"Overdose is an epidemic. It's a serious matter that has to be addressed."

'The folks we serve have worth and value'

Educating the public and reducing the stigma facing people who use drugs is one of the hardest parts of the job for Simone Morrison, manager of outreach, education and prevention with Sanguen Health Centre.

"The hardest part for me is having to explain to people that the folks we serve have worth and value. The exhausting part is having to repeat that constantly and having to fight for that," Morrison told CBC.

"We really need to move past the judgment and stigma we have toward people who use substances."

The City of Cambridge is now in the process of applying for a Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) site, which Morrison and Sade Bezjak say is a step in the right direction.

Bezjak, who is a harm reduction worker with Sanguen and works at Kitchener's CTS site, has seen first hand the positive impact the site has had on the people who use it in that city.

"We've heard horrible things, like we're enabling to outlandish things like we're providing drugs, but none of that is true," she said.

"What we're providing is support, a space for people to come to test their drugs, to use with out judgment and that's so important. If we can see that in Cambridge then I think we'll see a massive shift in the mentality of things that are going on here."

The City of Kitchener will host an Overdose Awareness Day event from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Victoria Park, as will the City of Guelph — at the Royal Bank Plaza from 11:45 a.m. to 2 p.m.