Overdose Awareness Day hopes to honour those lost to addictions, break down stigmas

A special event being held in Thunder Bay Wednesday hopes to show people lost to addictions are more than just numbers.

The annual Overdose Awareness Day will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Kaministiquia River Heritage Park. It will include overdose prevention education, an empty chair campaign, free naloxone kits, and give people a chance to pay tribute to loved ones lost to the drug epidemic.

A ceremony and candlelight vigil will also take place at the park at 7 p.m.

"It's extremely important for us as community members, as community partners, to come together to raise awareness about overdose deaths in the community and across Canada," said Cynthia Olsen, the city's manager of community strategies.

"It's also a day to challenge stigma around drug related deaths, and to provide an opportunity for family and loved ones to grieve the loss of somebody," she said.

And it's a chance to acknowledge that those lost are more than statistics, Olsen said.

"When we often talk about substance use, or we're talking about overdose deaths, we do often talk about the numbers," she said. "But it's absolutely more than numbers."

"This is devastating communities across Canada, and individuals in our own community have lost family members to addiction," Olsen said. "It's really important that we celebrate those individuals for who they are, what joys they found in life."

Recent data released by the Ontario Office of the Chief Coroner shows Thunder Bay had the highest death rate from opioid overdoses in the province from April 2021 to March 2022: 82.1 per 100,000 people.

During that time, the data shows there were 118 confirmed opioid deaths, and nine probable, in the Thunder Bay District Health Unit service area.

Holly Gauvin, executive director of Elevate NWO, said she wasn't surprised by the data.

"We've stayed open, we've stayed boots on the ground throughout the pandemic," Gauvin said. "At the beginning of the pandemic, in the first year, we saw a lot of goodwill. We saw a lot of people trying to work together, trying to cooperate and trying to support people who might be somewhat disadvantaged."

"During the pandemic we started to see that shift," she said. "As the pandemic drew out and in the second year, stress really started to mount and peoples' health and mental health became very frayed."

"And people were less supportive, and people were less able to be supportive, because of their own own struggles."

That, she said, may have increased the frequency of opioid use, or led to people getting opioids from unsafe sources.

Gauvin said more needs to be done to make opioids as safe as possible in Thunder Bay, and that she'd like to see safe supply.

"Safe supply just means that under a doctor's orders and under a doctor's care, somebody can obtain a prescription for drugs that will help ease the pain, whether that psychological pain or physical pain, and help them maintain as much of their well-being as possible," she said. "There is no such thing as safe drug use. We know that, right? But we can make it safer."

"This is really taking harm reduction in the direction it needs to go, which is making sure that people have access to their drugs of choice, but that it's done through medical care so that they can be fully engaged in medical services."

That way, Guavin said, not only are the drugs safer to use, but people are supported when they want to reduce the amount they're taking, or stop altogether.

"For some people, they will always use substances," she said. "That's not necessarily going to change."

"But through a harm reduction lens, we can help to increase their quality of life, decrease the burden on taxpayers to provide really expensive, urgent medical interventions, and overall improve the quality of life for all the citizens in Thunder Bay."