Coalition community member Kim Porter wearing this year's T-shirt (#weseeyou) and the sign for the memorial garden that will be new at the sixth annual International Overdose Awareness Day event Aug. 31, 5-8 p.m. in the Medicine Hat Public Library courtyard.--NEWS PHOTO SAMANTHA JOHNSON
reporter@medicinehatnews.com
The sixth annual International Overdose Awareness Day Event is being held by local drug coalition members on Aug. 31. Part of the event this year is social-media campaign #weseeyou, and Mayor Linnsie Clark will be wearing one of the purple T-shirts with the slogan when she signs a declaration the day before the event.
The event is being held to honour those whose lives have gone too soon and #weseeyou is to honour those who often don’t get acknowledged in the community – to see them with kindness, compassion and an understanding of the struggles they are dealing with.
“Nobody purposely chose to live a lifestyle of struggling with addiction,” stated coalition member Kym Porter. “We also want to help people become aware that people are dying who are not necessarily struggling with substance abuse.”
First-time users have died by using something off the street that is tainted, with some fatalities as young as 12 years old.
“Kids start experimenting at that age and unintentionally end up dying,” Porter says. “Here in Medicine Hat, since they started doing statistics in Alberta in 2016, that is the year (my son) Neil died, in our community we’ve had 134 deaths. Overall, in Alberta there have been almost 8,000 deaths. We are at a point of about six per day in Alberta and 20 a day across Canada who are dying from substance use.”
The focus Aug. 31 is to come and openly grieve losses and to be surrounded by those who understand. It’s also a day to advocate for stigma change, to bring the situation and struggles people have more out into the open and to help eliminate some of the shame.
“When you have stigma and shame attached to people and what their choices are without understanding how addiction affects the brain, there’s a lot of judgement attached to that and people don’t understand how difficult it is to turn their life around,” explained Porter.
Porter explained that while the term overdose is still being used internationally, it is being moved away from.
“We prefer not to call it an overdose because that sounds like an intentional thing, and if it was intentional it would be declared more as a suicide. We think of it more as the toxic drug crisis or the tainted drug supply accidental poisoning.”
Such terminology, she says, is more accurate because as more is learned, it’s becoming apparent that overdose is a misnomer.
There will also be mental health information available along with naloxone training at the event.
“There is nasal naloxone, which is like giving a shot of Benadryl up the nose and is very simple to use,” says Porter. “We are also having an intermuscular training. We will have free kits available for people who come and take the training. It’s five or 10 minutes our of their day and they can go away knowing how to save a life. I carry my kit in my purse.”
Everyone is welcome to the event for International Overdose Awareness Day, to be held in the Medicine Hat Public Library courtyard from 5-8 p.m. If it rains, everything will be moved indoors to the library theatre. There will be a free barbecue from 5-6 p.m. and an open mic session from 6-7 p.m.
