I don’t want to alarm anybody and I
don’t want anybody to freak out or jump
out for the the doors but we’re actually
in the middle of a public health
emergency and I know what you’re
thinking don’t freak out if the guy
behind you starts to cough it’s not that
kind of public health emergency I’m not
talking about the disease of infection
I’m talking about the disease of
addiction and more specifically
overdoses before I start talking about
overdoses and what’s happening in our
community though I want to make sure I
ignore like something right off the top
and that is that a lot of people help me
make this I couldn’t have done it
without the help of physicians nurses
first responders people who work with
the homeless community and people who
help at-risk youth all of them
educated and inspired me so quickly and
so deeply that my head is actually still
spinning so that being said I’m talking
today about overdoses and more
specifically about a type of drug called
opioids opioids are a type of painkiller
and God forbid if your grandmother ever
you know hurts herself and needs to go
get a hip replacement she’ll probably be
prescribed something called morphine if
you know anything about the overdose
epidemic you’ve probably also heard
about a drug called fentanyl it’s
probably the most popular buzzword when
it comes to what’s happening right now
fentanyl is actually fifty to a hundred
times more powerful than morphine and
what that means is you only need a dose
the size of a grain of salt to have a
heroin like high but if you have two
grains of salt it’ll probably kill you
in fact it’s killed 914 people 47 of
them were in kelowna last year and
that’s an insane number it’s a number
that I couldn’t really comprehend when I
was trying to learn about these stats in
fact if everybody just took a second and
kind of looked around and seeing how
many people could fit in this room if
you triple that you probably still
wouldn’t have the right number it’s
about the size of a section in an NHL
arena not only that if you look at what
it compares to in years past you could
see how sharp the increases of overdoses
overdose deaths in recent years in the
year 1990 there were 80 overdoses we’re
doing that in a month now another way to
kind of look at it is if you were going
to look at how somebody in BC was
probably going to die you would probably
think about car accidents or drownings
if you combine those two measures
overdose deaths actually are much higher
normally when you’re faced with
information like that it’s probably
coming from someone who is an academic
or who’s an expert on this stuff or it’s
someone who has dealt with addiction and
is speaking about we’re claiming so much
of what that experience is taken from
their life I am none of those things I’m
just a regular guy and I think that
that’s important because for far too
long when it comes to this issue that’s
happening in our community regular
people like us have been excluded they
we haven’t been showing up I wanted to
talk to as many people as I could about
what was happening in our community I
wanted to learn so much more about what
was happening and why and the first
thing I learned really quickly was the
idea that you were gonna drive out of a
certain part of town and not have to
deal with this problem anymore it’s just
not grounded in reality and this isn’t
just heroin that’s being affected by
this fentanyl it’s also MDMA cocaine
drugs that are used recreationally and
by people all over across so many
different demographics I also learned
that research from someone by the name
of Johann Hari and Hari was someone who
wrote a book in that book he went
through three years of trying to find
out what happened in the war on drugs he
wanted to try and understand the addicts
in his own life why the war on drugs
failed so miserably what he learned was
researched by a man named dr. Bruce
Alexander he cute I think he’s cute
and dr. Alexander did experiments on
rats and in those experiments you put a
rat in a cage and put two water bottles
and in one water bottle the water would
have heroin in it the other one would
just be regular water the rat would
expectedly do the heroin water so much
so that it would until it died and that
fits with what we know about addition to
be true the biological hooks and the
drug caused the rat to compulsively use
it until it died but dr. Alexander noted
that the only thing in the cage
the right to do was the heroin so he
built something called rat Park and rat
Park was a multi-level complex with
tunnels and balls and other rats to
interact with and what he knowed was
that the rest that were in rat Park
stopped using the drug in fact the usage
of it was almost zero percent okay
Steven people aren’t rats and that is
mostly true but there was also the
real-world experiment happening called
the Vietnam War and during the Vietnam
War 20% of American soldiers were using
heroin at a level that constituted
addiction so we can see from these two
experiments the idea that the
environment has a big role to play in
the outcome of someone going through
addiction well what about on a public
policy level we can see with countries
like Portugal which in the year 2000 had
one of the worst heroin epidemics in the
world 1% of their population was
addicted to heroin that they couldn’t
use the same punitive laws that Canada
and the United States were using to
treat their that to use with their
addicts it wasn’t cost-effective and it
just wasn’t working to deal with the
problem so what they did was they
gathered a panel of healthcare experts
and asked them what the most
evidence-based solution to the problem
was and what they did was radical they
legalize all drugs and most importantly
they took all of the money that was
being used on enforcement and used it to
actually provide a social safety net for
addicts they provided safe injection
sites legal heroin and most importantly
went to employers and said if you hired
this person who’s going through this
addiction we will pay for half of their
wages what that did was it allowed them
to develop connections beyond their fix
it gave the young people in Portugal a
future as you can see here the deaths
from overdoses went down by half when it
comes to the future of our young people
you can see the differences are actually
quite stark the faces behind me are
people who have passed away from phasing
out of our foster care system the young
lady in the middle her name is Paige she
phased out of foster care and then died
of an overdose in oppenheimer Park in
Vancouver the young lady on the left is
a her name is Carly Fraser
and the day after her 19th birthday the
day after she face at a foster care she
committed suicide died by suicide by
jumping off the Lions Gate Bridge and
the young man on the right his name is
Alex travail and he’s from Abbotsford
British Columbia my hometown and he died
by suicide when he jumped out of a hotel
window that he wasn’t supposed to be in
under ministry care when I made this
talk I wanted to make it with the
intention of turning whatever apathy you
may have had about what was happening in
our community and turned it into
awareness but not only that the the
tragic thing about faces like this is
that we don’t ever hear their stories or
see them until after they’re gone and it
isn’t about being just because we live
in a place that’s modern a country like
Canada a place like BC it doesn’t mean
we’re actually effective at dealing with
the issues that face our community we
are underwhelmed and they are being
underserved there had to be a better way
there has to be places in the world
where young people are being treated
better and there is raising the roof
Canada is advocating for policy based on
what happens in Australia and in
Australia they keep track of their young
people when they are in kindergarten
because they haven’t dropped out yet
it’s there that they can actually
catalog all the young people that are in
their education system and throughout
their educational career anytime
something happens whether it’s a
substance abuse issue mental health or a
problem at home and of any kind there
immediately flagged and experts and help
is provided it’s provided when they’re
at home and a solution can be solved
relatively easily before long-term
life-changing consequences occur one of
the things I did that was the most
impactful for me was I went downtown to
the local Boys and Girls Club and it was
there I learned about how important
homelessness was to dealing with young
people because if you have a substance
abuse issue or if you’re mentally ill
that problem gets way worse if you don’t
have a place to sleep at night not only
that when it comes to instituting
policies you’ve probably heard I mean
just in the past couple of days the
government got millions of dollars
within a federal agreement to have more
money to advocate and provide services
for mental health
the problem with that is that money will
almost certainly be used for beds care
beds and detox clinics and not for
preventative measures which is really
important and it’s hard to see how far
you can stretch your dollar when you’re
working on prevention not only that when
it comes to detox clinics there isn’t
provincial guidelines on what to do and
so one of the things I learned was that
there’s clinics in Vancouver where if
you finally get through all of the
paperwork and all of the work to
actually get into a detox clinic you
have the ability to leave and go back
out on the street in the middle of
treatment and be around users again we
need more holistic and coordinated care
and we need to be more preventative one
of the most hard-hitting and impactful
things about that visit to that Youth
Center was that I got a tour of the
facility and I got to see the kitchen
and the lounge area
I saw teenagers not much younger than me
I know I don’t know I’m not that far
away from my school sitting around
eating cereal and blasting rap music out
of the communal computer rap music that
I like which is good and it was there I
realized I could no longer externalize
this problem anymore
because now all of us us regular folks
who normally don’t interact with this
issue are suffering because we’re
missing out on their perspective but
also on their potential any one of those
young people could be going to a school
like UBC Oh
any one of them could maybe be on a
stage like this nervously presenting
something that they worked on but
they’re not and a lot of them won’t be
and that isn’t because a lot of people
didn’t work hard or try hard or wanted
for that to happen but it’s because they
had interactions with our education
system our social services and us the
greater community and those things let
them down I had to ask myself if that
was good enough for me it wasn’t so okay
Steven that’s what’s happening right now
but what can we do about it well for one
you can probably get one of these things
this is a unlocks own kit when
somebody’s going through an overdose the
thing that causes them to pass away is
they stop breathing and this medication
can reverse the overdose and allow them
to start breathing again and that is
really important that more people have
this because time is of the essence when
it comes
to an overdose it’s really easy the
training took me 10 minutes and the
hardest part was writing my name on the
certificate at the end seriously the
other thing is well that you can do is
learn more about the mentorship affect
thinking about the young people in your
own life understanding that there isn’t
a guidebook to your teenage experience
or an owner’s manual on getting to
adulthood with your feet on the ground
and being there for them because the
mentorship effect says you just need one
adult in your life one adult to have all
of these different metrics so that be
your health your education your job
prospects to go up all of us can be that
the other thing as well is there’s all
kinds of really great community
initiatives as well to like in from the
cold and others people hear from em cool
hi guys it’s a Boys & Girls Club as well
and local community food banks Johann
Hari said at the end of his three years
that the opposite of addiction isn’t
sobriety it’s connection and what I
learned is that whether it be the rat
studies or Portugal or Australia or even
that little moment I had in that youth
shelter I realized that all of those
things were connected by that concept of
connection the idea of regular people
just like us looking someone in the eye
and saying the trajectory of your life
is not where it deserves to be but we
will be there for you because you matter
dealing with this issue isn’t an
obligation it’s an opportunity and
something amazing happens when you do
that those people become part of the
community they’re not a threat to it
they’re a part of it and when you
believe in them and provide them with
the services they need they have the
ability to contribute and this fits not
just on a social level I mean on an
economic level there’s room for all of
us all of our voices all of us to have a
seat at the table to deal with this
issue and irrespective of whether or not
government has ability to create a magic
silver bullet solution that has nothing
to do with whether every single person
in this room and every single person
watching can help make it better I’m not
telling you what you have to do I’m just
telling you what you have the power to
do if you choose to disrupt the trend
line that’s ever-increasing when it
comes to overdoses and to
make the situation better for our
community and better for our young
people thank you
[Applause] [Music]
don’t want anybody to freak out or jump
out for the the doors but we’re actually
in the middle of a public health
emergency and I know what you’re
thinking don’t freak out if the guy
behind you starts to cough it’s not that
kind of public health emergency I’m not
talking about the disease of infection
I’m talking about the disease of
addiction and more specifically
overdoses before I start talking about
overdoses and what’s happening in our
community though I want to make sure I
ignore like something right off the top
and that is that a lot of people help me
make this I couldn’t have done it
without the help of physicians nurses
first responders people who work with
the homeless community and people who
help at-risk youth all of them
educated and inspired me so quickly and
so deeply that my head is actually still
spinning so that being said I’m talking
today about overdoses and more
specifically about a type of drug called
opioids opioids are a type of painkiller
and God forbid if your grandmother ever
you know hurts herself and needs to go
get a hip replacement she’ll probably be
prescribed something called morphine if
you know anything about the overdose
epidemic you’ve probably also heard
about a drug called fentanyl it’s
probably the most popular buzzword when
it comes to what’s happening right now
fentanyl is actually fifty to a hundred
times more powerful than morphine and
what that means is you only need a dose
the size of a grain of salt to have a
heroin like high but if you have two
grains of salt it’ll probably kill you
in fact it’s killed 914 people 47 of
them were in kelowna last year and
that’s an insane number it’s a number
that I couldn’t really comprehend when I
was trying to learn about these stats in
fact if everybody just took a second and
kind of looked around and seeing how
many people could fit in this room if
you triple that you probably still
wouldn’t have the right number it’s
about the size of a section in an NHL
arena not only that if you look at what
it compares to in years past you could
see how sharp the increases of overdoses
overdose deaths in recent years in the
year 1990 there were 80 overdoses we’re
doing that in a month now another way to
kind of look at it is if you were going
to look at how somebody in BC was
probably going to die you would probably
think about car accidents or drownings
if you combine those two measures
overdose deaths actually are much higher
normally when you’re faced with
information like that it’s probably
coming from someone who is an academic
or who’s an expert on this stuff or it’s
someone who has dealt with addiction and
is speaking about we’re claiming so much
of what that experience is taken from
their life I am none of those things I’m
just a regular guy and I think that
that’s important because for far too
long when it comes to this issue that’s
happening in our community regular
people like us have been excluded they
we haven’t been showing up I wanted to
talk to as many people as I could about
what was happening in our community I
wanted to learn so much more about what
was happening and why and the first
thing I learned really quickly was the
idea that you were gonna drive out of a
certain part of town and not have to
deal with this problem anymore it’s just
not grounded in reality and this isn’t
just heroin that’s being affected by
this fentanyl it’s also MDMA cocaine
drugs that are used recreationally and
by people all over across so many
different demographics I also learned
that research from someone by the name
of Johann Hari and Hari was someone who
wrote a book in that book he went
through three years of trying to find
out what happened in the war on drugs he
wanted to try and understand the addicts
in his own life why the war on drugs
failed so miserably what he learned was
researched by a man named dr. Bruce
Alexander he cute I think he’s cute
and dr. Alexander did experiments on
rats and in those experiments you put a
rat in a cage and put two water bottles
and in one water bottle the water would
have heroin in it the other one would
just be regular water the rat would
expectedly do the heroin water so much
so that it would until it died and that
fits with what we know about addition to
be true the biological hooks and the
drug caused the rat to compulsively use
it until it died but dr. Alexander noted
that the only thing in the cage
the right to do was the heroin so he
built something called rat Park and rat
Park was a multi-level complex with
tunnels and balls and other rats to
interact with and what he knowed was
that the rest that were in rat Park
stopped using the drug in fact the usage
of it was almost zero percent okay
Steven people aren’t rats and that is
mostly true but there was also the
real-world experiment happening called
the Vietnam War and during the Vietnam
War 20% of American soldiers were using
heroin at a level that constituted
addiction so we can see from these two
experiments the idea that the
environment has a big role to play in
the outcome of someone going through
addiction well what about on a public
policy level we can see with countries
like Portugal which in the year 2000 had
one of the worst heroin epidemics in the
world 1% of their population was
addicted to heroin that they couldn’t
use the same punitive laws that Canada
and the United States were using to
treat their that to use with their
addicts it wasn’t cost-effective and it
just wasn’t working to deal with the
problem so what they did was they
gathered a panel of healthcare experts
and asked them what the most
evidence-based solution to the problem
was and what they did was radical they
legalize all drugs and most importantly
they took all of the money that was
being used on enforcement and used it to
actually provide a social safety net for
addicts they provided safe injection
sites legal heroin and most importantly
went to employers and said if you hired
this person who’s going through this
addiction we will pay for half of their
wages what that did was it allowed them
to develop connections beyond their fix
it gave the young people in Portugal a
future as you can see here the deaths
from overdoses went down by half when it
comes to the future of our young people
you can see the differences are actually
quite stark the faces behind me are
people who have passed away from phasing
out of our foster care system the young
lady in the middle her name is Paige she
phased out of foster care and then died
of an overdose in oppenheimer Park in
Vancouver the young lady on the left is
a her name is Carly Fraser
and the day after her 19th birthday the
day after she face at a foster care she
committed suicide died by suicide by
jumping off the Lions Gate Bridge and
the young man on the right his name is
Alex travail and he’s from Abbotsford
British Columbia my hometown and he died
by suicide when he jumped out of a hotel
window that he wasn’t supposed to be in
under ministry care when I made this
talk I wanted to make it with the
intention of turning whatever apathy you
may have had about what was happening in
our community and turned it into
awareness but not only that the the
tragic thing about faces like this is
that we don’t ever hear their stories or
see them until after they’re gone and it
isn’t about being just because we live
in a place that’s modern a country like
Canada a place like BC it doesn’t mean
we’re actually effective at dealing with
the issues that face our community we
are underwhelmed and they are being
underserved there had to be a better way
there has to be places in the world
where young people are being treated
better and there is raising the roof
Canada is advocating for policy based on
what happens in Australia and in
Australia they keep track of their young
people when they are in kindergarten
because they haven’t dropped out yet
it’s there that they can actually
catalog all the young people that are in
their education system and throughout
their educational career anytime
something happens whether it’s a
substance abuse issue mental health or a
problem at home and of any kind there
immediately flagged and experts and help
is provided it’s provided when they’re
at home and a solution can be solved
relatively easily before long-term
life-changing consequences occur one of
the things I did that was the most
impactful for me was I went downtown to
the local Boys and Girls Club and it was
there I learned about how important
homelessness was to dealing with young
people because if you have a substance
abuse issue or if you’re mentally ill
that problem gets way worse if you don’t
have a place to sleep at night not only
that when it comes to instituting
policies you’ve probably heard I mean
just in the past couple of days the
government got millions of dollars
within a federal agreement to have more
money to advocate and provide services
for mental health
the problem with that is that money will
almost certainly be used for beds care
beds and detox clinics and not for
preventative measures which is really
important and it’s hard to see how far
you can stretch your dollar when you’re
working on prevention not only that when
it comes to detox clinics there isn’t
provincial guidelines on what to do and
so one of the things I learned was that
there’s clinics in Vancouver where if
you finally get through all of the
paperwork and all of the work to
actually get into a detox clinic you
have the ability to leave and go back
out on the street in the middle of
treatment and be around users again we
need more holistic and coordinated care
and we need to be more preventative one
of the most hard-hitting and impactful
things about that visit to that Youth
Center was that I got a tour of the
facility and I got to see the kitchen
and the lounge area
I saw teenagers not much younger than me
I know I don’t know I’m not that far
away from my school sitting around
eating cereal and blasting rap music out
of the communal computer rap music that
I like which is good and it was there I
realized I could no longer externalize
this problem anymore
because now all of us us regular folks
who normally don’t interact with this
issue are suffering because we’re
missing out on their perspective but
also on their potential any one of those
young people could be going to a school
like UBC Oh
any one of them could maybe be on a
stage like this nervously presenting
something that they worked on but
they’re not and a lot of them won’t be
and that isn’t because a lot of people
didn’t work hard or try hard or wanted
for that to happen but it’s because they
had interactions with our education
system our social services and us the
greater community and those things let
them down I had to ask myself if that
was good enough for me it wasn’t so okay
Steven that’s what’s happening right now
but what can we do about it well for one
you can probably get one of these things
this is a unlocks own kit when
somebody’s going through an overdose the
thing that causes them to pass away is
they stop breathing and this medication
can reverse the overdose and allow them
to start breathing again and that is
really important that more people have
this because time is of the essence when
it comes
to an overdose it’s really easy the
training took me 10 minutes and the
hardest part was writing my name on the
certificate at the end seriously the
other thing is well that you can do is
learn more about the mentorship affect
thinking about the young people in your
own life understanding that there isn’t
a guidebook to your teenage experience
or an owner’s manual on getting to
adulthood with your feet on the ground
and being there for them because the
mentorship effect says you just need one
adult in your life one adult to have all
of these different metrics so that be
your health your education your job
prospects to go up all of us can be that
the other thing as well is there’s all
kinds of really great community
initiatives as well to like in from the
cold and others people hear from em cool
hi guys it’s a Boys & Girls Club as well
and local community food banks Johann
Hari said at the end of his three years
that the opposite of addiction isn’t
sobriety it’s connection and what I
learned is that whether it be the rat
studies or Portugal or Australia or even
that little moment I had in that youth
shelter I realized that all of those
things were connected by that concept of
connection the idea of regular people
just like us looking someone in the eye
and saying the trajectory of your life
is not where it deserves to be but we
will be there for you because you matter
dealing with this issue isn’t an
obligation it’s an opportunity and
something amazing happens when you do
that those people become part of the
community they’re not a threat to it
they’re a part of it and when you
believe in them and provide them with
the services they need they have the
ability to contribute and this fits not
just on a social level I mean on an
economic level there’s room for all of
us all of our voices all of us to have a
seat at the table to deal with this
issue and irrespective of whether or not
government has ability to create a magic
silver bullet solution that has nothing
to do with whether every single person
in this room and every single person
watching can help make it better I’m not
telling you what you have to do I’m just
telling you what you have the power to
do if you choose to disrupt the trend
line that’s ever-increasing when it
comes to overdoses and to
make the situation better for our
community and better for our young
people thank you
[Applause] [Music]
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