STRAIGHT TALK

RATEPAYERS DON’T WANT TO PAY FOR OD CRISIS

A Georgia Straight freedom-of-information request has turned up 35 emails to the city from residents who have little or no sympathy toward those who struggle with an addiction.

A lot of public feedback that the City of Vancouver has received related to the fentanyl crisis is unsympathetic toward people who struggle with an addiction.

“If people want to use illegal drugs, I’m not paying for them,” reads one letter typical of those included in a response to a freedom-of-information request filed by the Straight. “They can drop dead for all I’m concerned.”

The FOI package covers correspondence received by the mayor’s office and the city manager’s office from April 14, 2016—when the provincial government declared a publichealth emergency—up to the beginning of December. During those eight months, those two offices received 81 pieces of public feedback related to the overdose epidemic.

Of those, 35 emails can be described as taking a negative position toward people addicted to drugs.

“If you’re stupid enough to do drugs regardless of what your drug of choice is and your bad choice leads to an overdose (and potentially death), you deserve what you get,” reads another citizen’s letter. “Has anyone considered that this ‘epidemic’ is just nature’s way of eliminating the walking stupid who share our space?”

Only 16 emails expressed sympathy for people affected by the fentanyl crisis. Another 30 emails were “neutral” on the issue but were included in the FOI package because they discussed related issues: for example, a 0.5-percent increase to property taxes that the City of Vancouver implemented last December to boost its response to drug-overdose deaths.

“Why should property owners be penalized with a higher property tax to cover the costs of fentanyl over doses,” reads one typical neutral email.

Of those 81 emails reviewed by the Straight, just three expressed support for that initiative, which city council passed on December 13.

In a telephone interview, NPA councillor Melissa De Genova said she suspects the way Vision Vancouver councillors handled the property-tax increase made people less likely to support its larger response to fentanyl.

“If Vancouverites understood where their money was going, or if they had a chance to have input as to how it will be directed towards combatting the opioid crisis, perhaps we could get more of them onboard,” she explained. “There was no consultation.”

Vision Vancouver councillor Kerry Jang said that responding to the fentanyl crisis has been complicated by stigma and a lack of understanding of addiction as a disease. He told the Straight those factors are likely at work in some of the feedback the city has received on the overdose crisis.

“People don’t seem to realize— I don’t think even our opposition realizes, when it says stuff like ‘We should hand this over to the province’—that we had over 920 deaths last year,” Jang said. (There were 922 deaths across B.C. attributed to illicit drugs in 2015. That compares to 513 the previous year and 366 in 2014.)

“That’s why we’ve been sending out so many press releases, trying to help people understand,” Jang continued. “I’ve written back many of them [citizens] explaining that what we’re doing is providing money to first responders to help them cope.” Health Minister Terry Lake struggles to come up with ideas when asked what’s next in the fight against B.C.’S rising number of overdose deaths.

“We just need to continue on,” he told the Straight at a March 28 news conference at Vancouver General Hospital, “increasing the resources that are available, to be ready when people are seeking treatment.”

In Vancouver, it appears that the opposite has happened.

A review of financial reports for Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), the regional provider responsible for the City of Vancouver and Richmond, shows that while overdose deaths have skyrocketed, VCH has allocated less for mental health and substance use.

In 2013, it spent $290 million on mental health and addiction. That number declined by one percent the following year, remained stable in 2015, and then, last year, dropped by four percent, to $275 million.

The number of fatal overdoses in B.C. increased from 330 in 2013 to 992 last year.

During the same period, the City of Vancouver declared a “mental-health crisis” and Vancouver police apprehensions under the Mental Health Act rose from 2,276 in 2010 to 3,050 in 2015.

In a telephone interview, VCH spokesperson Gavin Wilson maintained that the situation isn’t as bad as it looks. He explained that VCH once paid for operations at the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction. That money is still being spent but no longer by VCH; instead, it’s funded by the Provincial Health Services Authority. Similarly, HIV/AIDS programming was once lumped in with VCH spending on mental health and addictions but now receives its own line in budget documents.

“This is a matter of funding shifting around from one category to another,” Wilson said. “We could always use more funding for just about any program, but there are limits to how much we can take from the public purse.”

But during the same period that VCH appears to have spent less on mental health and addiction, the provincial government gave the regional authority smaller annual increases in funding.

In 2009, the B.C. government’s contribution to VCH was up seven percent over the previous year. By 2012, the increase was down to four percent over 2011. In 2015, VCH actually received one percent less from the province than it did in 2014. In 2016, however, B.C. gave VCH five percent more than it did in 2015.

Lake acknowledged health authorities are trying to do more with less.

“We knew that health care was unsustainable, going up six percent every year,” he said. “I think everyone is coming to grips with this. If you look across the provinces, you’ll see that the increases back in ’06 to ’08, ’09 were significantly bigger than they have been since 2013 to today.”

Lake was elected as the MLA for Kamloops–north Thompson and has served as B.C.’S health minister since June 2013. He has announced he won’t seek reelection this May.

Asked what work he feels he is leaving unfinished on mental health and addiction, Lake paused.

“There are always things left undone,” he said. “Your need to achieve all your objectives is always going to exceed your capacity to do so.”