Local drug safety advocate makes plea: don’t use alone
The heartbreaking messages of yet more suspected overdose deaths keep rolling in on the social media accounts of local prevention advocate Brandon Bailey.
“It feels like they’re non-stop,” said Bailey. He heard of three more suspected overdose deaths in Windsor over the last two weeks. “People send me messages if they hear about an overdose death. The drug community in Windsor is small enough that one way or another, we’re all connected to one another.”
Bailey and other members of the Windsor Overdose Prevention Society have been distributing information flyers around a number of city locations where they know people are using drugs. The flyers implore drug users to never use
alone and, if need be, Bailey himself will meet them at their home or on a sidewalk to make sure they don’t overdose.
He made the same plea on Facebook in late-November shortly after losing a friend to an opioid-related overdose. More recently, on Dec. 3, Bailey said a woman he’s known for 26 years was found dead in her apartment.
“I haven’t heard the toxicology report, but we’re not stupid, we know what happened,” Bailey said. He heard of another OD death in the bathroom of a west-end coffee shop Dec. 6 and another in a Windsor motel room Dec. 11.
The Windsor Police Service had no information to share on any of those incidents.
“Our service had no recent news releases of that nature,” Steve Betteridge, the department’s public information officer, stated in an email.
The chief coroner of Ontario, Dr. Dirk Huyer, also had no information on those specific deaths. “I know there were some concerns a few weeks ago,” said Huyer, referring to reports of five overdose deaths in Windsor over a 24hour period, Nov. 10 to 11. “When we see something like that, we try to escalate the testing to see if there’s a particular substance involved that wasn’t known to us before. “ At the time of the five reported overdose deaths, a WPS spokesman said fentanyl use was suspected.
Huyer said he couldn’t share the test results with the media. Huyer did say there have been 11 opioid-related deaths in Windsor through the first six months of 2018 and that it represents a decrease from 2017.
“We’ve seen improvement in the numbers for Windsor, the good thing is they’re down and hopefully they keep going down,” Huyer said.
“I can tell you they’re not down in the rest of Ontario. Provincially, he said, the number of opioid-related deaths through the first six months of 2018 is up 16 per cent over the same period the previous year. Overall in 2017, there were 1,265 opioid-related deaths in Ontario with 30 of those in Windsor. As for Bailey, he’ll continue to push for a safe injection site and for police to carry the life-saving Naloxone kit.
“People know the risks out there,” he said. “But at the same time a lot of people have that much pain they ’re willing to take the risk to numb the pain. I do outreach every single day and most of the people I talk to don’t want to die. If they ’re using at an injection site, people don’t die.”