EMERGENCY RISK REDUCTION

I live in Canada, and perhaps like your location, ours a privileged society. Like most of the developed world, we have incredible freedoms. However, our liberal culture also has its dark side. Living in Victoria, British Columbia, are a disproportionate number of disenfranchised people — unemployed or under employed, disabled, and/or addicted. I used to live and still attend a church in the downtown core, which is ground zero for intravenous drug use, such as crystal meth and heroin.

2016 had an alarming rate of overdoses, and this is being blamed on a new, powerful, and cheap drug on the street called fentanyl, 50 times more potent than heroin. It’s supposedly being brought in from China, and is mixed with the other powders before injected. Only a small amount can mean an overdose and death. 

A cousin of fentanyl has now hit the street, called carfentanil. It is 100x more powerful than fentanyl, and is therefore a real killer. An almost undetectable amount injected by a user is deadly. In fact, emergency responders are compelled to always wear gloves, because just the absorption thru the skin of touching the chemical, usually sold in powder form, can cause an overdose!

My interest in this is long-standing.  I have never mentioned before that I have volunteered for a decade at a downtown drop-in center where most of the Victoria disenfranchised visit. I have observed the saddest of those compelled into this lifestyle. I witness the pain, both physical and emotional, and the various states of hopelessness that many of the clients face. I also witness the risk they take to escape this hopelessness, through needles, smoke, pills, or alcohol.  And now, the alarming increase in death due to these new chemicals. It has become a game-changer.

Carfentanil is basically an elephant tranquilizer. So you can imagine how little is required to subdue – or kill – a human. Not only a drug user, but any unsuspecting person. This is my scare – that carfentanil may become ‘weaponized’. Case in point: Several years ago, a region of Russia was seeking independence. Chechen militants took hostages in a Russian theatre, and the Russian retaliated with a strategy of incapacitating the militants thru spraying carfentanil into the theatre. Unfortunately, the potency of carfentanil caused >100 deaths, almost all civilian.

A number of other chemicals are or could become weapons of bio-terrorism. This is only the latest. But the more wrenches of this sort that are in the “toolbox” of a group wanting to cause a serious disruption for any reason – political, religious, social – the closer it might come to reality.   Let’s hope and pray that this and other deadly chemicals somehow get cut off at their source, and crawl back into the murky graves from where they emerged.

Thanks for reading.