(soft traffic sounds) - I don't know, I think important thing to note about this and these binders is that we used to change our
binders every few months because that's when we
need to change them. These represent the overdose records that we've printed and signed off on. So we can see we have
August 2016 until November, so there's a few month span there. We've got June until August,
there's a few months there but then picking up shortly after this, we've got like, January, February, March, April, May, June, July. Which were all solo
months because the volume of overdoses just picked
up so hard and so fast and then we were going through
a binders a lot faster. (low tense music) - People are dying of drug overdoses in unprecedented numbers
and most of those deaths are caused by what we call opioid drugs. These are a class of
drugs that include heroin, morphine, they include some
legal drugs and illegal drugs. Most of the deaths
occurring now are because we have a contamination
of the illegal drug supply with a drug called fentanyl. - Join me here, won't
you be seated please, ladies and gentlemen. America's public enemy
number one is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage
a new all out offensive. - Tonight we have asked
him to talk about about a topic on which he has been very active about drug policy and in fact, particularly the opioid crisis. So please join me in
welcoming in Dr. Dan Morhaim. - My conclusion is the war on drugs has been a war on people. After 50 years of the war on drugs, it's a colossal policy failure. John Erlichmann was a domestic advisor for President Richard Nixon in 1970. - [Nixon] I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. - He was involved in the Watergate scandal and ended up going to jail and he was interviewed in 1994 and offered the following, the war on drugs was created as a particular political policy to deal with hippies and blacks, Nixon's political enemies. And that was their strategy and it worked. Everything is worse. More violence, more drugs, more use, more disease spread. There's not one data point that's better. - Police department, search
warrant, open the door! - And you think it'd
strip away all the issues about drug wars, it's really a global of economic enterprise of
staggering proportions. Product is grown overseas in vast amounts, shipped in vast amounts, distributed to almost every street
corner in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere around the world. Somebody once said to me, if you want to get a dirty nuclear bomb into the United States, you just wrap it in
cocaine for safe keeping and then all the cash transactions of 5, 10, 20, $50 are
all money-laundered back through very sophisticated
financial operations in total in the billions of dollars that's not counting
criminal justice system, law enforcement, prisons, health care, AIDs, hepatis, just buying the drugs. It's a colossal enterprise. So we've had a policy
that's been not working and destroying our culture and society from the inside. It's a matter of life of death, it's a matter of life and death every hour of every day in every
part of North America and large parts of the world. It's a global issue. (tense music) - Now this is Danny's photo album, this is more sort of the older
Danny that I've put together. This is Danny the day he
graduated from culinary school. He went to the Art Institute of Vancouver and he, in spite of the
fact that he was using, he did manage to graduate
from culinary arts and he worked in some
of the best restaurants here in Edmonton. And this is like little Danny with his siblings. You know, he was always
kind of a quirky kid. When he was three, he wanted
a cactus for his birthday and when he was an eight, seven or eight, he wanted gold panning equipment. He thought he'd find the riches in the Saskatchewan River. Our youngest son, Danny, first came out and told us that he was addicted opioids, to heroin, then trying to help him and eventually he did
reach recovery for about a year and half, but like so many people in recovery, he had a relapse and he died and actually today is the anniversary, four years today is when he died from accidental fentanyl poisoning. We often think that people
who use are selfish, they only think about themselves, you know and they don't care about
the people who love them but they do. They deeply deeply care, and they feel guilty. Danny carried an enormous amount of guilt because he knew he hurt
the people he loved. His boyfriend left him because of his use. He hurt us and he was, yeah he had
an overdrawn account of regrets because of that. (somber music) - We're absolutely dealing with a crisis. The biggest thing is to
acknowledge the scope of the crisis and put resources
in an evidence-based way into the things that are needed. - Well there's lots of drug crises. We've had an alcohol crisis, there's tobacco crisis, there's a lot of crises at the same time. Why particularly opioids? Cause they're readily available because there's a huge profit margin. - Opioids are available both legally and illegally. So opioids are also
used for pain management in North America. - I myself would not take an opioid, just I've seen too much
in my own practice as a pharmacist to know better. - The likelihood of becoming addicted to an opioid is much stronger than any other substance that we know. - And it works in the brain and it works very, very quickly. It sits in the receptors in the brain that stimulate euphoria and that's why people use it. - And what we know now is
that when you give people opioids like morphine or Oxycontin, the brain changes, it changes very quickly to down regulate the pain fibers because you have all this
opioid sloshing around and you actually get
something called hyperalgesia where you feel more pain
because of the opioids and then you have to
go up on the opioid dose which leads to more side effects and tolerance and withdrawal if you stop and ultimately addiction. - I just had a kidney stone and I was given a narcotic. To be honest, it relieved the pain but you know, to take it for a few days and then not take it, I think I actually experienced
a little bit of withdrawal. - Opiate withdrawal and the
effects of opioid withdrawal on the body are very very tough. So it's been described to me as imagine the worst flu you've ever had and multiply that by ten. (tense music) - If they cut people off, then people may turn to the illegal market and there's where the risk then comes of exposure to fentanyl
and other contaminants in the illegal drug supply
that could cause death. (soft tense music) - Fentanyl is a hundred or more
times powerful than morphine so that what's called the margin of safety is much smaller, much
narrower than with say heroin. - It's odorless, colourless, tasteless, it can be in anything and there's no way that we know it's in there. You know as little as
one or two grains of salt that size could put
you or I into overdose. - Because we're dealing with a much much more powerful drug, that is where the problem arises. - It used to be that a young person might at some party somewhere, oh my friend's got some cocaine, oh maybe I'll try it and they might be okay, they might try it once, it might be great it might not be great but
they probably wouldn't die and now we don't know. - The majority of fentanyl and its analogs that we have intercepted in the Canada Border Services Agency is coming from China. - Because it's much more powerful, it's easier to import because much smaller quantities can go a long way in
the illegal drug market. - In June 2016, a package was intercepted at the Vancouver International Mail Centre being declared as printer cartridges. It was found later that it was 1,000 grams of carfentanil and many reports have shown that 1,000 grams of
carfentanil could potentially yield 50 million lethal doses. - And they're made in an
illicit lab, for example, there's no, it's not like its a reputable pharmaceutical firm where quality standards are in place all the way down the production line, so they can be great
variability between tablets. - So even though dealers may not
intend to provide a substance that will kill their customers, they don't have quality control when they manufacture the drugs for sale and tiny tiny quantities
of fentanyl can be lethal. - There is a very little
margin of safety with fentanyl and because of the cheapness and availability of this killing drug, this murderous drug, a
lot of people are dying. - This is a crash-kit check. So right now we're checking for the amount of medications that we have in our crash-kit, so we want to make sure we're ready with the right number of narcan because we can get overdoses right away. We could even have somebody
banging on the window like anytime, staring now. We just want to make sure that this is the first thing we do is that our crash-kits are ready to go. This is an artificial airway, so if somebody's not
breathing during an overdose, we're gonna tip them to the floor, tilt their head back, open their mouth, and put one of these in so that once we open up the airway to push air in, we can secure it with one of these guys. So we want to make sure we have at least two of each size. This is all part of the morning, the morning crash-kit checks. And they're very, they're
very well utilized, our crash-kits. We use them multiple times a day. It's not uncommon for us to have multiple at one time. So I think we were talking earlier about the average used to
be two overdoses per day and we're now at seven overdoses per day as our average but that number fluctuates from day to day. Insite is a supervised injection site, so the main intent of that is that people who are gonna be injecting using drugs, they can do so
with with others around them so if something happens, like an overdose, or some kind of injection
related emergency, help is right there. - Supervised consumption facilities, as we're talking about saving lives the number of overdose deaths, not overdoes but overdose deaths in supervised consumption
facilities is zero. That zero means none and if our goal is to save lives, they clearly do. - Unless we're gonna ignore
the suffering of people at every level of society, why would we want to ignore the level of people who
are addicted to drugs? And so harm reduction, to me,
is not controversial, what is controversial is
that it is controversial. - Right now we're in the injection room. So this is the only place where injections can actually happen. So we have 13 booths for that purpose. So typically people will come in, they'll register at the front desk and then once a booth opens up, we'll go to the door
and we'll call them in. They can come here and grab
all of their own supplies and I think an important part of this is that they can grab
as much as they need. So the person will
typically come and grab one of these trays. For all injections, we encourage people to use alcohol swabs to clean the skin. Waters, sterile water
so people aren't using toilet water, tap water, puddle water. Needles, the typical needle someones gonna use is,
is a one CC needle here. We have candles and matches, cause some drugs have to be broken down with a bit of heat. Like heroin, you need a bit
of heat to break that down. This is really for breaking
down crack cocaine. So we have this acid
for them to do that with. This is an important one, too. So these are cookers, these are sterile little tools people can use to prepare their drugs in. So this is different than a spoon that somebody might carry and reuse. Which can just increase
their risk of infection but also if they're sharing spoons then the risk of hepatitis C transmission or other infectious disease goes up and then once they're in their booth they can either call us if they need help, like if they need help injecting or they need help figuring, I don't know, their supplies or whatever, they can, they can just call us over, we'll go over and help but we also just pace around the room. - Places like Insite, other
supervised injection sites are gonna serve a certain population but we are overly focusing
on those populations when we are trying to think
of strategies to help. We have to got deal with the trades person or the person who got hooked on drugs cause they went to a
party with their friends when they were 19. - I've never seen anything
like this in my career. We've had instances where
there was a slight increase in overdose deaths, for example but that was very very minor compared to what we're seeing now. - Well I can tell you in one day alone at a peak time I responded to 22 separate overdoses in one shift and that's a lot of calls. - It's really hard to convince people out there in the sort of regular world that it's gonna touch their lives. You know they have this,
maybe this impression that's it's people that
are hardcore drug users on the street. That's not the case. - It's every community,
every socioeconomic strata from the very poor to the very rich across races, across gender. - The number of people that
are dying in British Columbia alone, about 100 people dying per month. In the worst months, it's more like 150. It's a terrible crisis. Young people in the prime of their lives, we don't have anything like this in BC, it's the worst public
health emergency we've had. - People need to wake up. Where's our compassion? I mean, all these people
that are dying have families. They have brothers,
sisters, mothers, fathers. - Every parent needs to talk to their kid about this because one
experiment with this drug can lead to a child's death. - Hello everyone. (laughter) (laughter) (applause) Hi, my name is Ben Cory
and this is my story. (soft music) - He always had tons of friends around him and he was a gifted athlete. By the time he was five
he was playing baseball and soccer, so he always
had lots of teammates and kids just gravitated to him. He was just a charming,
lovely, very human kid but he was also shy. Which as we realized later
was more of a problem than we thought. He was 13 and we got a
call from the school. They had to call an
ambulance. He was outside. - He called me first.
- Right, he called you. - On my cellphone and I was just about to go into a meeting and he said, "Dad I took ecstasy and I don't feel well." - I guess we treated it like
kind of a bizarre one-off. Kind of experimental and but at the time, there was no other indication that there was a problem so we treated it like that. - And he did say to us at one point that he wanted to experience
all of high school and I kind of thought,
well that's a weird thing to say but what he meant was there was partying and other things that he wanted to try. - We don't know exactly
when Ben started using Oxycontin and fentanyl but that was a game changer, for sure. (soft music) - At first, the teachers were concerned because they cared about him and the vice principal and the counselors, there was a lot of care and
compassion there at first and then as things got worse and worse, they just wanted some distance. - People don't understand
much about addiction, they don't understand
that this is a chronic health condition. - And if you ask anybody, not what was wrong with their addiction but what was right about it, what they liked about it. They'll say, it gave me pleasure, they'll say, it made me numb, they'll say, it reduced anxiety, they'll say, it gave
me a sense of control. Then you say, well why
did you have to be numbed? Cause you're in pain. - When I needed to have
my pills in the morning and I felt the most hopeless and fearful of where my life had actually taken me. I would lie on my bed thinking about where I went wrong and wishing I could just close my eyes and drift off into death but I would always find a way to get high and live about another day. - Nobody said to us, your son may be addicted
or dealing with addiction. Nobody every said that and we saw, as we've said, counselors and a psychologists and psychiatrists and lots of people who said
they offered a solution and some pretty wacky. - Yeah, yeah. - Things.
- from mainstream to wacky.
- We tried them all because we were so desperate. - Finally, thanks to my higher power for your patience, love, and compassion. Thank you. (cheering) - The challenging thing with opioid addiction,
is it's a chronic relapsing condition, there's no cure for it. You'll have it for your whole life. Similar to other chronic conditions like diabetes and we know that people are very likely to relapse even if they've been
successful in treatment for a period of time and unfortunately, people who relapse are at higher risk of death than others because they've
lost their tolerance to opioids after they've
gotten off them. So someone who's a chronic heroin user, that gets onto substitution therapy and relapses, if they take the same dose of heroin they took
before they were treated. They are now at much higher risk of death. (somber music) - The last year before he died. We resuscitated him half a dozen times. - Overdoses are a very frightening call to see for a first time, especially if you're not in
the health care professional. They're not breathing, quite often they're blue
because of the lack of oxygen. - Both the oxygen dropping in their blood and then their heart stopping both affect their brain function. - Their brain is still trying to breathe so it looks like they're gasping but clinically they look dead. - It's bad, it's bad. I've never really understood
the power of an overdose and like I said I've been
doing this for a long long time until I saw it myself
and I injected a patient with narcan and actually brought him back. - They might receive
a medication naloxone. Which will compete with the substance at the breathing centre and
they'll start breathing again. - That is, that's a bit
of an amazing thing to see because when you walk in,
they look like they're dead. - All of a sudden, he
wakes up from the steps, he just goes, and he sits up off the steps with his arms like this and he's just, the colour came back into his face and I was shocked, I was just like, I can't believe that this guy's alive. - They've been through
a pretty bad situation. They hadn't been breathing
so some brain cells had been affected, so they're not thinking too clearly. - So when I say I learned
about the power of addiction at that moment. The first thing he said to me, after I injected with him with the narcan and he woke up from a fatal
overdose, perhaps, right, was he called me a name and he said, "You ruined my fix" I think about that, I think about the power of that statement where you just saved somebody's life and he was mad at you about it. But it doesn't end there. So this was a Monday night, I was off on Tuesday only to come in on Wednesday morning to be told that he overdosed and died 24 hours later
on Tuesday evening. Think about it. Yeah. Right? So, there it is. You know, that's it. That's addiction. In a nutshell for me and I've been doing this for a long time and it was probably, like I said, 10 years into my practice here
where I never had that look at addiction where I was just like, that's what it is. That's what it is. So and the guy is dead today. He's dead today. He overdosed and died. - He had nine fentanyl
overdoses in that year and as Jill said, we found him unconscious six times. You're just really not you're not supposed to do CPR on your kid, Not just once but six times. - In that last fentanyl overdose, I think he just thought
he could take the dose that he'd been taken when
he'd been using a lot. - And evidently what had happened was he went out to have a smoke on the deck sometime in the night and died there and I didn't even know he was home. I had a naloxone kit sitting
right on the bedside table and people think naloxone
kits are the answer, well you got to be right there with that naloxone kit
right at that moment when that person is
having their last breath. Addiction is one of those diseases and you can have the best
treatment in the world and you're still gonna lose people. - Here you go, my dear.
- Thank you. I feel so tired from the last couple days I can't even explain it. In my hand. - Naloxone can save your life and for those individuals that survive but do not die, they usually end up with some form of fairly
significant brain injury. It's as bad a brain injury as
if you'd been in car accident, had a major fall, affects your personality, your cognitive functions, your ability to care for yourself. - Can you lock your brake, please? - I'm Norma and this is Tracey, she's my daughter. She was just a great equestrian and quite a competitor. Did very well in school, honor roll, very much connected in the community. So she was just, you know, like a regular kid who loved doing and being involved and was good fun. When she was maybe 15, she had endometriosis really bad. At that time, doctors pretty freely gave out morphine or something like that for pain. - The other concern that
we've had in North America is the overprescribing
of prescription opioids by physicians. Think about morphine, you
think about Oxycontin, which is in pill form and certainly in the last number of years in Canada and the United States there has been overprescribing of opioids for conditions for which it probably should not be prescribed, particularly chronic pain. - I'll never forget I'm going, wow this is morphine, that's what the doctor actually gave you, morphine, and um, when she was about 16 and 17, you know that's what she
would knock herself out with, with the painkillers
that he would give her. (tense music) - So the opioid crisis
is not just an accident, it's also, and it's not just
a problem with fentanyl, it's also a result of poor medical practice and unscrupulous pharmaceutical practice, for which nobody has
gone to jail, by the way. - There was a big push between 1998 and 2002 that every health professional who's around then knows about which was to treat pain
as the fifth vital sign. - Physicians are reading
in medical journals that we're under treating pain. In some cases, the pharmaceutical industry developed textbooks to be
used for medical students treating about pain. - There's only four basic
medicines to treat pain, Aspirin, Tylenol, non-steroidal
anti-inflammatory drugs, Motrin, Aleve, narcotics. - And then of course, the
pharmaceutical companies came in with Oxycontin and
the promotions of these drugs as safe and non-addictive. Paying physicians to
be on speakers' bureaus and promoting pain as the fifth vital sign and that we need to do a much better job treating pain. That was really an
intervention by corporations in the health care system that really lead to
what we call Iatrogenic or caused by the health
care system addiction. - As she got older I did not know that she was going to other doctors getting more. By the time she was 20, she was heavily into prescription pills. As a parent, you just sort
of try as hard as you can to help. Sometimes helping is enabling and I know that happened. Just trying to keep her off the streets. She got off the pills, 10 or 12 years ago into hard drugs. We tried to break the constant drug use and finally, with the help of a doctor, Tracey was able to, I'm gonna say pretty much break clean. She was in Calgary with her boyfriend and three girlfriends. One of the girl's boyfriends who was very heavily into drugs, brought "Stampede Special." What she had inhaled was just enough to bring on a massive heart attack. When the ambulance got there, they brought her back right away and she, they had said, the report said she was in full code for more than three minutes. They were doing an amazing job of keeping her alive. Yeah that was... (somber music) She has noxic brain injury. What Tracey's experiencing is just getting by day to day, that's all. But a person who's addicted, I mean, to a drug, they're just ordinary people. We didn't get up this morning saying we were gonna be, you know, have something horrible happen to us. They're just ordinary people and they're dying from horrendous drugs and we have no way to stop it and are we doing enough to stop it? I don't think so. (tense music) - The war on drugs has
been a terrible failure. We are reaping what we've sown. - You have the historical war on drugs and the moralistic values and politicians very hesitant to invest in the things
that need to be done. The system needs a major overhaul. The system, it's not even broken, it's so dysfunctional and so counter-productive that we have the opposite results to what we actually want. - That's where our form submission comes in through the website but what is most powerful here is the images of these are our kids. Moms Stop The Harm, it's a network it's an advocacy group of families that have been affected
by the opioid crisis. What our aim is to change drug policy, change it away from a
focus on criminal justice and blame the person to actually seeing it as what it is, it's a health issue. Yeah I see you, yeah there's, yay you guys are here, that's awesome. I thought we could have
a chat about our event in Victoria. Our group, one of the aims right now is to work towards decriminalization of the personal possession of drugs. If you want to take away stigma of substance use, you have to take away the
criminalization of it. It's just fundamental. Okay, love you. Bye. Bye. We look a lot at the HIV AIDS crisis to learn from the advocacy in those years. Because that was very much, again, fraught with stigma and
there was low public response and numbers were really rising. So we had an initiative
that we called Do Something, Prime Minister. We had our members send
photos of their children to the Prime Minister
and write on the photo, on the envelope, do
something, Prime Minister with messages like, people are dying, we need
actions from the government and he must of received about 500 photos. We want to change legislation. This is something we are
pushing really hard for. - You never lose votes
by being tough on crime. You might lose votes if you
decide to be compassionate to those that have experienced
the greatest traumas in our society. - So what we do know is that if you look at North America at least 60% of people coming into prison have a substance use disorder and if you include the crime related to substance use, that number goes up to 80%. - We're not going to
arrest our way out of this. Prohibition's not working. The war on drugs does not work. We need to rethink, we need to reset. - If I ran the show right now, I would, like Portugal, I would decriminalize any drug. - Portugal being a good example where they decriminalized the use of drugs and they put a huge emphasis into addiction treatment and recovery and you know they have
among the lowest problems related to drugs in the
entire European Union where they used to have one of the worst and it's been a boon for taxpayers in terms of saving money and then in terms of
public health and safety, things are much better. So we need a total rethink in where we're going with this. - I would call upon the
federal government to be bold. We are dealing with a crisis here, people are dying every day. This shouldn't be about ideology it should be about what the data shows us and it tell us, if we were to right now decriminalize possession of all illegal drugs, we could reduce the risk
that people might die from overdoses. - So it requires courage on
the part of political leaders, it requires humanity and compassion on the part of society and I actually think, that if we employ those, not only would we benefit the people that's most needed I think it would benefit, I think we'd just been in a better world if we adapted those policies and those approaches. (somber music) - It's not really a drug problem when you think about it. Really it's a problem with people learning to manage to
how to cope and manage and deal with boredom and curiosity but also deal with trauma and stress and depression and anxiety and isolation and those sorts of things and there are things that we can do that really help with all of those. - I think we have to
make it okay for people to say that, to walk into
their physicians office and say you know I've
had trauma in my life, it may be sexual abuse, it could be that I was bullied as a kid, when I was a kid, it could be that I had a grandmother that I was close to died when I was five and I've never really gotten over it. They need to be able to
comfortable saying that rather than being judged. - And since trauma of various degrees and various forms absolutely almost universal through this society, this is a highly addicted society. - I think we help society understand what addition is, that it is a disease that it is an obsession of the mind that kids, these are not bad kids. They appear to be bad and they may do bad things but it's because they're sick. - I think we can do something about this. I think we need to invest
money in prevention now and I think it will make a difference but don't expect us to change the numbers next year or the year after that. - It's been well measured and well studied for a long time that for every dollar
invested in substance abuse treatment you save 7 to 10 dollars in societal expenses and that's on the measurement is the expenses that can be measured. It doesn't measure the expenses, the suffering that you can't measure. - Hi.
- Hey, sweetie. How are you?
- Mom, you're back. - You've been waiting?
- Yes. - Oh I'm sorry. - Well I would encourage people to think seriously what they can do and who can they band together with in their community, other parents, clubs, or organizations are apart of all of that. - Okay. - I need to go home. - You're going home. It's okay, okay. Just. It's okay, we'll come back. Don't worry. - Okay. - Don't worry, we're
gonna go see Dr. Bowling. - I have to go right now. - Okay. I'm going to go dump this. - Okay and we'll go? - And then we're gonna go. Okay? Don't worry. Don't worry about it. Okay? - Everyone's part of this. There's certainly opportunities to support the work we're doing. People may want to volunteer and help but I think the average person just by beginning to talk about addiction in a different way amongst
their family and friends, that's gonna begin to reduce the stigma and really help us in this crisis. - I think the best way to
address this stigma issue is one is education but we also have to look
at it compassionately and from a different lens. - It's okay. It's okay. - The average person needs
to have a discussion, you need to talk to
your children about it. It shouldn't be a hidden topic, you know, it won't happen here - Hope is an interesting word. Hope is, is there hope for something happening in the future? Well something can always
happen in the future but I think there's something
much stronger than hope, there's possibility and possibility exists
in the present moment. So people can wake up
in the present moment. They don't have to hope they can just wake up. That's a possibility
that's with us right now. So yeah there's hope in a sense that we can imagine that things would be better in the future, but in the meanwhile, let's look at what's possible right now. (soft somber music) (tense instrumental music)
This is definitely worth watching. Brings the human element back to an addiction documentary.