Overdose Awareness: 25 years on, and more important than ever
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BY SJ FINN
In August 2001, when International Overdose Awareness Day was founded, the world was a simpler place.
But, it didn’t mean people weren’t losing their lives to overdose. Just the opposite. In 1999 alone, over a thousand people died in Australia from opiate use. That’s 3 people a day.
Back then, while the physiology regarding overdoses was clear, no one was sure what was behind such a high rate of fatalities. The heroin was strong and cheap, but why?
It was later we realised Myanmar’s military junta had done a deal with a drug king-pin some years earlier, and, as a result, warehouses that had been stockpiling heroin were hurriedly emptied. Australia was the destination for these drugs.
This type of occurrence is no longer so hard to uncover. We have more information and, through our needle and syringe programs, better systems to warn the unsuspecting substance user about toxicity and contamination.
But things aren’t going well. Things aren’t right.
For all our advances, all our improved intelligence and, indeed, responses to overdose, people keep dying. The current data (2024 statistics) makes it starkly clear. In Australia, seven people die from overdose every day. That’s a person every 3.5 hours. More than double the rate at the height of the heroin glut in 1999 and 2000.
For the 25th time, on 31 August, people around the world will be raising their voices as one to lower the overdose death toll. Governments should listen, because hard decisions regarding the redistribution of funds need to be made. Heavily weighted law and order responses are not working. And to rethink our approach begins with understanding the loss people experience when a loved-one passes away in this sudden and largely avoidable manner.
It has been a windy road which led me to starting Overdose Awareness Day in 2001, and has kept me campaigning for this issue for the past 25 years. In the 1980s as a young social worker, a mother sought counselling with me because the rural town she lived in had turned against her after her child died of overdose. The impact of the shame she felt complicated her grief. The effect judgment from others had on her has always stayed with me.
In the 1990s, as a family therapist working for The Royal Children’s Hospital, I saw families struggling because of interactions their children were having with drugs and the threat, sometimes realised, of overdose.
At the Salvos, where I have worked since 1998 and still do today, I have met people who live with that threat constantly. These folk have often lost partners and friends, and, back in 2001, I saw they’d never been given the opportunity to mourn their loved-ones free from shame. This I felt was a risk factor in-and-of-itself.
Of course, lowering the rate of fatalities is also about raising awareness. Now, one of the largest groups of people suffering overdose death are older people, who die from taking prescription opioids, and or benzodiazepines. Even in 2001, I was arguing there was no line between legal and illegal analgesics, and here we are, in living proof of the fact.
Why then, when we have more knowledge about why, when we are finally able to access the overdose reversal drug, Naloxone, aren’t we seeing the rates of death come down? The answer lies in the uneven way funding is distributed. Two-thirds of the pie goes to law enforcement. The other third is largely shared between advertising-style campaigns that are often mis-framed and closer to scare campaigns, and treatment services, of which there are not nearly enough. Less than two percent of funding goes to the Harm Reduction sector, the people trying to keep people who use drugs alive, and as much as possible, free from harm.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been advances in this last quarter century. The government has wisely decided to get behind the provision of Naloxone, and everyone in the using community – not to mention their families and friends – thanks them for it.
In June this year, 20 machines dispensing Naloxone were positioned around locations in metropolitan and regional Victoria. But without other measures – the introduction of a safe supply, an increase in drug testing sites, an increase in injecting rooms – we will continue to fall short and fail society at large.
So, after 25 years of campaigning, it seems we’re looking at 25 years more. Because until all those options for what we know would lower the risk of overdose have been implemented, those who campaign on a day that acknowledges the great loss experienced when someone dies of overdose will fight on.
With the number of fatalities nudging double the road toll, the stakes are too high not to.
Testimony to its need, the day has grown from a small gathering in the backyard of The Salvation Army Crisis Centre in metropolitan Melbourne to a far-reaching international event. For this, I am grateful. But, ironically, my wish is for the day not to be necessary at all.
SJ Finn is a Needle Syringe Program Worker at The Salvation Army, a creative writer and the founder of International Overdose Awareness Day.
