Every year we come together to remember the lives that have been lost due to overdose. International Overdose Awareness Day is recognized and marked around the world, and has been happening since 2001 in Australia. We’re grateful for that. But what about every other day of the year? Every day 190 overdose deaths happen in the US and 11 a day in Canada. Where is the fucking daily outrage? Can anyone really think that commemorating the millions of lives lost worldwide to this systematic drug war just once or twice a year is adequate?

Fatal overdoses may be slightly declining in the United States, according to preliminary 2018 data, but they are not falling out of public discourse⁠—and nor should they. Yet their prominence in daily news headlines and the 2020 presidential race typically glosses over important details. These omissions have consequences when over 70,000 people in the US and 585,000 people from around the world died “as a result of drug use” (not including alcohol or tobacco) in 2017.

Historian of science, technology, and medicine, Dr. Nancy Campbell, talks to HMM correspondent Corinne Carey about the controversy over the removal of park benches in downtown Troy’s Barker Park in response to open air drug use and overdoses in the park. Campbell, whose most recent book published by MIT Press in 2020 is OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, offers a set of alternative responses that the city could turn to that would enhance public safety. In this extended version of an interview that aired on the Hudson Mohawk Magazine on WOOC 105.3 FM in the capital region, Dr. Campbell offers concrete suggestions for steps that the City of Troy could take.

Ambulance paramedics are to supply to patients at risk of an opiate overdose take-home naloxone as part of a pilot scheme in Glasgow. The three-month trial, funded by Scotland’s Drug Deaths Taskforce, will see those treated by paramedics for a non-fatal overdose who decline to attend hospitial, and their friends and family, given a naloxone kit – which temporarily reverses the effect of an opioid overdose.

Distribution of life-saving overdose revival kits increased by 40% last year, new figures show. The charity We Are With You, which works on drugs, alcohol and mental health, has welcomed the increase, but warns more must be done to equip all those at risk.

After back to back months of record illicit drug overdose deaths in B.C., a former user who escaped Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside alive after battling homelessness and addiction for decades is working to educate and inspire others with his recovery. Today, Guy Felicella has a home, a wife, and three young children – including a new baby boy – but life has been a wild ride.