Dear Editor,
IN 2001, the year International Overdose Awareness Day was founded, the world was a simpler place.
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 three people a day.
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.
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 a person dies from overdose seven times a 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 raised 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.
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 of judgement from others had on her, has always stayed with me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After 25 years of campaigning, it seems we’re looking at 25 years more.
Until all those options we know would lower the risk of overdose have been implemented, we 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 at a Salvos Crisis Centre, to an international event. Ironically my wish is for the day not to be necessary at all.
SJ Finn
Harm reduction practitioner,
The Salvation Army & Founder of International Overdose Awareness Day