When asked what brought Glenn Mahoney to Overdose Prevention Day at the B.C. legislature, he responded in a candid tone which can only come from years of confronting a horrible tragedy.
"Death. Too much preventable death."
Mahoney's son, Michael, developed a substance use disorder at 13 when prescribed oxycodone for a medical issue. His journey ended at 21 with him dying alone in his car.
Michael is one of over 17,000 people in B.C. who have died from toxic drug use since the state of public health emergency was first declared in April 2016. What perplexes Mahoney as much as the fact that 2,000 more people have died since last year's gathering is the lack of action.
"I always find it shocking that people aren't outraged at this level of death," he said.
At one point, members in the crowd who had lost a loved one due to the crisis lay on the legislature steps. They covered them, painting a stark picture beneath the Canadian flag.
One sign read "They were so loved." Photos of those lost were strung with hearts along the fence – all ages pictured including young teens.
The drug toxicity continues to be the leading cause of death in B.C. for people ages 19 to 59, pointed out Lisa Lapointe, former B.C. chief coroner, in her speech.
"What could be more important?" she asked, calling for standardized, evidence-based, free treatment. "Why isn't our government bringing this kind of health care into the health care fold?"
Even though Mahoney and his wife are both graduate-level educated, he said they could not navigate the system to help their son. The best they could do was "very expensive" private treatment programs, all abstinence-based; programs he felt ridiculed people for taking any prescribed psychiatric medications.
"In every step, you're punished and stigmatized," he said.
At one point before his death, Michael had been "fairly stable" while he was on pharmaceutical alternatives, also known as safe supply, a word that Mahoney says has now been "polluted" by politics and misinformation.
But when Michael lost the person that was supplying him with the alternatives, he turned to the street supply that killed him.
His case was used by the coroners death review panel in 2020 because of the number of encounters with the health care system that the family dealt with. That included being denied applications by Island Health and not being accepted as a patient by adult community psychiatrists.
"At every point and every encounter, the system made his condition worse," Mahoney said. "It's a failure of public policy."
A call for change
Lapointe and Kelsey Roden, a physician, addiction medicine specialist and co-founder of Doctors for Safer Drug Policy, emphasized that despite progress with overdose prevention sites, decriminalization and safe supply, deaths continue because of prohibition and stigma remain unaddressed.
Based off of information from public health professionals from the provincial health officer down, and BC Coroner Service death review panels, Lapointe said there are "straightforward things" that could be done to prevent deaths. The first, she said, is to acknowledge it as a health issue.
She also criticized that private residential treatment centres are allowed to charge "tens of thousands of dollars" for unstandardized treatment and advocated for pharmaceutical alternatives.
"[They are] a really, really important way of stabilizing people so they can start to see a future, moving them away from the chaotic drug trade," she said.
For Glenn and Jan Mahoney, they vowed to keep fighting every year so that no other family endures the same loss, all while remembering their son – a "creative, artistic, funny, caring and polite" young man who used to sing with Victoria Opera.
"If I have to be here every year until I'm 100 ... I'm gonna be here to tell the government that this is not good enough. These lives matter," Jan Mahoney said.
