Dear Editor:
We need to call the fentanyl crisis what it truly is.
We have all lost someone to fentanyl, it seems, or know a grieving family who has lost someone.
If I was a pharmacist and was providing prescriptions, but was replacing the medicine with quantities of cheap and deadly poison, and I was killing my patients ... I think I would be charged with murder, and treated like the despicable mass murderer that I truly was.
But if the same murderous assault is being done to opioid addicts, nobody seems ready to call it murder.
Why is that? I haven’t heard that expression in the media or (from) anybody else.
We are seeing people who are addicted to fentanyl itself now, rather than the other opioids they were previously battling. One can only feel that they have been tragically caught up in the grip of the most addictive substance known to man. It is not something any individual can battle on their own. In the meantime, more Canadians have been killed at home in the past eight months than all the brave servicemen and women who fought and died in Afghanistan.
In my mind, I see a group of people who are mass murders operating against our society across the country, without pain of being outed for what they truly are.
These are the fentanyl producers in China and elsewhere, the international and Canadian smugglers who get the product into Canada, and the Canadian drug dealers who distribute it locally. They are all mass murderers.
Finally, here is my question: Why are we not viewing this terrible situation in the way we should be? Why are we not raising the alarm, that a group of mass murderers are attacking our citizenry and killing us in record-breaking numbers?
Let’s try adjusting our language.
This is what we hear now: “There were nine overdose deaths on the DTES last night ... .”
Instead, call it what it is: “Nine people were murdered in Vancouver in a single night, bringing the number of murder victims in B.C. this year to almost 200 victims.”
We should all be talking about this.
John Durrant
North Vancouver
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