Overdosing Alone

Why big-city solutions to the opioids crisis dont work in rural communities

- Sharon J. Riley

Last winter was a brutal one in southwestern Alberta, with snowdrifts taller than trucks and record-breaking cold temperatures. Then, in late February, nature delivered another blow: a howling blizzard, icy roads, and snow that reduced visibility to near zero. At the same time, a particularly lethal shipment of opioids, known on the street as “super beans,” arrived in the area. Officials would later say that they suspected the drugs contained carfentanil, the powerful opioid 5,000 times more potent than heroin. People started overdosing almost immediately.

“It was a perfect storm,” says Esther Tailfeathers, a physician in Stand Off, a small community that’s a forty-minute drive southwest of Lethbridge. Stand Offis the administrative centre of Blood Reserve 148, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada and territory of the Blood Tribe (also known as the Kainai First Nation). About 4,500 members live on-reserve. “The graders and snowplows were working like crazy just to get to the homes where the overdoses had happened,” Tailfeathers says. Paramedics responded to 150 calls that weekend — a substantial feat, considering the community covers an area twice the size of Toronto. In one home, Tailfeathers says, five people overdosed at the same time. Over ten days, thirty people overdosed on the Blood reserve, and nearby Lethbridge reported more than fifty others.