Drug Poisoning and the Pandemic

Nicole – Working in Community Outreach

Nicole discusses her work in community outreach and how she has lived experience with addiction and living rough.

Kate – Miracle baby

Kate shares about her brothers daughter being born after he had died

Kristal – Drug Poisoning During Pandemic Stigma

Kristal discusses how the pandemic has created additional stigma surrounding those who use drugs. She dissuses how it seems like some losses are treated as more deserving of being mourned than others. Many people have had to grieve privately instead of publically within a community. She touches on the state of the public health system during the pandemic.

Kristal – Activism To Ease Anger and Grief

Kristal discusses using activism to help ease or channel her anger from the loss of those in her community to drug poisoning. She talks about her grief being very quiet and inward before, but that taking action helps her to move through it. She discusses how there may not be peace from these losses, but the goal should rather be feeling safe in the emotions.

Christian – Language around those pushed to the margins

Christian talks about how people who are pushed to the margins are not discussed as part of our community and how we need to include them. As a community how do we care for our neighbours and how do we mourn the loss of our neighbours

Kate – Things I do that help

Kate talks about how art, hiking and visiting the cemetery can be very therapeutic

Nicole – Stigma Surrounding Drug Use

Nicole discusses how the stigma around drug use has an impact on how people feel able to grieve when those in their community are lost.

Kristal – Poetry, Comedy, & Art for Grieving

Kristal discusses using poetry and other forms of creative expression as a distraction from her grief and to disassociate in a safe and productive way. She discusses grief being love with nowhere to go, so she puts it into art.

Laura- Loss to Covid & Disconnection

Christian – Supporting people who may die

Christian talks about going from zero overdoses to 50 in a matter of months and how to help people who may die

Kate – My story

Kate tells her story of being away when her brother died of an opioid overdose