Fri Apr 14, 2023 – 3:29 pm EDTFri Apr 14, 2023 – 3:36 pm EDT
(LifeSiteNews) — Seven years after the province of British Columbia declared the drug epidemic a public health emergency, and just one month after the decriminalization of all drugs, overdoses continue to skyrocket.
According to the Canadian Press, B.C. tragically set three new overdose records this March, just the second month after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government allowed the province to decriminalize all drugs starting February 1, 2023, in an effort to combat the crisis.
In March, B.C. saw the most overdose calls ever recorded in one day (205), the highest 30-day overdose call average (119.9), and the most days in a row where paramedics were called to 100 or more such calls (19).
Declaring the uptick in overdoses a public health emergency on April 14, 2016, recent statistics show that annual deaths have nearly quintupled since the government began ramping up its intervention.
The 2016 emergency was invoked after statistics showed that 474 British Columbians had died from drug overdoses in 2015. In 2022, that number had increased nearly 5-fold, resting at just under 2,300 lives lost.
While the current approach by
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