Elise Stolte: One bad morning walk shows just how serious Edmonton's drug crisis has become

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It was bright, sunny and warm when Phil O’Hara took his dog for an early morning walk two weeks ago.

The McCauley resident was just leaving his alley when he found a man sprawled against a heavy metal fence.

“I’m said, ‘Are you OK. Do you need help?’ He was non-responsive.”

He was about to return home to call 911 when an ambulance and fire truck turned the corner. Relief filled him, then confusion. The trucks stopped up the street. He started walking toward them and found a second man six houses down.

“He is out, too. Unresponsive, lying flopped over.”

That’s when he noticed a third man, this one lying right in the middle of 109 Avenue near 96 Street. That’s who paramedics were working on.

The number of deaths from overdose have been climbing, not just in the inner city but across Edmonton. These three lived this time, but O’Hara’s walk continued to be eventful.

He passed two men buying drugs. Then he turned a corner and found two men injecting behind a garage, one already passed out. The other asked him not to call an ambulance and “wreck his high.”

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O’Hara finally got home and saw the two drug buyers again, one now unconscious. He stayed, talking to the most lucid of the pair for five minutes until the other groaned and rolled over.

This was a particularly bad morning. But it’s why O’Hara and his neighbours were not surprised to hear three men died from a suspected overdose in broad daylight in a central Edmonton park Friday. It’s everywhere.

“We see so many people overdosing. It’s worse in terms of sheer numbers; they’re younger and there’s more young women,” he said.

“The nightmare is to have seen those three men and have walked away. You don’t want to be the person who could have done something.”

Several blocks south, a dozen friends gathered to remember the three who died Friday in Boyle Street’s Kinistinâw Park Wednesday morning.

The dead include Jason Bush, a 46-year-old from Vancouver who loved to cook and used to work in the oilfield. His common-law wife Jenny came Wednesday morning to cry, hug and receive his flowers.

Michael Dion was in his 50s. He used to work in construction and roofing, and would boast about the years when he was into body-building, said Jimmy Ali, a friend who runs the Early Bird Cafe.

Clifford Mitchell was 71, originally from Fort Vermillion and went by the nickname Mooshum, which is Cree for grandfather. His daughter bought the flowers. His friend Tim Senft called him the “most gentle man I knew.”

“I’m really going to miss those guys,” said Ali.

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Police have not released a cause of death and toxicology results will take time.

But their friends say none of these three were addicted to opioids or other hard drugs. They drank beer and smoked pot. Senft and others believe someone gave them a joint contaminated with fentanyl and it killed them.

It’s a real tragedy, and hugely complex. Try to figure out what’s to blame — is it the contaminated drug supply, the misery of this pandemic, a long-term underfunding of additions treatment and trauma recovery?

It’s all of those, of course. In the short term, overdose deaths nearly doubled in the Edmonton Zone last year with 485, up from 267 in 2019.

That’s part of what O’Hara is seeing on his walk in the inner city. But he and his neighbours see a small fraction of the pain. Alberta Health statistics suggest 80 per cent of people poisoned by these drugs are dying at home, often in the suburbs alone in their living rooms.

Thankfully, addictions are starting to be recognized as a health issue and funded as such. That’s why the provincial government dropped fees for treatment beds, committed to funding 4,000 more spaces a year before the next election and is working on a new shared computer system to track wait times and availability across the province.

But there is obviously a long way to go.

The community needs permanent supportive housing and the City of Edmonton is still hoping the province will fund operations, including health and life-skills support, for the five projects under construction this year. Supervised consumption sites are important but they are not actually solving the issue.

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This won’t be fixed tomorrow but it’s not hopeless either. The first step is to recognize just how bad it’s become.

estolte@postmedia.com

twitter.com/estolte