International Overdose Awareness Day is extremely important here in Sarnia-Lambton, according to the vice president of mental health and addiction at Bluewater Health.
Paula Reaume-Zimmer said the community experiences a higher overdose rate than the provincial average, and that overdoses have increased by nearly 50 per cent locally since 2019. She said the day helps residents understand what they can do to start changing that trajectory.
"It's important for us as a community to recognize people who are struggling with substance use disorder and how we connect people to help sooner, and that's really what the awareness is about."
Sarnia-Lambton residents are invited to the St. Clair River Tuesday evening to recognize Overdose Awareness Day. The event, hosted by Bluewater Health, gets going at 6 p.m. in Centennial Park near the fish fountain.
Reaume-Zimmer said while the local community is very dialed in to this concern, the crisis is escalating and becoming harder to get on top of.
"Sarnia is starting to create quite a diverse group of options, and that's what we need because not just one thing works for everyone. So, we need alternatives and we're creating a pretty decent menu of that, but we need to continue to build."
Reaume-Zimmer added that prior to the COVID pandemic, Sarnia-Lambton was already heading into the crisis of substance use disorder and overdoses.
"But definitely, the whole mantra of the pandemic was to isolate, and what we're trying to ask people to do who are using substances is not to isolate. We want them to be around people, we want support, we want people to recognize when they have an accidental overdose."
International Overdose Awareness Day is an annual campaign aimed at ending overdose, remembering those who have died and acknowledging the grief of loved ones left behind. The campaign began in 2001.
