Prince George is featured in a new CBC Gem documentary series in an episode about the opioid crisis.
Good People debuts today on CBC's free steaming service, CBC Gem. The five-part series takes a look at the issues of homelessness, the spread of garbage in the environment, issues facing veterans, gun violence and the opioid crisis.
Series creator Mark Sakamoto said he wanted to take a look at some of biggest problems facing communities in North America, and the creative ways some communities are tackling them.
"They're not insurmountable problems, that's the thing," Sakamoto said. "We really set out to look at what some communities are doing."
Sakamoto said he chose to come to Prince George to shoot parts of the episode on the opioid crisis because he wanted to illustrate that this problem isn't just found in places like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
"We wanted to show that this crisis really doesn't' discriminate between bigger cities and smaller cities and towns," he said.
While the in city, he met with the co-founders of the POUNDS (Preventing Overdose and UNDoing Stigma) Project. The POUNDS Project operates mobile overdose prevention teams and a resource centre for people experiencing homelessness in the city.
"I started my interview and we were interrupted by a lady assaulting another lady with a crowbar," Sakamoto said. "We spoke directly to many people who are struggling with opioid issues. They really talked to us about what it's like."
Public discussion about drug addiction often focuses on the statistics, the number of overdose deaths, etc., he said, but when you look people suffering from addiction in the eyes it humanizes the issue.
Good People debuted on CBC Gem a day after the B.C. Coroners Services announced its latest statistics on illicit drug overdose deaths. Between Jan. 1 and the end of March, seven people in Prince George died of drug overdoses.
In 2019, a total of 25 people in the city died of drug overdoses and 49 in 2018.
Based on statistics from 2018 to the end of March this year, the city has the ninth-highest rate in the province of drug overdose deaths per capita. The city's rate of deaths is the equivalent of 35.8 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to the B.C. average of 20.4 deaths per 100,000 people.
So far this year, Northern Health has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths per capita, at 29.3 per 100,000 residents.
"But there is hope," Sakamoto said. "This is not blind hope, but hope based on factual evidence."
After leaving Prince George, Sakamoto's crew went to Burlington, Vermont – located 150 km south of Montreal.
"Burlington looked eerily similar to Prince George a decade ago. Vermont was the worst state in the U.S. for opioid issues," Sakamoto said. "Then they did something really interesting... They thought about it as a health pandemic."
Instead of treating the opioid crisis as a criminal problem, they treated it as a purely medical issue. They established a command and control system that responded to increases in overdoses like an outbreak during a pandemic.
Overdose prevention teams would respond and go into an area experiencing a surge of overdoses and provide reinforcements to the local public health personnel on the ground, he said.
"That changed the whole ballgame in Vermont," Sakamoto said.
The state went from one of the worst rates of opioid overdoses in the United States to one of the best, he said.
Similar to Medicine Hat, Alta., which is also featured in the series for its work to eliminate homelessness, Vermont changed its results by changing how it approached the problem, he said.
"There is nothing special about Burlington, or about my hometown of Medicine Hat. They just went ahead and did it," Sakamoto said. "If there is a silver lining of this (COVID-19) crisis... the world has hit a pause button. In this quiet pause... citizens can think deeply about what kind of society do we want to live in."
View the episode of Good People featuring Prince George free online at https://gem.cbc.ca/season/good-people-with-mark-sakamoto/season-2/8cff4c66-8468-42d4-bcb5-3ca65cbb5a22.
