Vancouver Sun | Lori Culbert | Published Jun 27, 2024
Health Canada-funded app provides info and resources for labourers, the hardest-hit sector in the toxic drug crisis
A new, free app offers warnings about opioids and links to overdose-prevention resources for those in construction and other labour industries, the sector hardest hit by the toxic drug crisis.
“It’s a really big problem that, unfortunately, is getting worse,” said Effie Argyropoulos, who helped design the new Level Up tool.
“It offers an opportunity to circumvent the stigma associated with getting support around substances.”
The Health Canada-funded app, designed by the non-profit organization Digital Public Square, was launched in late May and for now targets the three provinces with the highest number of fentanyl poisoning deaths: B.C., Alberta and Ontario.
Those are also the regions, she said, with significant housing shortages, building booms, growing populations, and shortages of skilled trades workers — all factors that put pressure on labourers.
“So we see this as a very necessary prevention measure to disseminate quite far and wide, especially in those three provinces,” said Argyropoulos, the app’s project lead.
“And particularly in Vancouver, the epicentre of this public health emergency.”
The overrepresentation of trades workers, mostly men, in B.C.’s toxic drug death tally has been documented for years, and is often tied to their physical jobs and high injury rates.
More than 14,000 British Columbians have been fatally poisoned by illicit drugs since a public health emergency was declared in 2016. Of the victims who were employed at the time of their deaths, more than half worked in the trades, in transport, or as equipment operators, the B.C. Coroners Service says.