Vancouver Sun | Lori Culbert | Published Jun 03, 2024
Grassroots group adds its voice to calls for simple, nasal spray naloxone on work sites to save the labourers most at risk of overdosing
The list is long and tragic as carpenter C. Michael Kinsella recounts memories of friends lost to fatal overdoses.
There was the kid his family spent Thanksgivings with, who lived next door during Kinsella’s childhood. In 2021, after that boy grew up, he worked on a construction site alongside his father, until the day his parents found him unresponsive in their basement.
And there was Kinsella’s lifelong best friend who was proud of the living he made as a bricklayer until he was injured and started taking prescription opioids for pain, which led to an addiction to illicit drugs. He overdosed in 2020.
“He was one of my best friends for my whole life,” said Kinsella, 37, who grew up with him in Tsawwassen. “It was a tough time there for awhile.”
That death sent Kinsella into his own downward spiral, requiring someone to use naloxone to save him from an overdose.
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.
In 2023 alone, Kinsella said, he lost 12 friends employed in the trades — 10 of them current or former co-workers.
Those losses prompted him to co-found a non-profit that is calling for naloxone, an overdose-reversing medication, to be mandatory on all construction sites in the province.
His group is called The New PPE. The name stands for Pioneering Protection for Everyone, a play on the common abbreviation for personal protective equipment.
“This is the most personal thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” said Kinsella. “And I’m not the only one with these stories.”
More than 14,000 British Columbians have been fatally poisoned by toxic drugs since a public health emergency was declared in 2016. The B.C. Coroners Service says about 20 per cent of those victims worked in the trades, in transport, or as equipment operators.
When the coroner’s office analyzed the background of the one third of overdose victims who were employed at the time of their deaths, it found more than half worked in trades, transport or equipment operation.
B.C. construction workers are not alone. In Ontario, a third of opioid toxicity victims had a history of employment in the trades, according to a 2022 government report. Nearly all, or 98 per cent, of the 428 who died were men. Close to two-thirds were 25 to 44 years old and almost one third were 45 to 64.
Ontario enacted new legislation last year that requires high-risk workplaces, such as construction sites and nightclubs, to have at least one naloxone kit for every 50 employees. The province provided free naloxone and training for the first 10 months, but employers who delayed signing up must now pay on their own.