A Port Moody student’s quest to educate young people and reduce the stigma of B.C.’s overdose crisis has received a major boost.
Chloe Goodison, who founded NaloxHome in 2020, is one of five young Canadians awarded a $50,000 prize by Mazda Canada as part of the company’s Rising Legends program to recognize and support youth and youth organizations who are working to improve their communities.
Goodison, who’s in her fourth year studying health sciences at Simon Fraser University (SFU), said the money will help purchase resource materials like posters and expand NaloxHome’s education and awareness efforts beyond the Tri-Cities, where 5,000 high school students have already learned about the toxic drug crisis and been given the tools to recognize and help overdoses by the group’s team of 55 volunteers — all of them under the age of 25.
Goodison said since she embarked on her mission during the isolating and uncertain early months of the COVID-19 epidemic, she’s been struck how little young people know about the overdose crisis.
"They check out because they don’t use drugs themselves, they don’t think it applies to them," she explained. "But it affects everyone and overdoses happen everywhere."
Getting that message to young people from their peers is key to NaloxHome’s efforts, she said, so presentations and demonstrations are done in schools and at community events likely to attract youth.
"When it comes from us, they’re attentive, they trust us," Goodison said. "If it’s from adults, they tune out, they think they’re out of touch."
Goodison added she’d like to use some of the money to provide her diverse group of volunteers with more cultural training so they’re better able to connect with marginalized groups like Indigenous youth, who are disproportionately impacted by the toxic drug crisis.
"Youth need to see people like them so they know it’s a safe space for them," she said.
Making that connection will become more important as the funding boost will also allow NaloxHome volunteers to travel to more remote, northerly parts of the province where education and resources to deal with the overdose crisis aren’t as readily available.
In fact, in a report released Thursday, Dec. 14, the B.C. Coroners Service said some of the highest rates of deaths from unregulated drugs up until August of this year occurred in the Northern Interior, Central Vancouver Island and Thompson Cariboo Shuswap.
Across the province, there were 189 suspected unregulated drug deaths in October alone — that’s about 6.1 every day. And that number is already increasing as preliminary statistics indicate there were more than 200 deaths in November.
"Unregulated drug deaths in the winter months have historically increased over the numbers reported during the rest of the year," said the coroners service in a statement.
Goodison said the statistics are frightening and numbers she thinks about every day. But being able to provide programs like NaloxHome brings a ray of hope to the darkness.
"It balances out the sadness of the overdose statistics," she said. "It’s very motivating to focus on that fact."
