By David P. Ball
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\u2018Fighting for Space\u2019 author Travis Lupick discusses political failings, and the power of grassroots organizing by people who use drugs<\/strong><\/p>\n As new data reveal British Columbia saw the worst year for overdose deaths in its history, a seasoned reporter and author on drug policies says the crisis has hardly made a dent on the provincial election campaign trail \u2014 despite being far deadlier in the province than the biggest campaign issue, COVID-19. <\/p>\n Travis Lupick, author of the book \u201cFighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City\u2019s Struggle with Addiction,\u201d says the terrible toll of the pandemic\u2019s response on drug users has barely registered with party leaders, so far. <\/p>\n \u201cIn the last couple elections, federal and provincial, which were held with the overdose crisis in full swing, we saw this issue receive no attention at all,\u201d Lupick said. \u201cI don\u2019t have a lot of hope for this issue receiving a lot of attention this election cycle. <\/p>\n \u201cI expect COVID to receive a lot of attention, but COVID is not killing people in the numbers the overdose crisis is.\u201d<\/p>\n All parties have made a few statements supporting addiction treatment and overdose prevention programs, yet Lupick said there has been nothing substantial or urgent enough to suggest the crisis is killing more than five of our citizens every day on average. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By David P. Ball — \u2018Fighting for Space\u2019 author Travis Lupick discusses political failings, and the power of grassroots organizing by people who use drugs As new data reveal British Columbia saw the worst year for overdose deaths in its history, a seasoned reporter and author on drug policies says the crisis has hardly made…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":15951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[57,225],"tags":[886,1048],"radio":[237],"origine":[280,262,231],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15947"},{"taxonomy":"radio","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/radio?post=15947"},{"taxonomy":"origine","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/origine?post=15947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}