Gillian Kolla has been looking into the impact the drug toxicity crisis is having on people working to respond to overdose.
“While people really, really find doing harm reduction work and doing service provision for people who use drugs to be valuable and rewarding work, it has been emotionally devastating as the drug toxicity crisis has escalated,” she said.
The assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University worked on a recent study that heard from harm reduction workers with an eye towards how some of the negative consequences of their jobs could be mitigated.
“They’re being put through a certain amount of trauma within their staff role,” she said. “There is a role for organizations to be able to support their workers, to be able to do this work in the best way possible.”
Some of those surveyed had access to support programs, but Kolla says the people on the other end of the phone weren’t always prepared to deal with the continuous grief and trauma inherent to responding to overdose and drug toxicity deaths.
“A lot of times when people actually tried to avail themselves of those services, they found themselves supporting the employee assistance counselor person.”
Kolla says that ultimately, larger solutions are required to end the drug toxicity crisis.
“This is, at its forefront, a drug policy crisis, a drug supply crisis.”
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