The evidence is clear. The question is whether we are ready to listen
In Part 1 (June edition), I traced how B.C.’s toxic drug crisis unfolded, from OxyContin marketing to fentanyl, and described the four self-reinforcing cycles driving deaths in our region today. In Part 2, I want to challenge the narrative that harm reduction failed, look honestly at what we actually tried, and name what a different path could look like here in Kamloops and the Interior.
The experiment we never actually gave a chance
When we are frightened and exhausted, simple explanations are appealing. A growing number of voices now claim that harm reduction failed, that compassion did not work, and that it is time to get tough. Before we accept this, let us look at what actually happened.
Supervised consumption and overdose-prevention sites, where people can use drugs with trained staff present, have recorded no on-site deaths. Medications such as methadone and buprenorphine allow people to stabilise, work, parent, and stay alive. These treatments cost tens of thousands of dollars less per person than cycling through emergency departments, ambulances, and intensive care.
The record does not show that harm reduction failed. It shows we never built it to the scale the evidence demanded. We pulled back whenever the politics became uncomfortable. Visible tents drew louder complaints than invisible funerals.
Our healthcare system has its own blind spots, and they are costing lives. Approximately two-thirds of people who died from drug poisoning had visited an emergency department within two weeks of their death. Many of them asked for help, but they left without a meaningful link to treatment. In hospitals where doctors start treatment on the spot, patients are twice as likely to still be in care 30 days later than those handed a phone number and sent away.
We have the tools. We have not opened enough doors.
What could actually work
Let us be concrete, not about theory, but about Kamloops and the Interior.
Regulate the supply. When people use drugs with a known dose and ingredients, accidental poisonings drop. Safer supply programmes in B.C., where people receive pharmaceutical-grade alternatives to street drugs, have already demonstrated this on a small scale. A person who knows exactly what is in their prescription cannot be killed by a hidden dose of carfentanil. The barrier to expanding these programmes is not a lack of evidence. It is a matter of whether we, as voters and residents, are willing to accept them.
Fund Indigenous communities to lead. When Indigenous communities design and run their own programmes, trust rises and outcomes improve. Every time services are designed “for” Indigenous people without their leadership, we waste money and lives. The pattern is consistent and well documented. The real question is whether we are willing to transfer decision-making power to where it actually works.
Build services around how people actually use them. In Interior B.C., most people who use unregulated drugs smoke rather than inject, and most use indoors. Yet the bulk of our services are still built for people who inject, can travel to Kamloops during business hours, and can keep scheduled appointments. Someone in Barriere or Chase should not have to spend an entire day travelling to see a prescriber for ten minutes. Walk-in treatment, telehealth prescribing, and housing with on-site health supports would save time, money, and lives.
Change what we measure and what we complain about. Our loudest complaints right now are about what we can see: a tent in a park, someone in distress on Victoria Street, a needle near a playground. Those concerns are real. But if we measure success only by how tidy our public spaces look, we will keep pushing people into hiding and calling it progress. If instead we asked how many preventable deaths we avoided this year, we might find ourselves backing very different solutions.
We were wrong. We can change our minds.
I want to end where I began, with assumptions.
When I arrived in Canada from India and started working at the Paramount Theatre with the Kamloops Film Society, I walked past people in crisis in the back alley every week. I told myself the familiar story. They had made their choices. That story let me feel sad for a moment, maybe mildly annoyed, and then move on. It asked nothing more of me.
When I started reading, listening, and mapping how this system actually works, and when I sat with the data, the history, and the experiences of people on the front lines, that story fell apart.
After a year of research, my central conclusion is simple and hard to unsee. The architecture of our system, not the character of any individual, largely determines who lives and who dies. The people dying in our city are not failing themselves. They are being failed by structures that were never designed to save them.
An ambulance and a naloxone kit can pull someone back from the brink tonight. Changing the system is what saves them next week and the week after.
An invitation
The full research behind this article, including a systems analysis, a causal loop map, and a policy report, is available to anyone who wants to see how the pieces fit together. I can be reached via the Kamloops Chronicle.
A decade into this emergency, B.C. deserves more than another decade of doing the same thing and calling it resolve.
Radhika M. Tabrez is a Master of Arts candidate in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. She was a Finalist and Audience Choice Award winner at the 2026 Map the Systems competition held at Thompson Rivers University in April. She can be contacted through the Kamloops Chronicle.