If you’re coming into Christmas carrying the grief of a loved one lost to the drug crisis, just know that there’s a lot of us fighting to get out from under the weight of profound inaction on this critical issue. We all need a button like the one View Towers resident Carla wears as BC closes in on 10 years since declaring a state of emergency over the toxic drug crisis, with still so little change. Some 18,000 people who have died since 2016, each with, say, 30 people who knew them, loved them, worked alongside them – that’s more than half a million people right there who could have been wearing this button. Only 12 per cent of BC’s toxic drug deaths involve people living homeless; the largest percentage of deaths are among men working in the trades. But people who are homeless account for just 0.5 per cent of the overall population, so are vastly overrepresented. People living unhoused in BC are 24 times more likely to die from toxic drugs than those with housing.