A life saved

That’s Olivier Laurin on the left, a @victoria_news reporter who was on the block with me last week talking to the street community about grief. Maybe 30 minutes after I took this photo, somebody called us over to Mason Street to help with an overdose. Olivier did chest compressions on the young man outside St. John the Divine Church as the man’s lips turned bluer and a street community member held a phone so the 911 operator could talk Olivier through it. Another community member pumped in one, two, three shots of naloxone. Her expertise was awesome but unsettling to see, because it revealed how many times she must have done it before. A life was saved that day. Then we all went back to our own lives, and it was only later that I thought, good grief, how did this become a normal thing to happen? And 10 years into a state of emergency over the toxic drug crisis, why has so little been done to change any of it?

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