Opinion: Living and dying through B.C.’s overdose crisis

published on March 28, 2025 by Jackie Dives in Globe and Mail

When my father died from an accidental drug overdose in 2017, I immediately picked up my camera to help me process what I was experiencing. His death gave my photography practice a specific urgency – it became essential to create in order to grieve and to survive that grief.

My father was one of more than 50,000 people in Canada to die from a drug overdose since British Columbia’s provincial health officer declared a public health emergency on April 14, 2016. To put this in perspective, the first Canadian death attributed to AIDS occurred in 1983 and approximately 21,000 people have died from AIDS since then.

In other words, we are currently living through one of the worst public health crises in generations. I believe that, just as with HIV/AIDS, one day these deaths will be more widely attributed to government neglect and policy failure…