Lorrie Maude lost her brother to fentanyl poinsening after the drugs he was using where laced with this synthetic opioid. Here are her thoughts on this issue.

In a nutshell, I think the increase in deaths in BC, Alberta and the rest of Canada...really North America, is due to dealers, driven by greed, cutting Fentanyl into heroin and cocaine without the patron's knowledge. They are also crushing up fentanyl and repressing them into pills and marketing them as a more a expensive drug, such as OxyContin. People, like my brother, who have used heroin (or other drug) for many years and are probably better at eyeballing a hit than a nurse or an experienced bartender is at measuring an ounce of vodka, are taking their usual amount to stay well or to get a buzz only to be found dead later and labelled as another "overdose" victim. If a mother of 3 was found dead after drinking a glass of wine and the wine was found to have fentanyl in it, would we say she drank herself to death? If the heroin had Cyanide in it, would they then call it a poisoning.

I do not want my brother's death or anyone else's death to be called an overdose under these circumstances. This insinuates that due to their miscalculation, their mistake, they died by their own hand. Reminds me of when they used to ask the victim of a rape what she was wearing or what she was doing to entice their attacker. Our loved ones survived the streets; they survived beatings, they survived jail, they survived police brutality, they survived sicknesses most of us will never experience; they survived the daily grind of living with addiction. Everyday for them was a war and they were warriors...fighting their demons and struggling to find sobriety for short stretches and sometimes for longer ones... these people were fighters. Saying they overdosed is like the final kick in the teeth that they do not deserve. They did not do this to themselves. They were poisoned. Their lives were robbed. They were killed I would like to stop using the word "overdose".