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“This is a poisoned drug supply that is killing people,” she said during a news conference in Surrey, B.C.

The coroners service said 1,486 people died in 2017 despite efforts to combat the province’s public health emergency.

Chief coroner Lisa Lapointe, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, Dr. Evan Wood, of the BC Centre of Substance Use and Leslie McBain, who co-founded Moms Stop the Harm after her son died of a drug overdose, said that more must be done to fight the crisis.

“Substance use disorder is a health issue and forcing those attempting to manage their health issue to buy unpredictable and often toxic substances from unscrupulous profit-motivated traffickers is unacceptable,” Lapointe said at a joint news conference at the B.C. legislature.

Lapointe said the province must do things differently to save lives, adding the highly potent and addictive opioid fentanyl was detected in 86 per cent of the overdose deaths. She said illicit overdose deaths claimed more lives in 2018 than deaths from motor vehicle accidents, homicides and suicides combined.

Henry said her office is working with the Health Ministry, the Mental Health and Addictions Ministry and the Justice Ministry to find ways to deal with the crisis.

She said she is looking to help supply people with safe drugs and working with law enforcement to steer people into treatment and away from the courts and jails.

“These are the people we need to support with regulated pharmaceutical-grade opioids to help them and meet them where they are so that they are able at some point to look at the possibility of recovery,” Henry said.