Eighteen hundred purple and white flags lined Holland Park Thursday.
Each one represents a person who has lost their life in Surrey during the B.C. toxic drug crisis.
One of the flags represents a young man who died earlier this week, Mona Woodward, a Surrey Union of Drug Users member, said.
"It's important to honour the lives that we lost due to overdose that could have been prevented, and it's important for the public to know and be aware that the deaths can stop by supplying a safe supply," Woodward said.
This number only represents people who have lost their lives from toxic drug poisoning in Surrey since 2016, Anmol Swaich, a SUDU community organizer and master's student in SFU's Faculty of Health Sciences, said.
International Overdose Awareness Day is marked each year on Aug. 31, but the event took place on Aug 29 from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Holland Park (13428 Old Yale Rd.)
More than 100 people gathered in Holland Park Thursday (Aug. 29) to remember the people who have lost their lives during the drug overdose crisis, Sukh Shergill from Surrey Overdose Response Community Action Team said.
Several community organizations that provide housing, health, employment, income and health support were also at the event.
"We just wanted to make it accessible and available so people could connect in an informal way and get to know each other," Shergill said.
The Fraser Regional Aboriginal Friendship Centre Association provided a meal.
April 2024 marked eight years since a public health emergency was declared in response to the overdose crisis in B.C.
In the first half of 2024, 1,158 people died in B.C. from toxic drug ingestion, with the crisis still the leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 59 in the province.
Surrey is the city with the second-highest number of toxic drug deaths in the province, just behind Vancouver.
Harm reduction and safe supply have been hot topics as B.C. heads into a provincial election this fall.
Swaich said politicians feed the misinformation and "present an inaccurate image of the issue."
In Newton last week, there were eight overdoses in the same area, Swaich said. This area has no supervised consumption site.
"We should be opening up supervised consumption sites, but this politicization and this like using of people who use drugs as scapegoats for their own political benefit by politicians on both sides," Swaich said.
"We're at a time where we're up to seven deaths a day. What should be happening is that we should be ramping up like non-medicalized or medicalized, safer supply. People should be having access to that. We should be trying to combat the rising death toll," Swaich said.
When politicians change their minds about issues like harm reduction and safe supply, it sends a message to the public.
"So that says that every time they give in, they're saying that, 'yeah, actually, we do. We change our mind. We do want people to die,' and I think that that's really, really shocking. I think when you stand amongst those the flags, like when we were putting them up, it's quite emotional. That represents individual human beings who had lives, who had loved ones, who had hopes and dreams and regrets, and you know, they were just complicated human beings who had no reason to die and they're, they're part of our society. They're not the separate outside group that we should be looking down on," Swaich said.
Accessing treatment is not a simple process, Swaich said.
"What we need to do is have evidence-based treatment available as soon as people want it," Swaich said.
"What's really happening is that the death toll is rising, and politicians are just like, you know, they're just doing interviews and trying to get votes and whatever, but the death toll continues to rise, and there is not better access to treatment and and it's, it's unrealistic. I think if the war on drugs was going to work, it would have worked by now," Swaich said.
-With files from Sobia Moman
