Dear Editor,

Empathy is defined as 鈥渢he ability to understand and share the feelings of another.鈥�

Your letter writer Mary-Ellen Bergvinson was

Though not surprised, I am appalled by your letter writer鈥檚 lack of basic human empathy. I live in Victoria now and am often in contact with street people. I try to remember that each person has a story. That each of us was a baby, helpless and dependent on others (and might be again), our lives as much about luck and chance as our powers of choice.

Then again the absence of empathy or the cloying presence of moralist judgement doesn鈥檛 mean anything to the dead. If four dead addicts a day isn鈥檛 a problem, then perhaps the exponentially more devastated friends and family of these stricken people, should be added to your letter writer鈥檚 equations. I鈥檓 not a rocket scientist but I can guess that the dead are dead, addicts or whatever. So it must be the living who suffer. That鈥檚 the problem. You have to be alive to feel pain.

The effects of the prescription opiate epidemic require that we learn from the ground-breaking research that has been done in Vancouver; including the Insite safe injection centre. Four British Columbians are dying almost every day. At that rate over 1,000 people will be buried prematurely in B.C. this year. Even if one wants to write them off as junkies who should have known better, what about their 10s of thousands of family and friends who just happened to love them?

What is needed right now in our communities is not judgement and paranoia, nor shielding our children from the stark realities of life, but education, compassion, and basic human empathy.

These are unnecessary wounds that we are allowing to be inflicted on our society. The more we deny and hide the more harm we will all spread. Every family in our province is somehow or other in the shadow of the opiates鈥� valley of death.

Steve W. Hodge

Victoria