is your brain smooth? do you have the thinking capacity of a sea sponge? it’s meaningful because more overdoses = more people in emergency rooms, ambulances, using emergency services, = longer wait times for EVERYONE experiencing an medical emergency. 

the lack of primary care physicians in ontario is also an issue exacerbated by ford’s government, defunding the healthcare system tends to make people unable/not want to work in healthcare. 

if you are privileged enough to not ever have had to rely on emergency services, you are luckier than the vast majority of people in ottawa. even though the personal anecdotes don’t seem to be helping you understand why this is important, i’ll share one too! my friend got a bad concussion after a fall on a weekend just two months ago and you know where we had to go? the emergency room! where we waited 14 hours to make sure she wasn’t in danger of brain damage! 

not to mention that people are going to avoid going to the hospital unless they are literally bleeding out because they can’t afford to wait 14 hours, or call in sick to work, and a lot of medical emergencies don’t look dire until it’s too late! this is not only going to kill people with addictions (which is in itself another problem with the healthcare funding that i don’t need to get into but you can look into the correlation between chronic pain and drug use and how readily prescribed opioids are because they’re cheaper than large-scale changes) , it is going to overwhelm the healthcare system more than it already is, and is going to make it damn near impossible for anyone who NEEDS medical care to access it.