The Free Press, September 03, 2015

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Your Source for 44 Back to School Supplies n 12

Thursd a y , Se p tem b er 3 , 2015

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Serving the South Country, Fernie, Sparwood, Elkford since 1898

Fernie prepares for fall fair Pizza & pasta

250-423-4231

MON-TUES MADNESS! Ask us for details.

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Fentanyl hits East Kootenays By Katie Smith Free Press Staff

GHOSTRIDERS

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Start of season for Riders - Page 17 FERNIE

New seats at Vogue Theatre - Page 2 COMMUNITY

Women of Steel Page 13

SPORT

Downhill race Page 19

Feast and Fest organizers Holly Kimola and Lisa Janssen hold their chickens Marigold and Anna, who will be featured in the fall fair. Photo by L. Scheitel By Leah Scheitel Free Press Staff

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his fall, there will be a new festival coming to town to help celebrate the harvest in the Elk Valley. Our Harvest Feast and Fest – Fernie’s Fall Fair will be held Sept. 19-20 in Prentice Park as a way to bring the community together to enjoy the local harvest. The “feast” on Sept. 19, prepared by chef Barrie Elliott, winner of the Food Network’s Chopped Canada competition, will feature a locally-sourced menu of harvest cuisine, served outside at the community EcoGarden. Local wine and beer will be available for purchase, alongside live music and a fundraiser auction with all proceeds going towards keeping Fernie wild.

OurHarvest

The “fest” will take place on Sept. 20 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Prentice Park. Lisa Janssen and Holly Kimola are two of the main organizers of the event and say that hosting a fall fair in Fernie is an idea they’ve wanted to pursue for some time. “We talked about a fall fair a couple of years ago when we first moved back, and then for whatever reason, we brought it up this spring and it’s been go since then,” said Janssen. Janssen and Kimola are both avid gardeners and farming advocates. They believe that it’s possible to grow, share and sell produce in the Elk Valley. “People are gardening. People are growing their own veggies and it’s exciting,” said Janssen, citing that it’s a lifestyle choice that many people in the area are pursuing. “It’s amazing even in Fernie

what you can grow in a small pot or on a balcony,” Kimola said, “Farming is not dead in this community.” Because this is the first event of it’s kind in the area, Kimola, Janssen and the other organizers were able to decide how they wanted the Feast and Fest to look. “About two months ago we had our first meeting with six volunteers and I’d say four of them had never been to a fall fair, so it was fun to get them together and discuss amongst ourselves what a fall fair meant and what it would look like,” Kimola said. “Wildsight does a lot of things in the Valley - education programs, conservation - but there is nothing that really brings the community together in terms of an event. Continued on page 11

Saturday Sept 19th

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new form of synthetic Fentanyl is being sold in East Kootenay communities and health officials have issued a community warning about the drug. While the drug itself is an opiate used for pain management, the tablets being found on the street are illegally manufactured and are more toxic than the legitimate medication. Dean Nicholson, executive director of the East Kootenay Addiction Services Society, said the drug started to show up in the East Kootenays around January of 2014. “That was when we first saw it on our radar,” Nicholson said in an interview with The Free Press. “We hadn’t heard much about it anywhere in the country, so I contacted the National Drug Centre in Ottawa to let them know we were seeing this stuff and that was news to them. Now we’re hearing stories across North America about Fentanyl.” Nicholson said over the course of a month, five or six young people came to addiction services looking to go on the methadone program – which is an opiate substitute program – because they were taking what they thought were OxyContin, as that is what Fentanyl is often mistaken for by recreational drug users. “They were on these street OxyContin things that they’d gotten involved with and some had non-fatal overdoses,” he said. “This was a real blip in the kind of typical profile of intakes that we have.” Opiates aren’t part of the “major drug scene” in the East Kootenays so the centre doesn’t normally see a lot of intakes for opiates, he said. “But all of a sudden it was in Cranbrook and Invermere, and it was people in their late-teens early-20s which is not the typical profile.” Upon further investigation, Nicholson and his colleagues found what was happening was this illicit Fentanyl was being marketed in a pill form, being called OxyContin – or “Street Oxy”, which is being manufactured in Mexico with the ingredients coming primarily from China and sold on the street as a greenish tablet which may be stamped with ‘80’ and ‘CDN’ and may go by the name ‘Greenies’, ‘Green Jellies’, ‘Street Oxy’ or ‘Fake 80s’. Continued on page 3

Sunday Sept 20th

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featuring a locally grown feast prepared by Chef Barrie Elliot @ Community EcoGarden

biggest veggie contests miniature ponies cake walk & pie auction demonstrations harvest farmers market potato sack races

Tickets at Wildsight Office & wildsight.ca

10am-4pm @ Prentice Park


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