The sheer magnitude of Ontario's opioid crisis became tragically clear with last week's revelation that 865 people in this province had died after overdosing on one of these powerful drugs in 2016. To put this heartbreaking figure in perspective, consider that in the same year Ontario recorded 206 homicides while motor vehicle collisions claimed 482 lives, which included 96 alcohol-related deaths. People and politicians are rightly committed to protecting human lives by preventing homicides, making roads safer and cracking down on drunk driving. [continues 392 words]
Chief medical examiner's office pores over deaths in opioid fight EDMONTON - In the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner each morning, medical examiners, investigators, and morgue staff divide the stack of files containing unexplained deaths that have come in from the night before. Five years ago, this department, headquartered in a low-slung grey building in Edmonton, investigated between 1,900 to 2,000 cases a year. But in the last couple of years the caseload has jumped to between 2,500 to 2,600 annually - the bulk of that increase, officials say, is due to fentanyl and other opioid deaths. [continues 1507 words]
The legalization of cannabis and rapid scale up of supervised-injection sites - as well as community-led initiatives, such as the site set up by Overdose Prevention Ottawa in Lowertown this month - have thrust Canada back into the limelight of global drug policy. Against the backdrop of a national overdose crisis and a fracturing of global consensus on drug prohibition, these are welcome changes. Yet they only begin to chip away at the drug policy challenges facing Canada. Canada's policy community remains divided about how best to tackle the overdose crisis. As the death toll mounts, should we invest more in law and order approaches, treatment, harm reduction or some combination? [continues 582 words]
Advocate sees a role for public health nurses in fighting opioid crisis in rural communities The opioid crisis in St. John's is far from over, and a community advocate wants to see changes. "We see people every day who are at risk," said Tree Walsh, the harm reduction manager at the Safe Works Access Program (SWAP) for the AIDS Committee of Newfoundland and Labrador. "We're trying to save lives, and we're trying to prevent deaths, but as soon as the pharmaceutical supply of opioids dries up, which is happening now things are going to get so much worse." [continues 559 words]
Perth District Health Unit highlights harm reduction for drug users Nearly a year after the Perth District Health Unit (PDHU) began offering free Naloxone kits to residents in Stratford and across Perth County, the harm reduction benefits for opioid users are quite clear. Naloxone, more commonly referred to by its brand name Narcan, can be administered as a nasal spray and is used to stop overdoses. At the PDHU's Festival Square office at 10 Downie St. in Stratford, staff have been giving away kits containing two doses of Narcan each to opioid users, their friends, relatives or caregivers who feel they or their loved ones are at risk of overdosing. [continues 791 words]
Thursday is International Overdose Awareness Day, and Metro looks at just a few of the ideas to end an ongoing epidemic that's on track to kill 1,560 British Columbians in 2017. 1. Artisanal opiates? Most overdoses have been from drugs laced with fentanyl and its even deadlier cousins. An Aug. 17 B.C. Centre for Disease Control report asked, why not let opiate users grow their own poppies to ensure an untainted supply? It suggested authorities "explore medical opium" through "grower's clubs, production on a model similar to medical marijuana, personal cultivation." [continues 310 words]
Urged to declare an emergency, province promises "significant resources and supports" The opioid drug crisis flaring up in Southwestern Ontario is becoming so bad across the province, hundreds of doctors, nurses and others are pushing Queen's Park to declare an emergency. In an open letter to Premier Kathleen Wynne Monday, the health workers say limited resources and poor data are preventing them from responding properly to a disturbing, sustained increase in overdoses. "The consequences have been clear: lives lost, families destroyed and harm reduction and health care worker burnout," they write. [continues 794 words]
Your deputy editor Tyler Dawson's piece in Saturday's Sun is incredibly naive. Residents and law-abiding citizens have every right to complain about a pop-up harm reduction site in a city park and the resulting unleashing of stoned drug addicts carrying illegal and potentially lethal drugs wandering the park and the surrounding streets while families and their children play. A two year old could tell you injecting illegal drugs into your bloodstream is bad. Observing the process in a city park in a tent to make sure they do it properly, if that is even possible, is asinine. [continues 58 words]
Cheryl Guardiero should have spent Thursday celebrating her son's 30th birthday. Instead, she attended an International Overdose Awareness Day vigil in Nanaimo, her boy now among the dead for whom they grieved. Brett Colton Mercer was born in Nanaimo on Aug. 31, 1987, to loving parents who eventually had five children. He died Aug. 19, 2017 of an accidental drug overdose, alone in a motel room in Hope, where he had recently landed a job with an oil and gas firm. [continues 812 words]
Funding set for advanced drug-testing system The planned supervised injection site at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre will include world-class drug-testing technology. With funding from the Canadian Institute of Health Research, the program will be able to operate a mass spectrometry machine, which can determine the chemical makeup of users' drugs, Lynne Leonard of the Ontario HIV Treatment Network announced Thursday. Drug-testing services are themselves rare, and it is even rarer for harm-reduction organizations to offer testing as technically advanced as mass spectrometry. The system at Sandy Hill will be the first of its kind in Ontario. [continues 87 words]
It is not enough to move slowly while people are losing their loved ones, family members, friends, colleagues and patients from preventable deaths More than 700 harm-reduction workers, nurses, physicians, nurse practitioners, public health officials and others working within our health-care system, from 59 different cities and towns in Ontario, have signed a letter calling on the provincial government to declare an immediate emergency in response to opioid overdoses and related deaths in Ontario. The Ontario provincial government has been slow and ineffectual in its response to the deaths of Ontarians from the opioid crisis. Drug users and their allies have been left to respond to the recent opioid crisis alone, without sufficient funding or support. Appallingly, the most recent data available for Ontario is from 2016. It showed that opioid deaths jumped 11 per cent in the first half of 2016. For those on the front lines, it is evident that the current rate of opioid-related deaths is exceeding the mid-2016 estimate of two deaths per day and the rate of emergency department opioid-related visits has risen dramatically. This crisis has impacted people all across the province, including in northern Ontario. [continues 428 words]
Hundreds of health-care workers are urging the province to call the recent spate of opioid overdoses and deaths across Ontario by a different name. More than 700 front-line workers want the province to declare a state of emergency over the opioid crisis, in hopes that the urgent classification will boost funding for front-line workers, open up more overdose prevention and safe-injection sites and increase support and treatment programs for drug users. Whether or not the province chooses to declare the epidemic an emergency, it must start treating it as one immediately. [continues 326 words]
'People are dying in Northern Ontario and in our community with regularity' from opioids Drug deaths are now happening at an alarming pace in Sudbury. "It's not just in Vancouver," said Lisa Toner, community outreach coordinator with the Reseau Access Network. "People are dying in Northern Ontario and in our community with regularity. It's not once a month - it's weekly, is my experience this summer." Toner, who has worked in addictions outreach for a decade, said her sense of the escalating crisis has lately been confirmed by people in the city's medical field. [continues 875 words]
Province stops short of declaring public-health emergency, which more than 700 health-care workers called for in an open letter The Ontario government is promising extra money to fight the opioid crisis after more than 700 health-care workers called on the province to use emergency planning measures to address a spike in overdoses. "It is clear that more needs to be done," Premier Kathleen Wynne in a statement on Monday, vowing to commit "significant" additional resources to address the crisis. [continues 682 words]
Niagara is not immune to opioid use. Opiods are being used all over the region, not just in areas with lowincome housing and high crime rates. According to Positive Living executive director Glen Walker, hard drugs such as fentanyl aren't only a problem in larger municipalities such as St. Catharines and Niagara Falls, places such as Fort Erie and Welland also have many users, part of an epidemic across Niagara. "We have a lot of work to do," Walker says. [continues 823 words]
City's death rate among the highest An Ontario report warns Hamilton shows signs of having among the highest illicit opioid use in the province. It also flags a potential lack of addiction treatment services here compared to the high death rates found by the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network. Its alert comes at the same time that city data shows July had the highest number of opioid-related 911 calls so far this year. "Hamilton has stood out as having one of the higher death rates in the province," said Tara Gomes, a scientist at St. Michael's Hospital and the lead author of the report. [continues 581 words]
Chatter was spreading online and through the Downtown Eastside on Sunday and Monday, a rumour about cops busting an unlicensed pop-up cannabis dispensary. The dispensary in question is different from the roughly 60 unlicensed pot shops running in Vancouver, many of which are slick commercial operations. The High Hopes Foundation, a small booth that opened this summer in the Downtown Eastside, is run by the people behind the Overdose Prevention Society and works toward the same goal of saving lives as an escalating overdose crisis rocks the city and province. [continues 681 words]
High Hopes cannabis dispensary an 'outside-the-box' solution supported by first responders Chatter was spreading online and through the Downtown Eastside on Sunday and Monday, a rumour about cops busting an unlicensed pop-up cannabis dispensary. The dispensary in question is different from the roughly 60 unlicensed pot shops running in Vancouver, many of which are slick commercial operations. The High Hopes Foundation, a small booth which opened this summer in the Downtown Eastside, is run by the people behind the Overdose Prevention Society and works toward the same goal of saving lives as an escalating overdose crisis rocks the city and province. [continues 681 words]
Ottawa says it has no plans to consider decriminalizing hard drugs, such as heroin, despite calls from local politicians, health officials and experts who argue such radical action is needed to combat the overdose epidemic that first hit British Columbia and is now a national crisis. Vancouver's mayor became the latest person to advocate for this shift in drug policy after new statistics showed his city had already surpassed last year's overdose death toll of 231 people. But a spokesperson for federal Health Minister Jane Philpott says Canada is focused on legalizing cannabis not decriminalizing other, more deadly illicit drugs. [continues 686 words]
A coalition of legal advocacy groups in British Columbia is pushing to make sure justice reform is top of mind as the new NDP government heads into its first legislative session early next month. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association, Pivot Legal Society, West Coast LEAF and the Community Legal Assistance Society banded together on Wednesday to call for sweeping changes to the province's justice system. Recommendations include abolishing solitary confinement, protecting tenants from unfair rent hikes and stopping the arrest of harm-reduction workers or people in possession of small amounts of drugs. [continues 292 words]
Community marks International Overdose Awareness Day for first time A total of 48 opioid-related deaths have been reported in Chatham-Kent between 2005 and 2016, according to Public Health Ontario, but it's likely that number is higher. Jordynne Lindsay, a registered nurse with the Chatham-Kent Public Health Unit, believes the number of local deaths could be under-reported due to a difference in the coding used by the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance emergency department, Chatham-Kent EMS and Chatham-Kent police. [continues 512 words]
For the past several months, a group of frontline workers, illicit-drug users and parents have met to discuss how they can better inform the public on the one thing that unites them: The overdose crisis. "It's such a diverse mix of people, but we've all been affected," said Leslie McBain, a founding member of Moms Stop the Harm. She lost her only son, Jordan Miller, to an opioid overdose in 2014. She has helped support other parents and has become a respected advocate at all levels of government. [continues 699 words]
Temporary clinic has been open for a week in building at Victoria and Dundas Sts. It has been nearly one week since Toronto opened its first city-run site for people to use illegal intravenous drugs and, so far, three dozen people have used the controversial service. "We are thrilled to be offering this life-saving service to the community," Dr. Rita Shahin, Toronto Public Health's associate medical officer of health, said Saturday. "The very first client that we had when we opened our doors, to us, represents a potential life that we may have saved. We had 36 visits in just five days, which . . . represents a great success. We look forward to more people becoming aware of the service and helping more people in our community." [continues 560 words]
Advocates say they can't wait any longer and will open a safe-injection location Drug users are dying while politicians fill out forms and wait for approvals for supervised injection sites, says a group promising to open a guerrilla injection tent of its own somewhere in Ottawa Friday. Overdose Prevention Ottawa, which has only existed for a matter of days, is taking the delicate political compromises that have let harm-reduction efforts lurch forward here and kicking them aside. Because waiting is costing lives, the group says. [continues 1487 words]
Abstinence is seen as the key to sobriety, but the closer you look at those struggling, the clearer you see the real problem is pain Recently, a reporter asked me a question regarding First Nations' perspectives on abstinence and harm reduction as they relate to the public-health overdose emergency. I am still thinking about that question, as it is only recently that my own mind has changed on this subject. When we attempt to "confront" family members, friends or loved ones who are struggling with alcohol or substances, our all-too-human approach can be to call for, plead and beg for abstinence. In that moment, we believe we see the problem and a resolution clearly, in black-and-white terms. We see the substance, the drug of choice or alcohol, as the problem, and we see abstinence as the solution. [continues 642 words]
The push for legal harm reduction requires breaking the law. That was the chatter Friday down at the pop-up safe-injection site in Lowertown. And it's true. With the big black tent in the background of Raphael Brunet Park, volunteers prepared for what they expected to be a busy evening. Boxes of fruit snacks and flats of Costco water sat nearby. Some people moseyed through, grabbing a doughnut and cup of coffee and asking what was going on. Things that are illegal don't tend to become legal until people realize the consequences aren't as grave as they fear. More to the point, perhaps, with something like harm reduction and drug use, things don't tend to become legal until everyone realizes that it was criminality in the first place that made an activity dangerous. [continues 547 words]
When Erick Laurie found out Friday that a pop-up safe injection site had been set up in his neighbourhood, he called one of his friends who uses drugs and, after a little convincing, they walked to Raphael Brunet Park together. "You'll have somewhere where you feel safe, you'll feel comfortable. A friend can bring them (to the site)," said Laurie, who was addicted to opioids while receiving treatment for back pain about a decade ago. The launch of the "pop-up" supervised injection site was announced on Thursday, and on Friday the location was revealed at the Brunet park near the By Ward Market. The site was open to people who wanted to use the service it provides for three hours Friday evening. [continues 360 words]
Medical pot viewed as safer, less addictive than painkillers; health officer cautious A Nanaimo-based researcher believes cannabis could help reduce opioid overdoses and help people overcome addiction. Philippe Lucas, who works for medical-marijuana producer Tilray, published an academic paper in the Harm Reduction Journal that explores cannabis as a substitute for opioids. Lucas said doctors should consider prescribing cannabis as a safer, less addictive alternative to opioids for treating chronic pain. "The evidence is clear at this point that medical cannabis is far less addicting and has zero risk of overdose compared to opioids," said Lucas, who has been researching the therapeutic use of cannabis for more than a decade. In a case where an opioid addiction has already taken hold, cannabis can be used alongside opioid-replacement therapies such as methadone or suboxone to improve results, Lucas's research suggests. [continues 404 words]
Concern about dangers of discarded injection paraphernalia has prompted the tattoo artist James Takeo to launch an online petition which asks Welland city council to investigate installing sharps containers in public places such as city parks. Takeo said he posted the petition on social media during the second week of this month. He said as of Tuesday it had racked up 715 signatures. He is pleasantly surprised by the response. The petition says: "Too many times there have been incidences of needles being improperly disposed of in city garbage cans or in other public places in our community. This poses a safety risk for all members of the community, especially city workers and staff who often must take the responsibility of disposal of these sharps. [continues 919 words]
Overdose crisis linked to prohibition, expert says Vancouver In 2001, Doug MacPherson developed the City of Vancouver's Four Pillars drug strategy, a policy that emphasized concepts like harm reduction (such as safe injection sites) as well as addictions prevention, treatment and drug trafficking enforcement. The deadly overdose crisis shows no sign of stopping. Earlier this week, Vancouver reported that at 232 deaths in 2017, the city has already surpassed 2016's entire total. MacPherson is now turning his attention to a "total rethink" of Canadian drug strategy and is calling for what he calls "the legal regulation" of all drugs. Metro spoke to MacPherson about political risk and what it takes to move controversial policies into the mainstream. MacPherson was recently awarded the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy from Simon Fraser University. He'll deliver a lecture on drug policy after receiving the award on Oct. 10. [continues 463 words]
