Funds from marijuana taxes will also help, says mayor

Federal funds targeting the opioid crisis will be welcome in Lethbridge. And Mayor Chris Spearman says a share of the newly announced taxes on marijuana will also help, when its use becomes legal later this year.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau included $231 million in his new budget - - spread over five years - to support communities battling an opioid crisis.

"Maybe we can get some relief," Spearman said, pointing to the steps the City has taken to respond to the situation. One initiative, a safe-use centre where drug users can find medical help and counselling, opened Wednesday.

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Emergency services taxed by spike in overdoses, incidents

Police, firefighters and paramedics are so overwhelmed with drug-related 911 calls in the days after welfare cheques are issued that Victoria's police chief wants the province to consider staggering distribution of the cheques throughout the month.

"Generally speaking, we see a spike during the evening of welfare Wednesday and the day or two after of overdose calls, disturbances, drug activity occurring. Sometimes someone has been defrauded or robbed," Police Chief Del Manak told the Times Colonist.

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The significant spike in illicit drug overdoses in Lethbridge has not reached Medicine Hat - yet.

There is no way to predict that it will or when, said Insp. Tim McGough, Medicine Hat Police Service.

Lethbridge recently experienced its largest spike in overdoses - 16 cases - ever recorded in a 24-hour period. There were 42 overdose calls to first responders in the week after Feb. 19.

"We've had no specific overdose spike (in Medicine Hat) but we are always concerned with illicit usage." said McGough.

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The president of the union representing more than 3,000 Suncor workers says they have prepared to bring the issue of random drug testing back to arbitration if the Supreme Court of Canada does not hear their case.

The comments came after the Alberta Court of Appeal upheld an injunction against the practice granted by the province's Court of Queen's Bench.

In a Thursday morning interview, Ken Smith, president of Unifor Local 707A, said he was confident Canada's top court will hear their case. The union expects to hear a decision by the end of March.

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Regulations as to where cannabis can be used are needed, officials say

With the upcoming legalization of cannabis, Yarmouth's recreation director, Frank Grant, has big concerns.

"One of the things that we have concerns of with legalized cannabis is how it's going to be used on the street, in our parks, in our sports fields, in our parking lots or outside gymnasiums or halls," he said.

In the past, when the recreation department has had issues with older youth, at facilities where cannabis has been detected and reported to the RCMP, Grant says it's been downplayed.

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Scientists and lawyers are raising a series of concerns over Ottawa's plans to combat drug-impaired driving, saying the proposed regime is not based on evidence and will struggle to withstand legal challenges.

Bill C-46, which would create new drug-impaired driving offences, is currently being studied in the Senate, where there is growing pressure on senators to amend the proposed legislation before it comes into law. The government wants the new rules in place before cannabis is legalized for recreational use, a move expected in late summer.

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An emergency situation demands an emergency response.

When people are trapped in a burning house or wrecked car, the priority should be getting them out alive first, and then worrying about damaged property or blocked roadways.

This is how people in Waterloo Region need to understand the horrific and rising number of opioid overdoses ravaging their community.

We are, collectively, facing an emergency. People are dying in staggeringly high numbers. Others are suffering terribly.

For all their sakes but also for the welfare of this region, we must offer help - even as we work out the details.

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The union representing Canada's border agents is hoping money allocated to combatting the country's overdose crisis will go toward hiring full-time chemists to screen for fentanyl and other deadly drugs at major mailing centres and ports of entry.

Most fentanyl shipments coming into Canada originate in China and first arrive at the Vancouver International Mail Centre. A pilot project launched last fall at the facility sees chemists conduct on-site testing and analysis of items suspected to contain fentanyl in a safe examination area where ventilation is controlled.

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Nearly three weeks in, London's temporary overdose-prevention site - the first of its kind in the province - has gone from four drug users a day to 44, and front-line workers are beaming.

The stripped-down supervised consumption facility opened Feb. 12, a quick, co-ordinated response to the growing number of opioid overdoses among London drug users. As of Tuesday, staff were seeing as many as 44 clients a day.

"Clients are having trouble believing it. It's too good to be true," said Sonja Burke, needle exchange director at the Regional HIV/AIDS Connection.

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A new clinic giving access to a drug similar to prescription heroin is likely heading to Edmonton's inner city.

Alberta Health is planning two clinics as a pilot project, one each in Edmonton and Calgary. Treatment would require opioid addicts to visit the clinic several times each day to inject drugs supplied by the clinic.

It means users no longer need to buy drugs on the black market, and studies at Vancouver's Crosstown Clinic found patients in the program cut back their use of illicit drugs from at least 14 times a month to less than four.

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OTTAWA * The military is currently wrestling with the implications of marijuana legalization, Canada's top general says - including time restrictions on using the drug before going on duty.

"We're going to try to be smart about it," chief of defence staff Gen. Jonathan Vance said on Monday. "But in the end, this is dangerous duty, this is serious duty for the country, and we don't want people doing it stoned."

Vance's comments came during an appearance before the Senate defence committee, where he was largely grilled on the troubled military procurement system, peacekeeping and efforts to stamp out sexual misconduct in the Forces.

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This week marks a historic first for the City of Lethbridge. The Supervised Consumption Site (SCS) will open its doors and will be the first of its kind in North America to offer all four modes of consumption - ingestion/oral, injection, intra-nasal/snorting and inhalation. Despite this milestone, it's fair to say the facility has been met with mixed reviews, including people who have come to me to "blame" the police service for letting it happen. This not only demonstrates a narrow view of Canada and our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but a failure to understand the role of the police in social-political decisions that are driven by municipal , provincial and federal officials and the mandate they support.

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U.S. consul general and mayor issue warning to travellers

Canada's pending marijuana legalization may end up slowing more than just pot users' reaction times - it could slow the whole border, Mayor Drew Dilkens and U.S. Consul General Juan Alsace suggested Monday. Dilkens and Alsace chatted at the mayor's office Monday about border issues, including NAFTA negotiations, international trade, Great Lakes health and the Trudeau government's intention to legalize recreational use of marijuana. Both officials said problems at the U.S. border could be sparked if pot is legalized in Canada as proposed some time in the summer. "I think it's a real issue," Dilkens said after the private meeting with Alsace, who travelled to Windsor from Toronto for the informal chat. "And I think it's an issue that folks in this area need to be attuned to. "Obviously, being in the Windsor area, we rely on our ability to go across the border seamlessly and frequently. People buy groceries over there, people go shopping for the day over there."

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Iam increasingly concerned with the inadequacy of our approach to the opioid crisis, both as a society and in the field of public health.

There is no question that when people are dying in large numbers, we have to respond, and that has been happening. Safe injection sites, the distribution of naloxone kits and similar efforts are important.

But this response is sadly inadequate. It repeats the "upstream" story that I told in the first column I wrote, in December 2014, one that is fundamental to the public health approach. In essence, villagers living on the banks of a river are so busy rescuing drowning people that nobody has time to go upstream to learn how they are ending up in the river and stop them being pushed in.

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Trying not to be too cynical about all the reporting, discussions, debates and business preparations on Trudeau's "wrath of pot" legalization predications, with the lame duck excuse that the crooks are making too much money on its sales, I'm sorry! The recent news of the inherent benefit of marijuana has been blown right out of the water by a recent group of very prominent world scientists.

They have reported that there is absolutely no shred of evidence whatsoever of its benefit for health and pain relief, because of the availability of hundreds of pharmaceuticals that do not have negative health aftereffects like brain damage, in addition to dangerous driving which puts the very heavy load on our police forces that still do not have equipment to test for drug impairment.

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St. Catharines council is unanimously supporting the creation of a temporary supervised injection site in the city to help deal with the opioid crisis.

"It is pure harm reduction. It is stopping people from dying," said Sandi Tantardini of Niagara Area Moms Ending Stigma, speaking in support of the site at Monday night's council meeting.

Tantardini and Jennifer Johnston founded the group of moms, families and friends of people who have been lost to or are struggling with addiction.

"When we're talking about the effects of the opioid crisis, our group and its representatives and our families, we're the faces of it," said Johnston, whose son Jonathan, a chef who trained at Niagara College, died of a fentanyl overdose in Toronto.

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Structural changes are required to clamp down on the unregulated private lending networks that drug traffickers are using to launder their illicit gains, a Simon Fraser University criminologist says.

A recent Globe and Mail investigation identified people connected to the local fentanyl trade who are also private lenders, using Vancouver-area real estate to clean their cash.

Neil Boyd, a criminology professor at SFU, said the complexity of these private lending networks and similar white-collar crimes make them notoriously hard to prosecute.

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Brighton - People consume marijuana because it relaxes them but the prospect of its recreational use becoming legal is making police anxious.

"Anticipated issues" include "easier access for the youth population," impaired operation of vehicles, and the "facilitation of trafficking," OPP Detective-Sergeant Rick Dupuis said in a presentation to Brighton council on the implications of the federal law that is to take effect sometime after July 1.

"The provincial and federal governments indicate that this act was introduced to minimize or mitigate accessibility to our young population but in my professional opinion I believe that is ... counterintuitive," he told council Feb. 20. "It's going to make it much easier."

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Victims of bad science at Motherisk

Return their children.

That's what they want - the parents who saw their kids ripped away based on flawed alcohol and drug hair tests from the now shuttered Motherisk lab at the famous Sick Children's hospital. A report tabled this week examined 1,270 cases handled by the lab going back more than two decades and found 56 clear cases where Motherisk's flawed test results had a "substantial impact" on the decision to remove children - - though critics argue there are far more.

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Recommendations too late for many families 'broken apart' by flawed drug and alcohol tests

The Ontario Motherisk Commission's two-year effort to repair the damage to families ripped apart by flawed drug and alcohol testing has produced sweeping recommendations aimed at preventing a similar tragedy, but in only a handful of cases has it reunited parents with their lost children.

Alice, a Hamilton mother whose daughter was apprehended in 2011 after hair testing from Motherisk purported to show she was a heavy drinker, is among the lucky few.

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