$2.5M FOR CITY’S OPIOID FIGHT
Wynne calls plan a model for others
The City of Ottawa’s plan to deal with the opioid drug crisis is a model for the rest of the province and the Ontario government is ready to fund it with $2.5 million, Premier Kathleen Wynne said Monday.
“We are prepared to work with them to fund their plan,” Wynne said. “We’re prepared to make sure that Ottawa has those resources.”
“We talked about global numbers. Our public health department thinks it’s about $2.5 million to help (Ottawa) by, for instance, more detox spaces, more treatment spaces, money to give firefighters and police naloxone kits. That’s about $55,000. There are specifics like that,” Mayor Jim Watson said, speaking at Wynne’s side in Toronto.
The premier said the province will call a summit of mayors very soon to talk about opioids and will use Ottawa’s estimates for the help it needs as a starting point for working out what has to be done elsewhere.
The health unit itself is still working on those specifics, said program and project management officer Dan Osterer.
“Over the last weeks we have heard from the community that, amongst other things, withdrawal management space and enhanced education and prevention (including in schools) are needed,” he said by email. “These are important elements of the Ottawa approach, along with addressing other urgent needs such as enhanced access to naloxone, and improving real-time surveillance.”
Treatment beds, especially places with medical supervision for withdrawal that can be so severe as to be deadly in itself, are very expensive. Mostly they’re run by non-profit agencies that between them offer a patchwork of programs — shortterm, long-term, specializing in women or aboriginals or teens, and so on.
Watson was leading a mission to Queen’s Park for the day, with a loaded agenda that included touting Ottawa as a research hub for self-driving cars, explaining the revised plans for the next stage of light-rail construction, and getting Wynne to a picnic celebrating the 150th anniversary of Confederation with Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard on the Alexandra Bridge in July. Opioids are the only things on the list that are actively killing people.
Drugs in the opioid family — codeine, morphine, heroin, oxycodone — aren’t new. Even fentanyl, the powerful cousin to those drugs about which we’re currently freaking out, has been around for decades. What is new is fentanyl’s widespread availability in powdered form, which makes it easy to transport and to consume, and to cut into pills masquerading as pharmaceutical-quality drugs like Percocet.
There’s a minuscule difference between a dose that makes fentanyl useful as a prescribed painkiller, a dose that gets you high and a dose that shuts down your breathing, which makes it especially dangerous to people who don’t even know it’s in the pill they’ve just taken.
Dr. Isra Levy, Ottawa’s top public-health doctor, pins a sudden rise in Ottawa’s overdose deaths in 2009 on powdered fentanyl, an increase that was key in convincing him that Ottawa needs a supervised injection site for drug addicts. Most drug overdoses don’t have to be deadly as long as there’s someone around to help.
Ottawa had 36 deaths from accidental overdoses in 2014 and 48 in 2015, most of them from opioids. The health unit is still compiling figures for 2016 but Levy said last June the main reason the number of deaths was so low before was luck, plus the distribution of hundreds of kits of naloxone, an antidote drug that can reverse an opioid overdose if it’s given quickly enough.
Watson is against supervised injection sites that protect needle-drug users. He finally said last summer he’ll yield to Levy’s and the health unit’s expertise, though, and stand aside if they’re sure.
But now we’ve seen overdose deaths of teenage girls in the suburbs. Hundreds of parents packed into a room at the Kanata rec centre at the end of February to talk about them and their anxieties about their own children. That gets politicians’ attention.
“It is a crisis throughout the country. Certainly we’ve seen some tragic deaths in the city of Ottawa in the recent past several weeks,” Watson said in Toronto.
The federal government handles big-picture health policy, border control and criminal law, but public health is a city-level responsibility mostly funded by the provinces. Some addictions begin with legitimate prescriptions for pain, which implicates doctors, pharmaceutical companies and pharmacists. Responsibility for opioids is all over the place.
The mayors of Canada’s big cities had a conference with federal ministers a couple of weeks ago but that’s not enough.
“We also need a provincial-municipal strategy and that’s why I want to thank the premier for agreeing to call mayors together — not just of big cities, because there are smaller cities, smaller municipalities grappling with the issue of becoming addicted and not having detox or treatment facilities and literally people dying every week in the province of Ontario,” Watson said.