Life expectancy dips due to opioid deaths
STATSCAN REPORT Fatalities rise among young due to tainted street drugs: expert
VANCOUVER • Life expectancy rates in Canada have stopped increasing for the first time in four decades, says a Statistics Canada report that blames the opioid crisis for the setback.
Statistics Canada said life expectancy did not go up from 2016 to 2017 for either men or women after an upward trend from the mid-1990s to 2012, but overall gains then started to stall.
“In particular, the drug overdose crisis occurring in Canada was a major contributing factor in the change seen in life expectancy from 2016 to 2017, especially for men,” the agency said in a report.
Life expectancy fell in B.C. in 2017 for the second year in a row, especially for young men between the ages of 20 and 44, it said.
“Although older men are living longer, the increase in deaths among young men almost completely offset these gains. A similar pattern occurred among women, although to a lesser extent.”
Canadians concerned about young adults dying from overdoses should demand drug-policy changes by “holding politicians’ feet to the fire,” said an addictions specialist responding to the data released Thursday.
“I don’t understand, truthfully, how governments are making decisions that pertain to this issue because we’re hemorrhaging money with bad drug policy and poor health-care spending,” said Dr. Keith Ahamad of the high rates of deaths.
Ahamad, who works at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, said street drugs tainted with cheap and potentially deadly fentanyl and the more potent carfentanil, typically used to tranquilize elephants, call for a regulated drug supply because too many young people are dying.
He said life expectancy between young men in Vancouver’s poor Downtown Eastside and the west side differs by 17 years and men are dying 11 years earlier than women.
“It’s absolutely mind-blowing,” he said, adding Indigenous people are disproportionately affected by the overdose crisis that led the B.C. government to declare a public health emergency in 2016.
“We’re doing a very bad job nationally with drug policy, combined with the fact that we’re not looking after people from the lower socioeconomic groups,” said Ahamad, who is also a researcher with the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, which advocates for evidence-based treatment with opioid substitutes such as suboxone.
Ahamad said it needs to be a federal election issue this fall.
“There’s a traumatic fallout for people who are losing children and siblings and friends and parents. There is health-care-provider burnout at a level I’ve never seen before. My colleagues are absolutely burned out.”
Statistics Canada said death rates due to overdose were 2.1 times higher for men and 1.6 times higher for women in 2017 compared with 2015 but those are likely underestimates because the cause of death in some cases has not yet been determined due to ongoing investigations.
Of the 4,108 overdose deaths recorded in Canada in 2017, nearly 1,100 involved people between the ages of 30 and 39, the agency said.