Dramatic rise in Hamilton death investigations blamed on opioid crisis
Lack of consumption treatment services here compared to less hard-hit areas
A dramatic rise in area death investigations shows the devastating toll of Hamilton’s opioid crisis.
At the same time, there’s a lack of consumption treatment services here compared to less hard-hit areas of the province, found Ontario’s auditor general.
Death investigations at the Hamilton Regional Forensic Pathology Unit jumped 70 per cent to 1,386 a year by March 31, 2019. There were 815 cases only four years earlier.
Ontario’s chief coroner has put much of the blame for the troubling increase on Canada’s ongoing opioid-overdose epidemic which has been particularly evident in regions served by the unit such as Hamilton and Brant.
“Hamilton truly is representative of the opioid deaths,” Dr. Dirk Huyer said in an interview with The Spectator in December. “We’ve seen an increased number of deaths — most of it is opioids. Really it’s harder hit in that region.”
Yet, Hamilton doesn’t have as many consumption treatment services funded by the Ministry of Health as other parts of the province which are not seeing the same kind of substantial increases in opioid-overdose deaths.
Hamilton has one supervised injection site at Hamilton Urban Core Community Centre on Rebecca Street. The city is planning a second site but it hasn’t opened yet.
Brantford has no supervised injection site despite having one of the worst opioid-overdose problems in the country.
“In 2018, although the number of opioid-related deaths in Hamilton was 50 per cent higher than in Ottawa, the capacity of ministry-funded sites in Hamilton is about eight times less than Ottawa,” states the auditor general’s annual report released in December.
The province has also arbitrarily capped the number of sites at 21 across the province.
“The ministry has neither determined whether the number or capacity of Consumption Treatment Services sites is appropriate nor ensured each site operates consistently,” states the report.
It’s significant because the report says the sites “provide a safe environment where their clients can consume substances they possess under supervision of health-care professionals, who help identify and respond to overdoses on site. The sites can also connect clients to other addictions, health and social services.”
Highly respected Hamilton forensic pathologist Dr. John Fernandes warned about the deadly consequences of the opioid crisis on this area right before leaving his job when he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in November, 2018. He died on April 18, 2019.
“Our numbers of cases have gone up dramatically, in particular in association with the current opioid crisis we’re facing,” he said at the regional meeting of the American Association of Anatomists Nov. 10, 2018.
He went on to say, “It’s creating a real lost generation. This crisis is one that is really exposing a societal issue that we have where the drugs of addiction are crossing over socioeconomic barriers.”
He said life expectancy could drop in Canada because of opioid overdose deaths.
“We’re used to our life expectancy every year getting longer and longer. The opioid crisis has brought that to a screeching halt. That is a worrisome trend. We want to stop that right now.”
Just over one year later, the crisis appears to be getting worse instead of better. The city reports paramedics responded to 596 suspected opioid overdoses in Hamilton in 2019. That compares to 450 in 2018 and 437 in 2017.
The number of deaths that Hamilton forensic pathologists have determined to be due to acute drug toxicity — or overdose — more than doubled by March 31, 2019 compared to four years earlier.
And the number of death investigations continues to climb for vastly different reasons than in other parts of the province.
“For all of the regions except for Hamilton it’s based on boundaries and community hospitals not doing as much work,” said Huyer. “Hamilton frankly was an increased number of deaths.”