Declare opioid crisis an emergency, experts urge

OTTAWA— Canada should declare a national public health emergency over its deadly opioid crisis, healthcare experts urged Friday, as the perils of addiction, overdose and death came under the microscope in Ottawa.

The country with the second-highest per capita prescription drug rates in the world now faces a situation so dire it demands a response at the highest levels of government, said Dr. David Juurlink, head of pharmacology and toxicology at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

Politicians gathered with public health experts, doctors and advocates — many of them ordinary Canadians who have lost loved ones to drugs — during Day 1 of a two-day summit in Ottawa aimed at hashing out possible solutions.

Donna May, whose daughter Jac was 35 when she died of a drug overdose, said she supports calls to declare an emergency. “I am calling it an epidemic,” May said. The House of Commons health committee also recommended such a declaration in an interim report tabled on Friday.

Declaring an emergency “takes out of the political realm the singular job of protecting public health and gives it to the people who are tasked with and empowered to do that,” Juurlink said.

NDP health critic Don Davies said there’s a clear consensus that leadership and effective co-ordination at the federal level would have a major impact on reducing overdose deaths in Canada.

“We urge the federal government to take immediate action to help save lives,” Davies said in a statement.

A public health emergency is considered an option of last resort, said Dr. Gregory Taylor, Canada’s chief public health officer. Such measures have never been enacted in the country, he added.