Don’t close injection sites
Nearly 4,000.
That’s the appalling number of Canadians “from all walks of life” who died of opioid overdoses in 2017, according to new figures from the federal government. More than 1,100 of them were in Ontario. And Toronto Public Health reports that 303 were in this city.
To call it a “crisis” or even an “epidemic” — the label given to SARS, which killed 44 people in 2003 — seems an understatement.
“I don’t even think we have the vocabulary any more to describe (how) it’s getting worse,” says Benedikt Fischer, a senior scientist at the institute for Mental Health Policy Research at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
What is clear is that all levels of government must work together urgently if the deadly trend is to be reversed. No one can afford to turn a blind eye to this rapidly escalating disaster, which killed almost 1,000 more people in 2017 than in 2016 and is now the leading cause of death among those aged 30 to 39.
It’s more evidence that Premier Doug Ford’s head-in-thesands campaign promise to close seven supervised injection sites opened in Toronto and Ottawa by the Liberals is so alarming. One can only hope that health officials change his mind now that he and his new health minister, Christine Elliott, are in office. They will have plenty of ammunition to do so. Study after study has shown that supervised injection sites reduce the risk of overdose. In fact, in just nine months, volunteers at a site in Toronto’s Moss Park reversed more than 200. Staff at The Works, operated by Toronto Public Health, have reversed another 165 overdoses since last August by administering oxygen or naloxone.
As well, if Ford truly believes in “supporting people, getting them help,” as he says, he will find the money needed to establish more sites.
That’s because of the obvious truth that no one can get help if they have died from an overdose. And federal statistics point to the fact that the vast majority of addicts don’t want to die. A full 92 per cent of overdoses are unintentional. Another 4 per cent are suicides, while the rest are undetermined.
Further, staff at the sites not only help prevent those accidental deaths, they put users in touch with the rehabilitative help they need.
Promisingly, other levels of government are being much more proactive than Ford.
Last week, for example, Health Canada took steps to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place by trying to reduce the over-prescribing of painkilling opioids by clamping down on advertising of those drugs to doctors. It has asked pharmaceutical companies to stop marketing them until new rules are established.
This is a well-timed move, considering that Canada has the second highest rate of opioid prescribing in the world. In fact, David Swann, a physician who is also a member of the Alberta legislature, has argued that “75 per cent of addicts were started by doctors.”
That was the case for Sandi Tantardini’s 28-year-old son, Scott. As Tantardini, the co-founder of NAMES — Niagara Area Moms Ending Stigma — told the Star’s Rosie DiManno, the successful entrepreneur’s addiction to opioids arose from prescriptions he was given following extraction of his wisdom teeth.
While the Health Canada program will go a long way toward preventing people from becoming addicts in the first place, the Ford government should not abandon current users. They are, after all, people like his own late brother, Rob Ford, who used crack cocaine. Or as the chief public health officer of Canada, Dr. Theresa Tam, notes, the statistics are not just numbers. They “represent the loss of family members, loved ones and friends.”
Indeed. Ford and Elliott should remember that before closing supervised injection sites. Lives are now in their hands.