It’s time that higher orders of government treat the overdose crisis like a health issue and fund programs and save lives, as opposed to treating it like a toxic issue.
Toronto public health chair Coun. Joe Cressy, on the record number of drug overdose deaths in July,
Twenty-seven Torontonians died by drug overdose in July, a grim monthly record for the city that far exceeded the number of Torontonians killed by COVID-19 in the same period.
Coun. Joe Cressy, the city’s public health chair, said Tuesday the Ontario government must immediately start implementing recommendations from Toronto’s top public health doctor to halt the surge in preventable deaths.
“What we’re seeing in Toronto mirrors what we’re seeing across Canada,” in cities including Vancouver and Calgary, Cressy (Ward 10 Spadina-Fort York) said in an interview.
“The combination of reduced (health) services because of COVID-19 coupled with an extremely tainted drug supply, with all the changes to border activity, has resulted in an ever more dangerous drug supply,” he said.
“The continued stigma associated with drug use, where we treat it not as a health issue but as a criminal justice matter, results in reduced services for people who need it.
“It’s time that higher orders of government treat the overdose crisis like a health issue and fund programs and save lives, as opposed to treating it like a toxic issue.”
Toronto’s overdose death toll in July more than doubled June’s total of 13. Toronto paramedics attended 25 suspected overdose-related deaths in May and also in April. From March to July, such deaths jumped 85 per cent over that period in 2019.
COVID-19 killed 18 Torontonians in July, according to Toronto Public Health.
In June, Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, called for specific actions by the Ontario and federal governments to contain an opioid crisis that has killed 14,000 Canadians over the past four years.
They include: lifting the Doug Ford government’s “arbitrary” cap of 21 safe-injection sites in Ontario; fully funding treatment and harm reduction services for drug users; and expanding access to naloxone, which can reverse overdoses.
De Villa also wants drug use decriminalized and help providing users with a “safer supply,” including legal, regulated prescription opioids as part of treatment.
Cressy is hopeful the federal Liberal government will allow Toronto users to access hydromorphone, a synthetic opioid available in B.C., and that Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government will add it to the provincial benefit plan.
But so far Ford’s government has ignored all of de Villa’s recommendations, Cressy said, “and the province, frankly, has taken steps backwards rather than forward when it comes to overdose prevention in recent years.”
Ford in 2018, months before he was elected premier, said he’s personally “dead set” against supervised injection sites and the focus should be on rehabilitation. His late brother, Rob Ford, received successful drug and alcohol treatment at a private Muskoka clinic while Toronto mayor in 2014.
Zoe Dodd, a Toronto harm reduction worker, said overdose deaths started rising in January, before COVID-19 significantly hit the city. The subsequent suspension of health services and relocation of some homeless people to shelter hotels, away from their drug supply, heightened the crisis, she said.
Governments “need to take this crisis as seriously as they do with COVID,” said Dodd, who helps run one of two safe-injection sites in Toronto that receive no provincial funding, unlike seven others in the city. “In Ontario everything ground to a halt as soon as the Ford government took office,” she said. “You need all levels of government working together, which they have never done, because otherwise the carnage is lasting and will go on.”
Ontario’s health ministry “remains committed to addressing the opioid crisis and to supporting people with an opioid use disorder to get the help that they need,” said Alexandra Hilkene, spokesperson for Health Minister Christine Elliott.
In an email, Hilkene said the ministry is “actively monitoring the impact of COVID-19 on people who use opioids, and taking steps to support people who use opioids during COVID-19,” including support for existing safe-injection sites plus programs to distribute naloxone and facilitate needle exchanges.
Safe-injection sites have modified practices to reduce COVID-19 infection risk, Hilkene added, including screening, physical distancing and increased cleaning.