Opioids killed 511 in T.O. in 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, the opioid overdose epidemic continues to kill Torontonians at alarming record levels.

Toronto Public Health on Friday released preliminary figures showing 511 people died just last year from opioid overdoses, but warned that that figure will rise, as the provincial coroner’s office finishes investigating the causes of other deaths.

The preliminary figure is slightly lower than the total of 539 deaths in 2020, but it represents a 74 per cent increase from fatal overdoses in 2019 and a 273 per cent increase from 2015.

The city’s drug-checking service has detected “increasingly toxic and unpredictable contaminants in the unregulated drug supply in Toronto,” including powerful pain-relieving opioids such as Fentanyl.

Fentanyl-related deaths that were on the increase before the pandemic increased in the early days of lockdown as support systems, including safe-injection sites, suspended operations or became harder to access.

Toronto, which has a multipronged overdose-prevention strategy, took steps, including offering supervised safe-injection sites at homeless shelters, to combat an increase of overdose deaths in shelters.

City council and Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s public health chief, have called on the federal government to decriminalize all drugs for personal use as part of a shift to a public-health approach aimed at reducing stigma and solitary deaths.

In a statement Friday, de Villa said, “In keeping with our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing the drugpoisoning crisis of this size and scale requires resources and action from all levels of government … These are preventable losses and members of our community.”

Health Canada is weighing exemption requests from Vancouver, the B.C. government and Toronto to decriminalize drug possession in these jurisdictions. Advocates say any delay is unconscionable, given the death toll due to overdoses.