From ottawacitizen.com 2017-12-11

The number of Ontarians taken to hospitals with opioid overdoses surged over the summer, which has pushed Health Minister Eric Hoskins to declare the situation a public-health emergency.

By the end of the day Thursday, his federal counterpart Ginette Petitpas Taylor had accepted the declaration and given Ontario permission to approve temporary supervised drug-injection sites without waiting for the federal government to sign off.

Since the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that ordinarily forbids people to use illegal drugs is a federal law, the feds are in charge, but they’re getting out of the provincial governments’ way. They run health care and oversee public health efforts.

“These overdose prevention sites are one step in what has been and will continue to be a concerted and urgent response to this crisis,” Taylor said.

The province isn’t yet sure what such temporary sites would look like, said Hoskins’ spokeswoman Laura Gallant; now that the feds have said it’s OK, the province will have to work quickly to set its requirements. But the idea is these will be somewhere between emergency tents that activists have erected in city parks and permanent injection sites in health centres that have built or renovated to create dedicated spaces

As bad as the opioids crisis has been, the most recent figures say it’s still getting worse.

According to preliminary stats from Public Health Ontario, the rate of opioid-related visits to hospital emergency rooms was 5.6 per 100,000 people in July and 6.7 in August. It dipped to 4.9 in September, but that’s still higher than the pre-summer record of 4.8 set in June.

Although getting reliable data on deaths from opioid overdoses takes a bit longer (many cases aren’t clear-cut, involving multiple drugs and underlying illnesses), the province says 336 people died of opioids in Ontario between May and July, which is a 68 per cent increase from the same period in 2016.

Ottawa’s rates of overdoses are a little lower than the provincial average, but emergency-room visits for opioid ODs rose over the summer from about three per 100,000 people to four per 100,000 people.

It’s not a ton of emergency-room cases, but it’s more than one a day here. Many people overdosing or nearly overdosing don’t go to hospitals, either — the number is an indicator of the problem, not its full measure. 

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