Sharp rise in OD deaths calls for better policies for 20- and 30-year-olds: study

Tributes to loved ones were scattered in downtown Winnipeg's Stephen Juba Park, remembering the lives of those who were supplied with the poison.

Arlene Last-Kolb, one of the people behind the Gone Too Soon memorial garden, has been pushing for safe medication since she lost her son to Fentanyl at age 24.

“Right now we have a stockpile of toxic drugs on our streets, mostly fentanyl, killing people every day. People don't know what goes into drugs,” said Arlene Last-Kolb of Mothers Stop Harm.

“Where else do we have this level of toxicity on our streets and allow people to ingest it.”

Opioid-related deaths in Canada doubled from 2019 to the end of 2021, with significant jumps in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, mostly among men in their 20s and 30s, a new study calls for harm reduction policies.

University of Toronto researchers analyzed opioid-related accidental deaths between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2021 in these provinces, as well as in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and the Northwest Territories.

Manitoba saw a sharp increase in overdose deaths for people aged 30-39 to 500 deaths per million population, five times the 89 deaths per million population recorded at the start of the study period.

In Saskatchewan, deaths in this age group tripled to 424 per million, up from 146 per million, and Alberta's rate increased 2.5 times to 729 from 272 per million. Ontario's death rate jumped from 210 to 384 per million.

British Columbia, the epicenter of the overdose crisis, had 229 deaths per million for this age group in 2019, an increase of 394 in 2020. All of that province's coroner services data for 2021 was not yet available when the researchers completed their work. About information collected by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Nationally, the annual number of opioid overdose deaths rose from 3,007 to 6,222 over the three-year study period, which researchers say coincides with pandemic health measures that have reduced access to harm reduction programs and imposed border restrictions that may have increased their toxicity. drug supply.

“Furthermore, for many people, the pandemic has exacerbated anxiety, uncertainty and loneliness, contributing to an increase in substance use worldwide,” they said.

The study was published Monday in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association.

According to senior author Tara Gomez, one in four deaths were among people in their 20s and 30s. More than 70 percent of all deaths were among men.

A spokeswoman for British Columbia's coroner's service said 78 per cent of overdose deaths in the province from 2019 to the end of 2021 were men.

The sharp increase in fatal overdoses — especially among young adults in the Prairie — suggests the province needs to act quickly, said Gomez, the epidemiologist, who called for harm reduction services, including supervised consumption sites.

“Being slow and not being as flexible as we want to be in our responses can have a really devastating effect,” said Gomez, who is also a lead researcher at the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network.

Manitoba Housing, Addictions, Homelessness and Mental Health Minister Bernadette Smith said the province plans to open its first supervised consumption facility in Winnipeg next year and will offer drug testing machines so people can test their illegal substances for toxicity.

“We came out of a previous government that, unfortunately, did not take a harm reduction approach,” said the new Democrat, who defeated the Progressive Conservatives last fall.

“We're working with frontline organizations because they haven't been listened to or engaged with in our province for the past seven years, which has been a real problem.”

Manitoba plans to train family doctors to treat drug addiction, including Suboxone and methadone, Smith said, noting that doctors typically refer patients to detox for treatment.

“We're creating a model so that people don't have to go to different places to get different services,” Smith said.

He declined to say whether Manitobans would have access to a prescribed safe supply of the drug.

Tanya Hornbuckle of Edmonton said her son Joel Wolstenholme was 30 when he died in 2022. He became addicted to illegal substances, starting with cannabis, before turning to methamphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs laced with fentanyl at the age of 14.

He also struggled with mental illness, but it was difficult to get help for both that problem and addiction at the same service, Hornbuckle said.

Wolstenholme tried to detox several times, but the clinic, where people had to line up at 8 a.m., never had enough beds, she said.

“It happened over and over and then he called me. I went and stood in line or I took him there and waited in line with him. There wouldn't be enough beds for them.”

Her son's anxiety and addiction worsened when pandemic restrictions prevented her from going into the emergency room with him because she didn't trust the staff, Hornbuckle said.

On February 6, 2022, Hornbuckle went to her son's house to cook a meal together. He found her dead.

The Alberta government's strategy of focusing more on recovery and abstinence-based treatment than on harm reduction, mental health and housing is the wrong approach, said Hornbuckle, who noted that her son spent some time sleeping in parks and abandoned houses after losing his car and apartment. dependence.

Rebecca Hines-Saach, associate professor of public health at the University of Calgary, called the overdose deaths of young people a tragedy and said more people suffer brain injuries from exposure to toxic substances.

“Of course we have the wrong answer. We don't have the approach and the services available to keep people alive,” said Haynes-Saah, who also called for harm reduction services.

“We don't have the full-scale public health response that is required. We don't plan to fund anything related to what we call harm reduction.”

Much of the current approach to drug addiction excludes the majority of drug users, Gomez said. He said about a third of the deaths in Ontario involve people without a diagnosis of opioid use disorder.

“So focusing on (residential treatment) alone is something I'm very concerned about, because we need to make sure we have different options for different people.”

– With files from Edward Jahn, CityNews