Opium Policies and Information in Modern Canada – June 2022 – Cannabis News, Lifestyle

Is funding a ‘safe’ injection site a good idea from a public perspective?

Why is it so difficult to find hard data or the official opium numbers?

Has opening the safe injection site helped measurably?

What is driving the increase in opium overdoses since the Liberals took power?

If our policies don’t help and are expensive, why aren’t we allowed to talk about the failure of these costly policies?

These are some of the complex questions that come to mind when looking at Canada’s 2022 opium crisis.

Is funding a ‘safe’ injection site a good idea from a public perspective?

When you look at the opium crisis, it’s hard not to compare it to other modern problems we face. From a public-political point of view, some crises are thrown everything and the kitchen sink. Others get a shrug and a yawn. Or, like with the opium crisis, they get a container doused with gasoline and a few pallets put on it to burn for a while.

In recent years there have been more deaths from an opium overdose than from covid19 in some places in Canada. Guelph, Ontario is one such place. In May 2020, the CBC reported that the “safe” injection site in Guelph had already doubled the number of deaths counted in 2019. Just five months into the year!

According to media reports and public health data, the number of deaths in 2020 had tripled from 2019 by the end of the year.

In Guelph, the number of drug overdose deaths was 21 in 2021. A measly reduction of 3 deaths after years of massive increases. The same pattern is everywhere in our country.

In 2021, BC saw more deaths than ever from opium overdoses.

From the public’s perspective, the “safe” injection sites are increasing the number of deaths across the board, not just in Guelph but across Canada. I can’t say that conclusively because I can’t find any reliable information.

I now wanted to compare the overdose numbers to the overdose numbers from the early 2000s to give a clear picture of how things have changed in this area of ​​public health. It has been challenging to get a clear view of these numbers and indeed I have found conflicting numbers reported by the newspapers and public health. The graphic below reflects this. I also found links to all the sources that provide overdose death figures.

Why is it so difficult to find hard data or the official opium numbers?

It took a long time to dig to find a live link. Often there is a reference to an image on one page that links to another government page. But when I followed the link, the data was missing.

These are opium deaths from 2004 to 2016 in Ontario:

But if you follow the link to the source data: (why would they even link to Ontario public health?)

The website returns a 404 or page not found.

I thought I’d found a promising lead to breaking down deaths by year and city, but it hit a dead end.

I don’t have a good answer as to why the death data was so hard to find. Maybe I didn’t type the right terms into the search engines I used (I used Brave, Google, and Bing), but the data was hard to find. When the link I followed was not broken, the data set was often incomplete, covering only a few years (2014-16) or omitting data prior to 2000 altogether.

Is there a reason I can’t find the opium/overdose deaths since 2000? Nobody overdosed on heroin in Wellington Dufferin Guelph Public Health before 2004? It seems unlikely. where is the data I’m afraid I have no idea.

Has opening the safe injection site helped measurably?

I finally found the opium tool that has the year 2003 – 2021. 2021 is incomplete but you can click the original tool or check the google doc based on the csv file of the data. (Changes include: I moved the number of deaths closer to the date on the left, highlighted the year cells with different colors, and summed up the number of deaths in a year at the end of the year).

Here is a visual representation of the chart:

Same dates but annually

You can download the CSV file here.

I have presented the data in the table below

The visual charts clearly show how the number of deaths and emergency department visits began to increase in 2016. It was reported that Guelph tripled its total number of drug overdose deaths from 2019 to 2020. Many media outlets reported it, but looked for data looking only at Guelph overdoses versus Guelph overall public health was difficult.

Using WDG Public Health data, I averaged the number of deaths per year from 2003 to 2015. The number is 7. Then I averaged the number of deaths per year from 2016 to 2020. The number is 24.6.

When I first started researching this problem of opium overdose and the increase in deaths, I was unaware of the conflicting numbers and differing reporting standards for overdose deaths. Some newspapers report the death toll in the city and do not cite a source or hospital data that is not/no longer available, or any other source that is unclear or inaccessible to the public. Some reports use public health data to report the city’s death toll. You can tell if the information matches health records. However, this CBC article does not match the public health data. PH says 25 deaths, and this article says 24.

In this article, CBC speaks of seven deaths in 2019; public health says 35.

So that’s a very long way of saying that SOMETHING undoubtedly happened in 2016 to increase overdose deaths.

People are talking about drug toxicity and how deaths are increasing as a result. Doesn’t it seem like a strange reaction to “toxic” drugs to offer non-toxic drugs? Wouldn’t you take damage control measures and possibly police action to prevent people from intentionally selling poisoned drug supplies? Would you expect the policy of providing ‘safe’ medicines to reduce the number of overdose deaths? What if it looks like the death toll is going up? If the death toll since 2018 is consistently well above the average of 7 from 2003 to 2015, what would it take to stop this policy of providing addicts with drugs that hasten their deaths?

Deaths from WDG PH were 14 in 2016, 23 in 2017, 26 in 2018 (safe injection site in Guelph opens mid-year), 35 in 2019 and 25 in 2020.

What is driving the increase in opium overdoses since the Liberals took power?

Justin Trudeau took office in 2015. In 2015, the average number of deaths in our health department was seven, and the actual number was eight. Since Justin took office, the average number of drug overdose deaths has more than tripled. In some places, more people have died from overdoses than from Covid, yet this damaging policy continues without real discussion. The people who support this policy do not want to hear any criticism of the policy. They will ignore you if you try. They believe they will achieve their goals, it seems.

I do not agree with you. I think we can go back to the 2003-2015 average and I’m sure we could do even better. I would suspect that a return to more traditional drug policies in our cities and communities would produce results similar to those we saw in the early 2010s. Why does everyone happily sacrifice three times as many people to this expensive and ineffective policy without honest political scrutiny?

To answer my question: The ideology is driving the rise in opioid overdoses – possibly a dose of arrogance.

If our policies don’t help and are expensive, why aren’t we allowed to talk about the failure of these costly policies?

I think the answer to this question mirrors the answer above. Because of arrogance and ideology, we are not allowed to talk about the rampant political failure.

First, if you challenge the officials implementing the “safe” injection sites and ask about the increase in deaths, they will claim that the current death rate is lower than it would have been without their intervention. We’ve seen this kind of logic before in the Covid response. It wasn’t valid for Covid and it’s not true in this context. We have other places to compare that don’t give drugs to addicts seeking help. Are their results better than ours?

Like the Covid response, real-world outcomes from jurisdictions not following these guidelines are being ignored to steer the ideologically favored one. Real-world data is being replaced by loud public speculation and the silence of all critics.

This has set us on a path of worsening drug problems, increased overdose deaths, and an unwavering public policy that has doubled and tripled those failed and deadly interventions.

A more traditional approach to addiction would be much more effective with fewer deaths, where community building and detoxification are highlighted.

Everything you know about addiction is wrong, looks at how humanity dealt with drug addiction in the past and how we dealt with it in the 80’s and 90’s. I don’t think criminalizing drugs and addicts is the key to reducing deaths. A holistic approach that focuses on the human connection and refocusing on the importance of detoxification from harmful drugs for addicts would produce a MUCH better outcome than the expensive, failed measures we are currently implementing.