As local opioid poisoning deaths continue to rise, the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit (SMDHU) is calling on the province to step up and do more to address the situation.
In a March 16 letter to Ontario Minister of Health Christine Elliott, the SMDHU board urged the provincial government to take eight actions designed to address the current situation and work toward preventing deaths in the future.
Some of the recommendations to the province suggested by the health unit are as follows:
- Create a task force to guide the development of a provincial opioid response plan to ensure necessary resourcing, policy change, and health and social system co-ordination;
- Expand access to harm-reduction programs, including lifting the provincial cap of 21 consumption and treatment service sites;
- Expand access to opioid agonist therapy, which includes treating addiction with medications like methadone;
- Provide a long-term financial commitment to creating affordable and supportive housing for people in need, and people with substance use disorders;
- Address the stigma against those who use drugs, including investments in health and social services, and advocacy for the decriminalizing the possession and use of drugs; and
- Increase investments in substance use prevention and mental health promotion initiatives
The recommendations follow a dramatic spike in opioid poisoning deaths in Simcoe-Muskoka and Ontario throughout the pandemic, which had already been trending upward in the years leading up to it.
In Simcoe-Muskoka, 245 deaths occurred through the first 19 months of the pandemic, a 69 per cent increase over the 145 deaths in the previous 19 months.
Provincially, there have been 200 or more opioid poisoning deaths through 15 of the first 19 months of the pandemic, a figure that had never been reached prior to COVID-19.
The 1,703 opioid-related deaths tallied in Ontario through the first nine months of 2020 were eclipsed by 2,035 deaths through the first nine months of 2021.
Mia Brown, manager of the health unit’s Substance Use and Injury Prevention Program, said the pandemic has brought about numerous issues with regard to opioid use.
“Disruption in how people typically access their substances and disruption in their health and social networks of support has increased substance use-related harms throughout the pandemic,” she said.
“This change in access to the illicit drug supply and community supports, along with a contaminated street supply, overall increased stress, and using alone due to physical distancing measures, have contributed to the increase in emergency department visits and, in particular, the very substantial increase in fatal overdoses seen regionally and provincially,” Brown explained.
Although the health unit has employed a multifaceted approach to the opioid crisis — including distributing naloxone and needle exchange supplies, and advocating for a consumption and treatment site in Barrie — it has had to rely on fairly limited resources, she said.
“The key challenge faced during the pandemic has been the somewhat limited resources that the health unit and many partner agencies have had to dedicate to this work, given the demands of the pandemic response,” she said. “However, this issue has remained a priority for the health unit and will be increasingly so during the pandemic recovery period.”
Orillia Coun. Ralph Cipolla, who serves as vice-chair of the SMDHU board, agreed, stressing it has been difficult to manage the pandemic and the escalating opioid crisis.
“The staff situation, both in the health unit and the city, (means) we don’t have the health resources in order to be able to deal with the pandemic as well as the opioid crisis,” he said.
“I think part of the problem when the pandemic came is that it created more health issues and more mental health issues for people and created more homeless people. It’s the young people that have been affected, more than the older generation.”
Cipolla advocated for a proactive approach, which includes increasing educational opportunities about opioids and addressing affordable housing issues in the area.
“It’s up to us as politicians and up to the province to be able to look to the education system to educate against this kind of thing, because it’s killing more young people than anything else,” he said. “I would like to the see affordable housing issue (addressed), which is in a crisis situation right now (and) contributes to the opioid crisis.”
