Mental health and opioid crises: Are we paying attention?

New Hamburg Independent – Eerie similarities are beginning to emerge between our region’s ongoing opioid crisis and the aptly named “parallel pandemic” that has seen an increasing strain on our mental health.

On opioids, we’re too-well aware of the toll, with more than 6,200 overdose deaths reported in Canada last year, or an average of 17 every day. The situation is similarly grim in Waterloo Region, with a record 102 overdose deaths in 2020, almost double the number of the previous year.

If the current numbers continue apace, Waterloo Region will record an almost identical number of overdose deaths again this year.

Add to that a study released earlier this summer by the University of Waterloo, and you see an almost 600 per cent increase in opioid deaths and hospitalizations since the start of this century.

We saw this coming.

In 2008, the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council published “A First Portrait of Drug Related Overdoses in Waterloo Region.” The report chronicled annual record rises of opioid deaths in Ontario, fuelled mainly by “bootleg fentanyls,” highly toxic drugs that many people were unaware of ever consuming.

The report advocated for “overdose prevention and intervention programs” that never arrived and, a decade later, fentanyl became a street drug so common that most of us recognized its name and its role in overdose deaths.

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