The Record: Continued drug poisonings ‘outrageous,’ front-line worker says

The Record – Feb 19, 2022: WATERLOO REGION — Outreach workers in Waterloo Region had a colder start to January than most, as they dealt with 16 drug poisoning deaths in the first weeks of the year.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” said Michael Parkinson, community engagement worker for the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council.

“And the crime prevention council, more than any other organization in Canada, we predicted this crisis and called for an urgent and proportional response and largely watched a preventable crisis of death and injury unfold before our eyes.”

The numbers are stark. In the year 2000, there were 111 opioid-related deaths in Ontario. In 2021, there were 4,000. Locally, deaths from drug poisoning climbed from 105 in 2019 to 145 in 2020 and 158 last year. If the trend were to continue, nearly 200 lives could be lost by year’s end.

Direct service staff in outreach, shelter and other roles are feeling desperate.

“What we’ve heard is ‘yes I’m tired of finding someone frozen in a snowbank or on the brink of death in an awkward washroom stall,’ but the other part of it is, what we’ve heard loud and clear, is there is no sense that the damage is going to stop any time soon,” Parkinson said.

There are currently hundreds of versions of the highly toxic fentanyl drug circulating in the unregulated street drug market in Waterloo Region. The drug made its way into the region around 2015, along with heroin, after Purdue Pharma pulled the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin off the market. That left a massive market of people living with addiction or dependency who no longer had access to the drug.

Parkinson said he sounded the warning bell when he saw that OxyContin was being pulled because removing one drug only means another will take its place. What comes next is typically more toxic and in a higher dosage. That’s one of the key reasons the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council endorsed a policy paper earlier this month that recommends all drugs be legalized and regulated. All drugs would be treated similarly to marijuana, prescription drugs and alcohol, with strict regulation of production, distribution, sales, possession and consumption.

As long as there is an unregulated supply, there will be death.

“There is zero chance that the unregulated market will become safer or healthier. There is zero chance we will, despite billions of dollars in funding, be able to incarcerate our way out of it or naloxone our way out of it,” Parkinson said.

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