Three people were found unconscious on Friday in an abandoned building in the Centre-Sud district of Montreal, likely linked to opioid overdoses. The event once again highlights the seriousness of this public health crisis in the metropolis and elsewhere in the country.
It was the employee of the company owning the building, a former soap factory now boarded up, who contacted the authorities after discovering three unconscious and intoxicated people.
Urgences-Santé claims to have intervened around 9 a.m., on rue de Lorimier not far from boulevard de Maisonneuve, near Parc des Faubourgs.
On site, two homeless people needed immediate assistance and especially a dose of naloxone, a medication that temporarily reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. The other user was in a better condition. He was able to leave the scene on his own, without needing intervention or transport to hospital.
“No transport to a hospital center was therefore necessary”, since the two users who required intervention signed a refusal to travel by ambulance, indicated a spokesperson for Urgences-Santé, Jean-François Charest.
The Montreal City Police Service (SPVM) also intervened to assist the paramedics in their work. According to the police force, calls related to overdoses or opioids are made to 911 on a regular, even daily, basis, especially in downtown Montreal.
According to the most recent data from Urgences-Santé, which serves the territories of Montreal and Laval, 242 interventions with naloxone administration were held in 2023 as of last September, i.e. during the first nine months of the year. . In 2022, this figure had been 291 for the entire year. Annually, the increase is considerable from year to year; there were 146 events including naloxone in 2019, then 194 in 2020 and 280 in 2021.
Please note: these data exclude administration by first responders and by first responders such as, for example, injection center employees.
Fears of a “tragic setback”
Last September, Montreal Public Health had already launched an investigation into numerous overdoses potentially linked to fentanyl in the city center.
At that point, nine people, including seven homeless Indigenous people, had been taken to hospital for overdoses. “The community is devastated,” said the general director of Projets Autochtones du Québec (PAQ), Heather Johnston. “We have speakers who had to return home, everyone is traumatized,” she added, visibly in shock.
A few weeks ago, at the end of October, the National Institute of Public Health (INSPQ) also warned Quebec is “not immune to a tragic setback” in the opioid crisis, even if its situation is less alarming than elsewhere in the country.
An analysis coordinated by the INSPQ and regional public health directorates, conducted among more than a thousand drug users in Quebec, then “revealed the presence of an opioid in the urine in 27% of 655 study participants in 2021 and in 24% of the 1068 participants in 2022.”
According to the Institute, the opioid mortality rate “is lower in Quebec than the average of Canadian provinces”, but it is still increasing steadily. In fact, their numbers more than tripled between 2000 and 2020, going from just under 100 to more than 300 during that time.
Currently, there is an average of around fifteen opioid-related hospitalizations per week in Quebec. On an annual basis, this represents between 700 and 800 hospitalizations.
Ontario is the province with the highest number of deaths linked to opioid poisoning in Canada, with approximately 2,500 in 2022. All things considered, however, this gives a rate of approximately 16.6 deaths per 100 000 inhabitants, which is good for fourth place behind British Columbia (44), Alberta (33) and Saskatchewan (19.7).
With 541 deaths linked to this phenomenon last year, Quebec is still far behind this ranking, with a rate of 6.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.