As is the end of year tradition at Duty, we take you behind the scenes of major reports. In 2023, investigative journalists Améli Pineda and Stéphanie Vallet analyzed 405 coroner’s reports and went into the field in Montreal, Gatineau, Quebec City and Laval to better understand why the ravages of stimulants, such as crack and the crystal methare still in the shadow of those of opioids in Quebec.
“Have you noticed that we are talking about “crack alley”, but that Quebec is announcing money for injection sites? Crack is not injected, it is inhaled,” says Stéphanie to Améli, over coffee on a scorching morning.
“It’s true that we talk a lot about opioids, but if we look at most of the seizures from the SPVM and the SQ, it’s coke,” replies Améli.
That was all it took for us to launch into an investigation into stimulants.
The overdose crisis was particularly talked about during the summer of 2023. The statistics are exploding: Urgences-santé announces in Montreal that it has a record administration of naloxone, an antidote to overdoses of opioids such as fentanyl and heroin.
In downtown Montreal, we talk about “crack alley”, so named by the residents of social housing on Berger Street, located opposite the Cactus organization which hosts a supervised injection center.
At the same time, While it is still under construction, Montreal’s very first supervised inhalation center, managed by Maison Benoît Labre, is making headlines following the discontent of the citizens of Saint-Henri.
After a quick Google search, we see that several media outlets use photos of syringes on the ground when discussing “crack alley”, the future Maison Benoît Labre center or even crack overdoses. “The opioid crisis” has been highlighted in the media for several years, but it is also omnipresent in political discourse.
When we contact Quebec, a member of the cabinet of the minister responsible for Social Services will answer us “but what is a stimulant?” “. Moreover, after several days of trying to convince Minister Lionel Carmant’s press secretary to obtain an interview for us, the minister ended up declining our request.
The discourse around the opioid crisis does not seem to correspond to the reality of users’ needs. Every morning, on our way to the offices of the Duty located at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Berri streets, near the gardens of Place Émilie-Gamelin, and every lunchtime while walking in the neighborhood, we come across users inhaling crack or crystal meth with their little glass pipe. We are witnessing deals of drugs in the entrances of vacant businesses and sometimes even fights after a transaction that went wrong. On the ground, there are not syringes lying around, but rather crack pipes and crystal meth.
There seems to be some confusion: what is the difference between opioids and stimulants? How are these substances consumed? But above all, what type of drug really kills the most in Quebec?
No data
The National Institute of Public Health of Quebec (INSPQ) monitors overdoses and makes its figures available on its website. However, no details are mentioned as to the specific substance that caused the overdose death. All this leaves us wanting more.
We therefore decided to request all overdose files from the Coroner’s Office for the period from 1er January 2022 to June 2023.
We discovered 405 files, and just as many human beings who lost their lives in tragic circumstances. Stories that we analyzed one by one in order to fill out a large Excel table that would allow us to have the most representative portrait of reality.
After two weeks, we were finally able to draw our first conclusions, which correspond to our initial hypothesis: cocaine, crack and crystal meth were more deadly than opioids in Quebec.
What struck us most throughout our readings was undoubtedly the solitude in which more than 80% of overdose victims died.
We then went into the field in Quebec, Gatineau, Montreal and Laval to verify these findings with experts and consumers of stimulants attending supervised inhalation centers, but above all to understand why the consumption of these substances is not is not as well regulated as that of opioids.
In Quebec, Karine Babeux, a peer helper at L’Interzone in Quebec, testified to the many lives saved each time a user walks through the door of the supervised inhalation center. “For me and for the people who come here, it’s a reassuring place. All the overdoses that there were, we managed to save them all, we didn’t lose one,” she emphasizes. “Me, when I started doing coke [des centres de consommation supervisée]it just didn’t exist,” recalls the forty-year-old, who was 16 the first time she used drugs.
In Gatineau, Nancy, a peer support worker for eight years at the Outaouais Regional AIDS Action Office, told us that she chose to give back to her community by supporting other users. “There are people who come here every day, seven days a week, because they have a routine. It allows them to socialize, to perhaps leave the house because they have no one. It also breaks the isolation,” explains the woman who started using at the age of 12.
In Montreal, Yami Morin testified about his organization to compensate for the absence of a supervised inhalation center in the metropolis and avoid being the next to appear on the long list of overdose deaths. “I have this concern in mind all the time. It’s certain that I am not safe from an overdose or that it will go further,” confides the 27-year-old man, who has survived eight overdoses.
Our data is clear, opioids are far from being the leading cause of fatal overdoses in the province. At the end of our investigation, we tried to understand why, despite the fact that the majority of deaths are linked to overdoses of stimulants, neither Quebec, nor the Coroner’s Office, nor the INSPQ seem to compile data as precise as those concerning opioids and fentanyl.
Moreover, we have noted that the INSPQ refuses to characterize the situation of opioid overdoses as a crisis. In a written statement, he admits that “INSPQ data are indeed often used by some to speak of an “opioid crisis”. [On] recognizes that the overdose situation in Quebec is worrying and [on] leaves it to the authorities to qualify the seriousness of the situation on the basis of the information available to them.”
When the testimonies in the field and the data compiled in our analysis of the coroner’s files do not agree with those published publicly on overdoses, we must admit to having a tendency to doubt. As investigative journalists, we sometimes feel like what we discover is too big to believe.
A week after the publication of our survey, Statistics Canada released a report showing that the use of stimulants like cocaine was on the rise across the country, and in direct link with the increase in the number of overdoses over the last year. Then the New York Times released a survey showing the extent of stimulant consumption in the United States.
This shows that our mornings thinking out loud about current issues around the coffee machine can lead to a subject of investigation which will have earned us an invitation to Everybody talks about it.