Emergency-room visits for opioid overdoses increased 76 per cent in a year, according to new figures the Ontario government released Tuesday.
The figures compare the first half of 2016 to the first half of 2017. The number of trips to hospital for overdoses from drugs like heroin, morphine and fentanyl increased from 1,078 to 1,898, the government says.
Our numbers are a bit less alarming than the provincewide trend but still headed the wrong way. In the first half of 2016, local hospitals saw 109 opioid-overdose cases. In the first half of 2017, they saw 157.
Over a year ago, with the crisis brewing and knowing worse was to come, Ottawa’s board of health voted 9-2 in favour of the general idea of helping someone else open a supervised drug-injection site, a place where addicts shooting drugs like heroin can be treated by nurses if they accidentally overdose.
The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre is due to open a fuller site around the end of October, working as quickly as it can to get all the approvals and money it needs, but in the meantime the body count is growing.
So far, the only such site in Ottawa is a tent in Lowertown, staffed part-time by volunteers, whose rough disregard for bureaucratic niceties changed the discussion from “Can we do this?” to “We’re doing this — are you going to stop us?”