The epidemic is blazing from coast to coast, setting cities and towns ablaze. In the Yukon, in northeastern Canada, one of the least populated territories in the country, it killed 23 people in 2021, an increase of almost 500% compared to 2020. In the Great Plains of Alberta , 576 deaths were reported in the first six months of 2021.
In Timmins, a small town located 700 kilometers north of Toronto, the excess mortality peak is also maddening. “We distribute more syringes than sandwiches”, is moved a social worker of the municipality. But the epicenter of the phenomenon is in British Columbia: more than 4,000 people have died of drug overdoses in the past two years. A slaughter greater than that caused by the Covid-19, with its 3,469 deaths.
Submerged, this province in the west of the country, which had declared itself in “state of health emergency” as of 2016, was authorized, on May 31, to derogate from the law in force in Canada: for three years, the possession of small quantities of hard drugs will no longer be criminally reprehensible in British Columbia. Consumers will therefore no longer be considered as criminals to be prosecuted, but as people to be helped, even sick people to be treated.
The substances targeted are cocaine, methamphetamines, MDMA (ecstasy) and opioids, including heroin, morphine and fentanyl. This last family of opiates, particularly addictive powerful analgesics, is responsible for the vast majority of accidental overdoses, 27,000 for all of Canada since 2016.
Consumption boosted by Covid-19
Appearing in the United States in the early 1990s, the so-called “opioid” crisis spread like wildfire in Canada. After its approval in 1996 by Health Canada to treat “all types of pain”, OxyContin, distributed by the American firm Purdue Pharma, has become in a few years the most popular drug in the country.
In 2012, after the appearance of the first controversies related to the risk of addiction, it was withdrawn from the market. But the pharmaceutical industry immediately found an alternative: fentanyl and its derivatives. To medical over-prescription, which creates thousands of consumers addicted to these synthetic opioids, will be added the enthusiasm of organized crime for this new El Dorado. The profit margin would make any investor dream: 25 grams of fentanyl cost $420 to produce, they fetch $800,000 on the black market.
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