Hi everyone, Mark Iype in Edmonton today.
The toxic drug crisis has long felt like an intractable problem with few solutions. Despite a variety of efforts, from advocates, health care workers and all levels of government, thousands of people keep dying, and the issue seems to be getting worse.
While some may see no way to end the crisis, others are trying new tactics. One group of scientists believes obtaining better data is key and would be attainable if jurisdictions kept a closer eye on wastewater. Meanwhile, in a southern Alberta First Nation, tighter policing is proving effective in greatly reducing the number of overdose deaths.
On the Blood Reserve, a southern Alberta First Nation about 200 kilometres south of Calgary, the community has gone to war with drug traffickers and the rampant opioid use they push. The reserve set up a special police team, while simultaneously cleaning up and renovating abandoned houses that help fuel drug operations.
“We went from about 26 overdoses a month down to five or six after several major arrests,” Constable Manasse Gabor told The Canadian Press. He is one of three officers from the Blood Tribe Police’s drug team.
“Fentanyl is a lot less available right now. We hit it hard. It’s not going to go away overnight. If you close an eye to (drug dealers) for five minutes, they’re going to start again.”
Canada’s largest reserve, with a population of 10,000, spent about $1.5-million to fight the drug scourge.
“Probably we’ll never be able to do away with it completely, but we want to bring those numbers down,” Blood Tribe Chief Roy Fox said.
Wastewater testing
One of the many lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was the effectiveness of wastewater testing and the neighbourhood-level data that can be collected.
As reported by The Globe’s Alanna Smith, researchers at the University of Calgary built on that success to launch a first-of-its-kind study to track 48 substances, including fentanyl, benzodiazepines and xylazine, an animal tranquillizer that is becoming more common in North America. In a sign of its effectiveness, the group recorded a spike in carfentanil – a drug 10,000 times more potent than morphine – in June, the same month front-line workers warned them of increased overdose deaths.
While just a pilot project, it has the potential to save lives, researchers say.
Drug users could be warned of drugs in circulation, and health care providers could be notified of what substances to expect. Policy-makers could also use the data to determine where services such as supervised drug-use sites are needed.
Paul Westlund, chief executive officer of C.E.C. Analytics, a Calgary company supplying the technology to collect the wastewater samples, said people seem afraid to disclose or learn about the extent of drug use in their communities in that it might “expose that they are not doing as much as they could” to help the most vulnerable.
“You can’t really quantify how big of an issue there actually is without that data,” Mr. Westlund said.
The project is being run in six undisclosed locations, but the research team hopes it can be expanded, particularly to Indigenous communities where the drug crisis has been especially severe.
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.