Toronto Public Health has issued a drug alert after a spike in suspected fatal overdoses and a reported increase in the potency of the illicit fentanyl supply.
The alert issued Wednesday said paramedics had responded to at least 15 suspected fatal overdose calls over the past four weeks.
It said they received at least five calls within four-day spans on three separate occasions.
Harm reduction advocates called the alert “heart-wrenching” and “absolutely enraging”, as record numbers of people in the city die from opioid overdoses and calls for decriminalization and regulated supply largely go unanswered.
“People keep dying. We see these numbers, and these are human beings,” said Rhiannon Thomas, program coordinator for COUNTERfit, a women’s harm reduction program at Toronto’s South Riverdale Community Health Centre.
“I can’t even keep track of the number of people I know who have died. It’s just, it’s unnecessary.”
Toronto Public Health said a number of drugs were involved and that overdoses are happening in neighbourhoods across the city.
Toronto’s Drug Checking Service, a Health-Canada backed project that tests illicit drugs from across the city, found some fentanyl samples last week were three times more potent than usual, though it cautioned the numbers came from a small sample size.
Project Manager Hayley Thompson said the amount of fentanyl detected in a sample is typically about four per cent, but samples tested last week showed that number jumped to 14 per cent.
“It’s significantly stronger than what we typically see,” she said.
Samples collected in the downtown core, in particular, returned much higher concentrations of fentanyl than usual, she said.
Harm reduction advocates have long pushed governments to offer widespread, low-barrier access to a regulated, pharmaceutical-grade supply of drugs, given the unpredictable potency and composition of the illicit street supply.
“We’re going to continue to see these drug alerts until we have a legal regulated supply of opioid and other drugs that are currently illegal,” said Thomas.
It has been 10 months since Toronto Public Health formally asked the federal government to grant its request to decriminalize the possession of illicit drugs for personal use in the city, three months longer than it took Health Canada to approve a similar request from British Columbia.
Toronto laid out a model as part of that request that supports expanded safer supply programs and increased access to social supports, including housing.
More than 1,000 people died from overdoses in Toronto in 2020 and 2021, double the number of reported deaths in the previous two years.