Drug overdose deaths from multiple substances on rise in Ontario since start of pandemic: report

Just the other day, Dr. Marko Erak treated a patient in Toronto's Humber River Hospital emergency room who had overdosed on carfentanil, an extremely toxic opioid.

Stronger drugs are a common theme that's worrying doctors like Erak.

"The amount of resources taken to resuscitate certainly are higher," he told CBC News outside of the ER earlier this week.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided for now, Erak said, it left poor mental health and financial hardship in its wake. This, he suspects, is fuelling a "tsunami of overdoses."

And the overdoses are becoming more complicated, as Erak said he finds that people end up having more than one drug in their system.

A new report published Thursday shows that's the case across Ontario, with people increasingly dying from multiple toxic substances since the start of the pandemic.

It's a trend that's also apparent throughout Canada and in the United States, where recent research shows that the number of overdose deaths from fentanyl and a stimulant (cocaine or methamphetamine) increased more than 50-fold from 2010 to 2021.

The report, released by the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network (ODPRN) and Public Health Ontario, also offers more details on the victims and the drugs that killed them. It points to an increasingly toxic and unregulated drug supply, which is creating more complicated addictions that require nuanced treatments.

"What surprised me the most was just the complexity of it," said Tara Gomes, the report's lead author, a research scientist based out of Unity Health Toronto and a principal investigator with the ODPRN.

"Understanding the full complement of all these different substances that are contributing to harm and how often they're being used together in different ways really just shed a light on how difficult it is to address this issue."

Between 2018 and 2021, there were 8,767 accidental deaths from toxic drug and alcohol use across Ontario.

Data from 2021 shows that 2,886 Ontarians died from consuming a toxic substance — which equates to the deaths of eight people every day. It's also five times higher than the number of people who died in traffic accidents in the province that same year, according to the report.

At the same time, the number of deaths from 2021 was also nearly double the amount in 2018.

The study focused on the following four substances, which were found to be involved in the majority of the deaths: opioids, alcohol, benzodiazepines and stimulants.