Peel’s battle with opioid crisis on hold as overdoses spike; advocates want COVID-type response

“With COVID-19 we’ve seen the full extent of what governments and systems are able to do and implement very, very quickly across multiple sectors and systems and the types of resources that are actually available to do those things, which obviously is great. But when it came to the overdose crisis, which has been going on for years now, that same approach hasn’t been taken anywhere in the country,” he says. 

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COVID-19 has disrupted the world’s drug supply, forced people into isolation and has led to a surge in opioid related overdoses. 

In Peel, much of the long-term effort to battle the opioid crisis has been placed on hold with the lion’s share of public health resources allocated to fight the novel coronavirus, a fight that should be mirrored to deal with mounting drug-related deaths. 

Published in The Pointer Brampton and The Pointer Mississauga on September 23, 2020