Middlesex-London EMS operations superintendent Adam Bennett sat down with London Morning host Rebecca Zandbergen Monday to talk about what paramedics are seeing in the city.

Here's part of that conversation:

The increase over the weekend has continued from what we've seen throughout the week. There's been approximately four and five times the number of overdoses that we would normally see throughout the year. [That's] just this past week.

That would be between four and five calls per shift.

I would say it's on track to be at least comparable to what we saw last summer. It just seems as if it's been ramping up this past week. Hopefully it's an isolated incident and the number will start to slow down.

When we show up, either the person is still unconscious, and they're having very shallow respiratory rates, or there might be people who are already performing CPR. Now, with the prevalence of naloxone kits in the public as well as police carrying them, a lot of the times the patient has been administered naloxone before we get there. It seems as if maybe the strength of some of the drugs that are on the streets right now are a little bit more intense than what they had been in the past, because they're taking a significant amount of naloxone in order to reverse some of those effects or to increase their respiratory rate.

Opioids depress the respiratory rate along with the heart rate. So, as the patient slowly becomes unconscious, their breathing slows down as does their heartbeat. The naloxone will actually remove the drug from that patient's central nervous system, so that it allows the person to wake up, their body to start breathing, their heart to beat a little quicker on its own. We want to use that in order to help increase their breathing rate. That's what you'll see when you give people naloxone. When you give them large doses [of naloxone], similar to what's available in those kits, the patient tends to wake up. So, you're giving them enough to actually undo the high, for a short period of time.

Well, unfortunately, the naloxone doesn't last as long as the actual drug in their system. So, our concerns are when someone is woken up with a naloxone kit, the potential exists that as the naloxone wears off, depending on how much of the drug they took and when they took it, the drug can still have effects on that patient and that patient can end up unconscious again. That's our concern when we're interacting with patients that somebody else has administered naloxone to: the person thinks that they're fine, but really they do need more medical intervention. They need a follow-up and they need to be watched to make sure they're in a safe environment before that drug is fully out of their system.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. All paramedics are concerned with their patients. Paramedics are very much wanting to help people and help the community. There's an emotional investment into every call that a paramedic attends to. As we see more danger happening within the city, if we see an increase in potential overdoses, we're concerned there will be more deaths.