Despite recent drug bust, Montreal is avoiding a fentanyl crisis, say community groups

Despite several big fentanyl busts by police forces in Quebec over the last year, fentanyl use doesn't appear to be reaching a crisis situation in Montreal, according to social services groups, but they're preparing just in case.

In late June, the SPVM arrested 14 people in Montreal and Laval and seized 7,900 fentanyl pills, 250 steroid pills and 800 Viagra pills.

Last December, the Sûreté du Québec arrested three people and found a one-kilogram mixture containing fentanyl and Xanax, as well as GHB, and weapons including an air pistol and a conducted energy weapon in the Eastern Townships municipality of Potton.

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Community organizations say they know fentanyl is on Montreal's streets, but cocaine remains the drug of choice, and they're not seeing the same conditions as Vancouver, where 170 people have died this year alone due to opioid use.

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Situation is fluid

Nicolas Quijano is peer worker at Méta d'Âme, an organization that offers support and services to drug users by drug users in Montreal. 

Quijano welcomed the news the police had seized more fentanyl, but said he wasn't sure those drugs were destined for the Montreal market — he said he heard rumours the drugs were headed to Vancouver. 

"We're pretty much in the same place we've been for the past three, four years where we know there's quite a bit of fentanyl in the heroin supply, but it's not in lethal amounts," he said.

"It seems that organized crime locally has been doing their homework, and cutting it responsibility, not having dosages that vary widely from one dosage to another and there's not too many overdoses."

He said that people using fentanyl in Montreal often use patches, so they know what they're getting, or they're using heroin cut with fentanyl.

Quijano says that there there's a smaller supply of opioid drugs in the city, compared to cocaine or marijuana, so it makes the situation more fluid. 

"So things can change from one week to another, so we're not fully prepared to tackle something like Vancouver," he said. "My outlook is fairly good, we're ready for things to happen, we hope it doesn't happen."

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He praised Montreal's public health department for their work in offering support to his organization and in training paramedics to use naloxone, a drug that can help reverse the effects of an overdose in opioid drug users.

Need to test drugs at injection sites

"We're not in a position to wait and see, we're already acting," said Louis Letellier de St-Just, the president of CACTUS Montreal, in an interview on CBC Montreal's Daybreak Friday. CACTUS opened a safe injection site in June.

"We're preparing because the opioid crisis probably makes it easier for safe injection sites to open here in Montreal. We already have three, we will have one more in September. This is not the solution to everything, but at least we're going to get prepared," he said.

Letellier de St-Just also said that opioid users in the city are still a small group.  

"Cocaine is still one of the main drugs which is used by drug users, injecting drug users, which is different from Western Canada, where heroin is more used over there, so it's cut with fentanyl, he said.

Letellier de St-Just says CACTUS wants to offer drug testing at its safe injection site in the future, to get a better sense of what drugs are on the streets, and so users will know what they're using.

"We're fairly sure that there is fentanyl on the streets but to which extent we can't say that. We can't have any idea at this point. But we have I think that we must consider ourselves to be in a crisis so in that way we do everything that we can," he said. 

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Public health vigilant

"We don't have any full explanation for the situation to explain why we are kind of protected until now from the crisis," said Carole Morissette, the chief medical officer for Santé Montréal, the city's public health agency. 

"Since 2015...there hasn't been an increase in deaths and overdoses related to fentanyl, but as I said we have to be very vigilant," she said.

She said public health has a plan in place to prevent overdoses if the fentanyl situation worses, which includes making naloxone more widely available to anyone at risk of an overdose.

Morisette said that public health has been tracking injecting drug users in the city, but many of the drugs people are injected are prescription pills, not counterfeit pills with fentanyl.