Community group sounding alarm over rising drug overdoses in Sudbury

A grassroots community group says the city is not doing enough to help solve the opioid crisis in Greater Sudbury.

Bob Johnston, who leads a group called Tomorrow's Hope, says he believes there have been overdoses and overdose deaths that have gone unreported by the city and the community drug strategy.

Johnston says back in the spring he warned the city that the drug situation was getting worse. Since then he says he's seen the numbers increase.

"Until we all get together and come up with some good ideas and follow them through — and I'm not talking office-level, I'm talking ground-level, out on the street, everybody working together — it's not going to get any better," he said.

Johnston says just recently five people died of drug overdoses in a six-day time period.

Sudbury Police confirm that there have been 67 suspected opiate deaths this year, 12 of which were this month.

Tomorrow's Hope has been working to help individuals at the street level since March. Johnston says he hasn't seen much action from the city.

"The response hasn't been the greatest so far," he said.

"The numbers are just growing and growing, and [the people are] just getting younger and younger. I met with two [city] councillors out of the 12. The mayor hasn't reached out to me ... It seems like no one really wants to step up to the plate."

Johnston speculates that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit has not helped the situation.

"That $2,000 a month .... it wasn't properly controlled and basically anybody could that could reach out and grab it."

He also says the pandemic has severely disrupted families.

"The parents who were out working, the children were basically left alone," Johnston said.

"Domestic abuse ... started rising too ... [kids] had no no recreational sports or anything to do."

The answers to the problem are in the community, he notes.

"All the organizations have to get together. This is a team effort. This is not one organization trying to outdo the other. This is life. Let's all get together. Let's do what we can for these people. It's all addictions and so on. And we have to be educating them," he said.

"The homeless and the addicts, not all of them walk around with phones and computers and so on. So how do we educate them? Well, we got to get out on the street. We have to do the one-on-one basis and treat them like our second family and pull all this together."

New provincial numbers

A new report on opioids by the Ontario Provincial Police says that overdose-related deaths went up 34 per cent in the province between 2018 and 2019.

According to the report, 1,163 Ontarians died due to opioid-related causes between January and September 2019.

OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique notes that's a rate of one opioid-related death every 4.7 hours in the province.

The report also says that the OPP responded to 897 overdose occurrences in 2017, 1,381 in 2018, and 1,625 in 2019. That represents an 81 per cent increase over a three-year period.

Since being equipped with naloxone in September 2017, OPP officers have saved 108 lives, according to the report.

The OPP say they laid 102 charges in 12 overdose-related death investigations in 2019, a 500 per cent increase over 2018 in an effort to hold drug traffickers responsible.