LILLEY: Numbers on overdose deaths show old way wasn't working

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In 2012, Ontario experienced 585 opioid overdose deaths, a rate of 4.4 deaths per 100,000 of population – and a decade later, the province saw 2,531 opioid deaths, or a rate of 16.8 deaths per 100,000.

That’s a staggering increase and yet, 2022 was down from a high of 2,858 deaths the year before.

These are the numbers and comparisons you don’t hear about from the media and their carefully chosen experts. Instead, we are told that we need more so-called safe injection sites and greater access to so-called safe supply or people will die.

Anyone opposed to that idea is portrayed as rejecting science and lacking compassion.

Here’s a cold fact for you that should make everyone question whether safe injection sites really are the compassionate answer to the drug problem. Since Ontario got it’s first injection site in 2017, the number of deaths from opioid overdoses has more than doubled from 1,270 to 2,531.

The total numbers for 2023 have not been released by Public Health Ontario, but the quarterly numbers indicate we will likely see a rise again in deaths.

It’s the same story if we look at local numbers.

Toronto had 309 overdose deaths in 2017, then an all-time high, but in 2022 the city recorded 510 deaths. In Ottawa, the figures went from 82 deaths in 2018, the year they got their first injection site, to 172 in 2022 – a 110% increase.

Early indicators for both cities are that 2023 numbers will be worse.

In Hamilton, the city went from 37 opioid overdose deaths in 2012 to 126 in 2018, when their first site opened, to 163 in 2022.

We were told that without these sites more people would die. After they opened and deaths went up dramatically, the same activists said more people would have died had they not opened.

Now that ten sites across the province are being closed because they are too close to schools or child care centres, the same activists are again saying more people will die. Yet, when presented with the evidence that their plans did not work, that opioid overdose deaths went up, the activists don’t want to hear facts.

“No one has died in these sites,” is the cry we hear over and over again.

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Now, the same people who said we needed to open these sites or people would die and that without them more people would die are saying you can’t show causation just by showing more people died. It’s a circular argument where they establish the rules, and they win every single time.

Some of my media colleagues are pointing to a pair of reports submitted to the Ford government and claiming the government is ignoring expert advice. These reports, which called for an expansion of safe injection services, even near schools, are all written by people wedded to the idea of harm reduction at all costs.

The idea that someone is an impartial expert simply because they are a doctor or researcher is foolish. The only people who would believe that or put such as idea forward are those who don’t know any doctors or have an agenda themselves.

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We all come to issues with our own bias, that includes doctors and researchers.

Ontario, like many other places, is in the middle of an addiction crisis. We tried the path called for by the experts the government is now accused of ignoring and the deaths doubled.

If you believe in science, in the scientific method, isn’t one of the main premises of that method is that you test an idea and if it doesn’t work you try something else?

Now, the province is looking to take another path.

Let’s see if this new path offers better results.

blilley@postmedia.com