Danielle Lake has been sober for about six months. After spending five years addicted to opioids and one year in the streets, he made the decision to stop.
“One day something clicks on my brain saying, as, I can not do this anymore,” Lake told CBC News. “I wasn’t doing it on top, I was doing it so that I wasn’t sick.”
Lake said he was lucky. She never overdose.
“I have seen many people die of these things and it is as they say, a pandemic, and it is crazy how many people are simply dying.”
In 2024 in Canada, 7,146 people died of apparent opioid toxicity, and the non -regulated drug supply is continuously evolving.
“Often, these samples have multiple fentanyl analogues, multiple non -medical benzodiazepines and, sometimes, veterinary tranquilizers, all mixed,” said Richelle Booker, a forensic pharmacologist of the response team to the application of Alberta’s law (alert).
“In the past we would see only one analyte or a single substance in a sample of medicines. Now there can be up to 10 or 12 pharmacologically active substances in a sample.”
Booker is a recent addition to the alert. Brought in the spring of 2024 to help investigators observe the crimes related to medicines, it also notifies the groups involved with reducing discoveries damage.
She says that mixtures make it very difficult for people who use substances to know how dose safely. It also makes people who respond to overdose know how to answer because naloxone will not always work. And complicates the side of treatment and recovery if the responders and medical care teams do not know what people are taking.
‘In the whole map’
In the downtown Edmonton, the City Medical Clinic treats people with addictions. The staff there have seen the unpredictability of drugs that are in the streets at this time.
The most recent statistics published by the province of Alberta Show 87 people died of opioid overdose in Edmonton in March. That is the largest monthly number of deaths that the city has seen since the province began to track the opioid crisis in 2016.
Angie Adams works at the clinic as a dissemination worker.
“Unfortunately, the non -regulated drug supply content is throughout the map,” Adams told CBC News. She adds that they have even been finding Ketamina, a fast -acting anesthetic, in recent drug samples.
“I have been listening to that even the nasal naloxone, which is much stronger than the injectable naloxone, that people have to use multiple doses of that,” Adams said. “And that is worrying in itself.”
Pharmacists Gaurav Sharma and Sidharth Arora direct the medical clinic of the city center. The installation has been helping people living with addictions and homeless people for about five years. They offer addiction treatment, mental health support and connect people with social workers to find stable homes and financial aid.
“The illicit drug in the street is becoming very volatile,” said Sharma. “It’s a bit challenging these days.”
He adds that many new analogues are seeing, which are medications designed to be similar to prescription medications, but differ chemically, in customer toxicology tests. Analogues such as xyilazine can have side effects similar to opioids, such as respiratory depression, but do not respond to naloxone.
“We have seen other molecules such as Norfentanil or other benzodiazepines that [we] I’ve never seen, which is not approved by Health Canada, “Arora told CBC News.
Then there is the mixture of superiors and downspouts, where the side effects of one differ from the other.
“There are two different holistic approaches for downers such as fentanyl, opioid disorders,” Sharma said. “We go with oatmeal treatment (opioid agonist therapy), but for the upper means there is still no approved holistic approach.”
Pierre Chue works with the clinic and is a psychiatrist who has been treating patients in Edmonton for about 30 years.
“I think that is why it is so complex,” said Chue. “What we are dealing with today is not what we saw two years ago or five years ago or 10 years ago. So I don’t know if we can always keep up on what is changing.”
For Angie Adams, your focus is to keep people alive.
“Regardless of what is in the supply, unfortunately they are forced to continue using what is available on the street without the necessary knowledge of what they are putting in their bodies. And the best we can do at this time is simply to obtain that information to help them keep them safer.”
Danielle Lake is now building a future. He moved to an apartment and plans to return to school to help others deal with addictions.
“I can see my children for me to be sober, and that is a blessing in itself,” said Lake. “I can’t even imagine back to that. It really scares me.”
