Research highlights impact on racialized drug users

Ontario study looked at four years of overdose deaths

- KENYON WALLACE

Crosses for Change, a memorial on a downtown Sudbury corner, represents loved ones lost to the overdose crisis. New research looking at four years of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario shows that deaths were concentrated in low-income neighbourhoods, with close to 50 per cent of Latin American and Black people who died living in areas in the lowest quintile of income.

As Canada grapples with a drug toxicity crisis, new research looking at four years of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario offers a revealing glimpse of the face of these victims.

The research highlights, among other things, the disproportionate impact that opioid overdoses are having on Black, Asian and Latin American drug users and raises questions about whether the province’s racialized communities are getting the help they need.

Published in the journal BMJ Public Health by researchers at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital, the study lays out in stark detail who is dying of opioid toxicity as well as disparities in accessing crucial treatment and harm reduction services.

“As the unregulated drug supply becomes increasingly toxic, we’re seeing more people dying each year, and an increasing number of these people are racialized,” said Tonya Campbell, one of the study’s authors and an epidemiologist with the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network, a program based out of St. Michael’s Hospital working to better inform drug policies in Ontario.

“Widening disparities in drug toxicity deaths are also being seen in the U.S., where they are particularly impacting Black and Indigenous communities, and unless we take measures to address the crisis in Canada, there are concerns we could see the same thing here.”