Non-profit sounds alarm about ‘complex’ toxic drug ODs as mobile prevention unit awaits federal approval

A city resource centre that focuses on harm reduction is sounding the alarm about two overdoses Thursday that were reversed only after intensive intervention, underscoring the urgent need to get its mobile drug-testing unit on the road.

A drug alert posted by Safer Sites — a social media page run by Sunshine House’s Mobile Overdose Prevention Site — said the two people who overdosed had symptoms that indicated “complex, multi-substance drug toxicity.”

One required lengthy intervention by first responders, including eight doses of the opioid-OD reversing drug naloxone, to revive the individual. The other also needed help from paramedics, and asked to be transported to hospital, “which is unusual,” the alert noted.

Sunshine House executive director Levi Foy said the challenging situations might have been avoided if the non-profit organization’s mobile unit had its federal government licensing in place, allowing staff to use its drug-testing equipment.

“It’s more difficult for us to keep tabs on what’s happening on the ground,” Foy said. “We don’t know what’s in it, sometimes (users) don’t, and there’s no really good system right now.”

Sunshine House’s drug-testing services, which operated out of a RV, ground to a halt after the vehicle was totalled in a hit-and-run collision on July 2.

The Salvation Army donated a decommissioned ambulance as a replacement, but it needs a federal exemption under section 56.1 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to provide safe-injection and drug-testing services.

Health Canada lists the Winnipeg application as being in the “review” stage and “awaiting key information before decision can be taken,” but Foy isn’t sure what’s taking so long.

As the weather gets colder and people stay inside, the need to be mobile and testing drugs only increases, Foy said.

“If people have access to warm shelter and a place outside of the elements to use substances, more often than not they will visit us to grab the safe (drug) supplies that they might need, and then use in those places,” he said. “With testing at least they have an opportunity to check before they go off on their own.”

Nine Circles Community Health Centre has been offering drug-testing services since April. The community health hub in West Broadway was selected by the province to get one of two infrared-light machines that can analyze small samples of substances and identify their makeup.

The other machine is being used by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s Healthy Sexuality and Harm Reduction’s street connections team.

The price-tag for the equipment was $200,000, which includes the cost of training staff to use them, and were purchased while the province worked on plans for a permanent supervised consumption site, addictions minister Bernadette Smith said at the time.

Kim Bailey, director of prevention, testing and wellness at Nine Circles, said while drug testing is a useful tool for the community, it does not replace the need for a supervised consumption site.

“It’s not going to answer or solve the overdose crisis in itself, it’s one tool along with naloxone, safe consumption sites… it will help mitigate the harms of a toxic drug supply,” Bailey said.

Bailey and Foy said a useful addition to the NDP government’s strategy to deal with the increasing drug crisis across the province is to have an online database containing drug-testing results which can be referred to by organizations so they have a better idea of what is being detected in street drugs.

“Ideally what you’d have is all the different drug-testing folks providing data into a bigger database so you can start to see the trends and sort of the bigger picture,” Bailey said. “This way you start to get some insight into the drug supply, and that’s important information in terms of policy, decision-making, interventions.”

Provincial data shows in the first five months of 2025 there were 167 suspected substance-related deaths. In 2024 there were 570 total suspected substance-related deaths recorded.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca