Community agencies brace for summer of street drug fallout

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This article was published 04/06/2023 (826 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The staff at Resource Assistance for Youth knows what to do when someone is at risk of overdose.

The colloquial term is “nodding off” — an opioid or heroin-induced state of drowsiness. Without proper intervention, some call it the final step before overdosing.

RaY staff on the streets will stick close to people they see nodding off, make sure they’re hydrated, keep watch to see if they lose consciousness. Ideally, they’ll have enough naloxone on hand to revive someone, if an overdose becomes apparent.

In the past week, they’ve tended to 15 people in the nodding-off stage, and provided naloxone to eight people overdosing.

In 2022, they intervened in 12 overdoses; they have logged 10 in January-May of this year.

Breda Vosters, RaY director of grants and information, said a supply disruption of naloxone in the past month — which the province said has now ended — has only exacerbated the issue.

“It’s kind of a combination, like a perfect storm… of limited access to (naloxone), because we’re just one outreach team, there’s several of us in the city… We’ve only been able to hand out one pack at a time, which is a lot less than we normally would give to people,” Vosters said.

“And then just the strength of the substances that are going around right now.”

It’s just an example of what Vosters expects will be a difficult summer for Winnipeggers who use drugs and community support organizations.

A provincial spokesperson said, after last month’s supply issue, it now has 2,000 kits to distribute across Manitoba. It expects 10,000 more to arrive in the first few weeks of June.

However, Vosters said it could take 1,000 kits monthly in the hands of just one organization to fully meet the need on the streets.

City of Winnipeg data shows there were 319 recorded incidents where naloxone was administered to a patient one or more times in May. There were 171 such incidents logged in May 2022. (This does not include incidents where someone was revived and 911 was not called.)

In the last few months, Vosters said an increasing prevalence of the veterinary-use tranquilizer xylazine in street drugs has had a “pretty devastating” effect, as it makes users less responsive to naloxone interventions.

As the weather gets hotter and people start to congregate, Vosters said organizations across the city are bracing themselves for the worst.

“I think this is probably a very small window into what summer in Winnipeg looks like, honestly. I think unless we have some pretty intensive interventions and adjustments immediately, I think we’re going to see these numbers only increase from here, really,” she said.

“Because we’re still at the very beginning of summer — and summer tends to be the worst time for substance users.”

Main Street Project is handing out 100-150 naloxone kits a month, double the amount it was distributing in 2022. After struggling with a supply issue last year, executive director Jamil Mahmood said it has been diligent in stocking up on naloxone.

“We were seeing this (for) a long time, but we have seen (overdose) increases more recently, as well,” he said.

“Also, with the number of naloxone shots needed to revive someone from an overdose — a year ago, four to five (doses) would revive somebody, and now it’s eight to 10, kind of on average.”

Mahmood said case counts increased dramatically in November, and never went back down. In the time since, Main Street has adjusted its training, and how often front-line staff are trained.

“We are shifted into that mode of, ‘this is the reality now,’” he said.

“Now, any new staff get trained on how to open a washroom door, pull someone out, administer naloxone. That’s one of our core trainings for any new staff before they can even be on the floor of the shelter. We’ve had to change how we train our people and respond.”

Project staff receive more equipment and make sure to check on people more regularly in the summer, he added.

“Before, an overdose was a traumatic event. And now it’s kind of normal, in the everyday, which is really sad, right? These are extreme traumatic events.”

At St. Boniface Street Links, a group of 11 gathered at a table Friday to discuss how they’ll fight a yearly battle: the weather has warmed, and in just six weeks, zero encampments in the area they cover have spiked to 18.

“We see people that have spent a lot of their winter, spending their time in shelter beds, actually exiting the shelter system to the outside,” executive director Marion Willis said.

With that comes new worries for its outreach team that helps unhoused people find long-term housing and get into rapid access to addictions medicine walk-in clinics.

“Encampment season has started, we are still, on average, housing one to two people a day. So start adding up the numbers, plus, we’re also now dealing with all the encampments,” Willis said.

Street Links is looking to increase its team to around 15 people to meet an obvious rise in need for services.

“We just have so many challenges,” Willis said. “And what we’re really sitting around this table talking about right now is how we provide the support to all the people that we’ve housed.

“How do we prioritize the most high-risk people that need almost daily support, and keep up the momentum in terms of addressing some of the encampment issues?”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca