Canada is in the midst of an opioid crisis. A stark declaration, but according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, opioid use and related hospitalizations continue to rise in the country and cannot be dismissed as a big city problem.

Between January and November 2018 emergency rooms across our region saw almost five hundred opioid-related visits, and doctors say the problem is getting worse.

Opioid usage in Barrie has become so rampant that even those who have struggled with addiction are surprised by what they're seeing on the streets downtown.

“It’s crazy. It’s insane. It’s like a war zone down here,” one homeless man told CTV News from downtown Barrie.

The path to recovery is often difficult to find and doctors say it has been even harder since 2016 when synthetic opioids, also known as fentanyl, started showing up and pushing up the number of overdoses.

“At RVH we usually have four or five doctors on at a time. We each see three to five per shirt, every day,” says Dr Joey Rampton, an emergency room doctor at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre.

These numbers are consistent with a new report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which says the number of opioid-poisoning related emergency room visits in Ontario is by 73 per cent. 

Experts say heroin, cocaine and even marijuana are now being laced with fentanyl. Dr Rampton says there’s a growing problem with illegal pills.

“In Barrie, there’s Percocet, Oxycontin and Xanax that look identical to the real stuff, and they’re fake. They’re 100 per cent fentanyl,” he says.

If the user doesn’t get naloxone or medical attention in time the results are often deadly.  In Simcoe-Muskoka there have been 31 confirmed and four more probable opioid-related deaths in the first six months of this year alone; down slightly from 2017.

"We need to come at this from multiple angles and multiple sectors and that's really what we're doing,” says Dr Lisa Simon, Associate Medical Officer of Health with the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit.
“We'll see if we're able to shift the needle or not. Clearly, this is such a complex problem."

The public health crisis is one that doctors say requires immediate attention. But there’s no simple solution. Experts say it will take more education, harm reduction strategies and a lot of treatment and rehabilitation.