New data released on Monday from a federal wastewater survey suggests that consumption of adult-use drugs increased significantly during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic – and confirms that the opioid crisis is still rampant, particularly in Vancouver.
The Canadian Wastewater Survey analyzed wastewater samples for 14 different drugs in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
Results indicate that Canadians’ use of cannabis, fentanyl, and methamphetamines has increased since the start of the pandemic. The wastewater numbers are supported by data from Statistics Canada’s Alcohol and Cannabis During the Pandemic survey, the increase in recorded deaths caused by unintentional poisoning (include drug overdoses) between January 2020 and April 2021, and the spike in opioid-related deaths between April to December 2020, which increased 89 per cent since the same period in 2019.
While wastewater loads of fentanyl in April 2020 were roughly the
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