Achi news desk-
The Alberta government encouraged optimism about the current state of addiction in the province before making changes to the way mental health and addiction services are offered earlier this week.
CTV News Edmonton has done an analysis of publicly available drug poisoning death data to see if the numbers support the province’s recent claims.
In Calgary on Tuesday, Premier Danielle Smith and Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Dan Williams unveiled two new agencies that will be used to provide mental health and addiction services in the province.
Recovery Alberta will be tasked with providing mental health and addiction services previously covered by Alberta Health Services and is expected to be operational later this year.
The other is a new Crown corporation called the Canadian Center for Recovery Excellence (CoRE).
The government says CoRE will build recovery-focused care systems by researching best practices for recovery from around the world, analyzing data and making evidence-based recommendations.
In the announcement, Smith said that the province is already seeing positive trends in relation to addiction as a result of the comprehensive system being built by the Alberta government.
“Over time, far fewer Albertans have lost their lives to addiction in our province, and many drugs had their lowest death rate on record,” said Smith.
According to the premier, deaths from alcohol are down 60 percent since 2021; deaths due to methamphetamine are down 41 percent; and deaths from cocaine are down 61 percent. In addition, deaths from pharmaceutical opioids are down 70 percent since 2018 and deaths from benzodiazepines are down 33 percent since 2017.
“While opioid addiction remains a significant area of focus for our government, it is important to remember that addiction is much more than opioids. The vast majority of people struggling with addiction do not use opioids and in almost every metric, we see addiction-related deaths at an all-time low, which is cause for optimism,” he told reporters.
When asked about the number of non-pharmaceutical opioid deaths, Smith admitted that the province still has a problem with illegal opioids, while Dr. Nathaniel Day, CoRE’s new chief scientific officer, said, “Although the numbers are still quite high and they’ n is higher than any of us want to see, the fact of the matter is that we see some ups and downs and there are other jurisdictions that only see ups and ups.”
What does the data say?
Using the Alberta Substance Use Surveillance System (ASUSS) to analyze the data, more than 1,800 Albertans died of an overdose in the first 11 months of 2023. Of those deaths, 93 percent involved opioids.
ASUSS defines pharmaceutical opioids as “typically prescribed opioids, such as codeine, hydromorphone, methadone.”
The data shows that deaths related to those drugs went from 133 in 2018 to 40 between January and November last year, marking a 70 per cent reduction.
However, those 40 pharmaceutical opioid deaths are only two percent of the 1,706 opioid-related deaths that occurred in 2023.
The data shows that the remaining 98 percent, or 1,666 deaths, were the result of non-pharmaceutical, or illegal, opioids, defined as “fentanyl (and analogs), heroin, designer opiates.”
Last year had the highest number of non-pharmaceutical opioid deaths on record, and while deaths from pharmaceutical opioids decreased by 70 percent between 2018 and 2023, non-pharmaceutical opioid deaths increased by 148 percent in the same time period.
While there have been some fluctuations in the number of opioid-related deaths in Alberta – such as higher numbers in 2021 followed by a seven per cent drop in 2022, then a 12 per cent increase in 2023 – federal data shows it part of a longer period. a trend that can be seen across Canada in provinces such as BC, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
Looking at the rate of growth, BC is the only province in Canada whose opioid-related deaths per 100,000 people went up for four consecutive years. When comparing the growth rate of the provinces between 2022 and January-September 2023, there was an increase of 25 per cent in Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan, Ontario and PEI — the most significant was Alberta at 25 per cent.
Other substances
Trying to reconstruct the figures provided by the Alberta government with publicly available data from the dashboard, calculations by CTV News Edmonton vary slightly.
Since 2021, alcohol-related deaths are down 62 percent (not 60); deaths due to methamphetamine are down 44 percent (not 41); and deaths from cocaine are down 63 percent (not 61).
Since 2017, deaths from benzodiazepines are down 36 percent (not 33), and as the figures provided, deaths from pharmaceutical opioids are down 70 percent since 2018.
Although deaths are down from the year each drug had either the highest or near the highest deaths on record, the total number of drug-related deaths in Alberta has the potential to reach an all-time high in 2023.
With data from just the first 11 months of the year, Alberta had 1,841 drug-related deaths. That is 102 more deaths than in 2022, and 34 fewer than in 2021.
Data for December 2023 has not yet been released, but the monthly average of deaths last year was 167.
According to provincial data, an average of six Albertans died of drug poisoning per day in 2023, and four out of five deaths involved opioids.
With files from CTV Calgary’s Michael Franklin and Melissa Gilligan
