KAWARTHA LAKES-Kawartha Lakes Police Chief John Hagarty told the Police Services Board today that overdoses in the Lindsay area have increased dramatically but the number of drug users has remained relatively the same.
The Chief was updating the board on the most recent stats coming from the service. Hagarty said from August 1 2016 to September 21 2016 officers responded to 2 overdoses. During that same time period this year police responded to 15 overdoses. 5 last weekend alone. “There’s a significant increase.” And it’s a struggle to prevent it, the Chief says. “It is a Canada wide problem, we are at a loss to find a way to stop it” It’s unclear how many of the overdoses were fatal.
Hagarty says the service puts significant resources into prevention and education such as having officers speak at schools, working with Fourcast Drug Treatment Centres, Women’s Resources and other community based organizations. He says more needs to be done to look at why people are addicted to drugs in the first place. “Why would someone shoot heroin into their system that could have fentanyl in it, they know that is there, what got them there?” he says, “It’s one of the reasones I am a huge supporter of the basic income pilot coming to our community and giving people some hope, giving people some additional revenue so they don’t go down that path because once they go down that path I’m not sure I can influence them.”
Lindsay was chosen as one of three communities in Ontario to take part in a pilot project that would give people taking part, a guaranteed minimum income. For a single person it would amount to $17,000 a year. The Province has earmarked 75 million dollars for the three year pilot project.
Mayor Andy Letham, who sits on the board, wondered whether the statistics show there is an actual increase in drugs in the community or drug users as a whole. “Is that a true read on the increase in drugs in our community or can it be a read on these are more potent drugs, not necessarily more of them just a more potent concoction where people are overdosing”.
The Chief deferred the answer to Constable Kirk Robertson. “I can speak to it from a front line perspecitve, we are seeing a lot of the same people but they are changing what they are using and still experimenting on what their tolerances are.”
“I dont think there’s an increased number in the people that are using illegal drugs in our community, I think that base just dont know how to handle the change from crack cocaine to a heroin, fentanyl mix.” Chief Hagarty remarked.
That’s an important distinction to make according to the Mayor. “I hear it from people as the Mayor that, do we have a problem in our community, what are we doing about it and how are we getting ahead of it.” he said. “They are hearing more in the newspaper about overdoses and stuff so people are assuming that we have many more drugs in our community than we used to have.”
Last week police said they had seized a substance believed to be carfentanyl. It’s a deadly tranquilizer used for large animals such as elephants and horses. An amount the size of a grain of salt can kill a human being.
Officers came across the substance while repsonding to an overdose. “At one of our overdoses it was actually a trafficking situation.” the Chief said, “We dont want people dying because they are afraid they are going to be charged with a minor drug offence and so we don’t if there’s minor personal use, breaches of probation etc., the Good Samaritan Act allows us to excuse that, seize the drugs but not charge the people.” However, in this case police had to act. “At a call last week there was such a significant amount of drugs there it was clearly a trafficking situation so we went back and did a search warrant and the information we have is that there could have been carfentanyl there.”
“I hate to say as a Chief that we are purely reacting, but in reality we are”
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