Friends, classmates, and members of the community gathered at All Saints Catholic High School Wednesday night, for a memorial for 14-year-old Chloe Kotval.
She's the Kanata teen who died on Valentine’s Day, after taking a pharmaceutical drug of unknown origin.
Kotval’s death renewed a call for more resources to help treat a concerning trend of drug use, overdoses, and deaths in our community, and across Canada.
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Wednesday, on CFRA’s Ottawa Now with Evan Solomon a number of guests spoke about the effects of opioid addictions in Ottawa. What are we facing and what can we do?
CFRA’s Dr. Barry Dworkin tells Ottawa Now fentanyl is an opioid, and a member of the morphine family. It has several derivatives, which can be far more potent and far more dangerous, such as carfentanil.
“Let’s use morphine as our base drug, say it has a value of 1. Carfentanil is 10,000 times more potent than morphine; it is 5,000 times more potent than heroin; it is 100 times more potent than fentanyl,” he says.
“If you were to look at a grain of sand, that one grain of sand [worth of carfentanil] is enough to kill you.”
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Dworkin says carfentanil was legal to make in China, originally designed as a veterinary anesthetic for use on elephants.
“Think of the weight of an elephant versus the weight of you,” he says.
Last week, China officially listed carfentanil as a controlled substance.
Carfentanil has been detected in Toronto, and Ottawa Paramedics have been warned to wear masks when treated suspected overdose patients, to reduce the risk of inhaling the powder.
Mark Barnes is a pharmacist and a member of Ottawa’s Overdose Task Force. He tells Ottawa Now the front line battle against overdose death is a daily one.
“If we don’t see patients after a few days, we always worry,” he says. “Have they died? Have they overdosed? It’s a real risk every single day.”
Barnes says there’s a certain profile when it comes to the victims of overdose and addiction, but it’s one that doesn’t play out on the front lines.
“The myth is that it’s homeless, low income patients, with severe mental illness, that these are the people who are overdosing. It’s not the case,” Barnes says. “It’s everybody. Anybody is susceptible. You assume that you’re seeing what you see on TV, the homeless people, the street people, that’s about 15 per cent of our business. The other 85 per cent are working class people.”
Barnes runs a pharmacy in Vanier that operates alongside Recovery Ottawa. The medical director Dr. Mark Ujjainwalla tells Ottawa Now there’s a lack of resources for prevention and treatment.
“People love to talk about this stuff, and grandstand it, but it’s been very frustrating to see a lack of actual action for young people to get help,” he says.
Ujjainwalla says frontline treatment is lacking in funding.
“These kids need help. They need it immediately.”
He suggests Ottawa alone would need $100 million to pay for the resources necessary to battle this problem.
“What did it cost to start the heart institute or the cancer clinic or developing a library? These are people’s lives, these kids are dying.”
It’s a big undertaking, Ujjainwalla says, but one that would not only save lives, but could ultimately save money in the long run. That’s a sentiment echoed by Senator Vern White, Ottawa’s former chief of police.
White tells Ottawa Now the cost of a prison cell far exceeds the cost of a rehab bed.
“To keep someone in a provincial jail is about 120 thousand dollars a year,” White says. “A bed in a drug treatment centre is about 36 thousand dollars a year and we could actually rotate four people through that same bed in one year.”
White suggests funding could come from fines police are already collecting.
“If we put a three per cent fine surcharge on every fine in the province, we could put thousands of beds in play tomorrow.”
Changes of the governmental nature take time, and people are dying now.
One way to fight back is through the use of a naloxone kit. Naloxone is a medication that temporarily reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, buying valuable, life-saving time.
They can be picked up for free, with a valid Ontario health card, at over 800 pharmacies across the province, including 80 in Ottawa.
The kits contain two ampoules of Naloxone, two syringes, gloves, swabs and a CPR mask, along with a checklist on what to do. Pharmacists may ask why you want it and will tell you how to use it, along with how to recognize the signs of an overdose.
Finally, there are resources in Ottawa you can access if you, or someone you know, is struggling with addiction. You can find contact information below.
Youth Services Bureau
24/7 Crisis Line:
Phone: 613-260-2360 or 1-877-377-7775 (toll free for Eastern Ontario)
Email: crisis@ysb.on.ca
Crisis Chat
Website: chat.ysb.ca
Hours: Thursday to Sunday, 4 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Crisis Line
www.crisisline.ca
Within Ottawa: 613-722-6914
Outside Ottawa: 1-866-996-0991
Ottawa Public Health
www.StopOverdoseOttawa.ca
Ottawa overdose prevention, Signs and symptoms, Information for parents, Local resources, and more...
Dave Smith Youth Treatment Centre
www.davesmithcentre.org
Application Inquiries
Telephone: 613-594-8333 ext. 2206
Email: admissions@davesmithcentre.org
Champlain Local Health Integration Network
With files from CTV Ottawa