Blood Ties Four Directions issues toxic drug warning for the Yukon amid spike in overdoses
The organization that runs the Yukon's supervised consumption site says it's seeing an increase in overdoses as an unusual drug sample has showed up in Whitehorse.
Jill Aalhus, the executive director of Blood Ties Four Directions said a spike in overdoses included some that happened at the supervised consumption site in downtown Whitehorse. Nobody died, but Aalhus said onsite drug testing revealed unknown substance that has advocates concerned.
She spoke with Airplay host Dave White about the situation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Are you able to say what you mean when you say an unusual sample?
What we saw was a sample of what's referred to as down, which is an expected opioid sample in the Yukon and really all of Western Canada. All opioid samples are expected to be fentanyl, but what we see is a range of fentanyl concentrations from one per cent to 100 per cent.
Often, the the opioid supply is also contaminated with other sedatives. Benzodiazepines are a common one. We also have seen more recently xylazine (a veterinary painkiller, sedative and muscle relaxant). In this case, it was an opioid sample that was contaminated with an unknown sedative. Sometimes there's limitations with our drug checking technology and we're not able to determine what that sedative is because we're comparing it to a library of samples.
And with new drugs emerging and changes happening, it can be possible that there's substances, though we know sort of what class of drug it's in, but we don't have the library to compare it to, to know exactly what it is. So that was a huge concern for us.
Do you test the drugs at the supervised consumption site before they're used?
We have an FTIR spectrometer. It's essentially a machine that measures light waves, and it can give us a pretty good approximation of what's in someone's substance, up to four or five different components. It has limitations, but it's a really good tool for us to learn about the supply and give people information about what might be in the sample that they're using.
If there's something in the sample that's concerning, do you advise them to not use it?
Often people who are using the supervised consumption site are people who are heavily reliant on substances and have limited resources. If people do have an unusual sample without a regulated and very readily accessible safe supply, there's not always another option for them if they're in withdrawals.
So we encourage people to, yes, surrender [drugs] to us if they'd like to, we can take them to the RCMP station. We have an exemption to do that.
But often people are in a position where they do need to use. They've got no other option. And in those cases, we're really encouraging people to use at the supervised consumption site, carry naloxone, start with like a lower dose than they might be used to.
I think a lot of the benefits of drug checking are to provide people with that information so that they can make the choices for themselves.
If you're seeing something like this, then it's likely that it's fairly widespread in the Yukon. Is that fair to say?
Yeah.Typically the folks who access our services know the patterns before us and often they'll come in and be the first people to alert us of a change in the supply. And sometimes we see that after there has been a police drug bust that's disrupted the supply and almost always really quickly and new supplier moves in. That might really change what's available.
Sometimes it can take some time for those supplies to reach all corners of the Yukon. So we find that even though the people who are accessing our services often know about changes to the supply before we do, there are people who are not part of that same circle, people who maybe use less frequently, people in rural Yukon who might not be dialled into that same conversation. And so we really want to let those folks know.
How do you feel about the fact that safe consumption sites became an issue in the federal election campaign?
It's very concerning to us. There's definitely been a lot of misinformation that's been spread about supervised consumption sites, and proposals to shut these sites down are dangerous and deeply out of step with the evidence, community needs and public health best practices.
Shutting down supervised consumption sites won't make drug use go away, it just makes it more deadly and often more public.
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