Opioid crisis in Canada: “Zombies” on the streets of Calgary and Montreal

Canada is facing an unprecedented crisis linked to the use of psychotropic drugs and the emergence of new powerful drugs such as xylazine.

A Native American man, on the border between adolescence and adulthood, consumes a strange mixture of dubious substances on Stephen Avenue Walk, Calgary's long pedestrian thoroughfare, where wheat-blonde young women of the same age pass by without giving him a glance. Around this opioid-addled boy are ageless men and women, sprawled on the pavement, insensitive to the hardness of the asphalt, to the rain, anesthetized in their artificial paradises. Some are curled up in the fetal position, mute. None are able to utter an intelligible word.

Calgary, Alberta's cowboy kingdom, where rodeos border on religion, is getting burned by the opioid crisis , just like Vancouver and Toronto. These psychotropic drugs are painkillers, some of the best-known of which were developed in the 1990s by Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, a billionaire family, to relieve incurable pain. They have changed the face of America.

At the time, the laboratory bribed scientists and medical authorities in the United States to convince the public that OxyContin, its flagship product, was not dangerous. American doctors then prescribed it indiscriminately, creating lethal dependencies, because opioids are addictive. These substances have caused more than 700,000 deaths in the United States in twenty-five years and 50,000 in Canada since 2016, the official date of the crisis in that country.

The Sackler family was convicted, but paid $4.5 billion to avoid prison. "All classes of Calgary society are affected. Friends who are lawyers and notaries have lost their children to these drugs," said a Radio-Canada Calgary journalist who requested anonymity. Opioids have spread across the country, led by fentanyl.

Along with pharmaceutical companies and doctors, criminal groups aren't solely responsible for the situation. By doubling immigration quotas without providing enough housing to accommodate 470,000 immigrants per year, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau threw his country off balance and created an unprecedented housing crisis. Thousands of people found themselves homeless, some of whom became easy prey for drug cartels.

“Medicines that can be produced quickly, whose distribution is controlled by Mexican cartels”

The forgotten victims of this deadly overconsumption are white, Black, rich, or of modest means. No one is spared. Here's a Chinese man. He's lying on a sidewalk, staring into space near the Guy metro station in Montreal, about a hundred meters from Concordia University. "A Chinese man. We've never seen anything like that," says a Quebecer. Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, Eugène Oscapella, confides: "In Canada, opiates come mainly from Colombia. Mexico is only a transit country. These are drugs that can be produced quickly, whose distribution is controlled by Mexican cartels or biker gangs [like the Hells Angels, editor's note]." He adds: "Fentanyl is by far the most dangerous drug in Canada because it takes very little to kill. And it's cheap to manufacture."

In Montreal, the ravages of the "zombie drug" or xylazine, a new substance, are even more impressive. A disheveled, extremely thin man, slightly bent over, his gaze unfocused, stands like a pillar of salt. Motionless, without a movement. He is a victim of this powerful veterinary sedative used to tranquilize cattle and horses, which criminals mix with other substances. Xylazine causes tissue necrosis and often death.

No downtown neighborhood is spared from drug disasters. Above all, they have spread very quickly, in just a few months for xylazine. A few hundred meters from the Montreal Jazz Festival, a horde of frenzied drug addicts screams bloody murder at a hapless security guard charged with protecting the entrance to a treatment center.

Canadian authorities are overwhelmed. Eugene Oscapella concludes: "Our approach to drug management poses more problems than it solves. The main difficulty stems from the fact that we have treated this crisis as a criminal matter rather than a public health issue. Criminal law is not the right tool. It has been used for a century and it has not worked. Drugs are linked to social problems, mental health, poverty, and loneliness in our society."