We need to treat this like an actual public health emergency. We need to invest at a scale to ensure that the effective treatments we have—like opioid agonist treatments, supervised consumption services and naloxone—are actually meeting population need. I would say there's a lack of investment in these interventions to the point where they're not scaled to meet the need in the population.
Beyond that, I think we need to look at the factors that drive drug poisoning deaths, which are increasingly housing, poverty and comorbid mental health conditions. For example, in my home province right now just under 40% of drug poisoning deaths are occurring in public places. That implies that there are a lot of people who are unstably housed or homeless. They are currently dying as a result of drugs, obviously, but also due to the fact that they're rendered so precarious in these situations by being unhoused and having no support.
I think primarily the federal government really needs to step up the level of investment and services across the country in partnership with provinces. We have just not scaled our response to anywhere what it needs to be to bring down and achieve sustained reductions in morbidity and mortality across the country.